This is my first real attempt at a compo entry. I kinda spent a good amount of the time writing parody lyrics instead of developing though.

All I know for sure at this point is that I’ll be using Flixel.

And now, for something more entertaining. Name that tune.

——————————–

Everybody get up, it’s time to scrum now
Let’s get a ‘real game’ going now
Welcome to the game jam

Do a dance in your pants
It’s a game jam

alright alright alright alright-

Come on and cram, and welcome to the jam
Come on and cram, it’s a part of game jams

Hey you, whatchu gonna do
Hey you, whatchu gonna do
Hey you, whatchu gonna do
Hey you, whatchu gonna do

All game makers in the house let’s go
Got a programmer and artist so

Download Flixel, load up FLEX-
Box2D, you know what’s next

Brainstorm- snacks in yo face
Pizza party’s all the craze

Prototypes all down the room-
Final product “COMING SOON”

10:15, :20 and :30
Bug in code – it’s 7:30.

Get tired, lose yo mind
Compo’s running out of time

Hey coders – SPEED IT UP
Tablet pens are burning up

Get on the site and hit submit
Servers down, delay’s legit.

This was my first solo compo, though I had contributed to other jam games in the past.

So… I was going to make a game where you’d basically be killing bugs.

If there are survivors in a wave, you hop into the next wave, with their offspring, whose abilities have evolved.

At level 1, your kitchen is infested by some simple bugs that just walk around back and forth.
At level 2, your kitchen is infested by smarter bugs that run away from you.
At level 3, you’d get your first super-large-bug that you can’t (easily) kill with the platformer-bounce, and would have to grab a knife or something else as a weapon to kill it.

Essentially, this would have broke down into a twitch-action, mindless beat/shoot-em-up :3

What I ended up having:

A short-time-limit bounce-on-all-the-enemies joke game.

It’s essentially the behaviors from levels 1 and 2, with a timer I threw in in the last 20 minutes lol.

I used about 22 hours on this, and about halfway through, after getting some basic player physics/interactions were working, I decided to kinda redo how all the sprites were set up, in preparation for having a weapon. It’s a kind of issue I’ve been thinking about, since I’ve been wanting to make an action-fighting-platformer for a while and have been thinking about hitboxes and how to really split that up. All that curiosity ended up in me treating it as a programming experiment, since I’ve been meaning to try a few things out (specifically, composition over inheritance, since it wasn’t something I really learned in school). The best part is I ended up omitting the weapon system in the submission. awwyeah, good use of time lol.

Interfaces are cool. Coding patterns are cool. Composition is cool.

Using XML would have been cool to set up the stages, if I had the systems I wanted and levels made lol. Instead, it just hardcodes the number of enemies in each wave.

This pretty much summarizes it.

..yep

Well, I’ve probably worked a total of like 21 hours on the game, and a lot of that was experimenting and refactoring code.

@__@

I think at some point, it (d)evolved into a coding exercise instead of a game.

Hooray for composition and XML-based levels?

Not sure if I’ll extend this into a Jam game since I’ll have no time to work on it tomorrow :/

the game has looked like this (while changing in the back-end) for at least 5 hours.

Flixel on Flashdevelop.
No drawing tablet.
Final Destination.

[I’ll be using DAME as my map editor, FL Studio / maybe Garageband for music, SFXR for sound, and possibly TweenMax, if I get to it]

I posted this last time I did a solo dare.

You’d think I’d have learned what to do when trying to make a game, but curiosity still gets the best of me, haha.

And here’s my time management so far, mostly in chronological order:

1.5 hours – brainstorm/design

3.3 hours – Dialog box system + minor code testing

7 hours – sleep

6 hours – Cutscene system + ‘unit tests’

3 hours – goof off. I WATCHED POWER RANGERS THE MOVIE THOUGH.

.5 hours – Art

1.5 hours – Look for a certain documentation for DAME

4 hours – Wrote my own parser for DAME while floundering around in documentation `__`

1 hour – Write an XML/CSV parsing system and build a test map.

.5 hours – Implement a player character and get it to move around in the map.

————-

Programming : ~16.5 hours

Art: .5 hours

Design:  1.5 hours

————–

The best thing about this is that I’ve spent nearly 9.5 hours working on the cutscene/dialog text system as the first features on this project. There was no game to attach them to – they are just sitting there, waiting for a concrete implementation, and they probably won’t get used much, either, haha. I was just really curious about how to implement them, though…

I’m poised to have about 7-8 hours to work on this tomorrow.

– Music/SFX
– more art?
– Basic enemies or level design things that are interesting (I only have basic blocks right now)
– Title/End states
– Player attacks?

I figure I can probably get 1 or 2 more systems in if I don’t get caught in the ‘testing’ part of the process. I want to work on music though, but I’m not so worried about that – I made all the music and sound effects for this game and half the music in this game in 1-2 hours, each.

I also made all the music, sound effects, and gameplay for this game,

…and I think it will be more like that one.

….yep.

Hi everyone, we’re Cosmic Adventure Squad and we’ve been doing game jams for over 10 years! You may have seen or played some of our previous games such as Deepest Sword and Game Name. We’ve been asked by a few people to share some of our processes and thoughts for how we made It Was All For The Tuna, our LD52 entry.

It Was All For The Tuna is a chill fishing game where you play as Toro the cat and you’re tasked with catching Tuna to feed the citizens of NekoTuna.

