So the theme is “minimalism” this time around.  I’ve been super excited to jump back into a Ludum Dare, and the final round of themes this time around had a bunch of good stuff and a handful of so-so themes I couldn’t quite settle on good ideas for.  I had a few that could be massaged into this one, so I’m looking forward to spending some time this weekend working on things.

I’ve wanted to work on a crafting-focused roguelike for a while now, so I think it would be fun to put together the cool equipment recipes and drops.  I’d also like to see recipes that extend the capabilities you have as far as mobility, carrying capacity, etc.  Let’s see where this goes.  I’m calling it a night to sleep and work through my ideas, so I should have more tomorrow.

I’m planning on participating in next weekend’s LD26 – I’ll be doing the jam again as it gives me more breathing room as far as the libraries and tools I can use.

Hardware: Macbook Pro, Wacom Tablet, iPad

Game Engine, Languages, & Tools:  Unity 3D Pro 3.5, C#, Xamarin Studio

Libraries & Frameworks:  Futile, Vectrocity

Graphics & Art: Corel Painter 12, Photoshop CS5, Blender 2.6, Procreate iPad

Music & Audio: sfxr, GarageBand, Renoise

Man, yesterday and today were pretty much a lost cause.  I got sick on Saturday with a head cold of ever-increasing intensity, so my productivity for yesterday and this evening pretty much dropped to zero despite spending a bunch of time staring at the project thinking I was working.

With all of my assets created on Saturday, I planned on spending all day Sunday on gameplay mechanics and programming, things I figured I was much better prepared to jump into.  With such a good day of progress on the first day, I really thought my game idea was within reaching distance for the Jam.  It’s sort of a bummer to have crashed halfway through when I was having so much fun with it, but in the end I got what I wanted most out of this round – a better understanding of how to model something in Blender and how to put together a basic music loop without spending a hundred years one either.  I’ve got some questions to look further into on these, and there’s plenty of things I didn’t have time to do (like texture and rig any animation).  Overall, though, I feel much more confortable with these tools.  It’s amazing what a dedicated day of sitting down and playing with them will do.

An in-game screenshot showing an active character in the movement phase, with movement radius visualized.

I did get some basics implemented, but in the end I don’t think it’s enough to consider an actual gameplay loop so I couldn’t submit it to the jam in good conscience.  So what worked and what didn’t?

What Worked

Assets first – Working on the models and music first let gave me a few early endorphin bumps seeing my progress on stuff I don’t normally even get to.  It was a lot of fun seeing these very “physical” things come together instead of seeing a bunch of grey boxes moving around.

Pathfinding in Unity – Once I got a chance to play with it and look through the documentation, the API is pretty simple and getting it up and running was super straightforward.  This is a really nice feature for rapid prototyping any kind of indirect movement (either AI controlled or, in my case, executed by moving a unit from one spot to another).

What Didn’t

Visualizing the movement radius – I really wanted this to be something similar to XCOM’s movement area, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to calculate that region without having a literal movement grid for characters to move around on.  If I had a discrete space like that, I could have just brute-forced the problem and checked each cell.  I started this whole concept with the goal of not having a discrete space, though.  I tried things with the built-in pathfinding in Unity and raycasting out potential paths from the character, but eventually I pretty much punted to move on to other things and just drew a circle around the character using the excellent Vectrosity library.  I’d like to revisit this after the jam to figure out how to do

Unity projectors for user interface stuff – I honestly didn’t expect this to be a big deal going in.  I wanted to project a contextual pattern on the ground to signify selected units and potential actions.  I remembered working with a projector way back when I had run through some Unity tutorials to do things like slap a blob shadow on the ground under a character.  Hey, thats exactly what I want to do here!  After ages of playing around with texture import settings and possible shader combinations, I realized that the projected texture (even at all white) was way too dim, that it was taking light from the scene and there wasn’t a shader that would ignore this and just show the pattern the way I drew it.  I haven’t had a chance to look into writing custom shaders (maybe for the next jam), so the projectors were pretty much a dead end.  I ended up slapping the texture on a Unity plane and moving it around the scene.  Crude, but it worked.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t conform to the terrain and has other issues.

