Hi guys,

Checkout my first Unity project, a casual game called Fruits! I’ve worked intensely on it lately, in order to meet the October challenge. Some early info and screenshots at www.fruitsgame.net

/MortenK

(cross-posted from Under The Bridge)

So we’ve almost won the October Challenge now:

• Make a game — check.
• Take it to market — check. And no rejection cycles, even!
• Sell one copy — 11 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes, 53 seconds to go!

This was a rather enjoyable little frenzy, actually, much more so than we’d expected given our previous history with commercial games programming. Which is actually a fair bit, starting with porting Dark Seed II to the Mac waaaay back in the day right up to little trifles (and some not so little) you can find on the App Store now. But the common thread throughout all of those is that our creative input was for all practical purposes zero; they’re either porting existing code, or implementing somebody else’s specifications. Doing so rather well, it is generally agreed, mind you; as nicely exemplified in what’s still our favorite review ever:

… Overall, Horse Racing Manager is a great port of a good game. It is bugless, it is an almost perfect replica of the PC version, it just isn’t a game that the average gamer would ever want to play.

Hey, it keeps the mortgage paid. But there is a certain lack of creative fulfillment itch there, which over the years every so often we’d consider scratching. But then we’d remember that producing a successful game generally requires a vast array of talents which we pretty much completely lack, from artistic to marketing; and return to our accustomed mercenary pursuits.

Fast forward to September 27th when we stumbled across the October Challenge; and as it so happened, we’d just been moping about losing on October 10th the kinda cool we thought “BallZOut” name that we’d registered with Apple last spring for a project that ended up not happening, now that you can’t squat on App Store names anymore. Plus, we’d been thinking gee it would be a good idea to get some actual experience managing a Game Center enabled app before somebody required that in a project bid. So hey, let’s see if we can indeed achieve a MVP in twelve days flat — a challenge, indeed!

First thing was the game concept. Narrowed it down pretty quickly to a level-based physics puzzler being the only thing of conceivable practicality given a twelve day time frame; and as our name is “BallZOut”, well let’s make it … knocking. ballz. out. Like marbles, or curling. With some obstacles to make it not completely trivial. Yep, that’ll do.

Engine choice given the concept was immediate; as big fans of cocos2d, we’d bought the LevelSVG code referenced here to support the author back when it first came out, and it demonstrates Box2D physics engine integration and Inkscape document parsing for level design. So hey, there’s most of the heavy lifting done already! And yep, that worked out pretty much as well as could be hoped.

So, on to design. Did we mention above that trolls completely lack artistic talent? Why yes, yes we did. So how, you ask, do we address that problem? Why, by frantically mining every clip art/sound collection in our archives and every free clip art/sound site on teh Intertubez, that’s how we address that problem. Plus picking over the discards from our last project that involved a real artist, in return for throwing in a referral screen. Topped off with laying out all our text type stuff with Comic Life Magiq as a substitute for any actual art skillz. We’d like to think that didn’t work out half bad. For lacking completely in both investment and talent, anyways.

Game Center integration went pretty well, although designing in multiplayer somehow wasn’t practical in the timeframe. We’d like to get around to that sometime. As with a vast array of other features. And more levels. We did rather underestimate how long it would take to design levels even vaguely interesting, the last couple days were mostly spent constantly downgrading our expectations of how many and how interestingly designed it would be acceptable to ship with. 20, by the time we’d achieved a state of complete panic a few hours before Lose Your Name Day™. Definitely, we would like to find the time to up that. Significantly.

But under pressure of immediate deadline, we offered it up to the Apple gods just in time, and in the ten days since we did some looking around for easy ways to throw up a support website; settled on Templatic’s iPhone App theme, which worked out pretty well we think to throw up ballzoutgame.com in an afternoon. The $99 we paid for that being the only cash investment involved here so far, other than $29 for the newly commercial Zwoptex native version, a handy and highly recommended tool for your sprite sheet creation needs. Add in the probably 80-90 or so hours we spent finding artistic assets and doing the coding, and, hmmm, well, we’d still have to sell a pretty unlikely several thousand to make the exercise remotely worth it compared to doing a couple weeks’ worth of contract hours, actually.

But hey, as we mentioned at the start, it was quite a different experience and surprisingly fun to just full steam ahead weighing nothing but “latest wild idea” vs. “time ticking away” minute to minute. Not news to anybody who does these abbreviated development contests regularly, no doubt; but doing it just for the sake of it, that just doesn’t quite get us revved up. Add the “… and sell one copy”, now the addition of that external validation condition, that suckered us right in. So here we are … waiting to see how that works out!