Play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/it-was-all-for-the-tuna

This is part 3 of a 3-part post-mortem taking a look at how we approached developing the game. In this part I'll be discussing the Audio and Audio System in the game!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Audio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XzqEv9vpao The song is hosted on SoundCloud with free download as well

Brainstorming and Inspiration

We spent the first evening doing idea brainstorms , and one of the concepts that stuck was a fishing game where you'd compete against other fishers and upgrades would affect pollution in the world. This lent itself to a really interesting idea for me - what if the song could seamlessly shift into a "corrupted" version of the main theme?

Usually, I compose music after we’ve come up with more concept art and even some gameplay, so it’s heavily inspired by visuals and gameplay. I usually try make the music fit to the existing visuals+gameplay, but this time I wanted to try to do the reverse and come up with music early enough to help inspire visuals+gameplay instead. By the end of day 1, I’d come up with the music sketch for the main theme, and added in a makeshift waves track to complete the feeling for the main part of the game.

I loved games like Skies of Arcadia where the world theme would seamlessly add in layers to its overworld music as you approached certain towns to add a cultural flavor to the airspace. In modern games, I've seen this come up in Age of Empires IV where choosing a civilization in the lobby would add in unique layers that flavor the main theme. In older games like Megaman X, an intro riff of a song would play once you enter a stage and then loop after that point. In Octopath Traveler, the pre-boss-battle music is crafted to loop until the player gets past the dialogue then triggers a transition piece into the main boss battle loop, and it's amazing.

https://youtu.be/b7Zc3f8cPnU?t=284

(at 4m41s he discusses how the transition occurs, or 7:20 if you wanna just hear it work, but definitely pan around if you haven't played!)

I figured I could take from each of these pieces of inspiration and craft a song where a melody or harmony could open the path to transitioning the background music to different chord progressions and eventually swap out the melody altogether! It'd be like a Ship of Theseus in music form! This needed a much more custom audio system using Unity’s Mixer and using much different approaches to audio than we’d done in the past.

Audio System

I had these goals for the audio system: - Crossfading tracks and gradual volume control - Ability to have “Layered Music” objects - multi-track songs with controllable volume-mixing through script. - Queueing tracks that would start when the previous song ends (ex: could use it to create an “intro” section that only plays once then a main loop, or to queue a new song that plays once the previous one has ended). In the best case, we could have a live playlist system.

I was able to finish implementing the audio system (enough to use the minimal features of it!): - Tracks and volumes ease in - We had up to 4 simultaneous tracks playing at once: the main piano theme, 2 harmony layers, and the ambient waves layer, and they were controlled through script: as you upgrade your boat, different layers fade in. As a nod to the pollution / “getting away from nature” idea, the waves track is actually loudest when you first start the game but gets quieter as you upgrade the boat! It’s probably an often-missed detail and I blame a certain bug for it :expressionless: , but it’s there! - We didn’t really get to use the queue-track feature; I wanted to use it for the “corruption” mechanic or seamless transition between ending/restart, but ran out of time to craft the song for it.

Scoping

Saturday was a friend’s wedding, so I went. To try to make up for the time, I drank coffee throughout the entire reception (5 cups!). When I got home, I stayed up the whole night and got my first pass through the audio system LOL.

The pollution idea went out of scope, so I ended up using one of the music sketches for reharmonizing the main theme into corruption as the ending theme.

Implementing and bugfixing the audio system took up a lot of my time, so the main music theme is almost exactly the original sketch. It’s still cute and relaxing, but it’s definitely a bit rough! I had a variation/”bridge” part I’d sketched out (so maybe it’d have more of an AAB or AABB loop then the AA loop it has right now - that is, if you feel like there isn't enough variation, that's because I didn't get to create/add it in time!) 😓

I barely had time to make SFX. At one point I made fft! sounds into the mic and that became the fishing rod throw. Now you can’t unhear it!

The cutscene dialogue text is generated from https://acedio.github.io/animalese.js/ - pretty handy tool :)

Audio Balancing Issues

Some of the big things that haunts me in this project are the audio balancing issues. I created the audio tracks assuming they'd be at a certain volume, but 2 main things threw everything out of whack:

• NORMALIZED AUDIO - This is an option that we've almost always turned on in prior projects. It adjusts your audio according to the peak volume of the audio file ~~so that it's on a similar loudness to the other audio~~. For sound effects (especially when exported or generated from different tools/sources), it's great. When you have a music track that's supposed to be quiet... it overturns the intended balance and makes it extremely loud. If you feel like the chiptune tracks in the Jam version were loud... they are, and it's not intended :weary:
• Unity WebGL Volume - For some reason it feels like the WebGL build's volume came out way louder than the builds we were testing with offline. It had me playing around 5-10% on volume in web when I'd be playing at 90% volume offline. Hopefully we'll figure out what's behind this or a workaround by next time.

Overall

I'm pretty happy with what we came out with! I’m proud of how the game looks and plays (seriously, a fishing mechanic that isn’t a quick time event!), and I think we managed to hit the relaxing feel we were going for!

For me with audio, I feel like there definitely could have been more polish from the asset/musical standpoint (I created a system that lets me do what I want, but I didn't create the content for it! oops! :sweat_smile: that's scoping for you) but I’m pretty hyped about the audio system that came out of it! With the things I learned from implementing it this time, we can do almost all the functionality I've wanted to have for a long time with our games :grin: