Looking forward to seeing what I can come up with. I did a practice run a while back, and finally a LD Compo Weekend aligns with my calendar.
Toolset:
Engine: Unity 3D
Graphics: Paint.Net, GIMP, NeoTexEdit
Sound: sfxr,bfxr,Audacity
Music: ?
Good Luck to everyone!
Well, a minimalist art style is my default, so, I decided to incorporate another definition of minimalism as well.
The basic concept is that your character has decided to make an extreme change from being a hoarder, and instead live a minimalist lifestyle. With your guidance, and a gradually building willingness to let go, your character just might make the change.
The first iteration of the playfield, character movement, and object interaction is done:
Tomorrow morning, the first priority will probably be adding some scoring/tracking mechanics, then I can begin to flesh out some content like more types of junk, more interesting room layout, and some surprises.
I am off to catch a solid 4-5, good night all.
Things are coming along really well on my hoard-reduction game. The basic gameplay is in place, there are rules for when you can get rid of stuff, when you can’t get rid of stuff, and when it is not in your best interest to get rid of stuff.
At first, your character will refuse to get rid of a lot of the junk. As you get rid of lesser-valued stuff, your will builds, which allows you to get rid of items with more perceived value to your character. Sometimes, the temptation of money will allow your character to sell something on eJunk that would otherwise be kept for a long time, though this is a temporary solution. Because…
A simple day-night cycle has been implemented. At the end of each day, a portion of the money that you made by selling, rather than trashing junk is used to buy more junk.
Remaining work:
At this point, “Dehoarder” is a complete, playable, and winnable game. If this were a LD24, I could submit right now. So, I have the next 24 hours to make improvements, make the game even more fun, and even kick back a little, get good sleep tonight, and catch up on what everyone else has been doing.
Main enhancements planned at this point are more types of junk, Sound FX, some random events, and maybe some music. Balance tweaking will also be happening throughout tonight and tomorrow.
I’m very happy that it has turned out so well so far!
It was very exciting participating in my first ever Ludum Dare. I had written a couple of games in the past using very few hours, but never had I tried to do it in 48 consecutive hours. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be successful or not. It turns out, as I write this, there are still 4 more hours in the compo, and my submission is already entered. Honestly, I thought I would be scrambling madly to get things done right now, not working on my retrospective.
Pretty much the whole thing. But here are some specific highlights.
At first, I was concerned about the theme. I didn’t want to just make a game with minimalist artwork and gameplay. I wanted to actually use the theme within my game. I looked up minimalism through Google, and from there, came up with the meta-concepts “Elmininate all X” and “Do X using as few Y as possible”. I stared at the Google results some more, and was noticing that more were about minimalist lifestyles, i.e. living without junk, than about minimalist art. Bingo. My “Eliminate all X” meta-concept quickly became “Eliminate as much junk from your hoard as possible”. Theme ideation success.
By 4 hours into the compo, I had a working prototype where you could walk about a room, and zap newspapers with your mouse. Having an early working prototype was a huge win, as always. I could turn in for the night satisfied that I was well underway.
I was very glad that I had recently done some work in blender 3D. I always have so much trouble with that program, as I find it very not-user-friendly. Fortunately, I remembered how to do most of what I needed to do. At first I wished I could pull in models from prior projects, but then later in the weekend I realized that I had actually created several general-purpose models that I can use in all of my future projects (except future Ludum Dares). Another win.
Keeping scope limited is key to something like a Ludum Dare, and I managed to limit scope very well. I did not feel a need for any kind of supplemental game engine with this project. I didn’t even have to pull in my code generator, though it was all warmed up and ready to go. There was even one point where Unity forced me to reign in my scope – originally, I had planned to model a 2-bedroom house, have specific types of junk for specific rooms, etc. It was immediately apparent upon a proof-of-concept test on my prototype, though, that Unity would not support the number of physics rigidbodies necessary to populate an entire house with junk. There would be no time to write any sort of complex custom engine to augment Unity physics to make it possible. So I had to scale back to a single-room design.
