Hi there, I’m Matt!

I tend to code much better than I art, but anyway… I’m likely to use unity for development of my game, along with blender for 3D modelling and The Gimp for texture creation, unless I decide 2D is really the way to go, in which case I’ll have to learn SFML on the fly and potentially connect it to Box2D (unlikely). Apart from those pre-existing open source libraries, I’m not going to bring any code into this competition.

If my microphone magically turns up or I use a headset I may have a crack at some piano tunes and then find an audio editing program (perhaps reaper?) to do some minor editing, but I’m feeling a little unprepared. Ah well.

And getting a head start on game ideas… rainbows are based on the refraction of light. Refraction connects (in my mind) to doubling… so we’re talking about rainbows composed of doubled up hologram zombies out in the sunshine. Clearly, they come from space to sunburn your brains, and you have to beat them by (of all things) tricking them into colliding with zombies of an opposing colour.

Go ahead, tell me that isn’t awesome.

Well, I have a gameplay idea. It involves running the hell away and trying to block enemies from reaching each other, as if they can’t reach each other they can use each other to attack you.

The twist comes when you confuse one of them into attacking enemies… for which they need a weapon. You.

This game will probably feature robots.

Apparently I decided to make music instead of a game! Of course, it’s music for a game. Might be obvious, I suppose.

Here’s my instruments. Pretty cool, hey?

Unfortunately I can only play the piano and bass guitar, but that’s something.
Oh, and here’s my recording set-up. Distinctly less cool, but very indie?

Okay so I wake up this morning. I have no idea what time it is.
Because of this:

So much for a day of programming, but the power will be back soon right?

Okay, so that’s 6 hours gone, but I can still record music on my mobile phone for a while, right?

One battery bar. Great.

This is part of my song. “The Flying Elephant” was a title for a song that I never wrote, perhaps 10 years ago – so the song was written today, the title 10 years ago. Hope that’s within the rules.

Since 8 hours ago was 10 am and I didn’t actually sleep, I left the blog post until now. Anyway, even among the issues like power outages and the rather worrying results of the Australian election I managed to get a game done… which has better graphics and music than I’ve ever made for a game before. Luck, I guess.

So I present Robocolosseum!

Feedback has generally said it looks and sounds cool, but there’s definitely a “Wait, what’s going on here?” factor. Essentially, you are in an arena with many cannon-bots who fire each other at you. You can block them with walls, dodge them, let them fire at each other or even jump in a cannon yourself and smash through them!

Feedback is always appreciated, I will definitely update it if there is a serious bug but leave links to the original versions valid.

Ludum dare is awesome fun so…

• Engine: Unity3D – C#
• Graphics software: Blender, The GIMP
• Graphics hardware: Wacom Intuos3 4×6″
• Audio software: Audacity
• Audio hardware: Zoom H2 audio recorder (much better quality than a mobile phone), Upright piano, bass guitar & amp, 5 octave Casio keyboard from 10 years ago.
• Food hardware: Electric stove, microwave, saucepans, bowls, cutlery.
• Accessories: Canon A650IS for (food) photos, potentially laptop with webcam if I can be bothered setting that up (probably can’t)

Hello! This will be my second Ludum Dare, and this time I plan to actually make a good game. Relatively speaking. This plan involves not immediately going for a 3d game, making art at the end (not the start) and spending more time on the game and less time yelling at the people of this country for nearly voting Tony Abbott in.

So it’s 3 am and I have a large serve of pasta, baked beans and cheese.

Followed by a tasty microwave chocolate muffin blob.

So far I’ve been going alright in LD, had to go to a 21st party which knocked off 5 hours. However my game is currently playable (though not too user friendly) and you can have a look HERE! Feedback would be great!

The idea? You fly the SpaceBrick, and discover all the things the universe has for you to smash, and all the ways to smash them. Very stupid, but hopefully fun.

Tags: foodphoto

As I mentioned in passing a little earlier, my game is named spacebrick. The main character is a brick with the goal of discovering every way to smash things and every possible thing to smash. All effort so far has been on code/gameplay stuff, art and (hopefully) music/sound comes tomorrow.

So far there’s only one type of enemy to smash, and the spacewindows (interstellar portals, indicated by the arrows) are indestructible. There’s also only one way to smash them, which is to crash into them. However, universe generation is up and running.

Use WASD or the arrow keys to move.

Play the current build.

Tags: progress, screenshot, unity, update

I managed to get some nice planet generation going – colours are set randomly (as is size) and the SPACEBRICK has a real mesh!