Ballsy

On the 9th of September, I decided that I was going to complete a game in time for the Windows Phone 7 launch. That was goal number one. I knew I didn’t have long, so I picked the most complete game from my portfolio to start from and began porting it to C#.

I had already started when PoV issued the October Challenge, but his second post said that the game can be something you’re already working on. OK, count me in.

So I added goal two: Sell a copy before the end of the October. This is quite different from my original goal. In fact, the last time I tried to make a commercial game, I “finished” it but never sold a copy…

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Hi everyone! Just finished making a rigid body train in my physics simulator haha. I might make a game like canabalt but with trains and realistic physics.. haha jumping trains ftw ^^ Anyways here’s a pic(:

Today I fixed the game a bit more. Still needing to add the spawn in but its turning out to be quite a challenge.
I got addicted to minecraft yesterday and didn’t do any work(Curse you Notch!!!!!!).
I need to get this done my sunday and then submit it to apple.

-bear

I’m almost done with the Iphone version of my game Explosive Love and I’ll post some gameplay videos one of the coming days. Here is a short non-public intro short video from the game. You can find an almost up to date webbuild of the game here: http://garbos.itu.dk/explosivelove/game.html Feedback is  appreciated

I didn’t succeed in embedding the youtube video, but you can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBklbC3bToo

Explosive Love intro video

Howdy,

I’m sadly probably going to have to drop out of the october challenge, at the start of the month I went to a conference then I released a new iPad game on the 12th and it’s been in need of some serious, serious polishing which has eaten up most of my time..

if i need get some days free before the end of the month free I may be able to finish the LD game, but it would be really unpolished and I don’t feel so hot about releasing another unpolished game

if your interested in what i’ve finished so far check out my dev blog @

at tumblr there I have a video of the first iteration of the my LD game

Anthony

Not as much visible progress as I would have liked; there is one of those “thanks for playing” exit screens now, and yes, I did make that first test flight mentioned in my last post! Not very interesting at that point, but at least, I could experiment a little with Asteroids style control (rotate + thrust) vs the classic Kobo Deluxe style controls (aim and go in the direction indicated).

Right now, I have a control system that’s much like that of Kobo Deluxe, but the ship is actually driven by physics (ie mass, inertia, forces, acceleration etc), using a set of thrusters for power and control.

The advantage of using actual physics is that I get that nice, smooth, realistic feel, along with actual data to use for rendering the ship and thruster flames. Also, I can very easily have the ship respond sensibly to projectile impact, collisions and whatnot; just apply the forces and let the physics deal with it.

The downside is that “real” physics demands real control engineering! Typical naïve methods will only have the ship wobble uncontrollably, just as it would in real life. Fortunately, I’ve spent some 12 years doing control engineering for a living, so I can probably figure that part out.

Oh, the ship has cannons too! Two sets even; one that’s much like the forward cannon from the old Kobo Mk I (the ship in Kobo Deluxe, that is), and one that spews out a massive, cool (er, I mean hot…) looking stream of… lava or something. The latter was just the result of my initial experiments, but it might show up somewhere, in some form.

I’m thinking of dropping the tail cannon of Kobo Mk I, and use two weapons instead; a primary nose cannon and secondary tail mounted device that drops a bunch of small bombs or similar. The latter would be mostly a defensive weapon, to get enemies off your tail. I’ll play around with it and see what works and what doesn’t – but first, I need some enemies…!

So after another week of frenzied coding, my game is totally playable! The level editor is totally working! And I’ve got rough menus all in.

You can see my blog for more posts about the dev process. The main things left are:

- Creating more levels!
- Crazy “social” features!
- Improving graphics!
- Adding music and sound!
- Ports to various platforms (Windows, iPad, others?)

Hopefully it’ll all come together!
-Phil

I have been blogging about my efforts in the October Challenge, but I’ve been doing so at my own blog. I realized that if I do manage to submit the game, there should probably be some posts to go along with the journal.

So if you’re interested, here are the links to my dev posts. I’ll add links as the project develops.

An Inspiring Challenge, where I write about my acceptance of the October Challenge.

Stop That Hero! Post-Mortem, in which I discuss what went right, what went wrong, and what I learned in developing my LD18 submission. I also say that I intend to rewrite the game for the Challenge.

Stop That Hero! Development Challenges and Concerns, in which I discuss the major issues I want to address in this update of the game.

Designing Resource Usage in Stop That Hero!, in which I lay out the problems with the original game’s implementation of resources and analyze a number of different options to address those problems.

Agile Alert: Slow Project Progress, in which I express dismay at how slow my progress is and try to identify the major causes.

