I finally got around adding a walk-through video for my experimental storytelling game “The Invention of Colour”. Since the game is very much focused on atmosphere and “the experience” you can actually get a very good impression of the game by just watching the video. Make sure you use a good pair of headphones to enjoy this to the max:

Walking into this competition I had one goal in mind: Create something that has a dense, expressive mood and portraits a distinct character to the player. I wanted the player to walk away from the game feeling like he actually got to know the main character’s emotional world by just listening to him for 2 minutes.

I personally find the transfer of emotional concepts to be one of the most challenging for a game designer. Quite often realism does not translate to something that’s emotionally impacting. The current trend seems to be toward hyper-realism. But to be honest I was a lot more emotionally involved in some of the classic games of the 8bit & 16bit era. There’s a huge potential when we leave gaps for the player to imagine things.

What do you think? What makes a game emotionally interesting? How can you involve the player in the world you’re trying to create? Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Oh and when you’re ready to rate my game click through here: The Invention of Colour

A while Back me and a Friend started making a small Command Prompt Application Called BatchChat after a while we got Bored and stopped developing it However I have decided to Release the source code here and If anyone wishes to expand Upon it feel free to do so

Click Here to View the source Code

Click Here to View the forums Source Code

Click Here to View the Prototype of what was Eventually Programmed Into the Forums as Polls

I Hope you people Like it

Play the game here.

This is the time lapse of the full 48 hours of development, trimmed slightly so you don’t have to wait 30 seconds while I’m sleeping.

I like the concept of a timelapse, it makes it look like I know what I’m doing when I code something, as opposed to making it up as I go.

And again, if you could please play and rate my game, as well as leave any constructive criticisms, that would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks

The entry page.

Hello all, I guess the cool thing to do is a postmortem, so here is mine. First off, here is my game, I would love to hear some more feedback.

This is my first Ludum Dare so I really just wanted to see what it is all about. I didn’t push myself to create something amazing. I didn’t do any cool time-lapses and I didn’t try to ‘market’ my game at all. For the next LD I will try harder at these.

What I did right -

• I’m proud of my game. Even though I didn’t push myself in its creation I still put a lot of myself into the game. I
• I created what I had in mind. My final product is what I had envisioned from the beginning. Granted I did need to cut some content out but I sorta expected that.
• I finished! I didn’t give up or get discouraged!
• I didn’t kill myself while making the game. I ate well, and I slept well.

Anyways! Sorry for that! Terrible, terrible ramblings of a crazy game designer. Play my game! I would love some feedback! But since it takes so long to load, open it in a new tab and play some others while you wait.

I added forums to my google site now you can talk about stuff going on there

Spoiler Warning : Contains full play through. 

Cross-posted from my blog:

• http://www.gavpugh.com/2011/12/21/ludum-dare-22-postmortem-journal-and-timelapse/

So, this past weekend I participated in the 22nd Ludum Dare competition. You have just 48 hours over the weekend in which to create a game. The crux of the competition is that you create all code and content within that 48 hour period. No re-used assets at all. Only engine/middleware/framework code is permitted to be prepared beforehand.

I wrote my game with Unity. It’s the first project I’ve ever undertaken in Unity, and I had very little experience of it. I came out of the other side with a very positive impression, I really liked using it. As much as I love C/C++; given the time constraints, it seemed a good idea to go with Unity. The other big upside is that you can deploy the game to be played via a web browser. This was definitely what I wanted. I didn’t want people to have to go to the hassle of a download-and-install, just to play the little toy game I made over a weekend.

(more…)

I missed ludum dare? D:

aww ((

Welcome to part 2 in my 3 part postmortem series for my game ZERO2. In this post I’m going to breakdown the creation of a single environment used in the game. But hey, if you haven’t played the game yet please check it out first:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5821#LD48

CONCEPT

The first step to creating any environment for me is simply coming up with a concept for it. In this game I wanted to have two main types of environments: puzzle environments, where the player would need to focus on solving some obstacle to progress, and atmospheric environments, which would serve more to set the mood and advance the story rather than offer any gameplay.

