Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Index of games 1|2|3|4

The last part is released, it’s a bit shorter than the others but still full of good games! And that’s all for this LD! We have a total of 455 games featured on those videos. That’s not bad at all! So many creative games!

Thank you for participating and my apologies if somehow your game got left out (I hope I got everybody).

Hole in one!

Before the jam

As usual I didn’t practice for it, I didn’t do any gamedev or graphics or anything related since the previous LD :/ So I was rusty. At the end of last year, I had some time in between jobs to learn new ZBrush skills but I didn’t know how much I had lost since then. Three ludum dare per year is just not enough practice.

The theme is revealed!

Of all the themes in the preliminary rounds, there was only one I really hated, yup: minimalism.

I hate it because all LD games are already minimalistic by necessity. The whole point of participating in a Ludum Dare is to see how much you can do in a limited time. Choosing minimalism as the theme, is basically giving up before you even start. In my opinion, there are already too many minimalistic games in a regular LD. Games where the author instead of trying to work on all aspects of a game decides that colored squares placeholders are good enough. This isn’t about how good your skills are, it’s about at least giving it a try and learning in the process. Don’t aim for minimalism, aim big! It’s better to fail gloriously than to not even try!

Day 1: Anti-minimalism 3rd person shooter

After recovering from discovering that terrible theme, my first idea was to make an anti-minimalism game, I thought about a few ideas like destroying minimalist paintings and finally I chose to do a 3rd person shooter where you fight alien invaders trying to impose their minimalistic philosophy on Earth. I’ve never made a LD game where you can shoot stuff, my games tend to be peaceful, so this might have been the occasion to change that?

I spent half the first day working on the shooter mechanics and enemies and for the second half I worked on my main character.

Day 2: New game idea

After waking up, I realized that I was not very far along with my shooter game. The shooting part wasn’t really fun and I realized I would need a ton of custom animations for it to work with my character. And while I had some ideas to create a funny world, they didn’t really all fit together with the gameplay and I had no clear vision of what the game would actually be like.

At this point, I had implemented a way to push the aliens bodies once they are killed. And I realized it’s actually quite fun to just play with that and try to move them around. How about a game where you just have to push a ball around with physics?

So I already had my main character, the gameplay only required a trivial amount of work, the rest of the day was spent working on a few levels. At the end of the 48h I had something I could have released in the compo category if I rushed the final hours but I wanted to use the extra day to make the game a little bit better.

Day 3: Polish!

For the first time in a LD, I started the final day knowing I already had something that I could finish and release any time I wanted. Things I did that day:

Prettified the levels with some props and alternative textures and I added two more levels with a bit more elaborate mechanics (unfortunately the one with the bridge has a bit of a nasty bug, I didn’t notice it in my testing due to being biased as to how I expected the level to be solved. It wasn’t even a code bug, I just forgot a two-clicks setting in Unity How annoying!).

I tried to improve my character’s animation (without much success, animation is something I’ve never really spent time learning, I just fake it during game jams. I’ll work on that for the next LD).

I spent a bit more time than usual on the sounds, and even though the music is a randomly generated .mid file, I did spend some time in Reason choosing instruments and mixing it for a little extra.

In the end, I even had time to turn the code I had written for the minimalistic aliens into butterflies. A poetic way to end the conversion of what started as a shooting game in to a totally non-violent one

After the jam

I’m really glad I got lots of feedback this time. Over a hundred people played and rated my game, that was most likely due to getting an extra bit of spotlight thanks to my video compilation project but it’s nice to have my audience expand like that. That’s one good thing about making a game for a LD, you are pretty much guaranteed actual players!

Also thanks to the wonders of Twitch technology, I was able to see two people play my game in real time. I don’t usually see anybody play my games at all and that was really interesting as both did unexpected things.

