Good

• My zombie! I’m really proud of my ugly zombie. Yes, I spent a lot of time on it and it isn’t good art by any standard but I don’t care. It was worth it to see it “alive” in my game
• I only realized that after I was done but I kind of made the game I wanted to do for December 2010′s LD. Except then I had found myself making an alien instead of the zombie I had planned to do and then gave up before I had gameplay anyway. So it’s like I tied up a loose end.
• The jam. If not for the jam I wouldn’t have been able to finish my game and the LD would have just ended in bitter disappointment for me.
• My trusty ZBrush was awesome: sculpting/painting the zombie was the most fun part of this LD, Blender was also great for animating it.

Gray Area

• Making the low-poly retopology took more time than I thought. I tried TopoGun which I had just bought a few days before the compo and never used.  That added a few hours of work but then TopoGun worked really well for generating the color and normal map from the sculpt.

Bad

• I missed the compo deadline and had to do the jam
• I was generally not very fast. Lack of concentration maybe? Everything seemed to take just longer than it usually would.
• I spent the same amount of time on the environment than on the zombie and yet it really doesn’t show.  I just wasted time noodling with bits cut from my original hallway model and just made a mess and had to restart again. It was a time sink for no reason.
• Simplistic gameplay. I wanted to make the game more about stealth.
• I still suck at using Modo. It’s a great software I have no doubt of that and I mostly knew how to use it. But somehow I still find myself struggling against it every step. I don’t know how to explain what it is exactly. It’s weird and it’s probably just that I lack the practice to have the right instincts but it’s really annoying when trying to speed model and everything reacts in a slightly unexpected way and I keep having to undo and try again. I’ve got to spend more time using it.
• Still no time for particles effects. I put them on my priority list for this LD and still neglected them.

Time use

• Code: 11.2h (includes setting things up in Unity)

• Model: 9.3h
• Texture: 4.7h
• Animation: 3.5h
• Sound: 2.4h
• Level building: 7.6h (half of it wasted on a discarded version)
• Sleep: 24h
• Doing other things: 3.4h
• Misc: 5.5h (probably 50% actual work the rest being posting WIPs, chatting on the IRC channel, etc)

• Total spent on zombie (including sounds, code, etc):  15.5h
• Total spent on the environment/level (incl. medkit props and ambient soundtrack): 15.4h

PLAY THE FINAL VERSION

So I managed to finish a game. Not in 48 hours as intended but 72 Well, I thought that might be the case.  So I didn’t worry too much when I lost a lot of time doing the cute little character.

Can you find the kitty?

OK now it looks like a game. But less than 6 hours are left on the counter to make some levels.

I need the sugar

Here’s what I have so far. Unfortunately it’s not a game yet. Maybe I’ll be able to get something fun to play tomorrow for the jam.

I still don’t have a game but I have my animated zombie that can follow and attack the player. The AI is not too great of course but this is a zombie so it might be realistic

Time to eat a pizza!

The staple food of geeks

Braaaaaains!

So I finally have my zombie all rigged and ready for animations. I lost a lot of time in Topogun doing the low-res version from the ZBrush high-res sculpt. It was the first time I used Topogun and it was a really slow process :/ Also I had some problems with the Rigify auto-rigging thing in Blender, I’m not sure what happened but last LD it worked right away. Unfortunately I have not used it since then and I must have done something wrong this time. All sorted now but I’m far from having a game done. It already looks like I’ll have to do the jam instead of the compo.

Are you sure there is no one there?

Slow progress on the environment…

Modeled in Modo, textures with Photoshop and FilterForge, rendered in Unity

OK so the theme is “Alone” (you probably know that).

So here are my thoughts after 1 hour of waking up/brainstorming:

• Survival horror, rather obvious but it’s still my #1 idea. It might be a lot of fun to create. I can make ZBrush zombies and monsters which I love to do   But a decent 3D environment takes a lot of time and I’ll probably end up with a not very polished game (as usual).
• SETI. Find out if you’re alone in the universe. Nice but what would the gameplay be like? All I can think of is rather simulationy and GUI heavy which is not my style. (or shmup, now that you’ve found life, exterminate it! )
• “Home alone” themed tower defense. Might be fun
• Dating sim / visual novel. But I don’t have the right skill set for that (my drawings are horrible)

So I guess I’ll get started on the survival horror to avoid getting stuck doing nothing.

Breakfast of champions

Because desk photos are so last century.

My weapons:
Engine: Unity 3.4.2 Pro
Language: C#
2D: Photoshop CS5 Extended, Filter Forge 3, Painter 12
3D: ZBrush 4R2, Topogun 2 beta, Modo 501, Blender 2.61, Vue Infinite 10
Sound: Reason 6, Audition 1.5, SFXR

Strategy for this LD:

Ooops, do I need one?

