I agreed to do the jam for Ludum Dare #21 with a couple coworkers, and after hashing out multiple gameplay ideas we arrived at something that sounds like it’ll be pretty doable and fun. While I usually program in these kinds of things, I’m probably doing mostly art and design for this contest in the interest of time/teamliness.
Good luck, everyone. It’s really fun to see all the work that’s happening now.
I spent a weird amount of time of my first full LD Jam day in the shop for my car (doodling on my laptop/Wacom with people staring at me like I was making a bomb) or lying around lame/sick, but I did churn out level and player graphics. I hope I kept the watercolory look of the concept art.
We’re still using crops from my original concept art for the boss and enemies, but progress on the game overall looks pretty encouraging. We’ve got two types of enemies, one flying and one grounded, that both attack the player and a big bad boss. I’ll be focusing on making the boss more alive and scary today, both with code and art. Now, it occasionally shoots red dots now whilst hovering around on the left side of the screen. While hazardous, that’s not exactly the scale of threat I was hopin’ for :).
I got a fun chase animation for our boss going, which was an interesting bit of practice/experimentation for watercolor-style animation. I’ve been trying to fill in art assets where I can and we’re all buckling down and trying to finish those last bits that really make the thing playable. Enemies drop weapons and health now, things can die, and there’s a high score screen. Go team! I’ve proven less useful in this code than I’d hoped since I sent myself to art-land, but I still poked around in there a bit to make the game end properly when the boss dies. I’ve written up the todo list of things left before submitting. It’s bigger than I’d like, but pretty doable.
Good luck everyone!
We did it! Three days, one game. Hooray! There were some scary last minute bits due to out of date drivers on a testing machine, but everything came together and Run Run Robot got released. You can check out our game here or read on for my clumsy summary of the development process.
The Process:
We used LÖVE as our game engine and wrote our game logic in Lua. I did a lot of art and direction, but the vast majority of code was pumped out by the heroic and capable Brian and Eric. Art was done in the copy of Photoshop Elements that came with my Wacom.
We used Mercurial and the excellent Bitbucket for our version control. I’ve previously only used Mercurial for individual projects, but I have to say that having multiple people work on the same project on this time scale meant a lot of merges. I hope I was doing something wrong, because I don’t want Mercurial to be that hard.
Day 0:
The topic was announced at 7PM our time, so our first day of work was just discussion, design, concept art, sleep. Designing and talking over IM was a pain in the ass. We’ll try to meet in person next time, or at least have a shared whiteboard and voice chat online somewhere.
Day 1:
Brian wrote animation loading code, made a random level/enemy spitter-outer and handled our basic collision code in top notch time while Eric wrote most of our weapon/shooting code and added the boss. I painted all of the level graphics and player animations. Lame croppings of the original concept art were used for the initial boss and enemy graphics. Our animation loading code uses individual PNGs instead of strips, which seemed totally worth the performance hit.
Day 2:
Powerups, health, tons of discussion and tweaking to make the game as fun and playable as we could manage while still keeping it a little too hard. I drew the boss animations and finished up the win/lose screens. I’m pretty new to 2D animation in general, but this watercolory style of animation was especially new to me. I enjoyed it.
Eric also took it upon himself to sneak a Jedi mode into the game, which was way too cool to hide behind the Konami code as originally intended :). The only way to kill the boss is to reflect his own shots back at him with a light saber. I suck at it.
Day 3:
It was Monday! We had to go to work :(. During our lunch breaks and after work we fixed a couple crucial bugs, added more instructions and added a life bar to the boss so the player can know just how close he is to winning. We also made Jedi mode easier to get to as a rather good last minute decision.
Submission time was mostly composed of Eric screaming at me to redraw the victory screen for Jedi mode to have a light saber in it and me insisting that we just didn’t have the time. “WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DRAW HIM IN THAT POSE??!” he shouted, fists clenched to heaven. The cries shall haunt me forever.
The victory screen really does look like he should be holding a light saber. Sigh.
I fixed some bugs in my jump/animation code that I wrote last night, and added some camera zooming/panning zones that seem like they’ll be pretty necessary for the vibe and gameplay. I thought I had my light baking atlas work figured out for a decent workflow that wouldn’t result in hours-long bakes before release, but I was wrong and I’ll need to figure that out after lunch :'(. Still though, I’ve added animations, fun feeling movement, a smooth panning camera and the all important player shadow dot since last time I posted. Feeling good.
