Kinoko here! This is Team Target Practice’s 3rd LD.

To be honest, “You Are The Villain” was our least favorite prompt. We downvoted the hell out of it. But for Jade and I, Ludum Dare is a great way to set personal goals and see them fulfilled, so we’re in regardless. And after a bit of head-scratching, came up with an idea we really liked.

Our personal goals this time:

1) Less obsession about content and presentation, more focus on playtesting and balancing.
2) Less focus on narrative, more focus on creating a solid game dynamic.
3) Jade will be putting aside his personal engine for now and working in Unity.
4) I want to learn to be a better art monkey. This time, I’ll be leaving the design to Jade and will focus on churning out 3D models and UI.
5) I also want to focus less on music and more on sound effects.

Where this game is already different from our past two:
1) it will be a fan game of sorts
2) we get to blow stuff up

Let the jam begin!

We did it! Ran into a nasty bug with the release build just before submission hour, but thankfully Jade was able to straighten it out in time.
Entry page is here!

This is our second LD and our second submission, so we’re two-for-two right now.

Dragonom is a tile-based game about nurturing a baby dragon. Your character must explore the floating islands to collect food for him.

Enemies like bats will hurt you, so hit them with your magic!

Please play and let us know what you thought.
We’re going to be stress-testing everything some more, and will do a postmortem post as soon as we’ve had some rest.

Took a break from art because OMG my wrist.

Spent most of today mucking about with Reason. Conclusion: I am a terrible composer, and I should be banned from touching Reason ever again. :S

Here, have a screenshot of my piano melody…

Jade is working on adding text + UI, and we’ve realized that in its bare bones state, our game plays exactly like it was made in RPG Maker. Rest assured, this is not the case. Dx

Just grabbed the latest code off of Jade and built myself a demo level using his engine’s built-in level editor. :3

A game is beginning to take shape! The premise is that you are adrift on a floating island and are tasked with nurturing a baby dragon. You have to protect him from enemies and feed him to help him grow up. (Dare I say, he “evolves”?)

We have some stretch goals for what you can do with him after that, but that’s for another dev session.

Creatures on the island, like bats, will try to attack you and/or your dragon. We’re not sure which would be more feasible or compelling, but they’ll go after a target of some kind.

We’ve got some more things coming up. This is what is open on my Cintiq right now:

We’re calling it a night for now! Tomorrow I’m working on UI. I do UI art for a living, which means all my nitpicking will slow us down.

Kinoko here! I had a late 3pm start to my LD day today after staying up until 5am last night. So far today I’ve finished the main character’s walk cycle (she has separate frames for standing still due to us being lazy with technical limitations).

(excuse the blank space – it’s left empty for more animations if I have time!)

I’ve been hard at work on a forest tileset. This should probably be enough to be getting on with.
No idea if we’re going to finish in time, but we’re having a lot of fun!

Well, after two hours of deliberation, we’re plunging ahead with a game, theme be damned! I can still think of a couple of creative ways to integrate it, time willing.
While we were still on the fence, I neglected to mention:

Art will be done in Adobe Photoshop by me (Kinoko)
Code will be done in C++ by Jade, using his personal engine, Aki
Jade or I may try using Reason for sound at some point, though I’m not very experienced with it.

Jade is plugging away at code, upgrading Aki to handle a more advanced tile system. We both love the auto-tile system that RPG Maker has, so Jade’s attempting to create something similar.
Meanwhile, this is what I have to show for myself…

Simple grass tileset (regular size) and character (at double size). Four-frame walk “cycle” is a bit fast, lulz.

Spoiler alert! I have never made painterly-style game assets before. D:

Kinoko here!
Last LD, Jade and I participated for the first time and created “Tiny World Racer”, a multiplayer 3D racing game. It was a bit rough, but it was fun to play and was an exciting milestone for us!

This time, we’ve been so far unable to come up with any ideas that meet both of our creative needs. We’ll have a decent idea, but then the demands for art and code, instead of supporting one another, will be at odds. We’re a programmer/artist couple, and for our own sanity, the project needs to be balanced.
Throw in there that Jade has worked with “Evolution” as a prompt for a game before and disliked it for this exact reason, and you’ll see that we’re more than a bit stuck at the moment.

Our plan right now is to just make a game that we feel like making, and if we can revise it to tie the prompt back into it, then we’ll submit it! I know that sounds kinda hacky, but we’re on vacation right now, and it’s not worth the stress. Sorry LD, but we just don’t like this prompt very much so far. :S

Tiny World Racer

We did it – sort of! We have a playable game in which you can race your friends around the rings of Tiny Planet in LAN game.
The game will track your laps and position, and prompt you to reset when you drift off of the track.

We had to scale a lot back, but we’re pretty pleased with the result!
Until I get a host page set up, please right-click and Save As the following link:
http://www.alchemyprodigy.net/portfolio/games/worldRace/worldRaceV1.zip

We’ll be taking a well-deserved rest now. If you’d like to see the development progress, see our in-progress posts.

It’s two hours before our deadline, and by jove, we’ve got something playable!

Driving on some planetary rings, like you do.

Jade is busy adding as many gameplay features as he can before we need to start packaging the game up. Meanwhile, I’ve been adding a few graphical tweaks, like details to the carts.
We were saved at the last minute on music by our talented friend Presage, who kindly gifted us with one of his tracks. Many thanks, dude.

Another peek at what we’ve got:

track in the green part of its color cycle

a view of the planet

And for those of you who might be curious for a closer look at the bumper sticker on ermine’s car:

I’m still here!

The cars are driving / falling off the track well enough.

Right now i’m trying to get the car-car collisions to feel right – never easy on a network.

