So I have been busy working on a better and improved version of my ld48 compo entry.

With better hacking feedback and visual clarity, along with improvements to make it more fun and less random.

Aswell as better and less insane controls so the game is more focused on the game and not keeping yourself from flying into walls, plus a better far away indication on usable objects by just looking at them.

With future additions being a bit longer and full story along with an extension after the current ending.
A new additional type of hacking minigame that is more of a puzzle than the reflex-based minigame that is in now.

Playable here

Last time around I had jumped feet first into flash and actionscript3, knowing very little, but learning a lot. This time I was going for a way more graphical project, and I was going to make it within unity.
The theme ‘alone’ hit and it meant I would be doing a space themed game, with no other people, and a lone astronaut. I love that kind of sci-fi.

The good

Using unity.
The Unity engine turned out to be the most useful thing this time around, the amount of prototyping that could be done rapidly, the seamless exportation from blender which meant I could make a change to a model and it would instantly appear back in the game.

Graphical tricks
Most visual things in this game is pulled off with sloppy tricks, like focusing the detail I made where you actually see it on the player and leaving other areas largely untouched. Textures were made less to ideal, but still functional, so that I could get them in and pull a consistant visual rather than just ending up with two models.
All environmental station parts are built from a tiny piece of texture with enough variation to pull it off, the outside is nearly a crime, but works. Leaving the shading very flat overall gave me the ability to paint in more details into the textures themselves rather than having to rely on shading, which would add more work on top of the much I already had on my list.

Modular reusable gameplay elements
I made a few objects and wrote scripts for them in a way that I could just spread them out and connect them to things, such as doors to any amount of hacking panels, which at the point of writing the story I was able to squeeze out a few datapads within the last hour or so, and alter around hacking panels for different effects such as hotspot movement/shrinkage, difficulty, and amount of hacking stages.

The terrifyingly bad

Late actual prototyping
The first day was spent entirely just thinking of a setting and making art, with the first thing being a fully textured player model, could’ve only been worst if the first thing I made was a menu. The effects of this can be seen in the game itself, while the setting worked out nice and looks pretty, the gameplay is rushed and largely untested, with the hack-minigames lacking the variety they could’ve used. Prototyping early will be my goal for the next ludum dare.

Heavily visual project
Aiming to make this very visual and 3d project was a bad idea and still is, but still totally worth it. The effects were that of spending a majority of the time on art, which essentially makes the game an interactive story rather than a game.
Making a simple 2d project will be my goal for next time, but I know I will most likely end up doing another full on 3d project.

Lack of testing
Large parts of the game and story was implemented late the last day, which means they went untested, I wasn’t able to give it a proper gradual increase of difficulty, and instead it jumps around.

Bonus

Overall I was quite satisfied, from learning, pressing myself and eventually not giving up, which I was close to doing early the second day. My marriage also survived another ludum dare!
Definitely doing this again next one!

So after squeezing in the story and ending in the last few hours I finally have an entry that can be played from start to finish. It ended up almost an interactive story with reflex-based hacking minigame at its center, which I wish I would’ve extended a bit more to include more puzzling.

I’ll be writing up a big post mortem on this shortly.

Nonetheless, no regrets!

Play the game here: And then, alone at epsilon-1

Yep, I’m in that club now.

Modular stationparts, animated airlocks and now I need some gameplay surrounding these.

So I realized I should’ve warmed up a bit more on unity, as I’ve spent far too much time hitting a few brick walls, but hopefully I might be able to pull through in some way.

Good new though, fully textured and hastily rigged and animated astronaut, so it’s on to environment pieces and the rest of the game now.

A first playable, sans much gameplay, can be found here: http://www.eldpack.com/ld22/

And a reminder to myself: artheavy = disaster waiting to happen.

So my game is about having to be left all by yourself in the middle of nowhere in an escape-pod, but luckily ending up near an outpost.But, unluckily it’s been abandoned for quite some time, so it will be a game about navigating zero gravity in a clunky space-suit, to and from a derelict space station.

And, some further texture work in progress:

Working on the astronaut main character for my ‘alone’ entry, I’m already regretting my plans to have the entry be graphically heavy!

oh woe.

This time around I’ll be using:

Unity, photoshop & blender.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=3145

This was my second ludum dare, but my first time actually finishing something. The game was very spontaneous and unplanned all the way through, much like how my writing will end up like now, but in the end it worked as a fantastic incentive to finish something, and learn something new.

The theme ended up being one of the more confusing ones, there’s no clear indication of what it even is about, even if everyone has been there and experienced it themselves a hundred times over, but after some thinking I just ended up wanting to do a technically simple game, a rogue-like, and give the gameplay a twist if the theme. I love roguelikes, and I’ve never made one myself, and it fit with me having just about zero experience with as3 and my previous experience being c++ and from mainly being an artist.

In the end I came up with Monophobia, a rogue-like about the fear in danger of going alone, instead of combating monsters in a random dungeon you would enter these social encounters with people in a randomly generated city, and in the end of each day you would be rewarded with a reinvigorated mentality and a stronger one as well depending on how well you did.