For this breakdown I’m going to use my personal favorite environment from the game, which happens to fall into the ‘atmospheric environment’ category. At this point in the game, the player has just passed a fairly ‘scary’ portion of the game, so I wanted this area to serve as a bit of a respite. I also wanted to give the player some more clues about what was going on as well, as the game is purposefully vague and mysterious, not much has been revealed up til this point.

The idea I came up with was a fairly open ‘lobby’ type space, the focus being on a large geometric statue in the center. The implication being that this room is basically a gateway to a new section of this facility, one meant to serve as a thematic representation for the goals of the organization at work here. The twist being that the room is not pristine or brightly lit as one would expect, but flooded, dusty and crumbling.

CREATION

So I started building using my 3d tool of choice, Cinema 4d.

Here you can see the finished environment in the editor. Like all the environments in this game it is comprised mainly of rectangles of various shapes and sizes. The most time intensive element in the whole scene was the construction light on the right which I modeled based on an image I found in a Google search. But what about the statue in the middle you say? Actually, that statue was created procedurally using the Cloner tool in Cinema4d. Essentially, all I created was one of those cubes, then used adjustable parameters to multiply and rearrange them until I found some random combination that looked right!

The other important element in this scene is the lighting. For this game I wanted to use mainly diegetic lighting, meaning that the only sources of light would be ones actually in the game world. To get the most out of this light though, I included a few important components – volumetric lighting and visible noise. This means that the light source would not only illuminate the scene, but that the illumination would be actually be visible in the air. Including noise to this visibility introduces a smokiness to the atmosphere, essential for selling the mood of the scene!

Here’s the render straight from Cinema4d:

This looks pretty good, but it’s not quite there yet. An important lesson for any aspiring 3d artist is that you can almost always improve your renders with post production. So with that in mind, it’s time to move from Cinema4d to After Effects. Here’s a layer by layer breakdown of my post-production on this image:

1. Vignetting

The lighting in the initial render looks ok bit it’s a bit too flat. In order to increase the dynamic range of the scene, as well as draw focus to the center of the image, I added some vignetting to the top and bottom of the image.

2. Lighting Effects

I already spent a decent amount of time in Cinema 4d trying to get the right lighting, but I wanted to effect to be even stronger. Part of the reason I pointed the light at the statue in the first place was because I knew I could get some cool volumetric light rays streaming through the cracks. To amplify this I used a plugin called Trapcode Shine, which essentially fakes volumetric lighting using the highlights (and lowlights) of the image. This also adds a glow effect to the construction light, making it look more obviously like a source of luminance. Looking good now right…? NO WE’RE NOT DONE YET!

3. Color Correction

While the colors in the original render don’t look bad by any means, they just weren’t selling the mood strongly enough. A bit of color shifting can really change the feel to any image, and in this example, the increased sense of yellow-green makes things look murkier and adds to the density of the smoke in the atmosphere.

4. Noise

It’s probably obvious at this point that I’m into what could be described as a very filmic look. Adding some noise to the scene gives the image a sense of texture and density – the other huge advantage is that since the grain has movement to it, when you actually play the game it brings an otherwise completely static environment to life in a very subtle but effective way.

—–

So, that’s it! Easy right? Well, obviously the downside to this little tutorial is that these tools are by no means free or open source. Because I do motion graphics work professionally it’s certainly worth it to me to have them, for the average hobbyist game developer maybe not so much. Still, I hope the core concepts of this breakdown could be useful to you regardless of what tools you use to create your graphics. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments….

And please, check out my game!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5821#LD48

I’ve known about LD for a few years, but have never participated before. On Friday I asked Steve if he would be interested in being sleep deprived for the entire weekend and he was! Once we decided to join we anxiously awaiting for the theme to be announce and couldn’t focus on much else.

We added an extra layer of challenge beyond building a game in 72 hours. We wanted to try and build a lite version of a game that we could submit to the App Store. Going into it we knew it was a crazy and foolish idea, but we wanted to push our abilities and focus to their limits.