Since the project continued to go well all weekend, I was able to ensure myself adequate rest, and even spend some time with my wife, which contributed to my productivity at the keyboard. At no time this weekend did I feel harried or stressed about getting the game done. I was able to work at a comfortable pace and explore some tangents that bore results, such as the generated background music. This is how knowledge work should be done.
Speaking of the generated background music: the music was at the very bottom of my priority list. I think music is very important to a video game experience. It is a very effective tool for setting a mood. However, with no access to my Creative Commons resources, I had doubts that I would be able to put together something listenable for the music. I did some research before the compo, but did not find a tool that worked for me, until near the end of my work when I found cgMusic. I was able to quickly put together a soothing, generated piano piece that to me, was somewhat reminiscent of some of the Minecraft background music.
Keeping a constant, prioritized list of what needed to be done next helped to keep focus on important tasks and prevent scope creep. Constant integration and testing made sure that the project never strayed too far off track.
Unity3D continues to be a solid game development engine. Without it, such rapid development of a 3D game would not be possible. Everything just worked, as it usually does.
It’s hard to come up with much for this category. There were no epic fails, no cases where hours of work had to be thrown away, no stubborn bugs to chase deep into the night.
I struggled for quite some time with how to balance/utilize the money mechanic. In my testing, I had quickly concluded that the dominant strategy in early prototype builds was to completely ignore the selling and money mechanic and focus solely on trashing. I was worried that I was going to have to remove these interesting details in the name of minimalism when I figured out to use some of the special events (one of the last features implemented) to give the player some motivation to keep some money on hand.
Ludum Dare was a lot of fun, and I’m glad I did it. I now have another game under my belt, another portfolio piece to showcase, some art assets I can re-use elsewhere, and the confidence of knowing I can deliver a game based on a given theme inside of 48 hours. I would recommend this experience to any journeyman game developer.
If you haven’t already, check out (and vote when the time comes) on Dehoarder in the compo entries! Thanks!
Tags: LD#26, postmortem, SuccessStory, unity, unity3d
Last year was such great fun that I am definitely looking forward to this again. A couple of events tried to encroach on this important weekend, but I have finally cordoned off the time needed for the compo.
My LD26 entry, Dehoarder, did well enough to garner a little press attention and a couple of Let’s Play videos. This year, I’ll be aiming even higher. I nearly cracked the top 100 in a couple of categories in LD26 (Humor and Innovation), so this time my goal is to make the top 25 in at least one category.
My toolset remains largely the same as last year:
Engine: Unity 3D
Graphics: Paint.Net, GIMP, NeoTexEdit
Sound: sfxr,bfxr,Audacity
Music: ? (last time I used cgMusic and SolMiRe to generate music. Might do the same this year, might do something different.)
Can’t wait until the 25th! Looking forward to hacking out a great game and rating all of the other excellent entries!
Hey, just went a-harvesting through some old projects for some common code I’d like to re-use, so I’m declaring them here. Nothing special or earth-shattering, just a few basic utility classes and some “trim pieces” for polish that I use on most of my projects.
♣ Splash Screen (basic logo fade)
♣ Pop-up volume control (Volume +, Volume -, and Mute function)
♣ Loading progress bar (Ties in with Unity Streaming Loading)
♣ Fading Scene Transitions
♣ Scene Manager (utilizes said loading progress bar and fading scene transitions)
♣ Shadowed text labels
♣ Extension methods for common types
♣ Integer 3D Vector class
All of these scripts are for Unity 3D. Feel free to make use of them if you can.
Good morning,
Sorry no blog post last night, was very much falling asleep in my chair when I called it quits. I was pushing myself so hard because I was unhappy with my progress so far, hopefully I can turn that around today.
My game idea for this theme is for an Atlantis-like adventure – swimming around among a procedurally-generated underwater city, discovering key facts about mythological puzzles in order to unlock your escape.
