Woof

G’night Ludum people. Here’s a flying jetpack robot-wolf with a laser gun from our soon-to-be Ludum Jam entry! Still needs some particles and a proper artist, but we’ll manage.

We’re new here and this game would be our first actual finished game, so when you’ll see it in the entries list, please, criticize every bloody thing out of it.

Best wishes, Holy Cow Studio.

Yay! We’ve completed our first game together and we are so happy!

Big thanks to Ludum Dare for giving us that competition spirit, which in turn motivated us to complete at least ONE and FIRST ever game. You can download and rate it by going here <Link>. OST also available as free download!

With love to game development community, Suurin and Andy Ion.

Tags: 2D, compo, final, game, ld29, unity, unity3d

Hello! My name’s Alex, I’m the guy that made 1/2 of the game “In search of an Artist” for this months Ludum Dare Jam, and I really wanted to write a little post-mortem of our first game jam experience.

So, here we go.

Let’s start with the Bad things:

• Impreparation. We really should have done more preparation before the actual Jam. I mean, we lost at least a day of a Ludum timer just setting up and brainstorming for ideas. As you can see, the latter was not very successfull.
• Prioritization and time management. We ended up spending at least 10 hours just animating and doing enemy AI, and only, like, 5 hours on actual level design, player controls, etc.
• Sleeping.  To believe our skype call timers, out of 72 hours of jam time, we only spend ~27 developing (plus ~7 hours of preparations). So, yeah. Don’t do that sleep thing. It’s really bad.

Now that we’re done with the things that killed us, let’s see what revives us (aka the Good):

• Mecanim animations. Despite of how time consuming that thing was, it ended up really awesome. I like it, people seem to like it. I just need to practice that stuff more and stop wasting too much time on it.
• Music and sounds. Thanks to our awesome Man of Code and a sound artist, also known as Andy, sound in our game ended up being on a pretty good level.

So yeah, to be honest, these two things above are the only things I’m satisfied with in our game right now. We could have done better, and we WILL do better next time.

Also, the game IS based on a true story. We really lost our graphics artist in the begining of the jam. So thats how the “art” style was born, if you’re wondering.

Anyway, thanks to everybody who left comments on our entry page, it really helps us to evaluate our work!

Best wishes, Holy Cow Studio.

Hello Ludum Dare! I’m Alex from Holy Cow Studio, and I’m responsible for some code and design for our latest Ludum Dare submission – Gravity. This was our third attempt at getting a game done in 72 hours, and I think it went much better then the previous two. But, again, there are some things that I’m not satisfied with, which is good, so I’ve decided to write a little AAR about them here.

But first, here are 29 hours of Gravity development, compressed in 12 minutes!

So, yeah, let’s talk about the game now. Gravity is a game, in which player could use any object as a weapon by changing the way gravity affects it.

At least that was the original concept. And here is where my disappointment starts. Although, the game mechanic is here, I, as a level designer, completely failed at fully showing it. The main mistake, really, was trying to make a puzzle game, while all I needed is some objects to throw and some fun enemies to bash. There, at least on my level of skill, is no way of making a good puzzle game in such a small time frame. What I ended up with are 6 levels and “change a direction” game mechanic. I could’ve added so much more to the whole “gravity as a weapon” gameplay, but again, the time is my biggest enemy. I still feel like I could’ve done things better IN this time frame, though. Make the levels easier, for example.

ANYWAY, let’s talk about the things I’m proud of this time:

1. 3D – this was our first 3d game, woohoo!
2. Graphics – despite the fact that none of us in our team have any arts skills whatsoever, I think this game still ended up looking pretty good.
3. A fun game mechanic –  I really loved the idea, and I’ll look more into making a couple more prototypes using it.

Thats all I had to say, I think. Go play Gravity and leave some feedback, we would really appreciate it.