The arena is littered with shiny things… but the aim is to get a minimal score, so you really should be dodging those, too!

Negative scores good, positive scores bad!

Hostile aliens spawning all around you… you could blow ‘em up – but you’re aiming for a minimal score – so kill only what you really really need to! Try to avoid doing anything that earns points. Can you achieve a negative score?!

Did I misread the theme? – was it supposed to be Mondrian-ism or Monochrome-ism?

It’s going to be an arena shooter of some kind, with the aim of staying alive but getting the minimal score (*avoiding* power-ups, collectibles, and bonuses?). Perhaps a score that ticks downwards over time, if you can avoid killing/collecting things?

But for now, I’ve at least got basic player movement and done the mouse-to-world logic for firing. And spent too long messing with SpaceScape to create a skybox…

Well, technically this appears to count as an October Challenge success…

But in reality, it feels like quite a cheat, as the game has been in development since March or so, and it’s mostly coincidence that it was released in October

It’s available now, on the App Store (iOS) and Google Play (Android)

Trailer:

Screenshots:

The music is by Dustin Kulwicki (www.kwixmusic.com).  Just about everything else was done myself – using as many tools as possible to make the most of my limited programmer art skills. I can highly recommend SpaceScape if you need space skyboxes, and Genetica for texture creation!

I also recently posted a blog entry about the making of Skyriders, showing an assortment of screenshots throughout the development process.

Spent too much time messing with Blender and graphical stuff yesterday, I’m still lacking any gameplay – but I’ve got a scrolling map, and  aplyer that the player moves+shoots, and has collision detection. A slightly unconventional control system – arrow keys for forwards/backwards/steering on the player – but with mouse aiming.  WIP build here:  http://www.bluescrn.net/ld48alone/

So I’m in for another Ludum Dare (as long as the theme isn’t too silly…). I’ll be joining the #MidlandsIndies in Coventry tomorrow, but may spend Sunday at home in front of my ‘real computer’, as I struggle to be productive on a laptop in an unfamiliar environment…

This time, I’m giving up my usual C++/D3D this time, and I’m going to use Flash (AS3 in FlashDevelop) using Stage3D!

I’ve put together a little framework for doing sprite-based 2D games using Stage 3D. I call it ‘Turbo2D’, and the source is available here, if anyone fancies messing with Stage3D themselves.

There’s also a little test/demo here!

It was going fairly well – but after staying up too late last night working on this, I’m low on energy and enthusiasm, not sure if I’ll actually get it into a submittable state.  Too much time spent drawing the bike/biker, and learning about Chipmunk constraints…

Got the bike physics working quite nicely, after turning the friction up to 11.  Enabled bloom, added a smoky background.

A massive volcano has erupted… can you escape the advancing lava (well, I missed out on ‘Advancing wall of doom’ when that was the theme)…

Need to sort the camera out next, it’s not very playable that zoomed in…  but it does show off the bike that I spent far too long drawing, and which now has nicely working suspension…

Sine Rider

Struggling a bit to get decent bike suspension/controls working, but at leas there’s a partially controllable bike in there now…  time to work on the level generation code, and think about how to make it into more of a game…

Bike bits

Why did I decide to make a game that needed a human character… that’s my golden rule of Ludum Dare… minimal art, and *absolutely no humans, or other hard-to-draw creatures!*

Spent hours now trying to draw this bike and rider…  this will have to do, let’s get back to some code…

Wheely Good Progress

The chipmunk is alive!   Generated a nice rock-ish texture in Genetica (which is awesome, btw), use that most-overused Photoshop grass brush for some grass, and got it all UV mapped nicely.

Abusing 4×4 matrices for 2D sprite transforms – I’ve got a matrix class in my base code but no actual sprite support.   But I’ve got a super-inefficient sprite class going now, along with an as-simple-as-possible entity manager  (not much more than an array of pointers…)

Now I’ve got to try drawing the rest of the bike… that’s a bit more challenging…

Very early progress

The theme seemed a bit uninspiring. And I wanted to do something that’s not a tile-based platformer this time…  ended up thinking about the motorbike chase in ‘The Great Escape’, and decided to do a physics-based motorbike game, with procedurally generated terrain (rather heavily inspired by Tiny Wings/Extreme Road Trip/Smuggle Truck/Elastomania etc.)

Got a basic sum-of-sine-waves rendering+scrolling, but I’ve got some ideas to make it more varied. But first, time to add Chipmunk for physics, and get the beginnings of a player in…

So I recorded a timelapse of this LD48 – Chronolapse did a great job of capturing screenshots, although doing a batch resize+crop and high-quality encode from jpegs was a little trickier… The end result was pretty good, though:

And of course, the final game is here

Well, just submitted my finished build! It’s a bit simpler and shorter than I’d hoped, but as my first real Unity project it’s been quite a successful weekend.

Play it online (Unity plugin required)

(I expect that it requires a fairly quick graphics card to run well, though… there’s quite a lot of objects/polys/particles involved…)

Done: Level exits, dying, restarting, spikes, controls/physics bugfixing, basic sound effects.

Features cut: Enemies

Todo: Build more levels, Try to figure out Unity shaders.

Stuck with the ‘completely untextured but lots of polys’ style. Could have spent ages on texturing things, but I’d had enough Blender->Unity problems without even going there (mostly because Blender displays everything double-sided, and doesn’t automatically flip normals when a mesh is flipped…)

Been quite a successful weekend considering I’d only spent 2-3 days beforehand messing with/learning Unity. It’s horribly hacky, inefficient, and badly structured – but it’s a playable game

Created a fairly crude player model. So I’m not running a box around the level any more… Also got collectable gems, but I can’t get Unity shaders working, so they don’t look very gem-like – I just want to make them lit+additive, to look a bit like oldskool Amiga ‘glenz vectors’…)

Slow going, but I’ve got an almost working grappling hook system, it’ll grab the closest ‘grapple point’ (the round things). Yes, the block on the end of the chain should be the player, but it’s still a placeholder block.

And the colours are pink as Unity crashed and I lost some updates to my scene file, including the lights… Next to add some collectables, and a way to reset the level/load a new level…

‘It’s dangerous to go alone… take this…. grappling hook!’ is the basic idea

Using Unity this time, and I’ve only spent a couple of days learning the basics. Been having a real hard time getting meshes from Blender into it cleanly, but now I’ve got a first block in, I’ve been writing some scripts. Got a basic (brute-force) tilemap system, and simple platformer physics/collision (just done my own, to avoid some of the trickiness of using ‘real physics’ for a platformer)

Also figured out that you’ve got to smooth time.DeltaTime values yourself if you want anything to run smoothly when vsynced…

‘Playable’ version here

Cool, came in 5th in a compo that I almost abandoned halfway through due to isometric sorting woes

But looking at the scores in general has reminded me just how much the Humor category needs to be nuked from orbit!

Being hit with a load of 1′s and 2′s in this category (which isn’t relevant to a lot of games) isn’t much fun. It’s obviously not just my games that suffer from this – even Notch’s epic Metagun was given a couple of 1′s in this category, and that was a solid 4-5 game. How about just removing the humor category, if a game would have scored high here, that should add to the ‘fun’ score, shouldn’t it? (Maybe even score Fun out of 10, instead of 5?)

Also, there’s been a bit of what I can only describe as ‘troll scoring’ going on – with solid 4+ games being given 1s and 2s across the board by at least one voter (in a lame attempt to vote down the competition?)

I’d almost suggest filtering out the highest and lowest couple of ratings for each game when calculating the final results?

Discuss…