For next time

• Animation has to be my priority. I have improved my character creation skills so now the animation has to follow or it looks a bit weird.
• Try to work on at least another game to avoid getting too rusty in between LDs

PLAY MY GAME HERE

]]> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/05/20/night-of-the-living-post-mortems/feed/ 5 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/05/01/10-second-videos-compilation-project/ http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/05/01/10-second-videos-compilation-project/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 19:45:03 +0000 Codexus http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/?p=254207

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Index of games 1|2|3|4

The last part is released, it’s a bit shorter than the others but still full of good games! That’s all for this LD! Thank you for participating and my apologies if somehow your game got left out (I hope I got everybody).

People make a lot of games during a Ludum Dare. We have reached a point where it’s impossible to play all the games ourselves. But what if we could just sit down and relax while watching as many 10 seconds video clips of the games as we can?

I think that would be pretty neat. This is why I’ve decided to create such a compilation video. However I cannot possibly do it alone. You have to help me by recording a 10 seconds video showing your game and uploading it somewhere I can download it.

I will mass download the files and compile them into videos you can enjoy. I hope many people participate and we end up with hours worth of your awesome games!

Things to keep in mind:
- please use well supported video formats (ex. avi, mp4, mov with common codecs)
- The final video will be 1280×720 so 16:9 aspect ratio is best but I’ll letterbox other formats.
- only upload videos of actually gameplay of your Ludum Dare #26 entry
- the audio should be just your game audio please (or silence if your game has no audio)
- 10s maximum, 20MB file size limit
- IMPORTANT: only use hosting services that allow direct linking to the file itself (dropbox for example). So that I can download the files automatically.

Some video capture tools you could use:
http://camstudio.org/ (free)
http://www.bandicam.com/ (commercial, free trial)
http://www.fraps.com/ (commercial, free trial)

“For those on a Mac, screen capture can be done easily with Quicktime (go to File > New Screen Recording)” (Tip submitted by jacklehamster)

Please allow a few days for the first compilation to be made. I can’t wait to see what the result will look like!
FORM CLOSED!

I like making things glow

On the todo list for today: more levels, sounds, music, better character animation and some props and more varied textures to make the levels prettier.

I have just noticed that nearly all my software still has files from the previous LD in the most recent files menu :/ Time to finally do some gamedev again!

I’ll be using:

• Unity 3D 4.1 Pro (coding in C#)
• Modo 701, ZBrush 4R5, Blender 2.66, Photoshop CS6, Substance Designer 3.5, Vue 11 Infinite (maybe)
• Reason 6.5, Reaper whatever-is-latest, Garritan Instant Orchestra, Shreddage, Band-in-a-Box 2013, Adobe Audition CS6 (and SFXR if I run out of time for proper sound effects)

GOOD LUCK TO ALL!

And here are all the games I managed to make during a LD:

Moar gamez!

Play the game here.

Time spent:

Day 1: code, place holders (10 hours)

Day 2: graphics: main character, model & textures (7h), city (9h)

Day 3: business and punk characters, models & textures (6h), animations (4h), Sounds & Music (0.5h), Misc guitar model, level (1h)

What went right:

• Concept. I feel this is the first time in a LD that I have a solid, basically fun game concept. It matches the theme pretty well and I implemented the game to a point where the concept is clear. So I’m happy I was inspired to find this idea.
• Character art: I’ve been working hard on improving my programmer art. The time I invested paid off and this time the characters are better than last time.
• Combo system. I implemented a combo system that doubles the points you can make by corrupting a soul for each one you do in a quick succession. For me it made the game a lot more fun to play as there was an incentive to really master it. Unfortunately it’s unlikely that anyone else is going to play the game that much.
• I had some praise about the music and those people are probably going to go back and change their vote when they learn it took me 5 min to generate and export a randomly generated song with Band-in-a-Box

What went wrong:

The controls are universally being described as bad or confusing. I think it’s actually a combination of problems:

• Orbit camera: It was meant to be temporary and I can see why it’s confusing. It doesn’t affect the gameplay and while you could just position it behind the character and then ignore it, that’s not clear to the player. I knew that, I just ran out of time before I reached that point on my todo list.
• Delay in firing: I did the character animations near the end and when I integrated them it introduced way too much reaction delay. Unfortunately I was already in crunch mode and I didn’t have the time to fix the problem. The turning around animation while looking cute also made that feature completely useless due to taking too much time.
• Lack of any aiming indication. The plan was to replace the orbiting camera by a chase cam and then use the mouse to aim.

