So I would consider my self a  programmer and completely inept at art but:

It just seemed to happen so here is a link to it as a wall paper if you want it.

And here is a link to my game which it is inspired by.

So now that I’ve entered Ludum dare for the fourth time I’m starting to feel I know what I need to do and not do. Before this Ludum Dare I made a post about what I wanted to work on and try to achieve. I had several things I had wanted to work on:

UI

So I have never spent a lot of time doing UI, and again I have failed to spend time on it as the only good looking UI was the score and health bar:

This I was really happy with as I got the colour of the health to be the same as the colour of the monster. I think it also looks very clean. The rest of the UI didn’t have the same attention and was rushed using the standard Unity UI.

Tutorial

This follows on from the UI in that it was rushed and not very much time was spent on it.

So yes it tells you the controls and tells you sort of what to do, but it doesn’t show you as well.

Music

Well yes there is music and yes it isn’t and ear destroying as the previous music I have made. But it still isn’t that good and doesn’t quite work properly. At least I have a volume slider

Following on from that are the sound FX, these where rushed, but I had great fun making them and I think that doing them gave me the motivation to finish, so that’s a good thing.

AI

This was the challenge that I gave myself at the start, and it would have been added properly if I had more time. I ended up wasting time on trying to get path finding to work which meant I couldn’t properly get the AI to work.

Yes that person should be aiming that gun at me. Not sure why they aren’t.

Complicated Features

Ok, I know you can’t have no complicated features but my aim was to not add anything that wasn’t actually needed, like one of my games which had path finding when then people could have just walked in a straight line. So in a way I achieved this as there weren’t to many unneeded things.

The roads where one of the things which where complected but I got to work, except for one texture that was correct in blender and wrong in Unity, not sure why.

So from that it looks like I failed most of my tasks, however there where some things that I did that I hadn’t been expecting:

• Controller support, this is the first game I’ve made where you can use a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse.
• Web build, I have finally got a way to have a web build, done through itch.io. I know I could have done this before I just just haddn’t
• Decent(ish) art, I’m a programmer so this normally isn’t very good, however I have now got a graphics tablet so I can draw a lot better and have mad things like this:

Going Further

This isn’t the first game that I’ve kept going with, but I think it will work a lot better than my other one. So I can achieve my goal of adding AI, just not in the 48 hour version.

You can play my game in its current (buggy) state here.

And you can follow me on twitter to get updates on the new and improved version here.

After waking up and being slightly confused at what the theme was, iv got an idea and am making  progress with it, the sprites need a bit of work but the tile system is working so that’s good:

Also I’m making a time lapse of development so look out for it after ludum dare is over.

I really surprised myself when I noticed that this is my 5th Ludum Dare entry, and also by how much better I’ve got a programming games. I finally managed to accomplish my goal of making a proper AI in a game, in this case one which decides (just as the player does) what tiles to attack and build on, while making sure that  there aren’t any deficits in resource production. Yes, they cheat a little by being given resources if they run out. But its still a working AI and that’s what matters. I still haven’t found a way of doing good UI or music but iv put some sound fx in so that’s something. Anyway, I look forward to playing your games and here is mine if you want to play it.

Just uploaded a time-lapse of the development of Growdom.

CHECK IT OUT HERE

Also for people who have already played my game, I will try to fix the bug with placing buildings on captured tiles as soon as I can.

and if you haven’t played it

YOU CAN HERE

So after another entry to Ludum Dare (my 5th entry), I’m really starting to see just how much better I am at making games, when I compare this entry to my first one there is a huge increase in quality, detail and even the number of game mechanics in it. I’ve also now completed my goal of including an AI system within a game which can make ‘player like’ decisions based on the current situation and for the most part can do exactly what the player can do.

PLAY IT HERE

The good:

• Tile based map – the map can have tiles updated in real time with no obvious decrease in performance
• AI – the AI can compete against the player in a relatively realistic manner
• There is a fair bit of replay-ability with the game as the map and spawn locations are randomly generated
• Resources – the resource system works well and the idea of balancing your resources works well
• Upgrades – although I haven’t made it very clear, you can upgrade buildings to make them produce more which means that you can balance the negative effect of having too many tiles, which is that they each cost 1 of a resource in upkeep
• Kingdom borders – these took a while to get working but I’m very happy I added them as it makes it a lot easier to see where each kingdom is

The bad:

• There is no music in the game
• The tile graphics need a bit more work to make them look nice, its only the tiles I made near the end of the 48 hours that actually look nice
• The resource display sometimes doesn’t update properly
• I didn’t have time to implement a tutorial
• The fog doesn’t loop very nice, it needs something similar to the kingdom border

So overall, I am very happy with this game, and am currently continuing the development of it to fix some of the issues as well as to add some new features. I am also working on a mobile version as I think this might work well to.