I’ll be working on this idea for a while even with the jam over with.  I think it has some potential, and I’d really like to implement some of the artistic and thematic elements I didn’t get to.  Here’s one last look at the scene:

A birds-eye view of the scene at the close of the jam.

Here’s my first ever music loop, done in GarageBand.  Now, time for sleep.

My First Audio Loop

Ok, after a quick dinner and hours of doing terrible things to polygons, I’ve come out on the other end with my very first ever 3D character, all the way from sketch to model.  I’ve never done that before outside of following a few “box model a human figure” tutorials halfway, so I felt like I knew the general idea but I’d never actually executed the steps before.  I think my topography is a mess so I’m hoping that doesn’t come back to bite me when I try and animate the thing, but I’ll deal with that when I get there.  For now, I’ll be using it as a static figurine on the game board so I can move onto developing some actual gameplay.

The finished character model for the knight (minus rigging and textures). I’ll be using this for all characters in the game since it takes me so long make one.

My last goal for the evening is to work on a basic music loop for the game.  This is one of those things that I never get to in a jam, so I’m making a point to work on it before I program a single line of code.  I’m trying a new strategy here where I front-load all the things I don’t know how to do so that I can make sure there’s enough time to get through the learning curve.  I’m a bit worried that I’ve spent all day working on assets, but I feel like I should be able to jump in first thing tomorrow and get the basic game loop running so I think I’m doing okay.  Worst-case scenario I’ll come out much better at using these tools.

1. Greybox out the environment
2. Box up a simple person model to use for now
3. Get a simple background music loop up and running (before I write any code!)
4. Get all these assets into Unity
5. Get the basic turn structure and game loop up and running
6. Implement character movement
7. Implement character attacking, character status, death
8. Victory condition when all of one team has been eliminated

Spent the afternoon playing with Blender modeling the environment I sketched out in my last post. It’s pretty primitive and probably took me way too long, but that’s fine – this is what I wanted to spend my time doing this jam, getting more practice at the 3D side of things.  Some things I’ve realized I have no idea how to do correctly:

• Choosing a scale for the game to work at and making sure both Unity and Blender agree.  If there’s a strategy to this, I’d love some pointers.  In general, I modeled what I wanted in Blender, imported it into Unity, then compared it to a 1×1 cube as a reference for a character’s size and adjusted the environment model’s scale to match.  Still, a lot of fiddling and magic numbers and I have no idea where this is going to bite me down the road.
• Related to the first point, until I get the game itself up and running, I’ll have no idea if the distances between houses and other objects are realistic and playable.  I’m terrified of finding that everything is too far apart and I need to modify the whole environment to fix it.  I’ll need to look at how to break the environment up into pieces to place more modularly from withint Unity down the road.
• Optimizing the model, making sure there aren’t any hidden faces, making sure all my normals are good, etc.  I’m sure there are a bunch of tools in Blender to help out with this but I don’t have the time to look into them right now so I’m plowing ahead with my crappy first-run models.
• Lighting in Unity has always seemed like a black art to me.  With one directional light, realtime shadows and light-mapping both seem to have weird spots that are brighter than they should be.  Shadow’s usually look jaggy and hard no matter what knobs I play with.  More magic numbers to fiddle with and I don’t have time during the jam, but I’ll come back and take a look at this after other stuff is finished.

Here’s the greyboxed environment pulled into Unity.  Next up, the character model.

“You Are The Villain.”  That’s a tough one – I know it was in the top of the most-voted list throughout the week, but I really expected that it wasn’t going to be the selected theme.  I didn’t have anything nice planned out for it beforehand (the one idea I had wasn’t fleshed out enough to really work, and it was just an inversion of one of the themes that I wanted to do, anyways).  I was away from the computer last night so I had time to think it over and work out a plan, and now that I’ve slept on it I’m ready to get started.

