My first Ludum Dare =D

My entry: We Are Alone

I decided to go with procedural generation as I don’t have too much experience with it, and when you’re rushed for time is a great time to learn new things, right?  Apparently right, because I think it worked out pretty well. I’ve ran the generator a lot, and after tweaking it throughout the weekend, I think it’s almost impossible to get an unwinnable level.  Having more time, I could certainly improve it a lot.  Sometimes the four cave doors appear very close together, when ideally they should be spread more evenly throughout the level.  Also if I had more time I would have made the interior of the caves more interesting, I had intended on putting bats or other obstacles in some of them, but that would have taken more time than I had.

What didn’t go so well is the walking animation, it’s… not good.  I probably should have made the six characters less unique and more like a palette swap, then I would have had more time to animate them, but I wasted time giving some of them hats, making one of the characters a small kid etc.  Probably wasn’t necessary. The ending graphics were also incredibly rushed, but I don’t think that is quite as significant as the walking problem…

The Wolf AI is also incredibly basic and it can easily get trapped behind a tree or rock, but as right now, that’s the only way the player can really escape from the wolf without a weapon, so if I had fixed that, I would have had to spend even more time coding a mechanic to escape the wolf somehow…

Overall I am pretty pleased with this and will try to create something really good with procedural generation in the future now that I have had a little experience with it =)

My second LD, whoooo etc.

I have snacks stocked and ready! I won’t have to leave the house at all =D

I’ll be using BlitzMax again because I am scared of new things, but the theme will hopefully push me into some new gameplay mechanic or technique I’ve never tried out before, whatever it ends up being, and I’m aiming to get some music in my game this time.  Never made music before, so that should be… interesting =P

Woke up at like 7am, checked the theme – WHOOO! I was hoping for this.  Gives me a chance to try something weird that I’ve never tried before – normally in platform games, I use a tile/grid system for everything, and it is kind of limiting so I’ve been meaning to look more at image collisions and such, so great excuse to try that out!
So the basic idea is: a mario galaxy style game, done in 2D.

Three hours-ish in, and I have the basics done.  You can walk all the way round the planets, you can jump, you can jump from one planet to another…  I’ve tried some test planets that you can actually go inside, and they work fine so long as I don’t let the player get right to the centre – then weird stuff starts happening.

Not sure entirely what the game objectives will be aside form exploring micro galaxies and tiny tiny worlds yet, getting core gameplay first… next be enemies I think =)
(mario sprite is placeholder of course)

Progress has been made!  I didn’t make enemies yet, but I’m progressing towards that – instead I coded stars which you can collect and laid out the hubworld where you will select your next level from – the hubworld consists of a mini-earth, a moon (which orbits the earth!!) and a mysterious dark purple planet from which you will launch yourself to other levels.  There’s also a sun which you can kill yourself by jumping into. YAAAaaaAAAAy!

And as shown, I have little moon bunny friends that you can talk to and will tell you how to play the game and stuff!  Now I must make something to eat before I code the next level or enemies or whatever 😀

I have now created enemies! Dark shadow rabbits, their behaviour is pretty simple, and you just jump on their heads and they die.  Hopefully make some variety there tomorrow.  The end-of-level star gate thing now appears when you collect seven stars, though that will not be the objective in every level.  Also coded switches which you can jump at to activate things, and coded some new planet behaviours.

I’m hoping for five levels at least (not including the hub world) – I have two and a half finished so far (plus the hubworld).  I think this is feasible, if I have excess time after sound and music I’ll probably add more levels.  Sleep for now though!

Completed!

Managed to finish the game, did cut a couple of things – no intro showing the rice cakes being stolen by the shadow bunnies, and no level five.  Also only one type of enemy was finished I could have added a fifth level, but I wouldn’t have had time to put anything unique into it, so it wouldn’t have been worth the sacrifice to other things.

The basic gameplay idea (planets are platforms, walk round them etc)  I didn’t even know for sure I could do when I started, so I’m pretty happy at having accomplished that.  Also my first attempt at making music was… well, I don’t think it’s terrible, but I included a mute button in case you disagree 😀

I recorded a little video footage of my game, and added a timelapse at the end that I narrated over because I couldn’t get the game music to insert properly. I just babble on mindlessly about the game 😀

Video link

Quite happy with progress so far. Had some real trouble getting particles to work (still haven’t succeeded…). It’s the first time I’ve tried to use Unity, or anything 3D, for a Ludum Dare and its the most success I’ve had with Unity thus far
It’s a pretty basic game concept, destroy Happy Land by walking over the grass tiles to destroy them, try not to fall to your death. Hopefully tomorrow I will code some very simple combat and have the bunny and puppy get in your way 😛

My game (Blight on Happy Land) was apparently incredibly and unintentionally difficult for some people, because I wasn’t aware of the importance of Time.deltaTime and so the tiles in the game fell rapidly for some players, instead of at a more relaxed pace, making the game incredibly difficult and/or impossible. Ouch! The code was only even needed in one place! Two lines of code! Aghhhh!

Anyway, I’ve uploaded a fixed version of the game for web and windows, I’ve kept the old versions of course and made it clear that judging should only be done on the non-fixed version, but the fixed versions are up in case anyone wants to play the game as it was intended to run (I hope anyway)

Oh wow, I somehow made it… had to cut quite a lot, but the game is completable and the major points are there.

Link: click here

Samus Regrets:

It is, obviously, a metroid game, but instead of acquiring upgrades to progress, Samus is pursuing a minimalist lifestyle, and having to get rid of all of her belongings.

I should have a timelapse done eventually, will probably be at least Wednesday before I have time to fix it up though.