Other than the control issues:

• The overall time spent on graphics was not optimum. I spent time on sub-pixel detail on the main character that you can barely see even in the full-screen version, but the city and road that fill most of the screen are not that detailed.
• I wasted too much time at the beginning before I got started, I only had my final idea 17h into the event and it took time until I was really working full speed.
• I made the city too big, half of it is basically unused. Also even though it’s not the first time I do that, I still did a poor job of planning the modular elements which cost me time and resulted in some z-fighting and holes.
• No levels. I would have liked unique challenges and a more linear level based game than the current open go for the points system.

The beginning is code and placeholder but it starts being fun with some sculpting at 00:55!

Anyway I have obviously decided to target the jam which allowed me to use photo textures from cgtextures.com which was a great help for the buildings. But there is a lot to do on this game before it can be released, can I do it all tomorrow? Probably not :/

I can’t wait for 2015 so that I can get MY hoverboard

Red alert! Battle stations!

Also here is the percentile rank graph of my LD results so far because I’m such a nerd (please don’t hate me ). This way the results are independent of the number of participants so for example a percentile rank of 60% would mean my entry scored higher than 60% of the entries.

So I can see my previous entry did well, but I need to focus on Theme and Innovation.

Previous posts:

• Video of all my previous LD games
• My tools for this LD
• My general advice for Ludum Dare

I’ll use Unity 4 as my engine and C# for my programming.

For graphics my workflow is ZBrush (sculpting, painting, auto-uv and auto-retopo)-> Modo (general poly modeling, manual uv and retopo) -> Blender (animation). For texturing not done directly in ZBrush, Substance for texture generation (and maybe Filter Forge too) and of course Photoshop to put everything together. Maybe I’ll experiment with that new dDo texture generator.

For music, Reason and Reaper with the Garritan Instant Orchestra sounds. Also Adobe Audition for editing my sound effects. And I just bought Vocaloid in case I want (and I have the time) to have fun with that. I was also thinking about maybe using Band-in-a-Box for procedural generation because I actually don’t know that much about music…

I guess I won’t have the time to play with everything… :/

yeah software!

And my timelapse:

POST-MORTEM \o/

What I accomplished:

• I made a game! That’s always the best part of the LD. It’s like magic: last week I had no idea what I was going to create. All my projects had been on hold for a long time and then a wave of temporary insanity and a game has been created. I can’t explain it. Last year I started working on a similar mini action adventure game, weeks later I had nothing but gray boxes and half finished models. But in a LD, somehow I just do things, I don’t worry about knowing nothing about music, I just take my midi keyboard and I make some noise. I love Ludum Dare.
• I learned lots of new things!

New things I used for the first time:

• ZBrush 4R4 has a new auto retopology function called QRemesher. It was super useful as I could just sculpt in high-res, use things like Dynamesh and I could just get a game-ready model in a few minutes. A huge time saver that allowed me to have 3 animated characters in my game this time. I even found a way to make it work with multiple subtools to merge the clothes of my character into a single mesh
• Allegorithmic Substance, the node based texture creation tool. It’s really powerful and I managed to create some nice textures with it. The down side is that since it was the first time I actually made something with it and it’s so fun to use I probably wasted too much time. I even recreated a type of floor pattern I already had in FilterForge… I could have avoided that
• Garritan Instant Orchestra, a VST instrument with lots of easy to use layered orchestral sounds. They kind of sound good even when just pressing keys at random. Also new, I used Reaper to record/edit the midi, it went relatively well even if I was barely able to do basic things with it.

