Upon hearing the topic of minimalism, I wanted to cover a complicated topic in a very simple way.  I was inspired by a map of racial segregation, of all things.  Src = http://www.businessinsider.com/most-segregated-cities-census-maps-2013-4

becomes

I decided to make a game focused on taking game objects that are different and melding them together, but with some form of struggle.

Colors are simple, and I wanted to use paintbrushes and residue on the ground to make this painting, but time did not permit, so the minimal approach would suffice with spheres inside a box.

It was a fun adventure using new assets entirely.  It was so tempting to rip off a chill instrumental that I feel fits the mood. But making it myself is the  point of ludum dare!  In any case I have mute, I hope people figure out my little game and enjoy the experience all together.

One interesting challenge was freeing up time in my schedule.   Despite having a free-weekend, this was actually much harder than I imagined.

My Ludum Dare

direct link http://sheridanthirsk.com/colormeld/

I used this experience to try out the 2D features in Unity.

Some of the physics interactions was not smooth and took a bit of extra time but all in all I think it went alright.

Sprite sheets is something I’ve never had to do, but I started to become faster near the end.

My game isn’t complete, I think I need to do some more prep next time!   But here it is in half functional form.

http://sheridanthirsk.com/tauarrow/index.html

I had a few ideas to start, one of which I knew was impossible but I had the door open anyway.  I wanted to try multiplayer with the new lobby stuff Unity provides, but that didn’t happen (yet?)

But with that PvP idea I decided to make a hero-based real time strategy game crossed with sports!  I love the abilities from WarCraft 3 and I wanted to have the three heroes mirror the ones from NES hockey, fat, thin, medium.  Each with abilities on Q W E.  Also taking a page out of DotA I went with explosive towers to kill instead of a net to score in.

I took the RTS idea and decided to make a fully 3D interface, including cursors and arrows modeled in 3D.   I dont think it worked out that great, but it was fun to try.  In general my clicking and camera and dragging was okay, but i expect some people to have some challenges because it isn’t exactly the same as the other games people play.

It was a pretty successful project even though I fought a bit with plugins from Unity and from external (Vectrosity).  The deferred shading anti alias camera effects was fun to play with, but often failed and I had to spend a lot of time tuning a pile of settings.   I wish I could have applied a more interesting skybox and tonemap color treatment, but I should learn more about it up front instead of learning about it in the LD.

I also got a bit better at blender, especially modelling.   The UV wrapping was a bit puzzling, it seems easy but it didn’t come out right so I should watch a video.

Lastly, deferred and forward rendering sometimes broke? So I made two builds and got them both working eventually.  I am glad they have improved the WebGL support

Ludum Dare page

http://sheridanthirsk.com/robothockey/ vs http://sheridanthirsk.com/robothockey/forward/