Based on feedback I’ve tried to make the brick easier to control – you will be able to get upgrades for speed and various other things (that’s next on the todo list!) but for now it’s just WASD or the arrow keys to SMASH THINGS. Also, the “spacewindows” pointed to by arrows around the place lead to other planets.

Play (unity)

Tags: progress, screenshot, unity

I decided to put a timelapse together this time! And even better, you can play your favourite music alongside it, by which I mean I didn’t edit it. I’ll figure out how next time, I suppose. So here’s the Spacebrick Timelapse

It turns out I played a lot of Blight of the Immortals, especially early on.

On to the game – Spacebrick (which you can play and vote for HERE)

I really enjoyed making this game and got feedback at quite a few points – meaning I heard “It’s hard to control” or “I don’t know what to do” quite a bit. Eventually I ditched any sort of realistic physics. It’s curious to note that I actually went for realistic physics at any point when making a game about a rocket powered brick in space.

I’m actually not too happy with the music. I managed to take a few hours out to write and record some piano music, but in the rush I didn’t really make something that fitted the game. The first part seemed to fit the “space” part well enough, but later I was just playing whatever I came up with and it didn’t work so well.

The graphics did turn out pretty nicely, especially the recoloured planets. You may be less impressed with any skill you thought may have been in the enemy graphics if you saw in the timelapse that I quickly made a fighter, smoothed it, clicked “auto-unwrap” and scribbled something on the texture, whereas my last game was a purple mess, this looks quite nice

Oh and it turns out the upgrade curve is 100% broken.

I may not have coded a win condition, but I can safely say this is winning the game.

Anyway, I had a great time this Ludum Dare, especially chatting with other devs in the IRC channel. See you all next time!

Tags: ante-mortem (my game isn't dead D:), timelapse

Since LD19, a unity game competition turned up on Kongregate so since then I’ve been iterating on my game Spacebrick! It’s much improved from the ludum dare version and hopefully I’ll be able to hit the $1 october challenge target too.

Play on kongregate.

This would also be one reason I missed out on Mini-LD 24, but congratulations to everyone who completed a game for it!

Originally Atomic Pinball was a platformer. It was actually quite interesting, as it had an unusual character (an atom) with some decent movement mechanics and unconventional obstacles. Unfortunately, one of those obstacles specifically worked very badly.

Observe this random platformer (or something) image from the media library:

As you can see, to get anywhere the player must move through air. Unfortunately, when you are a hydrogen molecule, each oxygen molecule is 16 times heavier than you and if given energy may also cause you to explode. In the platformer, you never really got to wherever it was you wanted to go before some giant bloody wrecking ball knocked you right back to where you started. More thought is needed to turn this from an awfully inconvenient issue to a fun game mechanic.

As it turns out I have been at Freeplay all day, so I haven’t programmed anything yet. Partly because my laptop is useless in this situation. So anyway I am making a 2d game where you drink potions to be unceremoniously booted into other 2d worlds such as paintings and tv shows and whatever, at which point you grab the loot and make your spectacular escape or something. Or maybe you jump into a painting inside that painting….

Anyway the art will probably look like it was drawn quickly with pen on paper then photographed because that is precisely what it will be. I don’t know if I’ll get it done for the compo, but I’ll make sure to have something by the jam deadline.

I’ve been jamming at the rather crowded melbourne jamsite most of the time, but more recently I came home to sleep and record some music so here’s a picture of a piano and a ironing board:

I’m working on a 3d “god game” where you have a planet in your hand and poke it to do stuff – I think the music will fit well unless I turn it into a mad scientist doom game in which case it will really, really not.

Anyway, since that was edited at home I should probably have a picture of this desk, as well as the jamsite “desk” (half a 1m by 1m table).

Tags: compo, desk, music

I should also implement more gameplay at some point. And yes, that hand is awful I am sorta bad at 3D art.

Tags: compo, ld23, progress, unity

I find this question pretty easy. My colour scheme is near constant. It’s approximately… a black background with purple, red and blue on top. So they’re all banned*.

Designwise I plan to shove the theme into boxes it might not fit – board games, non-violence, whatever I walk past in the street (mailboxes?), movement systems … see what interesting things come out.

Toolbox: Unity3d SublimeText Blender GIMP Piano NoisyThings FreshAir SufficientSleep CoffeeForWhenThoseToolsBreak

*Mostly banned. Sort of.

You only get one page and have to mean as much as possible.

Start by running through a maze to construct a sentence, then the game goes freeform – you get a list of words to pick from, or options to edit previous words into synonyms. As you go further, new options (like pictures and other mysterious things) appear. Construct sentences better to get more time… and at the end, send a link to your page to your friends.

Yes, getting all that in 48 hours and also being fun might be hard.