So far, I have the first iteration of basic movement down, and am well underway on building generation. The building generation part is taking more time than expected, maybe I should have done a quick-and-dirty voxel engine, but that’s not the feel I was going for, so…
Floors, ceilings, and corner supports are generating for the buildings, now we just need some walls, doors, and windows and we can move on to the next part for a minute.
The player’s basic ongoing goal will probably be “reach the next checkpoint before you run out of air”. I’m thinking about having two endings – the “OK” ending where you manage to escape your predicament, and the “epic” ending where you do something, well, epic.
Well, back to it.
So, I wound up picking a game idea that was almost too big. The two scope items that have taken the most time are the procedural level generation, and the cinematic endings (there are indeed two).
It has taken me almost every waking moment in the compo (minus 12 hours total for sleep and eating), and I finally think I have the project in a good spot. The game itself is complete, playable, and winnable, which leaves me this afternoon to add some polish like more building layouts and textures, a proper title graphic, and sounds and music.
I was worried there for a while. I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew with this little project, but somehow I’ve turned it around. Things really started to fall into place yesterday afternoon, and I knew then that with a big push, a late night, and an early morning, I could bring it to completion.
You start out next to your broken-down submarine, which stuck on the top of a sunken high-rise building.
There’s a shark swimming around to be careful of. He’s only dangerous if he sees you.
The backstory itself is a silly straw about a prank gone horribly wrong on Mount Olympus. As you collect items and unlock the adventure, the backstory unfolds as you help some of the Greek gods out of a bad situation.
If you ignore the pleas of the gods and focus on saving yourself, you can “win”, however, you will get what I call the “Milquetoast Ending”. To get the “Epic Ending”, you must help the gods complete their task.
I wish I had felt I had more time to blog yesterday. There’s a number of neat things I pulled off that I could have talked about more. I suppose what is important is that I have a game to submit at the deadline, though.
In the process of recording sound FX. So far, I have made use of two bathtubs simultaneously (run one bathtub and mic the faucet on a second one down the hall to get ambient water noise), and an odd plastic tube that I just knew I would need at some point in the future (for bubbling noises).
What kind of creative SFX recording have you been doing this weekend?
And with a last-minute user input change that makes controls a lot less frustrating, my Atlantean adventure is complete enough for submission!
Your submarine breaks down while you are out on a joyride. What to do? Get out and find those parts it chucked!
Don’t try to hitchhike a ride with this guy, he looks like a shady predator.
Aphrodite is imprisoned and needs your help!
Escape from the watery depths, or hang around and see what the gods have in store for you!
I might make a couple more tweaks with the 3 remaining hours, but honestly I’m pretty happy with it as it is. And I’m tired. And hungry.
(As for the correspondences in the game, I can’t help it, my mind naturally goes there =D)
One casualty of the compo is that my lawn is now overgrown. Small price to pay for an awesome and fun crunch!
Total working time to make game: 34 hours.
This time around, there was a very quick committal to a game concept after the game was announced. This may have been due to having others around as a sounding board when the theme was announced. This allowed actual work to commence a lot faster than in LD26, when over an hour elapsed before committing to a concept.
This theme was too easy. There was no lack of ideas: a city builder where you had to move humanity into an underground city, an anthill adventure, playing as a fish or octopus, a game based on fracking, an adventure beneath the surface of the skin. Any one of these could have been viable. Indeed, I am starting to see that many of these concepts have been done by others.
The procedurally generated buildings turned out great. By taking a few base components, and giving the basic instructions for building up one floor at a time and randomizing, I was able to have the game generate some complex building layouts. Sure, the architect of these buildings must have been crazy, but isn’t that the same for most games?
One area of player feedback from LD26 was that Dehoarder lacked some kind of finality for a full clear of the room. There was one goal end at 10,000 points, but that was just an artificial goal and was only celebrated by a single popup that was easily dismissed. For City Beneath the Surface, I set aside time to create two different endings that are definitely final. I even had time to make them cinematic. They were the second largest identifiable time cost in the game, at 7 hours, with much of that spent watching the submarine escape scene in 10x slow-mo to get the timings and measurements good.
