LD19 coincided with a crunch at work, but LD20 falls smack bang on an extended bank holiday (who says the UK royal family are good for nothing, eh?). I will mostly be using Blender, Unity, Paint.NET, and Audacity. I haven’t tried composing music since 1995, so recommendations welcome…
All is in readiness. I planned to hit the sack early and get up at 3am when the theme is announced, but my 3-year-old girl has fallen asleep this afternoon so getting her off to bed will now be a bit of a nightmare…
Well, the theme is – quite literally – a joke, so I’m adapting my favourite concept (was hoping Climbing or Colossal would win), which was a tower-climbing game. But it IS dangerous to go alone.
I might introduce an AI character so you’re NOT alone, as in Ico or the Prince of Persia second reboot (the toon-shaded one). But that will be a HELL of a lot of work, so you may just end up being given a useful tool instead.
It’s gonna be hard to ensure that my procedurally-generated tower is in fact climbable, so an alternative could be having the old man pop up providing “cheat” items when you get stuck halfway up the tower. Er…old men can levitate, you know. My grandad does it all the time.
But I have finally got the core mechanic (the ledge grab) working, after much procrastination and head/desk interfacing. Climbing the tower is now more forgiving and more exhilarating, but a bit too easy. I’ve tarted it up a bit late last night when my poor brain couldn’t handle debugging any more JavaScript.
Next up, in priority order:
15 hours to go!
You can run Unity webplayer builds directly off DropBox! I did not know this – just discovered it by looking at someone else’s entry (hat tip to Doktor Ace). Useful thing to know about for Unity devs.
I just managed to get Lonely Fortress more-or-less playable by the deadline. No music, and a lot less gameplay than I planned (not even a win screen – it was that tight). But what a great exercise! I love having to do everything yourself.
I think the adrenaline is finally wearing off so I can go to bed. ‘Night.
Doh! I thoughtlessly picked one of the stock Unity skydomes, forgetting that this is ART and should therefore be made by ME. Oops.
So “Lonely Fortress” has accordingly been moved to the Jam. Apologies and thanks to all of you who took the time to rate it.
On the plus side, since it’s no longer being judged, I’m uploading a new version with a quick and dirty fix for the bug where you could get stuck with your head inside a block. And I plan to continue developing it into a full game. Gotta keep busy until LD21 rolls around!
I’ve polished up what I had, though it’s exceptionally short. I found tarting up the background an excellent displacement activity to avoid actually writing content. Play “White Flag” here.
I’ll let it rest a few days, then add to it. The dialogue system was intended to have internal variables, but I ran out of time – only managed to spend about 12 hours total on this, much of which was learning Stencyl and ActionScript. It’s been good fun though, and I’ve got a good solid template to build a more advanced system on…
Tags: as3, dialogue, flash, stencyl, unfinished
Things to do: clear desk, tidy house, generally sort out anything that might prove distracting! Excited to have Notch rejoin us, and see how the G+ circles pan out.
I’ll be using the shiny latest version of Unity – the new drag-and-drop prefab workflow should really help keep the pace up. Also Paint.NET, Blender, and Audacity.
Must also clear my calender for the next month just in order to *rate* everyone. The magical 100% coolness is becoming really hard to accomplish!
Well, that was manic. I had family stuff to do this weekend, but I didn’t wanna miss LD, so I’ve cobbled together what turned out to be pretty much the tutorial level of what I originally had in mind…
So here’s what I learned:
Tags: animation, blender, fireflies, postmortem, unity
Ludum time again! We’ll see if the third time is a charm. Plan to apply my experience of the last couple and keep it super-simple…although currently fighting an overwhelming urge to attempt a micro-Skyrim :O #optimisticindie
Tools: Unity3D, Paint.NET, Audacity, Blender.
http://intermorphic.com/tools/mixtikl/index.html
Check it out. There is an iPhone app version as well as the desktop builds. I think it should be on the Tools page!
Tags: music, procedural music
3-year-old daughter off to bed – the evening is mine, all mine!