The usual awesome things that always work miracles:

• Unity, ZBrush, Modo (I was better at using it this time) and Blender

What I wish I could have included in my game:

• Evolution. The little guy was supposed to evolve with each new power (for example, get rabbit ears with the rabbit power, and similar things for other animals). Unfortunately I didn’t have the time for it so my game’s connection to the theme is rather tenuous.
• The Falcon, ok I’m going to spoil it, but you don’t actually get to see the Falcon if you get to the top.
• Checkpoints, I knew the punishing nature of the climb would require some checkpoint mechanism. I don’t think games should be punishing. A game can be very challenging without punishing the player for their mistakes.

Things that didn’t go so well:

• Lightmapping in Unity while looking very good in the first room was sometimes a bit difficult to get right and prone to artifacts. This can be tweaked but that’s time consuming as baking lightmaps is slow.
• Code that I wrote at the last minute and didn’t test properly such as the music triggering problem that can really sound bad if the player just runs around and keeps retriggering them.

Next time I will:

• Try to aim for something a bit smaller (or not )
• Have learned better musical skills

Conclusion:

My game was too ambitious, I initially aimed for the 48h compo but I had to get that extra 24h of the jam category and still it was very difficult to finish. From the timelapse I can tell I spent 44h at the computer working, so it was quite an effort. But I had tons of fun and I’m really pleased with what I accomplished this time.

PLAY IT HERE

I’m really glad. It was way too ambitious and I initially aimed for the compo which was crazy but thanks to the extra 24h of the jam I managed to finish it.

I think it’s my best LD game so far and I’ve learn many things, used new software and techniques for the first time. It was totally worth the pain. There are a few minor glitches mostly with the “musics” (well sounds I don’t really know music) being triggered on top of each other but other than that it’s mostly complete.

Also I’ll post a full post-mortem with my timelapse video within a few days.

So here’s a new screenshot showing the main character and the rabbit!

Derpy rabbit FTW!

Behind the doors are supposed to be the game areas, they don’t exist yet. Also I’ll probably need to abandon my 3rd person idea to save time on the main character even though i already lost some making the camera and controls for it. There is a good chance I’ll have to submit in the jam category.

It glows!

Floating head!

So I’ve already made a declaration/tools post but here’s an updated version of the montage picture that started it all. Also a graph of my results…

As you can see the graphics are usually my strong point (which is funny since I’m a programmer who couldn’t draw a stick figure to save his life not long ago) but the rest isn’t so great. One thing I notice is that Fun seems to follow the Innovation curve. So maybe I should try to be more original. I don’t know but I think I’ll try to aim at something more fun and lively this time. We’ll see how that goes.

All we need is a montage

I’m a nerd, I love graphs

As requested, percentile rank

where the magic happens…

“Mr. President, terrorists have seized control of the interwebs.”

“Oh noes! What do they want, Jack?”

“Games! Thousands of games! We have 48 hours to deliver them or they’ll destroy all the lolcats of the internet.”

“But that would cause a mass panic and we can’t possibly make that many games in such a short time frame.”

“There is a way, Mr President. I need you to authorize me to unleash the geeks. ”

“My God, the world is never going to be the same after that. But do it, Jack. We have no other choice.”

Hey, I’m Codexus. I’ve made a few LD games before. And I will once again try to push the limits by not sleeping too much and avoid watching too many TV series for 48 hours so that I can make a game.

Code: Unity, MonoDevelop, C#

3D Gfx: Modo, ZBrush, Blender

2D and textures: Photoshop, Filter Forge, Substance, Painter, nDo

Music and Sound: Reason, Reaper, Audition, SFXR

Misc: Vue for a nice skybox maybe (?)

So I made a game! I did something different this time with a shogi game. In the end it turned out OK, the game is reasonably finished, has an AI opponent and even though I kept the graphics for last and had not a lot of time for them, it looks OK.

I used Unity, coded in C#, made the graphics with Modo, ZBrush, FilterForge and Photoshop, sounds with SFXR and music with Autotracker and reason.

I was worried yesterday when I had just that. No graphics, just simple board game rules.

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