OK, the compo is over… back to the real world where it’s cold outside and I badly need some sleep…

But first in case you missed it, here’s my final entry. And now some post mortemy things:

Various tools and utensils:

Unity 3D (free version), Photoshop CS2, Cinema 4D R10, sfxr, Reason 3.0, Wacom Intuos 3 tablet, stupid midi keyboard with no driver for windows 7 (I wasted almost two hours to install the hardware to use it with a midi cable before the compo and only used it to enter 3 notes)

Awesome:

• I finished a game. (seriously the motivation to participate in this LD was unexpected and sudden)
• Unity is AWESOME! Really easy to use even with no previous experience using it.
• sfxr allowed me to make a few sounds in less than 5 minutes!

Lame:

• Not enough preparation. I lost a lot of time learning how to do basic things in Unity while making my game.
• I thought I had a great idea: you would explore the level and logically find out where the hidden tiles are. Unfortunately in practice, with the limited gameplay elements I could implement, there is too much guess work and not enough “exploration”. The concept would have needed a lot of experimenting and more concepts (maybe something Minesweeper-like) so that it would be really possible to deduce the position of the hidden tiles.
• Wasted time making a nice 3D platformer camera thing when a fixed orientation camera would have been enough and would have made the game easier to play with a keyboard.
• Spent too much time tweaking some graphic details that made no real difference in the final result
• I downloaded ChronoLapse, but then wasn’t motivated to record a timelapse and now I regret it.

Conclusion: I’m going to use Unity again. With basically no previous knowledge, it was already a little bit faster than doing things from scratch (and I got some extra effects for free), I can only imagine what would be possible if I knew it well.

I just lost too much time fiddling with Unity or making stupid textures in Photoshop and now I don’t really have a game. I knew this was going to happen. Maybe I’ll be able to get something playable before the deadline but I doubt it. Anyway, current screenshot:

Things are going very slowly but I’m tired. I only got to spend about 6 hours on my game today and most of that time was spent figuring out how Unity works so I haven’t made that much progress. I’ve got some basic gameplay but I’m not so sure that my awesome gameplay idea is that awesome. At least it looks like it would need a lot of experimenting and tweaking to make it right so maybe I’ll switch to plan B tomorrow and make something quick with pygame.

Anyway here’s a little screenshot (everything is placeholder as I haven’t worked on the graphics yet):

first screenshot

At first I couldn’t think of anything original for this theme but then I had a revelation! I’m not going to spoil it right away but it’s going to be some kind of 3d puzzle/platformer with a unique exploration based twist.

My plan is to use Unity for the implementation and I hope that’s going to be OK as I have only spent a few hours on it and I’ll have to learn most things as I go. Hopefully it won’t slow me down too much as I’ll need some time to implement gameplay ideas and levels.

I thought I was going to sit this one out but all those enthusiastic posts about the compo are contagious so I’m going to try to do something.

However, I’m very tired so I’ll probably sleep most of the week-end and the result is going to be a disaster again so don’t expect anything great from me. I don’t really know what I’ll use, doing something small with Python/Pygame is the most reasonable option but I’ll probably waste my week-end trying to create the next World of Warcraft from scratch.

Anyway, good luck to all! May the Chocolate be with you, always!

New game using pygame, 2h30 of work done. 4h30 left.

Done: some tiles, map display and map editor

Next: add a player character

My game is going nowhere so rather than giving up completely or forcing myself to continue something that is not going to be finished or be any fun even if it was, I’m starting over from scratch.

It’s kind of late but for LD #3 I made a playable (if rudimentary) pygame entry starting 7 hours before the deadline so it’s not impossible.

Things are going that well. I lost a lot of time fighting against the Irrlicht engine and using it was not a good idea as I have clearly lost more time than it would have taken me to implement what I needed (judging from past ld48 experiences).

So my game is supposed to be kind of an underground golf game which you can’t tell from the screenshot as I have no gameplay at the moment. I’m not going to give up but don’t expect a great game either

I took two days off before the compo so that I would be able to rest and prepare myself. Well, I only did 50% of the work

So now I don’t know if I should attempt to use the irrlicht engine that I haven’t tested anyway or just do everything from scratch as usual (which means using up all my Saturday just to get a basic engine done in opengl…)

Tools:

Code: VisualC++ Express 2008, Irrlicht (?), something for sounds (fmod, irrklang, sdl_mixer ?), whatever else I end up needing

Graphics: Cinema 4D, Photoshop CS2, ZBrush, Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet

Sound/Music: Reason 3.0, Adobe Audition 1.5, Roland ED midi keyboard, microphone, kitchen utensils

The definition of the Ludum Dare competition is:

“Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated solo game development competition. Entrants develop games from scratch in 48 hours, based on a theme suggested by community.”

But it seems we are doing things less “from scratch” than we used to. People are now using full fledged engines, physics libraries, their own engines, etc. I don’t think this satisfies the definition anymore.

I’m not necessarily saying this is a bad thing. After all there is limited fun in reimplementing texture loading and opengl setup in every competition, especially since all those simple things can very easily add up to whole day and leave only half the time for more creative tasks. But have we gone too far?