I hope to make a game with better gameplay than last time. So I’ll try to get that working early. Also I really want to have some sounds and “music”. I might switch to doing the jam if I can’t get something good enough in the 48h. Also particles. I often neglect particle effects and they can really bring life to an otherwise empty 3d world.

Good luck everyone!

Time Use:

Code (9 hours):

• 4 hours on helicopter and camera control
• 4 hours on NPC behavior, gameplay logic, GUI and integration
• almost an extra hour of debugging a silly bug at 4am when it was time to submit

Graphics (22 hours):

• 1h for the skybox
• 30m for taking photos for textures
• 14h30 (!!!) world creation (modelling and texturing, the buildings and roads and being OCD about it, including 5 hours on the stupid modular road thing)
• 3h15 helicopter model
• 2h40 prisoner model incl. animations

Misc:

• 2h brainstorming

Total: 33 hours / 48

And now post-mortem:

Pro Style:

• Motivation: I was really motivated to get a game done no matter what. I didn’t get distracted by other things, woke up early and used all my available time. At the beginning of the second day I thought about restarting another game as I wasn’t too pleased with this one but I kept going. 4 hours before the deadline I hadn’t even started adding some gameplay but I still continued and in the end I made a game in less than 48 hours (I was a bit late on the dead line due to last minute debugging but since I was sleeping when the compo started it’s still less than 48h total)
• Ideas: I didn’t feel the usual frustration of “bleh, I don’t know what game I want to do”, I had several ideas right from the start.
• Blender: I switched to blender for character animation and it was actually the first time I tried to animate a character in blender. I had watched a few tutorials weeks before so I wasn’t completely clueless still this could have turned into a time sink It wasn’t Blender Just WorksTM. 
• Unity 3D: still awesome, ZBrush: still awesome, not much else to say about those :]

Noob mistakes:

• Not being so good with my 3d software. I just don’t do enough 3d, I do spend time learning them, watching video tutorials (because i can do that while being lazy) but it’s hard to be fast when only actually putting things into practice twice a year for a ludum dare.
• OCD. I wasted a lot of time obsessing over unimportant details. Getting good UV maps, editing small texture details. This was ridiculous, I don’t know why I got so obsessed with little things this time.
• The modular road system: I had a perfectly fine road grid you can see it in my WIP video post. Sure it wasn’t perfect, the roads kind of ended in weird ways but it was Good Enough. Instead I decided to make some modular elements: intersections, turns. Why did I think my helicopter game needed good roads that badly? Then turning my roads into modular tiles didn’t work as expected. I hadn’t carefully planned a good system. So nothing was aligned properly. And then persisted, I wasted 5 hours on those tiles until I was satisfied they aligned properly. 5 hours! More than I spent on coding the gameplay!
• No time to tweak the gameplay. It’s very boring as it is. Due to the time I lost I barely finished some gameplay in time and had to debug in overtime. I could test the gameplay logic by accelerating the time but I didn’t really play my game until after I had submitted it. Too late to fix the gameplay.
• no sound or music :/

I wish I could have made a jam entry out of it and taken the extra day to polish it, but since I had to work on Monday and then finally get some sleep after that I wouldn’t have gained anything by not going for the compo. A lot could be added to this game, I wish there could have been some shooting involved and cars and it could become like a mini-GTA! well if only I had a few months or years

No gameplay yet v___v

well, almost 13 hours left!!

Get übermotivated

Making a game in 48 hours is hard. There will be times when you feel discouraged by your lack of progress, skills or inspiration. If you’re going to finish a game this weekend, you need to make that your #1 priority. Don’t start the LD without knowing that no matter what, you’ll make a game this weekend. Maybe a very shitty game if things don’t go your way, maybe an awesome game, but a game no matter what. Don’t have any doubt about it and it won’t be a problem.

The excitement here and on IRC before the compo is a great way to build up that motivation, but be careful that once the compo is started it can work against you when others seem to be advancing their game more quickly.

Be prepared

There won’t be that much time for installing new software and learning how to use it. Do that now and be prepared.

Make sure to test all your tools before the compo. At the very least verify that you can run your software. Do you know where you put that dongle or original CD? Did you make any hardware change that could cause a problem with software activation (that happened to me with ZBrush once, their customer support fixed the problem… the next Monday).

If possible make a mini test game. At the very least, test your pipeline. Can you get those sprites to load? Can you export your 3D character and load it in the engine?

If you’re making a game from scratch without an existing engine, I suggest writing a conversion tool or plugin that will convert files to an extremely simple format that can be loaded directly. No need to waste precious LD time writing an .obj loader or whatever.

Get the ball rolling

So you may expect that once the theme is announced you’ll sit in silent meditation for a while and get the most amazing idea. Well, if that happens good for you. But for me it has never been that easy.

