https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEyLg4NbETs

Save the planet by balancing out the effects of the nasty population.

DOWNLOAD: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B87G2GktsRYDUkNSMVhSVDRXanc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEyLg4NbETs

Save the planet by balancing out the effects of the nasty population.

Controller supported | Mouse & Keyboard - WASD

LD: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/stupid-planet

After the reveal of the theme 03h00, we awaited the arrival of some of the students as well as the other 2 lecturers then began spitballing ideas. We eventually landed on the idea of balancing the increasing human population with the effects on the planet’s health through the use of natural disasters as a culling method.

With you being the planet itself, we needed a nice controller to make it feel natural and intuitive. I hooked up Rewired to take advantage of multiple inputs with ease, allowing keyboard and mouse as well as gamepad. The idea was perfect for a couch type game or mobile style game. The mechanics were relatively simple and included allowing you to rotate the planet then place one of the 4 natural disasters (earthquake, tornado, flood, or volcano) on the planet.

We had a nice balanced team of devs and artists of 11 people, that could really put together a good looking and functional game. There were a few challenges and stages of hair-pulling as is always the case in game development.

Unity Particles

We thought we could take advantage of the particle system as a way of distributing the human population as well as a method of killing them off, leaving the placement and collision physics up to them. What we learnt though is that the particle system is not friendly and does not play well with custom systems! We needed the particles to adhere to our spherical gravity which was tricky business but Walter managed to figure it out by calculating the vector towards the planet’s centre and apply a constant force to the particles. So we had gravity sorted out but the next problem was trying to get the particles to collide and die with specific surfaces, which we probably could have got sorted but there was a lot of weridness going on with the particles and gravity in certain locations. Particles would be attracted sometimes, others would fly off the planet. There was also a lot of lag once the particles reached their peak.

It looked like a mess and fixing it was going to take a lot longer than we had so we switched out the system. Rather than having “people” (the particles) on the surface, we decided to go with using cubes as buildings to represent a number of the population allowing us to use less resources and no weird physics issues. The cubes adhered to the surface and self-replicated using a short raycast to test if there were any neighbours. Buildings would also grow over time and increase their health, making them harder to kill off and increasing the difficulty of the game.

Fun Factor

We had no idea if the game would be fun or not until Monday afternoon, only a few hours before hand in. We had an idea and created a game around it but hadn’t been able to get the major game mechanics in quick enough to allow for rigorous game testing. This meant that by deadline we had only had around 3 hours of balancing.

Following the initial hand in, I reworked the gameplay to a better state. You now had to rid the planet of the humans entirely. There’s a tipping point however that if you don’t take out the enough of the major population in the early game, it spirals and you lose. The next state is if you manage to kill enough of them off, you win which then displays how long you took to destroy them creating a competitive state of trying to beat your highscore. I had initially implemented a system to store the scores online on our own server but could only get it receiving scores and not posting. I do plan to re-look at this but for a mobile environment, it’s much easier to implement leaderboards.

Final Thoughts

We had a great bunch of people dedicated to creating an awesome game in a mere 72 hours and I think we can all be proud of what we achieved despite some hiccups. We will continue to develop this game and hopefully release it for all to play =).

Ready to rock this jam from Centurion, South Africa =P

We had a pretty productive day here at Open Window and got our prototype done and started production on some final assets. We decided on a Math Fps VR game. You have to shoot a myriad of snazzy looking fellas coming towards you with alternating guns to come to a defined value and complete the round, before they reach you. Here are some videos of our prototype and some concept art.

Prototype: https://youtu.be/km75weu9raI

Some style examples: https://youtu.be/v-TM1QuREt8

We made some progress on our enemies and revamped some mechanics. We'll go into more details for our Day two check in. For now we're mostly off to bed. Remember to stay healthy everyone!

We had another productive day here at Open Window, so productive infact that I completely forgot to post the day two video, so here it is shortly to be followed by our day three video as the jam is drawing to a close.

In day two we put in the characters and one of the weapons and some sounds and furthered our mechanics as well as doing some play tests to feel how it feels.

https://youtu.be/TWcOikJvDzk

Doesn't Add Up - Educational VR Shooter

During our final few hours of the Ludum Dare, and as always, we were scrambling to finalise a decent working and feature-rich build of the game. As these things go, and as stated by old man Murphy, what can go wrong, will. The high score wouldn't work, we only had a VR build and no promotional materials (still to come ;)). The visual fidelity also seemed to degrade between our day two and three builds but no time was left to attend to this. On the final day we also decided that some of our core mechanics were lacking and so scrapped some and added a few more.

A week later and we've got some updates, fixes and improvements to round the game off and more importantly a keyboard and mouse control set, to allow anyone to test the game out without VR.

We've enhanced the visuals, improved gameplay, fixed that high score, and focused the mission of the game. Check out the git for the full change log.

Download:

https://open-window.itch.io/itdoesntaddup

https://youtu.be/TWcOikJvDzk

https://youtu.be/km75weu9raI

Top Down, 4 player max, coach game. Here at the Open Window campus we were lucky to have a large group of talented students working along side the lectures. Always a pleasure to participate in these game jams which offers our students great learning experiences.

Top down, multiplayer, couch game. Students and lecturers of Open Window came together to create a top-down couch game you can enjoy with 2-4 friends. We were lucky to have a large group of talented students help us create this fun arcade style game.

This Way Up Download

Objective:

Load up delivery trucks with packages with the help of your friends before the trucks leave Work fast for the packages could clutter up the warehouse, look out for a flamethrower to clear up some space. Use the lift when you feel like it or if something drops

Game controls:

Left Analog to move around. A is pick up and put down. Right Trigger to sprint. (No keyboard controls)

Credit List:

* *Lectures: ** Jared Brandjes Paulo Vilela Honours Students: Andalé Visser Reynard Droste

* *3rd Years: ** Hardus van Zyl André Hamman Nicola Alberts Reder Joubert Callum Stout Kobus Geldenhuys

* *2nd Years: ** Mary-Ann Botha Dylan Fairhurst Henrico Pienaar Christiaan de Jager Jean-Luc Lamarque Kevin Mynhardt

* *1st Years: ** Christopher Fourie Josh Shneier

* *Other: ** Bennet Rumboll Ross Adams

Top down, multiplayer, couch game you can enjoy with 2-4 friends. Load up delivery trucks with packages with the help of your friends before the trucks leave. Work fast for the packages could clutter up the warehouse, look out for a flamethrower to clear up some space.

Super challenging solo keyboard mode too!

Play and rate our game

Top down, multiplayer, couch game you can enjoy with 2-4 friends. Load up delivery trucks with packages with the help of your friends before the trucks leave. Work fast for the packages could clutter up the warehouse, look out for a flamethrower to clear up some space.

Rate and Play

https://youtu.be/z2AI1FZ9vKo

Top down, multiplayer, couch game you can enjoy with 2-4 friends. Load up delivery trucks with packages with the help of your friends before the trucks leave. Work fast for the packages could clutter up the warehouse, look out for a flamethrower to clear up some space.

Rate and Play

https://youtu.be/z2AI1FZ9vKo

Will keep you posted on our development - blaming the CAT for the late start.