Game link: Samus Regrets

I narrate/ramble in the video some of my thought process and such, but things:

What went right

Whoohoo! I made it to over 100 games tried somehow! So it seems all the cool kids are putting up a selection of their faves, so I will give in to peer pressure:

Less is More by atraxgames

This is a pretty clever puzzle game, where you have to get rid of the coloured blocks with the ability to delete a limited number of the border blocks. The different colours each act differently, and getting them to interact in ways that are beneficial to you is part of the puzzle.

Revolvengarde by Andrio

Minimalist controls throughout, you use the left and right arrow keys to rotate your little orb thing to deflect attacks that match the colour of your shield(s), it gets pretty quick paced. Even the menus retain the two button controls, in a way I thought was pretty clever.

F*** this job by Casino Jack

A one-button challenging platformer, you will die a lot. Similar to Super Meat Boy you are rewarded for your victory with a “recording” of all your failed attempts played at once.

Budget Squad by deepnight

It’s a beatiful game, you control two submarines, each with different abilities and limitations, collect gems, avoid things that kill you. I didn’t manage to beat it, but I will probably try again at some point. Very fun, but the theme isn’t really present except in that the submarines have “minimal” abilities each.

Fractured by dalbinblue

A challenging puzzle game with minimal controls. I’d say more about the mechanics, but it’s more interesting going in blind

And a quick plug for my own game: Samus Regrets a metroid game where you discard power ups instead of acquire them.

I don’t have a name yet 😐

Day one progress!

Graphics all very placeholdery of course.
I have a level editor done, recycled some code to make a level selection screen that loads all levels in the levels folder and displays information about them before you choose one (level name, size, author, difficulty), placed a worker unit who can be clicked on to move him around, or double clicked on to give him orders – right now all he can do is build three different types of treehouse.

It’s basically going to be a village of elves defending and protecting a forest from an invading army of something, probably orcs and the like. I have some weird resource management ideas for it that should make things interesting that I’ll post more about once they are working 😀

There are a lot of numbers on the left, but most of that is debug stuff while I make sure the enemy AI is working, so it’s not a huge amount to deal with.
Began coding the enemy AI today. So far, all it will do is build a few stone gathering orcs, once it acquires enough stone it builds a barracks which allows it to start spawning wood choppers. Who, of course, chop trees.

So the basic idea is, you control the elves defending the forest, particularly the magical trees that you spawn beside. If they get destroyed, you lose. The orcs cut down the trees for resources which they will use to grow their army and expand their corruption of the land. To defend yourself, you need resources yourself, but you have to balance how you gather these resources – you can gather twigs on the ground, which is slow, but not harmful to the forest, or you can start chopping down trees, which is of course not good for the forest. Too many harmful actions will result in the forest reacting against you >D

So tomorrow is probably going to be spent mostly on the enemy AI again, the wood cutters are a little buggy right now and I need to get attacking working.

Well, I have incredibly basic combat going on, fog of war, win and failure conditions… a lot of the important stuff.
I don’t have enough time to really make this great – I have to work on the level graphics a lot, there’s a lot of balancing of resources etc that could be done, I need to make at least a few level maps to play on, the level editor needs to have the ability to rename levels… lots to do and not enough time to do it all I fear. But I’ll try to get as much done as I can.

Well, it’s 3 am here, so I’m about to fall unconscious but I managed to finish my game.

The artwork is a little less than I was hoping for, I thought I had all day to work on the art, but then I wasted more time on the graphics for the title screen/endings than I really should have. I kind of like the ending, but I should have put more priority on the level graphics… anyway, it all works, and you can check it out here: Link!

Huzzah!

It’s a horror explory game, you must evade the ghost of Emily as you explore an abandoned school looking for items that can help you escape. If she touches you, you die. She gives you a 10 second head start though, so it’s not all bad.

I’ll probably have a timelapse up sometime in the next few days if everything worked fine.

I recorded a quick little video of me playing the game, followed by a timelapse I recorded with Chronolapse. I talk over the top about what went wrong and stuff. The timelapse contains spoilers, of course 😀

Youtube link

You can play the game here!

So a lot of people who played my game were commenting on it being very slow, after watching someone else play it and having someone test it on a different computer, turns out there was a massive bug that for some reason I and some players weren’t experiencing.

It was one line of code to fix it, that basically changed the game from drawing shadows over every single tile in the entire level (!!!) to only drawing shadows on the tiles that are being drawn to the screen! Obviously that makes a huge difference in speed, but it is just one line of code? I think it is allowed to fix this, yes?

At any rate, I’ve uploaded the fixed version, but I’ve kept the buggy version up as well and explained the situation on my game’s page so people can make their own judgement call on which version to rate

And if you played the game before and experienced horrible slowdown, please try it again now, this should fix the problem 😀

Finished my entry Link.

I was way too ambitious and thought I would get all the Peru stages demade + mansion. Luckily I did consider that this might be absurd, so I started with the best level, The Lost Valley, and it is complete, more or less. Didn’t have time to really polish the graphics so kind of wish I had went with an even simpler look, but ah well. Also I spent more time than necessary on some things that ended up not even being used in this particular level, like the pushable crates aren’t really necessary..

But it should all work, you can get from the start to finish (the Lost Valley part starts after the initial tutorial caves) and there are three super hidden pieces of the Scion to find.

No game name yet. I decided to use this as an opportunity to go out of my comfort zone and do something in Unity again. I actually managed to get all the game mechanics coded today except an ending and a title screen, so tomorrow will be mostly spent on graphics 😀

You have to find a treasure hidden somewhere among some strange ruins at the bottom of the sea, while avoiding hostile creatures that don’t like you intruding on their waters.