Crossposted from http://www.thomaspurnell.com/ld22-mountain/, not that you care

Play Mountain

Woohoo. Ludum Dare 22 was a happy fun time for everyone. 48 hours to singlehandedly make a game from scratch around a theme that is not announced until the beginning of the competition. This Ludum Dare was themed ‘Alone’, which I understand was pretty unpopular with a good deal of LDers, but then there always seems to be a group angry with whatever theme our glorius leader PoV the people choose.

This Ludum Dare I decided to make an effort to use Unity, mostly to finally see how it actually works and also to make the game more accessible to the ‘I don’t like to download games’ crowd, even though I will have lost my beloved Linux LD comrades votes.

Given that I’m quite unfamiliar with Unity I decided to keep the game fairly simple, and decided to make use of a number of canned scripts and functionality, such as the bog-standard first-person-camera with collision detection and predefined keyboard+mouse controls.

So I decided to make a dangerous mountain to climb alone. An initial test showed that climbing a large low poly mountain was both easy and boring, so I spent some time thinking about how to better meet the theme, make the game more challenging and try and add something a little unusual or interesting to what might otherwise be an extremely mediocre offering.

I’d heard about some kind of message system in Demon Souls, a game I haven’t played, where players can leave messages warning other players of traps and dangers in the vicinity, and often lie in these messages to mislead other players. Sounds like a great idea to me. I also wanted to make the game a lot more difficult to encourage some kind of communication between players beyond obscenities and gibberish, so I wrapped the mountain in almost total darkness and made the messages players leave illuminate their surrounding area, allowing for players to create a trail of lights up the mountain, showing where the dangers are hidden. The player can only leave a message at the spot they die, so even if they decide to write nonsense or query my parentage, their message will help illuminate whatever obstacle was responsible for their demise and so help other players better navigate the mountain. So I whipped up a database back-end and spent some quality time with the Unity documentation for dealing with web streams.

In terms of gameplay, I managed to achieve my goal. The Mountain isn’t particularly difficult to navigate, but does have some pretty mean, unfair areas. The graphics do their job, but aren’t particularly exciting, and the white text on the sometimes white background can become impossible to read. Audio was left until the last minute and really suffers as a result, the music was written in less time than it takes the track to play, and I didn’t have time to record or create any ambient or event noises that probably could have added a good deal of atmosphere to the game.

As it is, Mountain is a slow stroll to the top of the hill through a swarm of sometimes offensive messages, but for me it’s an enjoyable stroll, and seeing evidence of other players passing through the environment makes me happy.

Voxel in. Unity. Move along

Had a blast. Got a lot done. Gameplay really needs some adjustment and balance but I ‘realised my vision’ and I’m pleased with that. Hopefully this game will actually run on someone’s machine, unlike my last entry.

Game Video:

Timelapse, for whoever it is that watches these things (fairly sure I’m the only one):

Might try unity. Might not.

Kind of sad to see two days of work reduced into this flurry of rapid inactivity

Well that was fun. Game is buggy as a buggy bug bug bug no imagination left. Need to go away for a while and not think about Ludum Dare for a few hours. Forgot about memory management so everything is just dumped into RAM, which is fine if you dont mind my crappy game using over a GB of your memory .

I recorded a timelapse video which I’ll upload sometime soon.

Well done everyone

Just woke up and thought I’d upload yesterday’s timelapse in case I get hit by a bus today (whilst sitting at my desk) so that you may all mourn the loss of what surely would have been a very mediocre game

Discovery theme. Wasn’t expecting it to win, but it’s nicely open ended and I’m sure there will be a host of great games to come out of it.

This time I’m taking my own advice from my previous atrocity and am spending a good deal longer on planning and design. I’ve a few ideas, but to get going though I’m going to do some audio work before I fully commit to a design.

Dumping the code to my incomplete ‘cabbage’ game engine here in case I use it. Won’t be sure if I’m going to be using it or not until the theme is announced.

cabbage.zip ~39KB

Alright. LD19 will be my second Ludum Dare, and I’m going to be applying the lessons I learnt in LD18 to win this time. Or at least finish my game .

I will be using a self written pre-existing code base so that I can spend some time actually making a game instead of spending most of the time making an engine. I’ve also preinstalled a collection of fine free FOSS audio editing and creation software, booked the time window (I’m in Australia and the hours are a little inconvenient, but WhatCanYouDo) and even made a half hearted attempt at trying to get some other potential candidates interested in entering LD19 themselves.

Now i just have to wait and hope that Double Zombie Rainbow is not the chosen theme

Naive firsttimer here! I have pygame! I have a text editor! All I need now is a theme. And 48 hours of continuous miracles. If it runs, I’ll be happy.