So just get started anyway. What? Without an idea? That’s right. The longer you wait, the harder it is to come up with an idea that you will like.

Have a few generic ideas ready before the compo and get started on one. Or just create a sphere, apply physics to it and literally get the ball rolling Once you’re working on something it’s a lot easier to have ideas than if you just sit staring at a blank page. And if after a few hours you think of something different and have to restart again, that’s ok. It’s a lot better than doing nothing and still not have an idea. You can probably reuse a lot of the code and assets anyway.

Your final idea can also come much later. For LD #5 I started making a dungeon crawler type of game. 28 hours into the compo, I accidentally used a glRotate instead of a glTranslate. I thought the result looked cool and ended up making a racing game on a ring shaped track. I would never have had that idea without that happy accident.

LD #5 first prototype and final game

Get rid of the placeholder graphics

Nothing kills motivation like a game about rectangles colliding with triangles. Placeholders have their use but for the magic to happen, to feel like you’re really making a game you need graphics sooner than later.

Sometimes I like to start with a bunch of generic graphics that I will be able to use no matter what my game ends up being. You don’t need perfectly polished graphics, avoid that at all cost. You just get diminished returns quickly but you need enough for it to feel like a game. Then if you have extra time at the end (that won’t happen) you can go back and improve them. The main character, if that concept applies to your game, is vital. If you have it, everything else can be placeholders. At least, you’ll have some life on the screen.

Don’t sleep all day

Yes, you need sleep. The competition is 48 hours long so don’t even think about not sleeping. But be careful about turning off the alarm clock. It’s easy to sleep too much which not only wastes productive time that you will regret not having near the end of the 48 hours, but it can also make you sleepy and unproductive. Personally I think sleeping about 6-7 hours a night is best during the LD but you may be fine with less or need more.

Just don’t be lazy. You’re going to regret any time you waste on other things. For the weekend, make your game your absolute priority. You can watch your favorite tv series the next week but you’ll regret a long time not being able to add that one thing that would have made your game so much better.

Have fun!

In the end, win or lose, it’s just a game! The important thing is to enjoy the Ludum Dare and doing something you wouldn’t do normally: create a whole game in a weekend!

Nothing will prevent me from completing a game this weekend!

Engine: Unity 3D Pro (coding in C#)
Graphics pipeline: Modo 501, ZBrush 4.0, Blender 2.59, Photoshop CS5 Extended
Sound: Reason 5, Audition 1.5

not much to see yet

3 hours of work done. I have a simple platformer control system and a maze generator. So not much to see yet but there is more than enough time to make a game out of it yet.

Noms I bought today for LD20, including noms for the brain on the left

I’ve got all I need for another LD. After the ‘disaster’ of not finishing the last one, I’m super motivated to not let that happen again.

So I’ll be using Unity Pro 3 and code in C#. I’ll make some 3D graphics with Cinema 4D or maybe Modo, ZBrush and Blender. I might additionally use Vue Infinite 9.5 for the skybox or weird stuff like Groboto. For sounds I have SFXR which I actually hope not to use as it’s just too easy instead I might record myself doing funny noises and use Adobe Audition to edit them and make music with Reason 5. Also I will doodle on my Wacom Intuos3 and edit that in Photoshop CS5 and make textures with FilterForge 2.0.

Also for the first time I’ll try to use motion capture recorded with my Kinect.

Also from the previous compo:
Video montage of my previous LD games (not need to update it since I did not finish last time)
My Zelda-esque Desktop (I might post an updated one later if I’m not too lazy)

Theme: Tetris is now a Visual Novel! (and maybe true love as well)

Limitation: All audio must be your own voice (I mean technically you’ll only use the left mouse button, frame rate isn’t very relevant for a VN, it won’t fit in 60s so that leaves the voice things)

Rule: Use a tool/language you’ve never used before: renpy (I’ve wanted to use it for a long time)

I expect to probably fail as I’m very slow at drawing and a VN is too content heavy. Not that I can write a story worth two peanuts either. Anyway good luck!

So I don’t know if I’ll be able to make a game for the compo (maybe I’ll switch to jam instead).

I wanted to make an horror game and then when I started sculpting I made an alien instead of a zombie. So it’s going to be exploration of ancient ruins on an alien planet or something like that.

First screenshot

Stuff I might use:

• Engine: Unity Pro 3.1
• 3D: Cinema 4D R10 (old but I’m used to it), ZBrush 4.0, (also maybe Modo 501 or Vue 9 Infinite)
• 2D: Photoshop CS5 Extended, Filter Forge 2.0, Wacom Tablet Intuos 3 (9″x12″)
• Sound: Reason 5 / Record 1.5, Audition 1.5, SFXR, RolandED PC-300 midi keyboard
• Misc: Chronolapse, fraps

Also if you have missed it, don’t forget to see my video montage of my previous LD games.