Process

Even though 72 hours is technically 3 days, the schedule below is broken into the 4 “days” or awake periods between naps.

Day 1

Setup

Normally Steve and I work remotely, but we live close enough together that face to face meetings are possible. We decided to setup a joint office for weekend so we could brainstorm efficiently and motivate each other. I setup a folding table next to my desk and he lugged all of his stuff over.

Steve worked on OSX using Flash, Photoshop, and a Wacom tablet. He sketched out a lot of art on paper prior to working in Flash to make sure we nailed the look. I worked on OSX as well using XCode 4, Texture Packer, Particle Designer, Audacity, GIMP. We were targeting iOS so I worked with cocos2d-iphone and chipmunk. We were both very familiar with the tools and frameworks that we were using so we didn’t waste a lot of time learning our tools.

The Reveal

Every LD has a theme and this year it was “Alone”. We were ready to shout out ideas but when we saw the theme all we heard was crickets. “Alone” was one of the themes we were interested in but we knew it would be tricky coming up with a good game. Luckily the silence soon ended and we started brainstorming.

Brainstorming

Everyone started throwing out ideas and Steve scribbled them down. Whenever we would get stuck we would read through the list and try to go further with an existing idea or try to take it in another direction. We initially approached the process by trying to come up with a story or situation that fit the theme. This generated a lot of ideas but it was hard to come up with a game mechanic out of many of them. Here are some of the ideas we had:

• Ghost who wants to be alone and tries to evict the living
• A mute and deaf person (possibly blind?) who is alone in the world and needs to find a way to communicate
• Stuck in space
• Stuck at sea
• Buried alive
• Post-apocalyptic survival
• Famous and trying to buy friend

The Idea

We ended up expanding on the idea of someone who wants to be alone and can’t seem to get away. We decided that our protagonist would be a rockstar who was being chased by a horde or adoring fans and the player would guide them along a platformer-esque level to the tour bus.

The rockstars would be members of the four person pop group The Four Hats. Their debut album Hat Tricks is also introduced in the game.

The Four Hats in “Room to Roam”: Rockstars have it hard. Millions of adoring fans, mountains of cash, and no alone time. How is a musician supposed to write new music when chased by the paparazzi or the hordes of adoring fans? In order to find the solitude that you crave and unlock your inner muse, you must outrun fans and make your way to the studio. Don’t get caught by the paparazzi on your way there or your creative energy will be sapped dry.

The initial idea included having all of the members of the band as playable characters with different abilities that would allow you to navigate the levels in unique ways. The levels would take the band through multiple eras of music to provide variety. Clearly that was biting off a bit more than we could chew in the time that we had.

Why rockstars and music? We had at our disposible a very talentled musician who has written music for our other projects. We wanted to work on a project that showcased his strengths as well as ours. He could easily do the creepy music that would accompany the ghost story or the stifling silence of being buried alive, but who doesn’t want to be a rockstar for a weekend.

Flesh on the Bones

Next we started to flesh out the idea. We worked on the sound, did sketches to get the look, settled on the mood, and worked out the details of the mechanics. Once we were on the same page and understood what we were making we each started working on our own parts.

Getting the style and animation of the first character to match what we were aiming for brought Steve to our first nap break. During that time I got a basic prototype working of some platforms, and obstacles, the controls, and a horde chasing you.

Day 2

On Day 2 we started adding actual art assets into the game. I had put together a basic animation system on top of the existing system in cocos2d while Steve finsihed up the animations. We had also settled on a naming convention and system of organization to simplify the code and avoid rework.

Once we had the character in game, Steve moved on to background elements, obstacles, and other art assets. At this point our pace matched up really well. Art and code were never too far ahead of each other.

As the day drew to a close we had all of the basic gameplay in place with art assets and an awesome instrumental version of the music. We did some playtesting and identified the pain points to work on the next day. One of the issue we had was that the obstacles weren’t interesting enough to make the game varied and interesting. We had a few ideas for “traps” or “enemies”, but hadn’t added them into the actual game yet.

