This will be my first LD.

Will use Flixel/Flash if the theme is good in 2D, Unity if 3D.

Have fun!

So I have been ranting about this all day now on IRC. Building games together! This LD almost 900 games were submitted. If you think about it, the time and effort invested is mind-boggling. Roughly estimated when each participant invested maybe 30 hours in the weekend, that is about 30.000 hours of time invested in game creation in a weekend. But when the weekend ends many people walk away and don’t really look back until the next LD. I think this is a bit of a shame, because LD is the perfect opportunity to meet like-minded gamedevelopers.

So I am trying to figure out if it is possible for more people to collaborate on game creation, to meet more game developers and channel all this energy to create even more complete games. Because creating games is usually a team effort, and the more game developers you know, the higher the chance that individuals meet up that have fun together building games, or make the next big indie hit. I have even written a little word document that introduces the concept: Ludum Dare: Co-op:

Ludum Dare: Co-op

It is a rough concept at this point. The interesting thing is that many people on IRC like the idea very much, but are not sure on the execution. So discuss away! What would be the best way for you to collaborate with other developers, and together build something bigger than what we usually see in a LD?

Vic

I’m in! Or better said, we are in :).

Last time I joined the competition. This time we are joining the jam (2 man team so far). Last time I finished, but the final product was only a small part of what I was planning to build, and thus the game fell a bit short.
This time, we are planning to do things a bit smarter :).

Oh, we will be building the game in unity3d (pro), with C#.

– Vic

Buggy, Tank and missile launcher – How it started

Forgot a link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7283

This was my second LD entry, and it was Cavit’s first entry. I really enjoyed last LD Compo (and have since been active on IRC), and asked Cavit if he would like to join. We had a blast this weekend creating this game :).

The concept was created pretty easily. I woke up at about 7 am on Saturday, looked at the concept, went back to bed with a notepad. At about 8 am I had a number of concepts, and started concepting them on paper. Cavit joined in about an hour later. We discussed what idea’s we had, and this was the one we felt sounded the most fun and easiest to execute.

On saturday we first started by putting down the basic. A world, rotating cubes around it and clickable stuff. Cavit started on the building with the separate floors, and a simple Unity UI. I started with the planet, lanes and rotating units around the planet. After this basis was done Cavit continued with pure coding, while I started on models. I think it took about 3-4 hours to do all the models and animations. By about 7pm we had a working prototype with units rotating around the planet attacking each other and a building. Once we had the prototype the controls were not as intuitive yet. We stopped at about 2 or 3 am I think, we had a working version and were feeling good about it.

On sunday polishing started. I wrote a complete custom UI and created new buttons. Cavit started working out as many kinks as possible, set up basic AI, set up some basic menus. At the end of sunday we had a polished version.

On monday Cavit needed to go back to work. I spent the day integrating the upgrade system, tweaking the balance, and improving the AI a bit. In the evening Cavit worked on sound, and I built a second level and did some more menu tweaks. We sent in the game at about 2:30 am. Of course, we had a gameplay breaking bug within half an hour ( money labels did not show up). We are not sure why it happened, because it did not happen in the editor, but we needed to recode the ui system a bit, and went to bed at 4 am on monday.

What went wrong?

– What you see in the unity editor might not be what you get on other PCs. We had a really nasty bug after launching, needed to test on more computers

– Games like this are hard to balance, one player will beat it easily, others will not be able to make it. Needed more levels

– There could be some more depth in the game, we had more conceptual stuff on paper that did not make it in.

– Would have been awesome if the game had been multiplayer

– Health stuff: We worked until too late, now our sleep schedules are messed up, ate too much wasabi chips and other crap, need to spend a lot of time in the gym now.

What went right?

– Prototype done on the first day

– The game was easily extendable, we could add layers like upgrades later on.

– We enjoyed working on the game, it is a happy looking game, and that made us happy to work on it.

– We kept the graphic assets requirements low. This way we could focus on the gameplay (this was a fix to my biggest mistake last LD)

– We cleared our schedules as much as possibly, this made it easy to focus. We worked with skype on almost constantly, and in general we are very good at working together.

What did not make the game?

If we would make a full game out of this. We would add a number of features.

– Base defense, like turrets.

– Camera zoom, so you can see more of the battlefield

– Minimap with circle and dots of friendly and enemy troops

– Flying units so you can bypass lanes/death from above.

– Multiplayer

Conclusion

Cavit and I had a  lot of fun, and are definitely joining next LD. We are thinking about making a more full-featured game out of this for PC/Mac/iPad/PSN? after we finish the project we are currently working on.

What went Right?

• I enjoyed building the game, I did this LD because I wanted to have fun with a small game and I did have a lot of fun dropping cows and watching big waves of zombies run into machine guns.
• Focused on design, not graphics. Because I did not pay as much attention to the graphics as usual I could spend more time on adding a tutorial and some extra gameplay.
• I like the design, I think it has familiar elements, but it is different, maybe I can port it to tablet or something.
• It is a complete game, every feature I planned is in.

What went Wrong?

• Was busy until 3am,  that was not how I planned it :).
• Underestimated how long it would take to build the levels.
• Need to work on my Sound Fx/Music skills, the game really needed some zombie sounds and fun music.
• It needed more levels, probably about 10 levels or so. This way I would have been able to have a better difficulty curve. The game has enough content to build 10 levels.

So what I will do different next time? I will start earlier on the levels. So the first day is just implementation of ideas and features and the biggest part of the second day is building levels.

If you want to play my game, here is the link:

Play it !