I owe a lot to games like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics (and now the excellent XCOM) for their excellent atmosphere and art style as well as what they brought to the strategy/RPG genre.  But I also love games like Valkyria Chronicles and some ideas from tabletop miniatures that aren’t constrained to a grid but instead allow for free-form movement around a space, where the unit of measure is distances rather than “squares”.  I’d like to try and flesh out a single scenario from a game using some of these concepts, and I’ll be pulling some other influences in along the way.  I’ll be taking my tone and style form Glen Cook’s The Black Company books, with it’s matter-of-fact treatment of the magical alongside the grim realities of military tactics.  I’ll also be co-opting the general theme that good guys and bad guys in a setting like this aren’t all that different from each other, and you’ll be playing as the “bad guys” in order to apply everything to the theme.  I’ll be taking some visual cues from another favorite, the wonderful Vagrant Story (which shares a lineage with Final Fantasy Tactics, even if it’s not strictly the same genre).

The biggest risk going forward is that I’ll be going 3D, and I’ve never actually done any real honest-to-god not-a-tutorial 3D (so this is a big one).  I’m going to try and mitigate this by boxing out the environment and characters first and skipping the texturing and animating until I’m finished.

Here’s an overhead sketch I did of the intended environment last night before I went to bed, and I’ll be keeping it very simple to start with.  You’ll be defending the tower entrance.

An overhead layout of the intended environment for the scenario.

General checklist for the day:

1. Greybox out the environment
2. Box up a simple person model to use for now
3. Get a simple background music loop up and running (before I write any code!)
4. Get all these assets into Unity
5. Get the basic turn structure and game loop up and running
6. Implement character movement
7. Implement character attacking, character status, death
8. Victory condition when all of one team has been eliminated

This should give me the core of a simple strategy game (albeit without any real strategy).  After these are done:

1. Implement some basic strategic concepts like:
   1. height advantage
   2. flanking and unit direction affecting damage or dodge
2. Implement a simple automated dialogue system where characters will shout at each other in between turns or in different contextual situations (barks as well as back-and-forth dialogue between two characters if they’re still alive).  I loved the flavor this added to a scenario in the Tactics games and even though it’s non-relevant to the actual gameplay, I think it would add a lot to the atmosphere I’m trying to go for, and it would be fun to implement.
3. Work on skinning and animating the whole thing

In the end, this is a love letter to these games, and most of all to Glen Cook’s wonderful fiction.

I’ll be participating in the Ludum Dare game jam next weekend.  I’ll be using my usual assortment of tools along with a few new ones:

Hardware: Macbook Pro, Wacom Tablet, iPad with a Pogo Connect

Game Engine, Languages, & Tools:  C# using Unity 3D Pro 3.5, MonoDevelop IDE, and MattRix’s Futile framework.

Graphics & Art: Corel Painter 10, Photoshop CS5, Sketch 2, Blender 2.6, Procreate iPad

Music & Audio: sfxr, GarageBand, Nanostudio on iPad

Well, even working up to the final minutes, I wasn’t able to get enough game into my…uh…game.  The control mechanics and getting the scene put together with all of the UI elements ended up being more complicated than I expected.  I’m happy with the way the game feels at this point, though, so I’m looking forward to adding in the combat to see how the full arc of the game feels.  Here’s a screenshot of the final state as of the jam ending:

You can play what I ended up with by the jam deadline here.  Since there wasn’t any time for any real tutorial or documentation, some instructions:

- Drag the mothership to move around.  The mothership is the online thing under your direct control.
- Clicking on the buttons on the lefthand side of the screen produces a new computer-controlled minion.
- Minions will stay near the green waypoint (the little green icon that starts on your mothership).
- The waypoint (and thus, your minions) will stay with your mothership unless you place it somewhere by clicking within the green circle representing your area of control.
- If you move too far from your waypoint and it leaves your area of control, it will return to your mothership.