I have also added my game to Kongregate so you can play the latest version there as well along with the itch.io version.

Thank you very much for playing my game and I’m really enjoying playing other entries as well.

I have just made a walk through guide for my Ludum Dare entry, Growdom just to help anyone who is having difficulties.

YOU CAN ALSO PLAY GROWDOM HERE

Just updated the Kongregate version of my Ludum Dare 34 games which can be played:

HERE

Note this is not a compo version so don’t use it for rating, if you want to rate play:

THE COMPO VERSION

I have really enjoyed making this update and realizing just  how bad (and wrong) some of the original code was. This means that some of the main features of this new build are bug fixes, but I have also updated spawning script to make the start of games more varied and fair and I have changed the UI to make it easier to understand along with some balancing and optimizations.

I will most definitely continue to update this game but for now only on Kongregate so as to not get the compo version muddled up on itch.io. However when the voting has finished this will also be updated to the latest version.

And as always, thank you very much for playing my game.

If you want to see what the changes to this version, here are is the Change Log:

V1.02v0
Features:
+ Added tile type display, building name will be green if it is the optimum type for the terrain type
+ Added some useful messages to give the user more information about what is happening
(e.g. that a building is already at the maximum level so can’t be upgraded any more)

= Changed fog to use curved edges similar to how the kingdom border is done
= Changed scenes to be loaded additively
= Changed resource display poll resources to be more correct
= Changed resource cost display to show current resources/net and cost resource/net change separately to be more clear
= Changed cost resource display colours to show effect of building/upgrade/attack where the cost will be red if possible
and the net will be dependant on the final net (i.e green if the effect will end up being positive, red if negative)
= Changed team spawning to be randomly generated to give more variety and be fairer at start (will mostly start with positive net for all resource types)

Balancing:
= Reduced amount of gold produced by towns
= Changed attack cost when attacking a different team to include the base cost of the tile dependant on the terrain type
= Increased starting resources to 100 for each type (from 20)

Bug Fixes:
= Fixed bug where lines would end up between tiles at certain zoom levels, now uses a default material with “Pixel snap” turned on
= Fixed bug where display tiles would not be destroyed when new instance of the game is loaded
= Fixed bug where upgrade cost was inconsistent/wrong
= Fixed bug where the cost for building/upgrading buildings was applied incorrectly
= Fixed bug where resource display was incorrect
= Fixed bug where team start locations where stored in a static variable making them not be reset on starting a new game causing
an infinite loop when trying to find a new start location
= Fixed bug where buildings could be downgraded to negative levels
= Fixed bug where you can attack tiles if you click on a development button when you can’t build upgrade
= Change internal method of accessing upgrade data to make it more difficult for me to make mistakes and made it work properly

= Other optimisations and bug fixes

As usual I’m doing the compo, got quite a nice idea for this time. Got a room display system up and running, might have a random generation system at some point, maybe.

But so far, so good.

Been working on a card system, looking nice so far.

Cards can be dragged into play, currently they add rooms to the world but they will do more later on

The main UI is now up and running on my game, the basic AI is working just need more content and maybe fix the multiplayer.

But for now, MORE CONTENT TIME

Thats another Ludum Dare done you can play SHIFT

HERE

I’m very happy with this game, although i half implemented online multiplayer but had to stop as I knew I would run out of time, was dealing with quite a big bug

With that all done the only problem I have is that the animated character  shows as a white block in the web build, and I know I’m not the only one with this problem, has any one seen this in a unity web build before – did you have a fix for it, I’m not sure what is causing it:

Just uploaded a new version of my game SHIFT to Kongregate you can play it

HERE

Doing really well so far with what I have planned, so far the main things I’ve done are:

• Building rooms
• Worker AI
• Resource production and requirements for building

I therefore should be able to finish fairly easily tomorrow.

Really happy with this game, a base building resource management game. And I actually did most of what I had wanted to do

play it HERE

I guess that this is my October challenge entry. I’m unlikely to make a lot of money but oh well, this is my first game that I’ve finished to an alright standard.

You can get Vector Fighter for android on the play store.

I'm really happy that I have a really nice idea as soon as i woke up. So I can definitely say I'm doing this

Really good progress so far, I have most of the main mechanics in my game already. So I'll have plenty of time to do some polish tomorrow. I might even have time for a proper tutorial, although I think most of my time will be spent doing some UI

.

There were a few bugs in my game, mainly a rather bad memory leak. These are now fixed so it is now possible to play for more than a few minutes.

Go Play

Comments are most welcome and I will try to play and rate the games of anyone how makes one.