Day 3

Sunday was a busy day and by the end of it we had a game. Even though we were not in the 48 hours contest, it still felt good to have a complete game by the 48 hour mark.

A few things that we worked on:

• Everything else: menus, icons, etc
• Level loading, gameplay tweaks, enemies
• Writing and recording vocals
• Writing and recording menu music
• Playtesting

Up until this point we had been randomly generating levels, which worked for testing purposes, but it led to uninteresting levels. We decided to switch over to hand built levels.

The best part of the day was that we had the final cut of our main gameplay music. “Room to Roam” is a track written, produced, and performed by The Four Hats. You can check it out on soundcloud:

01 Room To Roam by The Four Hats

If you need music for your game, we can put you in touch with negapixel (or The Four Hats) as he is available for contract work.

Day 4

Level Building

Building the level was a lot of fun. It also gave me a lot of time to play test the game and burn off a lot of warts. Building the level by hand gave the game a good pacing and slowly introduced elements in a balanced way. Since we didn’t have time to build level selection screens, or other elements that would create a polished multi-level game, we made sure the level was decently long and ended with more challenging play.

Building and playtesting the level took a lot of time. I had been storing the level config in a plist, which is not at all visual, and definitely added some friction to the process. After reading other LD post-mortems I realized we should have been using a pixel map. It would have been a quick way to implement a simple visual level editor. It is definitely a technique that I will be using in the future.

Polish / Cleanup

We finished the basic game and added a lot of polish ahead of schedule. We knew we didn’t have time to add additional characters or levels so we focused on wart removal and polish. We spent time putting together sound effects, button states, an intro cutscene, and particle effects.

Playtesting

In the final hours of the competition we were as ready to submit we were going to be. We continued to playtest the game because we were addicted. It was a great feeling to realize that we were no longer playing to test, but because it was fun.

What Went Well

• Came up with a fun concept that excited us
• Balanced work, sleep, and breaks to stay productive
• Familiarity with cocos2d and tools
• Great teamwork
• Music, art, and gameplay meshed together into a consistent experience
• Had time to add a lot of the polish we hoped for
• Reduced scope to make schedule realistic and focus on quality
• Time constraints focused the project
• Lots of testing

What Didn’t Go Well

• First time building a platformer. Learned that realistic physics didn’t equal fun.
• Took a bit longer than expected to get gameplay feeling right
• Took too long to build level
  • Didn’t choose a good format for level editing
  • Wasn’t familiar with any existing level editors
  • Should have used a pixel map
• Took longer to animate initial character than expected
• Had to redraw some frames a few times to make the action smooth
• Had to reduce the scope of the game
• The kittens we rented ended up mostly causing a distraction when we didn’t need them for the theme
• A few minor bugs slipped through (expected given the time restraints)
• Building an iOS game for LD has caused fewer people to be able to play than if we built a flash game

What Next?

We are going to submit Four Hats to the App Store after Apple’s holiday break and will continue development on additional levels and characters if people enjoy the game. We originally pictured a much bigger game, but the 72 hour time limit restricted what we could build. In the full version we pictured:

• Four playable characters each with a special ability
• Switch between characters to work through levels
• Multiple eras of music by the Four Hats with levels to match
• An EPIC sound track

Prior to submitting the free version we will fix a few minor bugs that we missed in our initial testing. This should only be another hour or so of work.

Conclusion

Ludum Dare is awesome! We would definitely do it again. We are happy with what we managed to build in a weekend.

It would be great if there was an iOS focused version of the contest. I am not sure how to solve the distribution issue, but if all the participants had iDevices it would expand the audience.

Building a polished app in a weekend is extremely difficult. We already knew this going into the process, but we wanted to challenge ourselves. What we found is that it is possible to build a fairly well polished prototype or lite version of a game, but adding in the extra content required for a full featured game takes a lot of time.

