So I’ve decided to remove the “enemy” portion of my original design. I just couldn’t see how it was going to work out. Instead I did instead do the previously mentioned “lose condition back-pedalling” and decided to change the design such that you lose when you can no longer make a move that is a chain of two or longer.

I’ve also straightened out the bugs that were eating my game, implemented game over and resetting and all the other features to make this an actual game.

All in all I’m really pleased. This game is interesting and, whilst incredibly rough around the edges, is somewhat tactical to play. I’m also very happy with the code base. The code is reasonably organic and very much decentralized (no “game” class in this one at all!). It’s made adding and changing the rules to the game a breeze and fixing bugs a snap. It’s nice to get through one of these LDs without head-desking every other hour.

So with that it’s time to break for lunch and then to crank out as much mechanic tweaking and polish as I can find the energy to muster. Not bad for seven hours to go.

Maybe in that time I can even name the game too…

Well I am pretty damn happy about this game. I’ve been through each of the mechanics (including what could have been a nightmare of a scoring system) and come out on top. I’m enjoying playing my own game and I find it challenging. That’s basically as good as it gets – especially when it is your first try at a particular genre.

It may not look very different from the last screen shot but I’ve updated how the player is placed in the level, the whole scoring system has been overhauled, the way the grid is generated has been updated and how the difficulty of the game progresses.

It’s polish time now and first on my list will be sounds after a short mental break.

So polish has been a bit of a fail. I’ve failed at getting any decent music and sound effects and I’ll be scrapping the barrel shortly. Let’s hope I can find something soon.

I’ve learnt more in this LD than I probably have in the other ones that I’ve done. However my game just isn’t ready to be submitted and I want to work on the concepts in general later too. So I’m not submitting this time. I just feel like there is more to explore and experiment with than I can spend on it right now (as I can’t spend time as a JAM entry).

I had a great time, really learnt a lot of techniques and I have the desire to learn about more tools and techniques in the future.

Thank you Ludum Dare for always being a pool of inspiration!

I’ve been looking forward to this all week! Time to see how much I’ve improved since last time. Hopefully I’ll have some great ideas and will be able to see them through to the end!

Tools:

Unity (C#)

Visual Studio 2010

Paint.net

BoscaCeoil, Bfxr, Audacity

Git

So I’ve thought up plenty of ideas but none of them have interested me yet. I’m going to sleep on them and then see what I think up when I’m less tired.

So I haven’t  discussed my idea yet. The idea is a mixture between The Incredible Machine and A Snowman is Hard to Build. Each level is a box like room with some pieces stuck down and cannot be moved and some which the user can place, move and rotate as they like.

The goal is to direction the coloured projectiles to the correct buttons. These buttons then power the next room. Over time you can see that the whole game is a larger system within systems (hence the growing part).

Originally each room was going to have exactly two buttons (to have both themes) but that’s a little restrictive on design with the game now.

Time for a break.

I have a couple of tiles to finish creating and then the mechanics will be ready and it’ll just be polish and level design – hopefully I’ll finish all of that up today and tomorrow will just be that.

I’m getting too old for this… and I’m only in my 20s! Need to have another rest, maybe for the night.

Fortunately the core mechanics are basically in place. Hopefully I can bash out a short serialization system so I can use my editor freeplay mode to create all the levels at once (testing them as I go) and then copy the data wholesale into the editor outside of runtime.

So, jobs for tomorrow:

1. Create the tile serialization system.
2. Create all the levels at runtime and save the data out into a data file.
3. Transfer the data file information into the editor objects.
4. Turn off freeplay.
5. Implementation level progression / selection / camera movements
6. Sound effects
7. Music
8. Particle Effects
9. UI and Menu Screens

Sounds a little too much for tomorrow but fortunately the game has a minimalism aesthetic so I may be able to save time in UI and the Menu Screens.

I’m really happy about this. Yesterday I though I would be having a terrible time getting in the tile serialization it needed in order to quickly prototype levels. And now, just two hours after starting to plan it out, it’s basically working!

Time for a quick break and then to finish the rest of the game.

Remaining Todos:

1. Turn off freeplay.
2. Implementation level progression / selection / camera movements
3. Sound effects
4. Music
5. Particle Effects
6. UI and Menu Screens

Resonance by Starspell

I’m fairly happy with what I achieved this weekend. I am however disappointed that I didn’t manage to get any audio in. I was looking forward to doing it and in some ways it was the audio that I wanted to spend the most time with to give the game a degree of polish.

Ah well! That’s LD for ya!

Now time to rest before I try to play 100+ games tomorrow.

I’m not around for the whole of the Ludum Dare due to appointments adventures and visitors home invaders.

However I do have a pretty cool idea. I’m thinking about creating a puzzle platformer.

The first level is finding this ancient technology, then the maguffin breaks apart as you touch it causing the screen to split into multiple parts. You have to get around the odd angles it shows you in order to progress, find the pieces of the maguffin and put it back together to make things right again.

Why do I have the most interesting ideas when I can’t be around for the entire competition :_: .

Tools will be Unity, Visual Studio, Paint.net, Sfxr and BoscaCeoil if I get to music (I usually don’t).

Time to call it a night for now. So far the animation and physics are going well. Would have liked to get jumping in before taking a break but I’m feeling old .

Really enjoying making this game. Hopefully I’ll have time to continue it this weekend.

I have a bug in my input code where I can gain too much velocity on my rigidbodies in a frame. So the best thing is to provide an upper limit on the rigidbody’s velocity. But how to determine what that maximum should be without trial and error? Enter graphs:

The orange line is the vertical velocity of the rigidbody during play, the blue is the horizontal. Looks like the limits should be 15 for vertical and 10 for horizontal. Thanks graphs!

And the basics of platforming are complete. Now for the rest of the game! 😀

Updated the art for the game’s platforms, added a background and modelled the Ancient Technology for the game. To make the ancient tech. stand out I decided to make it 3D with the rest of the art being 2D sprites.

Finished health and death support, including animations for dying.

I’ve also refactored the game into separate scenes for the game scripts and levels. Doesn’t take long to do and now I have full support for as many levels as I want. Plus to make new levels I can just duplicate previous levels, change the names and then fiddle with the placement of objects in the level.

Still have a lot on my plate to do but feature-wise I’m reaching the end.

Well I came out of LD36 with a game. It’s not my best LD entry for sure but considering the small amount of time I had this weekend this will do just fine.

Have a play, let me know what you think and all the best to the people still working hard.

The Shattered Beacon

Really excited to do another LD.

Using Unity, Visual Studio, Bosca Ceoil, Sfxr and Paint.net.

Good luck everyone!

So out of my 17 ideas I’m going with this:

“Survival game where you are stuck in a room with a murderer or monster and you have to move from hiding place to hiding place without getting spotted. You can guess the movements of the murderer by what he says or does when hunting you and during a brief introduction into his murdering methods.”

I have the clearest image in my head as to how I want it to look and feel, and I can think up the most amount of interesting mechanics for it.

Now to design this game up!