My warm-up is going to be to finish my sorely neglected xmas challenge game. So far I’ve done a lot of tweaking the landscape generation code, but no gameplay at all. Older readers may find this looks suspiciously familiar, if a bit murky…
This weekend’s task is to get the gameplay mechanics and main game loop working. I might have time to improve the landscape and presentation a bit, if things go well. It certainly needs it…
Quick update…I’m succumbing to the temptation to spend the weekend tarting up a non-game. Need gameplay, stat!
That said, I have prepared a handful of tools to help me get gameplay content in faster tomorrow, and I’m WAY ahead compared to my LD21 effort, “Fireflies”.
LD22 Work in progress
Damned Unity first bluescreened my laptop, and then hung while trying to make last-minute text tweaks. After the second reboot, I found that the hand-sculpted terrain data had vanished. I am NOT BEST PLEASED.
Luckily, I had a test submission build, which is functional…but missing the majority of the flavour text and a proper ending. I’ll upload the source assets (sans terrain) in the morning when the rage has subsided.
Lonely Island
Tags: LD22, lonely island, submission, unity, unity3d, winterblood
Well, regardless of how the voting goes, I consider my effort a failure. I’ll explain why after breaking down the issues…
What went right
What went wrong
In this shot you can also see the debug plane – a quad with a mist texture on it that slices through the landscape (most obvious above the doorway) showing where the player can move. I used this to help sculpt the terrain and place objects on it, and intended to delete it before submission. It’s a minor niggle, but it annoys me!
Self-analysis
The main reason I consider Lonely Island a failure is that I made ALL THE SAME MISTAKES as in LD21. Read the post-mortem for that one here.
You’d think because I’m a programmer by trade, I’d be able to knock up working game mechanics in a few hours. And I can, if I try. But that’s exactly what I do at work day-in, day-out. During Ludum Dare, I’d far rather play around with the art – it’s more fun, I learn new tricks and I get a pretty result a lot faster than with programming. And I guess that’s fine, if that’s what I wanted to do.
But what I really want out of Ludum Dare is to prove to myself that I can design and build my own games – not just implement highly-polished cogs that go into the big machine. And I’m failing at that because I’m doing the fun stuff instead of the important stuff.
So as far as I’m concerned, the theme of the next LD is “Self-Discipline”!
Just a reminder for anyone who HASN’T heard already…
There is an upcoming jam themed around the game design tweets of spoof Twitter account @PeterMolydeux. Looks like fun, and would make a great warmup for LD23.
There’s lots of local meets but nothing set up for remote participation…yet.
I’m in! But I won’t have much time, because I’m crunching on a much bigger game
However, that does leave me with an awesome excuse. My LD48 entry will be rubbish because…
…BATMAN NEEDS ME.
Nevertheless: I’ll be using Unity3D, Paint.NET, Audacity and Mixtikl.
Same old tools – Unity, Blender, Paint.NET, Audacity, Mixtikl.
But this time I have a WHITEBOARD. With pro resources like that, what can possibly go wrong?
So, LD23 was a washout for me due to crunching on LEGO Batman 2. And LD24 I couldn’t commit to because of LEGO Lord of the Rings. But this time…no excuses. I’ve been waiting all year for a chance to get creative.
Tools: Unity, Blender, Paint.Net, MixTikl, Audacity. Have a hankering to use WorldMachine too, but it depends on the theme.
Finally, a quick shot of my current bijou workspace, including the whiteboard I was so proud of last time but never got to use…
Drew a bit of a blank on the theme, so decided to write a fairly traditional stealth-’em-up. This time I have mostly resisted the urge to make it pretty, and have got the core mechanics working instead!
You can turn the torches on and off, collect loot, and I have a sinister capsule patrolling a series of waypoints, coming after you if he spots you, and returning to patrol if he loses you again. Title and pause screen are working.
Day 1 progress
Day 2 is all about making gameplay from those core mechanics, and tarting it up – although one important thing I haven’t yet done is factor shadows into the visiblity code. But I know how that will work, just haven’t done it yet. Just done a last-minute stress test to see how many dynamic lights I can get away with, and the answer is “not many”. I may burn a lot of tomorrow optimising…
Tags: AI, dynamic lights, shadows, stealth, Thief