All in all, I managed my scope well. I had intended to put a means of moving from floor-to-floor inside the building, but as Sunday afternoon loomed, I re-evaluated that feature and decided that it would not add much value to the gameplay that was there, so I axed it. (If anyone asks, the Atlanteans moved between floors on unpictured elevators built into the corner blocks on each building.)
Similarly, the original scope for the building generator had the engine building interior walls as well, sometimes making for multiple rooms per floor. This never got implemented, never even made the prioritized backlog, and honestly would detract from gameplay and make the game unnecessarily harder.
Blender and I have been getting along even better since our bromance started in LD26. The shark is my crowning 3D modeling achievement for this Ludum Dare. Maybe someday I’ll actually get better at rigging stuff, too, so that he doesn’t just move stiffly through the water, but stiff is fine for a 48-hour compo, especially since your back is to him while you’re running from him anyway =D.
Making sound effects for this was fun. Some basic stuff, like alerts, inventory feedback, etc., were done with sfxr, but other in-world sounds were recorded on a cheap mic on my laptop. I think the scream for the shark death turned out especially well. I got a kick out of using the bathtub to make the water sound effects. Luckily with the way my house is set up, the laptop could be kept safe behind a wall while the dispensable mic did all of the dangerous wet work.
The music just happened for the second time, it was like a gift from above. I fired up cgMusic like I did last year, and fiddled a bit with it. I wasn’t sure it was up to the task of creating the deep, warm, droning music I was looking for. Then I took a piece it had generated, deleted everything after the second part, and turned the tempo way down to 15 bpm. Voila! The perfect sound – slow arpeggio guitar melody over a glacial harmony by string instruments with bows that must be 5 feet long.
There was something just wrong about the input for much of the project. I was using a fairly standard move-mouse-to-turn model, but it just wasn’t working out well. There seemed to be a weird acceleration curve, and that movement control always confounds me once the mouse moves outside the game window. So I switched out the controls at the last minute, and fixed another latent bug in the user input code. I was very glad I took some extra effort to correct this, it made the controls much, much better.
At a few points this weekend, I took a step back, and wrote out a list of what remained to be done. Then I would quickly prioritize all items on that list 1-4, and then knock out the 1’s and 2’s from that list. I repeated this until I was done. This micro-agile approach seems to work great for compos, because it keeps the highest-risk, biggest impact work at the forefront.
Having some common code libraries harvested from prior projects was a big plus. Some basic calculations were just there without having to go to Google to look up algorithms. And being able to fit a bunch of re-usable polish trim right in place, like streaming loading, volume controls, scene transitions, and the like, helps me present my entry in the best way that I can.
It was good that I had blocked off the entire weekend for this compo, otherwise it would have been fail. I even took a day off on Friday to relax before the compo to make sure I was going in fresh and rested. That was a very good idea. It allowed me to put in 6 full hours the first evening of the compo. For the rest of the weekend, I had my support network in place, meals arranged, and everything planned out so that I could focus on Ludum Dare to the maximum, and I am very glad that I did. With 34 of 48 hours utilized for the compo, 3 hours spent preparing meals or doing chores could have made the difference between success and failure this time around.
A procedurally-generated level was the best choice for this type of game, and manual level design of this scope would have taken longer and required a lot more pre-planning. Still, the map generation code took much longer (about 9 hours, over 25% of the project) than was hoped. This put the project behind schedule early, and I had to work like the dickens to make up the shortfall.
I would have liked the game to be more playable in the early stages. While basic player input and physics were done early, map creation was a large obstacle to testing any actual gameplay. Thus, it was not until halfway through the compo that the game felt more like a game and less like a physics simulation and world generator. It was not until Sunday morning that the game was actually winnable. It was hard to know early whether the gameplay would actually work out or not, which is vital with a compo.