Then i’ll see if i can squeeze in presage’s music and get a lap counter before 6.

I doubt i’ll actually be able to get the start/finish context in.  You’ll have to imagine that on your own

Jade: As you may have noted in kinoko’s previous post, my spline class is not perfect – it still has that annoying seam at the end.

Also, i don’t currently have a function to get the closest point on a spline to another point – which is pretty important for these cars.

Whooooops?

Yeah, so i’ll do that.  Also the track now pulses all rainbow.  I’d post a screenshot but i’m lazy.  Use your imagination.  It’s good for you.

Winding down for the night, and I’m adding a finish line and some text images. Jade is doing some spiffy things with code to make the track phase colors and such!
Here’s a screenshot from my recent test:

(The finish line will go right where that seam is. Shh! It doesn’t exist. )

completed art pass

Alright, i’ve finished the art pass.  Kinoko can just mess with assets on her end from here.  Now that i’m no longer art blocked i’m just going to cram gameplay stuff for the next few hours.  The network sync code and base physics object class seems to be working well enough, so i mostly just need to get these things to stick to the track.

Hopefully i’ll have time to put in the mariokartish speed boosts.

We’ve been looping the cave story soundtrack for about the past 6 hours.

Rendered ring meshes

I’ve got the ring meshes properly constructed now so it looks less ass!

Hooray me!  running out of time to make a game her, me….

Kinoko here! We’re hitting the home stretch of the Jam! While Jade plugs away at code, I’ve been shaping up my character/vehicle models. I failed at adding images to my last post, so I’m going to play a bit of catch up with you guys…

Late Friday night, I had a grayboxed vehicle with a UV texture map. On Saturday morning, I made a base texture:

And dropped that onto the vehicle. To get the ball rolling, I used this fox character that I made circa 2009…

We won’t support full 3D animation in this game, but I posed the rigged character on the car so that we can export him in this state later.
After getting a feel for what I’d be working with using Fox, I began creating a Player 2 model from scratch:

Saturday ended with the second character’s UV maps mostly finished. When I picked it up again this morning, I was able to start on the texture work.

The second character became an ermine, because I freaking love ermines.

Rigging the ermine. I used Fox’s skeleton to start, and edited the joints as needed. Since we won’t have full animation in the final game, his weights only need to be painted precisely enough to pose in the vehicle. Not a lot of touch-ups were needed, and I was able to finish rigging him in less than two hours!

Ermine more or less finished, and sitting his cart. To create his vehicle, I took the spoiler off of Fox’s car, scaled the wheels up, and edited the exhausts so they are larger and curve backward.

Now that the characters are ready-ish, I need to get to work on the level graphics. I have no idea whether or not we’ll finish on time, but I’m having a lot of fun regardless!

I have a basic track layout working now.  The characters will race on the rings around the tinyworld.

I wanted to grow the track with a genetic algorithm originally, but i doubt i’ll have time to actually balance that since we’re already pretty much at the last day and i’m way way behind.  So it’ll just be randomized.

Initial Control points

Here is a basic ring of stuff around the planet.  Pretty blah.

Filling in the spline to create a basic track

I would ideally like to replace these little elongated sphere primitives with a real track mesh.  I don’t think it will be hard to do, but its not my next task.  I need cars next.  Need gameplay to be thinged.

And now with a little deformation...

The control points are the dark spots now.  This is of course a non-geneticed track, and wont actually be in any way balanced to be either hard / easy / fun / etc.

On the track

And this may be a bit closer to the sort of camera angle a car will be seeing the track from.

24 hours left!  Right now we must away for food.

JADE: Alriight!

More than halfway through the gamejam and i’m almost ready to for real start.  My personal goals going into LD23 were: make a network multiplayer 3d game.

So, naturally, i’ve wasted like a day and a half dicking about with turning my dedicated client/dedicated server code in my game engine into a single client/serverable application.  Implementing a lobby.  There is chat.  It’s exciting, for real.

Also I was distracted by the office party friday night – so theres that too.

Anyway: obligatory pictures of nothing, GO:

game - main menu

Inspiring main menu!  It looks like pretty much any other main menu of my game engine’s wildfire module…but this one has the magic Add Server button! [Note to everyone who hasn't seen my other wildfire games, i.e. EVERYONE: usually you have to add servers by hacking the INI].  This took way longer than it should have.  There was a puppy around.

game - lobby state

And my first ever network game lobby!  I am sure kinoko will adore my awesome, awesome UI/UX design here. [Note to everyone: she won't.]

And so far the game itself is just a starfield – with chat support!

game - active state

In case you were wondering if I’ve just done nothing, i do actually have the basic game model skeletoned out in a mess of C++ structs&classes.  Course, its not rendering yet.  At least now you can join/quit/chat/etc, which is really probably more actual work than the game itself.

And now i’ve just wasted like 2-4 minutes of your time.  It is now time to crank the k-pop in my headphones and attempt to put a-cute-little-fox-in-a-go-kart kinoko made me…IIIIIINNNN SPPPPPAAAAAAACCCCEEEEE

peace

Almost a day in, and I’ve only just finished texture mapping the main 3D asset. >_<;
Hoping to really ramp up the pace later tonight. I’m glad that the Jam is longer than the compo, or we’d be in trouble right about now.

Jade is hammering away at the code and making good progress! I’ll post again once this thing is full textured and in-game.

My other half Jade and I will be participating in the Jam!

I will be handling art, while Jade will be handling code and the bulk of the sound. We will both work on the design together.

For code, we will be using C++ in Jade’s own engine, Aki.
For art, I will be using Maya and Photoshop.

What we will do for sound depends heavily on time contraints! I’ll post more info on that later.