Day 1 for Spermicorn! Our team is working from Milan and Tokyo, many drafts so far( we had some trouble posting), we are developing with Unity and our story is about...love!

Hello everyone! We had some trouble posting so here's a quick recap of the last days! Javarnanda was fast and composed great game music, we are still deciding which one to use :)

Spermicorn is a game about being stubborn and of course..very small!

Our gameplay has two different phases and some cut-scenes in the middle.

Graphics almost done, we spent the first day producing assets and programming (Unity), today we added details and we are still rendering the cut-scenes.

We have got a splash screen! Still polishing things here and there, it was the first LD for the three of us, I'm really happy with the results so far, we managed to move from scribbles on a notepad to something that is coming to life and making us laugh a lot :D Countless pizzas have been eaten in the process...well not by @Jabba, he's more into his Tokyo food :)

Hackathon donts: a major rework a few hours before the end😂😂 I wasn't happy with the composition of this scene, plus we polished the graphics a little more... it actually improves the overall player experience, filling the quality gap we had between our 2 gameplays.

Pleease don't let me spend the night sifting through a zillion of llama frames to reconstruct our cut-scenes:'( For some reason not all computers can see the video scenes...pretty annoying :D

Too many llamas!!

Ok, the background look so real...@jabba music made us laugh our heads off the first time we heard it. It doesn't show in this clip but you have to shoot a lot with your horn to make it through the crowd!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM0E6HuIaWU

3 hours left, some finishing touches and we are ready to publish. This was the first jam of us and the first time working together as a team. It really worked out and we hope to start a new project together as soon as possible! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yUFAnRjNa8

Play it here

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/spermicorn

Spermicorn Story

Spermicorn was born different, he lives inside a llama who has no idea he's going to change his species forever.

Help him spread his special feature!

The crazy run

You must run with a million of others like you, but you are special! Use your sparky horn to make room for yourself but watch out for the slowing areas. Move and hit sideways while goin' with the flow.

The sacred egg room

If you are good enough, you will be allowed to the sacred egg room, our second gameplay. Here is where you have the chance to prove your stubborness. What are those motivational phrases telling you? Believe in yourself and make your way through the egg!

This was our first jam, the submitted game is just the beginning, we are working to make it better! Thank you for playing and reviewing it!!

Omg I'm playing a lot and discovering great entries. If you didn't already, check these games out (more to come)! They are amazing.

Slice of Life

Cybernoir

Carefulzilla

Dad’s world

Bloody small world

My World

Small Hell

Stardust Adventure

Noizy

4 hours

Love Bug

Shakedown

Orbitunes

Spoiled Prince

Caturday

One way hero

Doodles

Critters

Agaric abyss

Care taker

Lunar Depot 38

* Well and of course... our Spermicorn ;) *

*I want to take this chance to say THANK YOU to all of you that took a moment to leave a comment. This is our first time and your feedback was soo much appreciated!! *

Thank you to everyone who believed in our crazy story and tried Spermicorn Game

Ludum Dare was a great adventure for us and one of the best things we bring home is * the discovery of such a beautiful community* with whom we share this big love for games.

We decided to focus more on the mood and story because we believe these are the key points in making a game memorable.

We are aware that our gameplay is at the moment a basic one, but we just wanted you to get the idea of what it could be.

Since day one after the submission we went on working to add everything that was needed to make the game a challenging and enjoyable one. We hope to post an update very soon.

As promised Llamacorns are just the tip of the iceberg, our plans for animalcorn domination are clear!

Mr Piggycorn is taking care of this personally.

(still reviewing your games, I will post Piggycorn's special choice of his favourites in a moment!)

Note: for those who asked: @jabba thanks you and will release Spermicorn Original Soundtrack very soon.

Few hours left and I keep finding gems like these!

here is, as promised, more games I really liked:

Lunar Depot 38

Floppy Mc Floppy Face

Colorfly

Flight of Claude

A lighthouse story

Psycho Paul

The Littlest Kaiju

Want to know who Mr piggycorn is? Check Spermicorn Game out too!

For those who asked, you can now enjoy the extended version of Spermicorn theme here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GMD93Y4d5I

and if you haven't already, give it a try here and rate us! We'd love to hear from you :)

Wait..why is "llama" so small? Let's add some llama love! :D Play Spermicorn Game here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJVHw9Z9n94

We are so happy that you liked Spermicorn music! Here is the extended version of the end titles theme, just for you! :D

Thanks to all who played and left comments!

Want to know more about how llamacorns are going to rule the planet?