Things That Didn’t Make It

- There’s no AI.  That big purple mothership?  It’s just sitting up there.  It should be chasing you, pumping out it’s own minions to hunt you down.
- Speaking of that, there’s not combat.  All those health bars and nothing to do with them.
- There’s no cost to making a new minion – the intension was to have a cooldown cost for each ship type, as well as a materials cost.
- With combat working, I was hoping to have each destroyed minion leave behind wreckage that could be reclaimed by a non-combat gatherer minion.
- Sound effects, menus, and any other polish stuff.  I never get to these, though, so I almost forgot to add them here.  I really need to learn to pump out a couple of basic sounds and a simple background loop right at the beginning so these don’t get left behind.

The Future

Without a game to actually play in here, I don’t know if the thing is any real fun if you actually had human or computer enemies.  My immediate plans are to hit the points above that would turn it into an actual game.  After that, I think I’d like to give the whole thing a less-abstract coat of paint and play with some different art styles.  I’d also like to see the thing running on an iPad or iPhone, since all the interaction maps well to touch.  From there, I’m not sure – should it be some sort of arena-based competitive thing?  Should it grow into a more open, exploration-based single-player experience?  Assuming interacting with the game proves enjoyable, I’d like to explore some of these possibilities.

It’s been slow going today, although I’ve made some basic progress.  I swear every time that I’m a.) not going to make a 2D game or b.) not using Unity, but I inevitably end up back in bed with both and just as ornery about it as the last time.

I picked up a copy of SpriteManager 2 and EzGUI a little while ago, which (at the time) were the only capable 2D system for the Unity.  The workflows to get anything put together with them are…not straightforward, and don’t map to any other 2D framework or tool set I’m used to (either for GUI design or game stuff).  Anyways, I probably need to take a look at what people are using these days, as there are a couple of options now.

All this to say that I’ve been fighting with my tools as usual, so rather than putting up a build that doesn’t do anything really, I’ll put up a screenshot with all of my abstract placeholder art.  I’ve currently got basic movement working for the mothership (the big circle) based on applying force with mouse dragging.  The button’s don’t do anything quite yet, but they’ll be used to queue up production of another minion.  Tomorrow morning, I’m hoping to get the minions sitting next to the mothership to orbit and swarm, at which point thing’s will start to look like the game in my head.  I’m worried I won’t get to having an actual enemy by tomorrow evening, but we’ll see how long things take in the morning.

Exciting, huh?  More tomorrow

Ok – after spending an hour or two last night mulling over my various ideas, I had settled on my strongest idea.  The problem is that it was (in my head) set in space, which feels the complete opposite of the “Tiny World” theme.  I decided to switch up the scale and use the same core game mechanics except with viruses and bacteria, but after working up some mockups and then sleeping on it, I think I’m going to take it back out to a space game.  To fit the theme, I’m going to emphasize the self-contained nature of the giant motherships the player controls – now, they’re carrying the last chunk of their dead home planet in a self-contained eco-bubble as a spaceship.  Talk about raising the stakes for survival (hey, there’s another theme runner up that would have fit my original idea *cough*).

The basic outline for the game, with a mockup:

• The player controls a single large spacecraft through the environment
• The player has direct control over the mothership, being able to maneuver (slowly) through space
• The player can produce small computer-controlled minions (fighters, bombers, etc.). These minions swarm and automatically attack enemy minions and motherships, and by default gather around the mothership.  The player can direct the “drone cloud” to go somewhere within a certain radius of the mothership, sort of a waypoint system.  If the mothership moves too far away, all minions will return to the mothership.
• (Maybe?) Destroyed minions and motherships leave behind salvageable wreckage, which can be gathered by gatherer drones.  This limited resource would make the game a closed system (rather than an infinitely-growing collection of minions).
• (Maybe?) Mothership special powers to provide a more direct combat activity for the player.  I still want to stay away from “giant laser blast” and do more with control skills that can disable parts of an enemy minion cloud, other mothership skills, etc.
• (Maybe?) Mothership upgrade system that can upgrade minion control radius, special powers, hull strength, reduce resource costs, etc.

