I'm in yo!

I love ludum dare, but it can really be a challenge when it comes to works vs sleep. I am exhausted and have many miles to go. Oh well, I'll sleep when I'm dead, or just tonight. Carry on my art horse, carry on.

Hey guys, that was a lot of fun by now I am extremely brain dead. I'll do a post mortem tomorrow but for now, let's play and rate some games like the old Ludum Dare traditions mandate! Way to go everyone, you made it!

Sondrian’s Ludum Dare 39 Post Mortem

Its that bittersweet moment when ludum dare is at an end, and you only have to show what you were able to produce. This has been my 8th time participating in Ludum Dare (second since the new website was officially launched), and overall I am pretty happy about the results.

I worked with 2 other people; Fariel and Mr McGibblets. My job was to produce the audio visual assets and smarter people than I took those assets and actually made them into a game. Given this narrow-ish band of involvement, I was still extremely busy until the last 6 hours, and even then there was a lot to do to get ready to publish the game.

There is a difference between an artist and a game developer who makes art though, because it comes down to a lot more than just how to do the art. My greatest challenge when producing assets is to a two-fold challenge. I need to figure out what we are going to need before we need to implement it, and I need to know how to format what we are working on so that the implementation process goes smoothly. These two aspects make a huge difference in terms of volume of work that can be outputted given the limited timespan.

I had not really done a Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past/ Binding of Isaac style game before, and it was an interesting challenge. Using a predetermined tileset layout, I made the tiles and Fariel was able to simply take the image and turn it into a paint brush and “paint” the level without having to hand place each tile. You can make a pretty big game if you don’t have to waste time with silly hand work. Figuring out how to open doors and do all the rest of that was interesting. I think next time I want to use the assets as a 2:1 pixel scale as I just think pixel art looks better blown up a bit.

I used a “orange/red is off” and “green is on” color scheme to help indicate to the player the progression and whether or not a thing was activated. I think that it worked out pretty well.

Those enemy things were really creepy too

I had a lot of fun making the music and SFX, but other than the really nitty gitty, there isn’t a lot that can be said about it. What I can say is that, and it amused me to no end, I wrote the music in the key of C# because it was robots and computer system. The usual challenge with sound effects is how to create the sounds so that you can hear exactly what was going on, nothing is too loud/quiet or out of balance, and that the sounds feel “right” for the think that is happening. You have to use sounds to communicate to the player what is going on when they can’t use the visual clues, and also to reinforce those things with are going on on-screen. For this, I felt pretty good about the results.

There isn’t really too much that I want to say went badly. I would have liked to see more set pieces in the game to make the world feel better, more broken things and what have you. I would also have liked to have been able to add more “feel” effects. You can’t add too much feedback, that just makes the game world a better world to play in.

Also, animation is hard, but its really rewarding. I can’t wait for the next LD jam. The best game out there is yet to be made!

Thanks to everyone who watched me on Twitch and who has and will play and rate the game. I love this community and I’m glad to be a part of it.

Sondrian out!

Into the Breech! Post Mortem for LD 44 By a spastic artist

Hi I'm Dan, I make art, music, and video games. Basically I like to make cool stuff. I'm not a programmer, so apart from the help of my teammates Jordan and DJ all I can do is make cool stuff; I can't make it do anything cool.

This was our 11th Ludum Dare entry that I had fully participated in, but it was the first time I had ever touched anything in 3D. Prior to this we had done 2d platformer, 2d sidescrollers, 2d twin-stick shooters, and even a 2d button masher. This time though, we took on the third dimension.

The journey to LD 44 began about a week prior to the event when Jordan asked me if I wanted to try to do anything with 3D this time around. I said sure, give me a week to learn how to learn some basic modeling and such and we can give it a shot. So we found an easy to use program called "Dust 3D" and I started playing around with it. Unfortunately I found it too klunky for my tastes and decided to ditch the software for one that had frustrated me in the past; Blender 3D. The best thing about Blender is that its free, so it was a natural choice, otherwise I would have gone for Maya something comparable. I may be biased though.