34 Hours was a little more time than I wanted to spend on my compo entry this weekend – that leaves only 14 hours for sleep, eating, hygiene, and not totally falling off of the world around me and into my own reality where it is only me and The Game. I am well aware that I picked a project that was almost too big to handle in 48 hours. Still, this means I pushed my abilities to their limits, so this could be considered a very good thing as well.
It seems that despite my best efforts, a lot of people are finding the controls for the game difficult and frustrating. One source of contention is the lack of an option to invert the camera pitch tracking. It seems the old fighter-pilot convention of up pitching downward and down pitching upward that I am used to is no longer the norm, so in the future I will be sure to provide this inversion only as an option. People also complained specifically about turning being too slow – the slowed movement was an intentional design choice to boost the mood of the game by making the player feel through the controls like they were moving through water. This does not appear to have been received well. These two points are the only specific feedback provided so far about the input issues. I retested, and could find no further issues myself.
In future events, I will try to focus more on gameplay mechanics before world building. In the case of City Beneath the Surface, I would instead have created the mechanics of the prisons and keys and sub parts before creating the first building, making sure the game was winnable early on. I had done this with Dehoarder in LD26, and did not realize until I was deep in the rabbit hole that I was doing differently this time around.
I wish I could say I won’t try anything this ambitious in the future, but part of the good of these events is that they push me to my absolute limits. So I will likely take on ever more ambitious projects anyway no matter what I say here to the contrary.
This was another awesome event. Even though I was intensely heads-down during a large part of it due to early missteps, I managed to create something really cool that probably would have taken a couple weeks to a month without the pressure on. It was great to see exactly what I am capable of, and how much I’ve improved since my last Ludum Dare. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone else’s submissions in the coming weeks.
I’m in for my third stint at Ludum Dare. There was a chance I would not have been able to do it this time around since my wife was in the hospital, but she was just released yesterday so I can go ahead and commit now.
My main goal is to improve on my performance from last time, which was not as good as my performance the first time. I’ll be using Unity 5, Audacity, Blender, NeoTexEdit, sfxr/bfxr, and probably some other tools.
I’ve also been hard at work at a sequel to my first Ludum Dare entry, Dehoarder. Strangely enough, it is called Dehoarder 2, and it is very close to being in a state where I’d feel comfortable submitting it to Steam Greenlight. As you can see here it goes well beyond the single-room cleanup that I implemented for LD26. I should probably be working on that this weekend, but I am trying to make LD an annual thing for me.
Good luck, everyone! I hope to start voting on a bunch of great games Sunday evening!
This year, it’s mostly just a bunch of extension methods I’ve collected. There’s also couple of really handy types, like the ColorHsv and ColorHsl classes. Gone from last year’s library are some of the basic UI elements like volume controls, because I haven’t had time to re-implement them in uGUI, and I don’t want to carry around the legacy UI stuff. Streaming loading is also out this year because Unity Web Player is effectively dead as of three days ago and the new WebGL platform does not seem to support streaming loading.
http://www.smilingcatentertainment.com/download/SmilingCatLD32CommonCode.zip
I’m a bit concerned about the move to WebGL within Unity; my initial experiments yield unacceptably large build sizes and glacial build times for just an empty scene, so hopefully I’m not spending too much time tweaking things. I hope I don’t need to resort to making my entry as a downloadable executable only.
I think maybe I’ll just let this screenshot speak for itself:
Still in early prototyping obviously. I so want to make this (optionally) multiplayer, but have no experience writing game network code. Maybe if I have time on Sunday I’ll fiddle with that.
An epic food fight is brewing. So far we have tomatoes, pies, and hot dogs, to be used on customers, a Maitre ‘d, waiters, chefs, and managers. If you attack the restaurant’s customers with food, the staff will respond in kind. It gets pretty hilarious when the staff starts hitting the customers with food as collateral damage.
There’s cover to be had, and the room contents generate randomly with each play through.
Next is some breakables, music and sound, more types of food, and lots of funny dialogue.