I plan to use some of Artist of the Fortnight‘s sweet CC tunes in my game. (oops, rules. Maybe after the compo!) I worked with him on Subatomic Kangaroo and was thrilled to see that most of his music is CC and thereby usable in the LD compo.
After some last second bug fixes, I’m calling this done for the 48 hour compo :D.
My schedule was pretty lax for this (until the last second omg-get-the-sounds-playing-and-post-it-now rush). I took plenty of breaks, hung out with family, and saw the new Mission Impossible movie. I’m pleased to be able to finish something like this while still enjoying my weekend, but now that it’s done I do wish it had a more solid ending. It’s a very short and simple game, and it doesn’t have an arcade-style high score hook like most of my others, but I am proud of it.
I feel like I got the lonely parts of being alone:
and the fun parts:
Gameplay:
I was dangerously close to just having running and jumping being the only game mechanics. I went back and added a dash powerup to the game with about 5 hours left to go in the competition. It enabled one of the more pleasingly lonely scenes I’d envisioned when designing the art style: flying through an empty desert with no other living thing in sight. I also added some falling blocks to add to the challenge and force more dashing, which isn’t particularly notable except for the last-secondness of it.
Graphics:
I tried to take advantage of the ease of animation and physics/collisions calculations in Unity and 3D engines in general to make development faster than it would be with a 2D engine. Given the cubetastic style, things were pretty easy
My pretty baked lighting did bite me in the end; I regenerated it all in one huge time-eating chunk after my patient piece-by-piece method inexplicably failed on me. It’s a fun, fast and clean style, though. If I can figure out how to do it in a more pipeline-able fashion I’d be thrilled to use it again. Unity’s built in light baking is damn pretty.
Music:
I tweaked the settings for atrk-bu.py for my music and kind of lucked out with how nice this particular generated song sounded. It was about my 20th song generated, though. Maybe that’s more persistence than luck :P.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol:
It’s okay. I had plenty of fun and the cinematography was generally gorgeous and impressive. It tried to be smarter and more introspective than it was sometimes and those were its lamest moments. The ridiculous plans and gadgets never disappointed. That 95% on Rotten Tomatoes is probably going down once it’s not IMAX-only.
The Last 10 Minutes of Rumble in the Bronx that I saw while waiting for the submission to upload:
A “YEAH!” freeze frame after running over a mob boss with a hovercraft? Yesss.
I’m in! Per the norm, I started with an art test. I’ll be working in Unity.
I’m playing with dynamic shadows this time around, which are pretty sweet so far. I’ll be trying to make a small world building game here. I’ve got some ideas for cute looking terraforming, but am troubled as to how game-like I can keep it. I’m going to work on basic controls for the main character and stew on actual gameplay for the remainder of the night.
Good luck, guys! Watching the flurry of action at LD is inspiring as always :).
My first hunch with this game after the visual design and goal was to make a mouselook top down shooter with world building elements (i.e.: get powerups from terraforming your world). Sounds like it could be fun. I don’t really have time for a second hunch!
I’ve got running, jumping, and mouselook working. I probably won’t have any need for jumping; I’ll use it for something cool looking to do during a special attack. I think it’s time for a second lap on art assets and then I’ll have to buckle down.
Keep on burning, everyone!
It appears I’ve made a grass growing simulator disguised as a game.
I’m okay with that.
Day 0:
This LD was announced at 6PM my time, which gave me just enough time to stew about how I wanted things to look and feel in game. I’ve spent a lot of time working on tiny planetoid games. I didn’t really want to do that again.
I had some friends over for DnD. I didn’t have enough of an idea of what I wanted to do to go at it full time and was bushed from work anyhow; I doubt it hurt my schedule much. I did my first art test with player animations and got some basic movement code working this night and that was all. My concept work looked very game-like, but I hoped a more solid game idea would come to me after sleeping on it.
Day 1:
I spent a ton of time working on details this time around, which is a pretty weird thing to do in a 48 hour competition. My first day of work was mostly art.
I animated flying cars zooming around skyscrapers and ant people handling deliveries in my cities. Cities ended up doing little more than being bullet sponges in game. Everything wobbles and rattles and it looks a bit silly. I’m very happy with that part of things.
I gluttoned out on some deliciously catered barbecue at a picnic my wife organized for her math department colleagues. I got food from an ice cream truck for the first time in years. Bubblegum eyes are still troubling.
By the end of this day I only had my plants coded, but I’d arrived at a design I liked a lot: farm/protect plants, using the energy to heal and upgrade your cities, which in turn gave you classic shooter-style powerups.