Is LD48 a competition meant to be from scratch or using existing engines? What do you guys think about that?

And now, you kids can get off my lawn…

Unfortunately there is no way I can finish something. I had an idea and motivation but I just didn’t have enough time and energy for a LD.

Things are not going too well… I managed to spend about 8 hours working on my game today but I’m really tired so I’m not very productive and I’ll have to sleep as much as I can tonight.

It’s not unusual for me to spend the first day on just base stuff and not really start the game until day 2 but this time I’m not really finished with that and I won’t be able to stay up all night until the end of the compo so I’ll probably be able to work on it only about 10 hours tomorrow and that’s not going to be enough (my previous games required 30-35 hours total and I was way more productive than I am this weekend).

It’s too bad as I think have an idea for a fun game and it would quite feasible if I could really give it my best.

Hi guys,

So I’m now totally unprepared as usual for this new LD adventure and hope it’ll be fun.

I’ll be using OpenGL to make a 3D game, I’m using SDL for initialization and input handling and DevIL to load picture files. For graphics I’ll use Cinema 4D, Photoshop (and maybe ZBrush?), if there is any sound I’ll probably do it with Reason.

Since everybody seems to be doing it, I’m also adding a mini library that I’m going to use. Well it’s not really a library just a few things I don’t feel like coding again this time. Here’s what it does:

- A Timer class that uses Windows performance timers to get an accurate timer (last time I checked SDL used the awful GetTickCount() on Win32 that gives really bad results)

- A simple Font rendering class that uses bitmap fonts generated by Bitmap Font Builder

- A texture and shader loading class (written during the previous LD)

- A few math stuff, bare minimum and incomplete Vector2D and Vector3D classes from LD12, plane/ray intersection, eye to mouse ray (I always need that one when making my level editor) and that’s it.

It’s really minimum so I hope you’ll forgive me for not respecting the proper delay and requirement of full documentation and stuff. I don’t even have a Matrix class or Quaternion or any fancy collision stuff, no graphics initialization, no object loading/rendering, just really boring stuff.

Download link: ld13-minilib.zip

(feel free to use it under a zlib type license: do whatever you want with it, you don’t have to credit me but don’t claim it as your own work)

And now it’s time for me to sleep at least 12h and miss the beginning of the compo

Good luck and may the Towlr not be with you ;P

Here is my post mortem entry. It’s a bit long so click the read more thingie to view it.

(more…)

My webcam timelapse video is available on youtube. I’m not posting the screenshots only one as it’s really boring.

A few tips for people testing my game:

Use the C key to test the alternate camera style (it’s very hard to play with it but it’s nice). EDIT: Also even in normal camera mode you use the END key to place the camera temporarily behind our blobby hero and view what lies ahead.

On the second level, you just have to get rid of the creature guarding the jump point. They always move in your direction so maybe you can trick it.

If everything else fails, use the cheat code: ctrl-shift-J makes a huge jump so you can skip levels or just have fun.

Here it is!!

Download (3.2MB)

I forgot to to add it on the screen but F1 brings the help screen.

EDIT: I’m still trying to resolve some dll dependencies, it doesn’t work on all machines currently.

EDIT2: Solved! the zip has been updated.

EDIT3: YouTube video available (also available as a higher quality avi (7.2MB)

EDIT4: I forgot to include the source code when i made my release (shame on me)

Not much of a gameplay yet, but at least it’s possible to move around in the tower.

YouTube Version (I couldn’t find how to embed it in the blog entry :/)

Better quality (2.7MB)

So much left to do, so little time.

The middle point has passed and I still have nothing playable. Doing 3D from scratch, combined with bad preparation are making my progress really slow. Will I be able to finish a game?

Tomorrow I’ll have to focus on gameplay at all cost.

So it has begun! The theme was among my favorites as it’s an open theme. Lots of games can be made with a tower theme.

I have an idea of what kind of game I’d like to make. The gameplay details are still fuzzy but I have enough to get started so now that the caffeine is slowly starting to work I’ll start the coding.

I’m not using a fancy pre-made engine library so I have to do the boring stuff again. I hope I don’t waste the whole day just to display some 3D objects, so that I can start working on the interesting parts. It’s annoying to have to code stuff like texture loading or a timer in every compo but at least we’re not using the insane “mechanical cat” rules where you weren’t even allowed to look at code you had written before the competition (apparently the poor people competing in PyWeek still have to do that). I remember losing hours because of that stupid rule during the making of my Lightstream48 and Ring48 games.

Hey guys,

It’s been a while since I participated in one of these but this time I’ll be there. Now I need to get ready as it’s been a long time since I did any game programming.

Once again, I’ll be using C++ and OpenGL to make a 3D game. This time I want to include some things I haven’t done in a LD before like using shaders for per pixel lighting instead of the default OpenGL lighting like in my previous games. So I need to make a few tests in the next days to make sure I remember how that stuff works.

I also need to see if I still know how to do everything to produce the 3D content quickly. Last time I used ZBrush and Cinema 4D and was able to model/texture/animate simple creatures quickly and export the results in a very simple text based format. So I’m going to do basically the same.

I think it’s going to be a great week-end.