See art, video, and photos from the project on our live blog post from the event.

Check out our page for Four Hats here.

Cross posted on our blog.

A mock trailer I made for my Ludum Dare compo game. Thankfully, the video didn’t take even close to 48 hours to make.

Here is our double timelapse for Braille:

So yeah, coding hard, even if slow ( I _HAD_ to sleep during the day, still weak from the sickness ). I managed to implement PNG map loading, character entity, tiles, and “tile cleaning”

PICTURE TIME!

Now to implement, in Gameplay milestone:
-Dying
-Multiple levels
-Time limit
-more tile types
-enemies

Sheesh. I guess I’ll be doing 3 days. Stupid sickness.

Also, I noticed that I’m making the game about a goblin that’s alone on his birthday. It’s my birthday, I’m alone in my bed, far from any friends ( in a foreign country ), coding. Not so different after all, eh? Maybe I’ll change the game ending from one I wanted to have to happier one. At least my Gobos will have a happy birthday

So this is the first Ludum Dare I made it all the way through, and my second attempt total. I didn’t make it for the compo, but thank god for the extra day allowed by the jam. I had a blast doing it, and I’m very proud of the result, Frosthome:

What went right:

Cutting the design. This is the number one reason I succeeded. The original design called for a series of levels in different settings, with an interesting little mechanic that caused the level to “decay” over time, bits and pieces falling apart and changing the paths through it. Further, it required a set of items to be scattered across these levels, which you’d have to collect to ‘win’. This design was originally called “Scraphunt”.

What I ended up with is a simple 2D parallax platformer with no bells or whistles. But I finished it on time, and I think the design is more elegant because of the features I cut.

TinyXML. It’s an easy to use open-source XML parser designed for simple integration. Thanks to this, I had level saving and loading up and ready first thing.

The art. Thank god for my tablet, but really this can also be attributed to the level editor. 99% of the level is made using two basic image files, rotated and scaled, with some fuzzy-blended patches of the same thing overlaid to hide the edges. It was quick and efficient. The art was the second thing I worked on, and prototyping with real art is a big motivational kick.

The level editor. It’s fairly easy to use, and without it I’d have to design levels by editing the XML file they save to. I still have to do that if I want to introduce an item with a texture not used in the level, but overall it’s simple and efficient. If I want to design a jump, for example, I just play the game, make the jump, swap to editor in mid-air, place a platform below me, and continue on. Easy.

Sleeping. I tried staying up late the first night, but when I was mistaking array[1] for array[i], I realized sleep was essential. After that I made sure to manage 6 hours a night.

What went wrong:

The physics. “It’s a platformer,” I thought. “How hard can it be?”. Well, it turns out that it’s damn hard to do ‘right’. Beyond the generic but annoying stuff like getting the player to follow slopes and preventing collisions with the environment, you’ve got the fun but damn hard stuff: adjusting jump timings, player speeds, air control, and all those other little questions about what makes a game fun. Can the player wall jump? What about one of those mid-air double-jump direction reversals, ala Ghouls and Goblins? Should he slide on the ice? Tweaking these things took time. A lot of time. I spent pretty much the entire second day doing that.

The level editor. I spent real time making it easy to use and intuitive- drawing outlines around selected objects, doing some things (color picking) in a dialog when I could have used straight key-presses. These little bits of polish all ate away at my time.

Real life. I lost about 3 hours a day to various real-world responsibilities, in addition to time spent eating and sleeping. The worst was an appointment I forgot to cancel on the afternoon of the last day, right during crunch-time.

Forgetting to explain double-jumping. This is a big one. After releasing, I had several of my friends tell me that my game was “impossible”. It turns out they weren’t double-jumping. This kind of basic mechanic introduction is key, and I can’t believe I missed it.

Level design. The last hour of time was spent adding the win screen, the kitty achievement, and freezing to death. The last 15 minutes was spent taking my test level and turning it into something playable. I really wish I’d spent time making a longer level. Luckily I hear it’s quite challenging, which makes up a bit for the length.