I’m going for a light strategy game that mixes a little bit Defense of the Ancients with Pikmin style direct/indirect hybrid minion control.  Also, I’ve never played and DotA game so I’m just making that up based on by perception of the genre from the outside  Ok – off to work, now.

I’ll be participating in the Ludum Dare game jam this weekend, and I’m going to try and be better at updates throughout the event.  It’s hard not to get distracted by that, though, and I’m easily distracted enough as it is.  I’m going to be posting updates at my site and cross-posting over to the competition blog at www.ludumdare.com/compo (this post is also testing a cross-posting plugin to see if I can get away with doing it automatically).

The final theme selections run the range of “looking forward to them” to “please no!”.  I’ve got a couple of ideas that cover most of my favorite themes, but I still have a handful that have be a bit stumped for inspiration.  I’ll be doing some more brainstorming during the next half-hour or so while I wait for the theme to be announced.  Good luck to everyone participating – I can’t wait to play through some of the awesome stuff made this weekend.

Hardware: Macbook Pro, Wacom Tablet, iPad

Game Engine, Languages, & Tools:  (Unity 3D Pro 3.5, C#, MonoDevelop IDE) or (flixel, Flash Builder 4.6)

Graphics & Art: Corel Painter 10, Photoshop CS5, Blender 2.6, Procreate iPad

Music & Audio: sfxr, GarageBand, Nanostudio on iPad

I’m thinking of mixing things up a bit and working with flixel this time around.  If I decide to go with Unity again I’ll probably stick with the jam so I don’t have to worry about third party libraries.  Anyways, the options:

Hardware: Macbook Pro, Wacom Tablet

Game Engine, Languages, & Tools:  (Unity 3D Pro 3.4, C#, MonoDevelop IDE) or (flixel, Flash Builder 4.5)

Graphics & Art: Corel Painter 10, Photoshop CS5, Blender 2.6

Music & Audio: sfxr, GarageBand

See you all in two weeks!

I’m considering jumping into LD21 this weekend, but just the jam this time.  I’m sort of on a roll with another project and I’m hesitant to change gears and risk losing my momentum there.  My current plan is to see how that’s going at the end of the week and work on that this weekend if I’m still being productive.  If the theme is something that works as a minigame or something, maybe I’ll look at implementing that.

I’m planning on using the same tools as usual (although I picked up a copy of Photoshop recently so that’ll be replacing Pixelmator and Pixen):

Hardware: Macbook Pro, Wacom Tablet

Game Engine, Languages, & Tools:  Unity 3D Pro 3.4, C#, MonoDevelop IDE

Graphics & Art: Corel Painter 10, Photoshop CS5, Blender 2.5

Music & Audio: sfxr, Wolfram Tones for music, GarageBand

Play the untitled, unfinished LD20 entry.

I’m done.  Its not finished, but I’m done.  With a little over an hour left, I’m missing:

1. any sort of complex pathfinding for the adventurer (read: she runs in a straight line from left to right, not jumping, no anything else).
2. any hazards other than the arrows falling from the sky
3. any items with behavior that interacts with the missing hazards (only the shield is in there with any behavior, which simply nullifies the arrow damage).
4. any sound effects or music
5. any animation other than what can be done with particle effects
6. any artwork other than the placeholder concept sketches and primitives-based models
7. any end goal for the level run (the player will stop in front of a beautiful white cube

In retrospect, my biggest hindrance is in the art department (as is the case for many folks, I would guess).  I’m fairly comfortable artistically, but I’m out of practice with anything but a pen and paper and easily distracted all over the place.  I spent way to much time tweaking particle effects for lava ash and god-rays for item delivery and not enough time producing quality assets or features.  I’m unfamiliar with sprite animation in Unity that doesn’t rely on the commercial SpriteManager 2 framework (which I can’t submit the source for so it’s out for any Ludum Dares).  I’m unfamiliar with anything but the most basic box-modeling in 3d modeling software (which I used extensively to model my arrows, which you can’t barely see anything of and was another waste of time).  I’m also fairly useless at audio output of any sort, so I was planning on pumping out something easy in WolframTones but didn’t have any time to figure out how to get the midi file playing.