Day 2:
I modeled and coded my enemies this morning and it quickly became obvious that I’d need to cut a lot. I spent what time I could polishing the basics (movement, flying, respawning with a god ray that annihilates your enemies) since I figured that was about all I’d have by the end of the compo. With three hours left I gave up on doing anything fancy with cities and turned things into a shooter where you got bombs by farming plants. The bombs kind of suck and the plants end up giving you a ton of them. In this case two wrongs kinda make a right.
I wish I had more time to tune things, but without the more complicated powerups I’d planned on from the outset I’d have a hard time balancing this in any meaningful fashion.
Thanks for the inspiration, everyone! LD was a blast, as usual. Happy 10th birthday, Ludum Dare 
.
You can check out Genesis’s Ludum Dare contest page here.
4This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2012 at 9:50 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
First, a moment of silence for my wife’s phone, which we failed to retrieve from the canal after the dog did a sweet spin move and kicked it in there. I like to think that our attempt was inventive, at least.
In a similarly genius move, I’ve convinced my wife Angie to jam with me for this. She’s well versed with MATLAB and I explained “what the dot does” yesterday, so this’ll work out great! It’ll probably be quite a bit slower than otherwise, but it’ll be great to work together on something. Or horrible. Probably great!
We’re doing some tabletop gaming with friends right now, but here’s our plan for a “You’re the Villain” themed game that we’ll start tomorrow… eventually, after The Hobbit, I guess:
A beat ‘em up base expansion game where you expand outward while defending your base and building walls/bombs/golems out of your defeated enemies for fun and profit!
It took some morning fumbling but I got a shared mercurial bitbucket repo going to help my wife and I share our work and started on the art while Angie works on some basic movement and camera code.
After the initial bit I believe she wants to work on some game art herself; she’ll have a go at working on the enemy models next. Sorry for the somewhat sloppy post. I’m writing this out quickly on my phone before The Hobbit starts.
Good luck, everyone! We’ll get back to it soon :D.
Goated! The most important addition possible. What are goats for? Why, they’re for throwing into portals to hell. Of course.
Finished! Well, submitted, at least. You’re a little bit invincible, which does hurt some of the gaminess of it all, but I feel like it’s still fun to throw goats around and summon golems to blow things up.
What went well:
What didn’t go well:
Angie played with Blender and made these sweet clouds while I was packaging up the various versions of Hell Guy:
Great work, everyone! I’m looking forward to playing some games, but for now we have a birthday to go help celebrate :)!
You can check out Hell Guy Hells It Up here.
I was workin’ late for the job that pays me last night and was a bit underwhelmed with the LD topic initially. After sleeping on it, I had an idea I find pretty appealing. I got started modeling/coding about 14 hours after Ludum Dare started (at 9 in the morning), but sittin’ in bed thinking about it before that definitely counts for something :). And I love sleep, any way.
For some reason I decided to make a game where the main character is mostly bezier curves. The game’s called Arrow currently, and will be about a lady named Note that finds a magic arrow. Just one magic arrow :P.
My wife ran a triathlon this morning, so I also got the opportunity to wrap her Christmas present. Yay! We’ll be celebrating that triathlon and her recent PhD candidacy tonight, so I don’t have much more time to work on this today. We’ll see how it goes.
^click for GIF!
I’ve got the movement and animation working for my character’s low/mid/high attacks now. I did some things with colors for this that I’m not sure about. It may be less pretty than before. Or it may just make her look more like an evil robot.
I’d better call it a night, though. We’ve all got a big day of compo madness tomorrow!
The idea behind Arrow is that Note will beat enemies into a stunned state and then finish them off with her one magic arrow. Enemies go to a different height depending on your last attack. The main features remaining are the arrow and enemies that aren’t spheres. We’ll see if I manage to add silly details like “dying” and “scores” in the next four hours, too ;P.
Good luck everyone! We’re close to done! Even if we’re not close to finished.
I’ll be using Unity. Usually I make an art test first but this time I just got really excited about making tentacles first… surely a sign that my priorities are in the right place.
Good luck folks!
It took me a strangely long amount of time to get the tentacles looking reasonable from a first person perspective and I’ve obviously got a lot more animation work to do for those things, but I’m pretty pleased with how it’s coming along so far.
Really, all I’ve got right now in the game is depth… not much gameplay besides that. It’s a good irony.
Click for a gfycat that’s bigger, prettier, and has a smaller file size.
I can now control four tentacles independently of each other and attack/grab/toss enemies to their dooms.
I still need some more enemy types, enemy movement, and enemy attacks. Naturally some sort of actual scoring and dying would be nice, too.