When LD 44 began, we got the theme, collectively groaned as usual (the theme is never what we want, except for one time when it was.) and got to "mindphooning" which you might call brainstorming. We found our idea relatively quickly and then we got to work. We would play as a magical coin that would slowly grow in size as it continued to pick up more and more things. Think Katamari, but with coins. Coinamari if you will. From about the 3rd hour, the problems started to emmerge.

So its not hard to create an object in Blender. Its not hard to import something into Unity for that matter either. It can be a little tricky though when you are trying to output assets from Blender into Unity in a way that your programmer's can use to do things. For instance, you need to be sure that the pivot point for the object is at the 0,0,0 origin point. You need to be sure that the model pieces are all fused into only the pieces that the programmer's need are exported. You need to be sure that the SCALE was set to the proper size (alt+p then u then ctrl+a aka "The cheat code") otherwise scaling the object in Unity will do horrible things, TERRIBLE things (Move it's location instead of just changing size) and since we were working in huge numbers due to the coinamari aspect, we ended up literally losing the assets into the distance aether in the Unity Scene. While it can be fixed, it can more easily just be avoided. Long story short, we had to muddle through a lot of these differences before we could even use the assets that I was making. By the end of the project, most of what I had made I had also exported 2-5 times. As a side note, in Blender the Z axis is the up and down axis, but in Unity its actually the Y axis. I also learned on Monday that shift+k would allow you to autopaint the entire model with a color, ya know, so that you don't have unpainted vertexes on your model that you don't find until hours before the game is to be done.

One of the major things that I learned was the importance of considering the purpose of what I was making and not just what it was. For example, I made a bone that looked great, like a low-poly bone. Problem was it was in no way designed with traversal in mind, and so the ultimate result was a slippery bone that was no fun at all to use when the game was later converted to a platformer due to technical restictions. Just as with music and sfx, you need to think about the context that its being used in prior to just creating an asset that "looks right".

Music and SFX/VO was really simple. I mean, for me its just old hat to write an ingame loop for the game. The real accomplishment for this game was that the music was at the right volume and didn't overpower the player experience. A nice simple theme that sorta floated in the background, creating mood and giving you something to bob your head to without drawing your attention away from the game. The voice over happened out of a need to create a quick cutscene to explain the plot. "Hey Dan, I need you to basically say that the wizard needs money and so he's enchanting his coin, however you want to do that." Sure thing, easy peezy.

One of my vocal lines took FOREVER to record. I probably said "that should do it" 50 times before I got a take that was suitable. "That should do it" became a joke with the team after that.

Finally, I took my first stab at level design to try and help get more of the game area planned out. Turns out level design is difficult. Its really easy to make stuf difficult, but to make things fun for the player experience, there is a certain finess that, like any skill, takes time and practice to develop. If you see the daggers around the potion bottle, that was me at t-10 minutes to push, and I'm sorry for that.

Despite changing our plan halfway through, I think we did pretty well overall. We didn't do everything perfectly, but we managed to deliver a feature complete game that can be beaten (if you have the skillz) and flaws and all, is a good time.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It cannot be stated enough the important of communicating with your team. With everyone engrossed in what they are doing, you can end up stepping on each other's toes or deleting their progress by pushing changes when they are not ready for you to do so. At one point, I deleted all of the game assets in order to reupload them, causing Jordan and DJ to wait on me to get them replaced. There was no reason to do that. It was rather careless and cost us a lot of time.

The best thing about learning that you were doing something wrong is that you get the opportunity to do it correctly afterwards. As they say, always be learning always be failing. I would add always be creating and enjoying what you are doing. That's why I love LD so much, you can just focus on creating something cool with people you enjoy working with and share that with everyone else. As a game designer, I'm a performer and love to entertain.

Thanks for reading!

Daniel