All said, I had a blast.  I was up way too late last night trying to get things put together and I learned a lot of little things here and there.  I think I need to brush up on some of my artistic output before the next Dare so that I’m prepared for another ridiculous theme.

I wasn’t feeling spectacular last night, and the theme was a complete curveball so I let it simmer and went to bed.  Today I had a bunch of stuff to do during the day, but I’ve kept my eye on the site to watch everyone else’s activity.  This morning I saw dock’s post with his concept art and something clicked, so I wanted to both call out his stuff and lay out my own plans (which I hope aren’t too similar to his).

Here’s a quick concept sketch to talk to:

A basic layout and flow for the action

The general idea is that you play a god and its your job to watch our for your adventurer follower by providing her with the necessary tools to survive.  The level is a linear series of platforms that the adventurer runs and jumps through in order to reach the end.  There are a couple of obstacles that she may face: goblin soldiers that need killed, goblin archers that fire for the background that she’ll need protection from, and jumps that are too far for her to make.  You can grab an item from the top bar (sword, shield, or rope) and drop it somewhere on the map and she’ll grab and use whatever is in her path.  Items fall from the top of the screen, so you have to time where and when to drop things.  I think I’ll also provide a healing potion to drop on her for restoring health (which will be displayed in a health bar which isn’t drawn here).

Things I’m unsure about:

1. Is her pace constant and does she always move forward?  If she does, then the challenge comes from dropping the right items at the right places and times for her to survive.  If she doesn’t, and she can fight through goblins and retreat/slow down, it becomes more like a side-scrolling RTS with a single unit.  I’m not sure which I’ll end up trying out during the contest.
2. What’s the point of the level?  I’m considering the final stretch being a treasure chamber in which she always opens a chest that contains a new or upgraded item (which she offers to you, her god, as thanks for your protection).  You can then collect and replace the items on the top bar with these new ones for later runs.  I love the idea of finale being loot-based (because I love games that are randomly generated stat-heavy item grinds , but I don’t know how well this works here because the challenges in the level and the items’ functionality are very closely tied to each other.  If you replace the rope, how do you overcome long jumps?  Perhaps there are three general classes of  items (attack, defend, and jump) and you can replace those with items with different mechanics (maybe replace the rope with double-jump boots or teleport spells or something).
3. There was something else on the tip of my tongue that I was a little worried about, but now its gone.  I’m sure it’ll show back up when its least convenient.

So, here’s a nod to docks’ drawing that got me going, and its time to get to work.

As LD20 sits just hours away, I thought I’d post a quick addendum to the tools I might use to include the samples and scripts distributed with Unity, along with any snippets of useful code I find in the Unity forums.  I’ll declare specifics as I use them or settle with a final implementation of something.

Also, no surprise here but my weekend has gotten busier around me, so my participation might be less than stellar.  I’m also exhausted from the March/April work on my Blackberry Playbook app (which should be out the door before the competition starts with a little luck).  We’ll see how it goes, but I’m pretty excited.  Good luck, folks

I’ll be trying again with LD20.  I’m planning on using the same tools as last time:

Hardware: Macbook Pro, Wacom Tablet

Game Engine, Languages, & Tools:  Unity 3D Pro 3.x, C#, MonoDevelop IDE

Graphics & Art: Corel Painter 10, Pixelmator, Pixen, Blender 2.57

Music & Audio: sfxr, Wolfram Tones for music, GarageBand

Libraries:  Nothing of note planned on so far – I’ll post things as I find them for particular concepts but I’m planning on keeping this pretty pinned down in scope.