Balancing Current and Future Needs, in which I explained my insistence on using Test-Driven Development and elaborate on my concerns for over-engineering versus making just enough to satisfy the deadline.

Loading an Arbitrary Stop That Hero! Level, in which I briefly mention that the game can now load a sprite representing the world map and render it.

Stop That Hero! Sprite Rendering Questions, in which I describe some nifty world map to screen resolution position scaling to render sprites in a consistent way. Thanks go to FuzzYspo0N for helping me with the details!

State of the Art Game Objects, in which I describe my research on a component-based object system and give up on it after being overwhelmed by the immensity of what I was attempting in a short period of time.

We’ve recently decided that in line with all the other Ludum Dare projects, simply calling our project the ‘Ludum Racer’ would not be in the true spirit of the competition, so we’ve actually thought about names, and have changed the theme slightly.

It’ll now be known as ‘Dwarf Dash’ and will feature Dwarfs on trikes, or similar.

Development-wise, collision detection code is being written (Some technical info on how we’ve used Adobe Illustrator’s SVG format and TouchXML to create the collision mesh here), and we have a project that we can actually run. Time’s tight, but things are looking OK.

No eye candy this time I’m afraid, just boring ol’ text!

We’ll be regularly blogging here and on our parent site under ‘Dwarf Dash (challenge blog)‘
Further to this, both myself @deltamikealpha and Gareth @36peas will be tweeting about the project as it evolves.

Little to no progress since my last post. I’ve had to work all weekend and stayed late working much of the week. No bueno. Still hoping to get something sent to Apple before the 31st, but the outlook is not too good.

I just noticed that I made two “day 4″ posts

Today I worked on getting the game to work again, I’ve fixed most the game but I still have to add the spawner. For some reason it didn’t like the variable “screen” equaling 1. I don’t know why this happened.

I’ll get the game to a proper playable point tomorrow and add some small things throughout the week.

I’m a little late to the game, saw the post on Reddit and have been heads-down trying to get a very simple game working for the iPhone using cocos2d by the end of the month.

So I had a quick question for those of us who will be going the app-store approach, any one thinking about going the no marketing approach? Hoping to write a game that will sell itself? Obviously very difficult if you’re making a web-game.

I’m personally writing a simple “distance” game where the player has to make it as far as possible without hitting obstacles. Figured it would be a great way to work with game center for the iPhone; since I’ve never done much with game-kit before. I’m figuring just add achievements and leader-boards. So I think I’m just going to release it as a game-centerable app and see if the new gamecenter area is new and hip enough to gain a sale without doing much in the way of posting to forums, reddit etc. Besides posting here… of course. Whattya think?

I’ve been through numerous game ideas, and have drifted around back to making a Cube mod.

My idea is inspired by time spent in AssaultCube using a shotgun. They’re such fun weapons that I want to make an FPS where the protagonist only uses a shotgun.

The game’s title is Shotty, which is also the name of the protagonist. The game will feature a handful of different shotguns. The player will have a basic shotgun which can fire either buckshot or an infinite supply of birdshot. There will also be a double-barreled shotgun, an automatic fire shotgun (Sometimes called a “Jackhammer”), and a low-spread shotgun that fires over long range. The bad guys will probably be trolls. Because trolls are ugly and mean, and make good villains.

The game’s setting will be lighthearted, starting in a quaint grassland and moving to a cartoonish Quake-like fortress. I don’t have a plot yet, but I like what I have so far. (Even though I have only vague designs and some slightly edited Cube sources)

I’m still hoping to finish one of these…

– Mr. Dude

So I got the blood working for my game ^_____^ However when anything collides, it bleeds which doesn’t make much sense for the boxes.. Guess I’ll go fix that now haha. Stick figures are going to emit blood, and boxes will emit brown wood pieces. Anyways, here’s a video of what I have in action. Well I dunno how to embed youtube videos so just click on the pic to see it haha.

No, really — it is!

Everything that needs to be in the game is so; what’s left is just visual and interface polish. ‘course, both the visuals and the GUI design are in need of some serious polishing.

Anyway: Distant Star now has an awesome technology tree; players (human or AI) can browse the tree and select new technologies to research. Researched techs affect all aspects of the game: ship combat, empire management, exploration, etc — and choosing to research one technology may prevent you from researching others. Choices, choices.

What to choose, what to choose?

Furthermore, the technology system is entirely data-driven; technologies, with their costs, dependencies, and effects, are loaded from XML. Even the tech tree display is automatic; it uses a simple tree layout algorithm to render itself. What this means is that I can step away from the technology system entirely, either outsourcing it to someone else (anybody feel like helping?) or pushing a newer, better tech tree in a post-release update.

More progress after the jump:

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