Audio. I spent some time integrating ogg/vorbis and openAL, and then never got around to using them. Thankfully this was mostly boilerplate stuff, so the time cost wasn’t too big… but I feel keenly the lack of moody music with whistling ice chimes and wind blowing.

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

Play It | Rate It

Origin

When I heard Alone was chosen as the theme, a set of bizarre ideas immediately appeared in my mind. I really wanted to explore about the feeling of being alone, about the psychological effect of it. Also, I had read The Knock recently so I wanted to explore more about that subject.

Development

The tools I used included:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Lightroom
• Adobe Flash
• Flashdevelop / ActionScript 3
• as3sfxr »
• Aviary »
• A standard Digital Camera
• Some burned papers
• A friend (lol)

The art is rather simple, I took some photos of my house and I asked a friend to model for me. We did some shots of him walking, but because I lack equipment (tripod, marks, etc) the result looks a little bad. I did my best to correct the photos in Photoshop. The room is a part of my house, that isn’t even a room, but I couldn’t take a picture of a real room because the camera angle was too short. I applied Exposure and Posterize to all the images.

The programming was done entirely in ActionScript 3, using some features of my own library, but the vast majority was to be made from scratch. I used Flashdevelop because I’m really fast with it… Just press Ctrl+Shift+1 and it’s like magic!

What now?

I think I’ll work more time on this game. I’ll add more puzzles, make an easy mode, add language support, and maybe more rooms to explore, or explore more about the story. For example, what happened upstairs?

This was my second time on Ludum Dare, and I think it was a really good experience. I don’t think there’s something that went wrong, maybe next time I’ll add more features to my framework, like effects, sound support and embedding support; but at the end I managed to do what I intended to do.

Our timelapses are online, yay!

Check them out here:
http://01101101.fr/ld48/

I’ll go write a post mortem now

I made a video about developing my Ludum Dare #22 entry, Omega Men. During the competition I filmed some video diaries, and some footage of the game as it evolved, so hopefully it’ll be an interesting story!

Btw, does anyone know how to embed youtube videos into these pages properly?

Si usted tiene hijos propios, puede ser casi imposible asistir a sus juegos o espectáculos musicales. Gestión de la caza y las diversas responsabilidades reunión pueden crear obstáculos enormes en su intento de apoyar a su descendencia. Bill Bruno, por ejemplo, se basa en los asistentes, los administradores del juego, y amigos para ser de ayuda para que pueda participar de las actividades de sus hijos. Artículo recomendado por Gran DT 2011

First Thoughts:

This was my first Ludum Dare and I loved every minute of the frantic 48 hours.

The theme fit in with an idea that I had in mind with some changes to make is possible in two days.

The Plus Side:

1. Graphics: None, no graphics made this part easy.
2. Sound: Since the sound was to be such a major part of the game, I was a little worried since I own no sound equipment. Somehow I managed to create all of the sounds in the game from scratch in Audacity (with a small contribution through my laptop microphone).
3. Library: Though I could have done without it, the flashpunk library really helped with the sound panning and entity management.
4. Platform: Flash made it accessible for nearly everyone and I felt comfortable coding in Actionscript. Flashdevelop was a great IDE and never gave me any issues.
5. The Ludum Dare Community: They were a great help in the testing and were very honest in their input.
6. Time: I budgeted my time well with frequent coffee breaks (I worked in a Cafe). The game was pretty much finished with plenty of time and I only had to cut a few features (I never got the kitten easter egg in there).
7. Two endings, three if you count drowning.

The Negative Side:

1. Setting: The island proved to be far too large and made the game quite difficult to finish (Not really sure if anyone actually finished, let alone got both endings).
2. Inventory: or lack of. The ability to hold only one item at a time really increased the difficulty.
3. My atrocious typos that I only noticed after the fact.

FInal Thoughts:

People seem to love the idea and it was a fun game to make. I loved the pressure of only having two days and it really helped to get me motivated.

The post mortem is on my blog here.