Play Spermicorn Here ;)

After years of programming "things" that were always too ugly to show,

after countless friends I had asked for help but never had the time,

after those who had time but left the work undone...

I said to myself: am I that bad at drawing?

Is there any chance I could make the art for my own games?

So in June 2016 I picked up the pencil and started to follow some tutorial on youtube. Unexpectedly I found myself drawing portraits of friends (the good ones) instead of game art. That was a phase I think. At some point I decided to give it a try and design some characters. (if you are curious about my art progress check out my instagram..you will find pretty embarassing things)

If I compare my work to that of a professional... there's a long road ahead, I don't have the technique and the experience yet, but

* my challenge for Ludum Dare 38 was exactly this: to produce all the graphics, trying to do whatever I had in mind without fear *.

Set no limits

What I learned is that weather you have plenty of time or just 3 days it's always a good idea to let your imagination go at first , without setting any limit, as you were capable of doing everything comes into your mind (this applies to coding as well) and THEN sift through what you imagined and think about things like: the time you have , what makes sense and what doesn't. This is where you "kill" ideas

There are rules though:

The reason for setting a limit can't never be: I'm not good enough or I don't know how to do this. It's for this very reason that why we decided to put ourselves outside of our comfort zones by using a new environment (Unity) (this doesn't apply to @jabba: Jabba was in his super comfort cozy zone in his Tokyo living room, eating sushi and making music :D )

Anyway: the thing is: I had no idea how to animate a sperm tail, let alone drawing llamas in love. Mi first attempt looked more like a cow-bear :D

This is what ludum dare is about : having the chance to try something new, to figure out how to do something you never did before, to learn new skills.

So, we decided to cut many things , but never the challenging bits.

We left the gameplay pretty basic because we wanted the game to be as complete as possible. We decided to spend our time more in the enhancement of the second gameplay , we completely reworked it in the last hours. We did this just because it made it more consistent with the rest of the game. For the same reason we focused a lot on the story: we strongly believe that is the story that provides context to a game and gives the player a reason for his actions. We cut some extra feature that would have been nice, we know. but we thought: if we have to implement them sloppy because of the short time, then better not include them at all.

Back to the artists part:

what I want to say here is: give it a try. Maybe you are not a Picasso, but now more than ever there's plenty of resources online to help you on the way.

Here's my process:

I realize I don't even know how game artists really work.

True game artists out there, I would greatly appreciate your advice!

*ok don't play the game below, really, just give me your advice! :D *

Spermicorn Game

This was our first jam and first Unity game.

We didn't expect that much!

First of all we are amazed by the number of ratings * and by your *great feedback.

9th position in humor means a lot to us, and 98th in music is an awesome result too.

We discovered the most incredible community of game developers here.

Meeting you guys was definitely the best part and it pushes us to go on *, learn more and come back with some new crazy game for *LD39 ;)

play Spermicorn here

Seems like yesterday when we took part in our first Jam,

it was Ludum Dare 38!

Now we are back with this little guy named Zoltan.

Just a quick post, because still have so much to do today!

We are using Unity

Our team for this jam:

The theme wasn't what we hoped for, but we worked it out :D

Happy jamming everybody! Go go go!

One man one soul, one cat...9 souls!

Finished our second jam, just in time! It was great. I think we asked ourselves more this time. Our last time we were completely new to Unity...and illustration. We did our best, we had fun, and we can't wait to play with all the games here! But wait, who's Zoltan?

Souls acquisitions haven't been going very well lately

Until The Devil's cat, Zoltan, has a brilliant idea!

Since cats have 9 lives, it's 9 times more efficient buying their souls!

Now Zoltan needs to find the most evil cats on Earth.

YOU WILL SEE:

here's the plan

About the Team

This is our second jam. Our first one was on LD38. We really wanted to make everything from scratch and we did the impossible to produce every asset and code in these 3 days, even if this is a jam.

We were a bit scared by the theme at first but then we were much more scared when we met Zoltan!

@tommyflower: graphics + code @fanu : code @ioleoso: music

We used Unity, Photoshop and AfterEffects.

(Note: in Italy, where we are from, cats have 7 souls, not nine. Still a lot :) )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOMxQ67XfYk

Play the game here!.

for those how are having trouble watching the intro ;)

Why chasing humans for their souls when just one evil cat can provide 9? Or is it 7? It really depends where you are from. In Italy cats are said to have seven lives, but Shakespeare says they are 9.

Play Zoltan'Idea here and find out :)

kidnap your favourite cat and see what misdeeds it can do...