The dangers in the game would end up being a standard ‘you lose your health you die’, which was renamed as mentality, as it represented your mentalstate. Your mentality would be consumed every time you did a daring social encounter, and the more socially tough a stranger was, the more you’d have to talk to him, in the end that friend would be more rewarding to have in the end of the day when you leveled up. Each friend that followed you would also act as a bonus to your social skills, and them agreeing with you would boost the amount of damage you did each social attack. I regretfully never had time to make it any more depth than that.

During the night you’d get haunted, which I initially planned to be your personal demons taunting you when you were alone, I never got around giving them taunting outbursts with the damage they did, it would’ve been a bit more fun and descriptive of what they were.

In the end there was more I had planned that I wanted in, like giving the player an incentive to go explore the city, stores to visit and buy things in, parks and places giving you and your daily comrades a bonus for doing fun stuff, and the coins and items you’d collect. I also wanted to implement more random encounters beyond the few I managed to get in for the end of the day, (with the zombieday being the actual fun one), as it would have given the random element of the game even more randomness. But with the timelimit I had to do what was the best for finishing the actual project in time and decide to cut things out.

What I got right

Using a web-deployed language such as AS3.  Not only was it simple to use and easy to prototype things fast, it also made it easy for me to put my game up.

Simple art. Characters are just one sprite, no directions, animation consisting of it being flipped, terrain was just 16×16 tiles too, fast and easy to make.

Replacing characters in the font with art.  I could easily draw  out special icons in text and the draw borders around the interface without adding any new code, it just used characters in the font I wouldn’t use for anything else.

The console. It is where I pushed every single bit of information into, once again, giving me more time for everything else, but that’s a given for a roguelike, fast to implement, got lots of use out of it.

Random generation. Could have potentially lead to better replayability, but it gave me more time to focus on the places in coding that I had issues with, since I wouldn’t be making any levels.

What I got Wrong

Using a language I wasn’t familiar with. This was what got me the last time, and this time around I manged to know it well enough to finish something, but it cost me some time having to read up on things that were different from what I knew, it hurt the project, but I don’t regret it.

Not using a framework. Could’ve saved time there without a doubt, a majority of my time went into actually writing the codebase before I even got to any gameplay since I was using just barebones AS3.

Making a roguelike. They’re complex by definition, I should have planned my game around a single simple but fun to perform gameplay element, and just polish around it, and in the end I didn’t have the time to implement everything I wanted in.

Conclusion

Have had a terrible cold this weekend and still coughing my lungs out, but it was still totally worth it . Ludum dare is awesome, I’m doing it again.

Also, Roguelikes are awesome fun, and I’ll most likely give this one some more work so it gets what it missed out on.

I’m quite happy I actually went through and finished my entry this time around, even if I had to cut some corners.

The game can be played at: http://www.eldpack.com/ld20/

And those who care little of their sanity can get the source here: http://www.eldpack.com/ld20/monophobia_src.rar

got a healthbar in for potential friends (enemies), it really helps in making it more fun to play rather than just guessing how much you’ve worked that stranger into submitting into friendship.

Any friends you have with you will join in the discussion and boost your social prowess.

During the evening all your friends will leave you and you risk bumping into your inner demons who will taunt you to the beyond and you’ll drop in mentality, as it is dangerous to go alone. So getting back to your starting home is an essential way to end the day, at which point you’ll get a summary for the day, and experience from making friends.

When your mentality drops to zero the game ends and your hero will be forever alone.

Still have some time to implement more fluff-features into the game, one where you get bonuses from visiting parks and other sectors of the town with your friends.

Social combat getting together, defeating them will ensure you have a bunch of friends walking with you and saying nice things to you.

Every day you wake up and have a day before you where you have to meet new personalities and befriend them.

Added some cars too, hoping my brain stays together.

(yes, there’s several bigbreasted women in there)

Another first time for me, it’s going to be incredibly useful for the genre I’m in considering I’ll just be pushing every information through the console.

Now I need to implement some social combat with npc’s to befriend them and have them go with you so that you can avoid going alone.

Having much better luck this time around, wrote a simple citygenerator for my game, where the chosen character will walk around and try to befriend npc’s until night hits and he has to go home to his loneliness.

This was interesting since I’ve never done anything like this before, now I need to implement some text drawing routines and I’ll be able to move on to more gameplay stuff, and after that hopefully further the mapgeneration with objects and more specialized buildings.

So while this was the theme I knew I could never get a proper idea for, I went with this one:

A friendship roguelike.

Your character suffers from extreme loneliness, to the point where it’s actually unhealthy.

Point of the game is to go out and gain friends, and befriend them enough so that they’ll give you kind words, items or phone-numbers at the point where it gets late and they have to leave you, and you’ll be struggling with your loneliness in your apartment.

It’s a survival game where you’ll try to survive each day and struggle with your autophobia

Didn’t finish up my last entry but that won’t stop me from joining in this time.

My previous mistake was using a language I was unfamiliar with, but hey, I’ll do it again!

Language: actionscript 3

Tools: photoshop, sfxr, musagi