I think it’s coming along nicely. Time for a meal break.
…and add some music, and bam, it’s a game!
“Dirty Fork: Unleash the Mayhem” is effectively complete.
The more havoc you cause, the more restaurant staff get involved to subdue you. Eventually, you can get a whole team of managers rapid-firing tomatoes at you.
The AI is as dumb as a bag of hammers, but the game is hard enough anyway. If I try to make the enemies smarter, I don’t think it will turn out very fun.
From here, I plan to spend the rest of my time working on some stretch objectives, like crouch controls and better textures. And maybe chef’s hats and another type of food. I don’t think I’ll get to rigging the person model or implementing multiplayer.
I looked into the whole Unity to WebGL thing. It REALLY IS pants at the moment. The TL;DR is that I would not be comfortable submitting the garbage that was output from that process for judging. Sorry, Chrome users. You’ll either need to apply the workaround or use the .exe version that I supply.
<rant>
I wasn’t optimistic based on what I’d read. But, wow… Webplayer build of this project is 3.5MB, runs like butter, and looks divine. For the WebGL build – after taking 15 minutes for this trivial project to build, the distribution is over 10MB (assuming my web hosting can use all the gzip stuff, have not tested that yet and others have reported problems. Without gzip – 50MB). Then, when loaded up in the browser, it looks like a dog turd, and runs about as fast as one too. (3-4 fps vs. over 100fps)
So, Unity developers aren’t in a very good spot with Chrome right now with the whole forced move away from NPAPI, and it really is a suboptimal situation. I’m all for moving away from old and insecure technologies, but not being able to do truly high-performance 3D apps in the browser like I am used to seems like a giant step backward. Something has to give here. Either Unity’s WebGL tech needs to be quickly brought up to par with the other Unity platforms, or some type of continued support provided for NPAPI plugins (a solution that does not require IT training of my users to apply like the current workaround), or something. And I’m looking at both of you, Google and Unity Technologies.
</rant>
Now that I got that off my chest, back to making Dirty Fork even better…
I am IN for my fourth Ludum Dare! As usual, I will be using Unity 3D, plus Blender if it is a 3D project, Audacity for any audio editing, and cgMusic for any music generation needed (shame it will only run on an WinXP VM).
My focus will be on humor once again, as that is perennially my strongest category. I nearly cracked the top 100 last time (#108) (LD32) with “Dirty Fork: Unleash the Mayhem”.
Speaking of older entries, be sure to check out my ongoing Dehoarder 2 Steam Greenlight for the full realization of my LD26 entry, Dehoarder:
Best of luck to everyone, and may the best game win!
Just about ready to call it a night… I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be, though I did manage to get one of the riskiest parts (for me) done – capturing animated 2D sprite renderings of the main character(s). It is a technique that I haven’t used before, so it involved a bit of trial and error. With this done, I am much more certain that I can handle the rest of the artwork on the project.
One of the biggest issues I ran across was with trying to find a model format that MakeHuman, Blender, and Unity could all agree on. No matter what I did, the resulting model wound up munged in some way and unusable. I lost nearly 2 hours there. I wound up having to cut Blender out of the picture and make my desired modifications to the model a different way.
So, yes, it is quite concerning that I don’t have any sort of gameplay yet except on paper. I do think I have a solid idea, though, so hopefully I can hit a home run tomorrow with it, because tonight was kind of a 1-2-3 inning.
So what exactly are these two doing? We’ll have to find out tomorrow when I can focus on it again.
So – the basic premise so far is this. You are a werepenguin. Beams of moonlight turn you into a penguin, and silver coins change you back. When you are a penguin you cannot jump, but when you are in human form you cannot walk across ice.
I still have a couple more game mechanics to implement before I start making proper levels, but at this point I think I am ahead of schedule, despite the rough start last night.
And yeah, I ditched that 2D work from last night :-(. Oh well, I think the result is much better – this kind of slip and fall hilarity would not have been possible with 2D: