Made a simple little mole bashing game in Unity yesterday in 4hours, turned out quite well I think and had a lot of fun making it! Split the time into 2 hours making assets and 2 hours coding and below is the result.

Link me do to both webversion and android apk file –> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26-warmup/?action=preview&uid=6823

I’ll probably add some more features onto it shortly after LD26, then get it out onto Google play, etc, etc

Yes, this will be my Ludum Dare 1 year anniversary!

I’ll using my standard tools of:

1. Unity3D
2. Photoshop
3. Flash (for quick vectors if needed)
4. Milkshape3D, yay, low-poly models!
5. SFXR for tasty sound
6. Audacity for other sound effects / crazy voices

Thanks once again to all the LD admin crew who organise the events and keep the website running, you’re awesome!

But, it’s February…I think I’m the last one across the finish line here, but the development journey was much more entertaining whilst taking the scenic route

So, yes Super Grid Run is the game and It officially got released on January the 31st, as the first entry to the onegameamonth.com challenge. It’s a fast paced avoider with fun retro graphics and I think I’ve reached the 1 dollar goal now, which is a great thing to achieve. It’s a very simple one-touch game and there is lots more details about it over at http://www.supergridrun.com/

The Ludum Dare Game Jams have been a great experience for me so far and I’m looking forward to the next one whenever it may be!

Best of luck to everyone who enters and has allready entered the one game a month challenge and I’ll be back next Ludum Dare.

Sneaky Promo Video and Google Play Links below:

Promo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7rvnwjvjbo

Free Demo: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Refresh_Creations_Ltd.Super_Grid_Run_Lite

Full Version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Refresh_Creations_Ltd.Super_Grid_Run

The Most EVIL Breakfast post mortem.

Aww yeah! This was a really fun theme, I admittedly spent the first few hours after I woke up trying to figure out what to do, I’d had thoughts of making vertical shoot-em-ups where you place enemies strategically in-order to destroy the hero plane , some ideas based around towers and tower defense but in my crazy brain they seemed concepts which I thought a lot of people would do and I wanted to try and challenge myself with coming up with something different (at least different to what I’ve done before)

So, I wrote down a list of all the cool things that villains have / do, including:

• Make awesome evil laughs
• Sound like Skeletor
• Own Underground / Moon Bases
• Have hoardes of minions / robots / henchmen to do their bidding.
• Own pets (think the claw from inspector gadget)

Next I thought, what would be a suitably evil task for the villain to perform. Whilst there were the thoughts involving destroying/ taking over the world I wanted my villain to be somewhat more odd, so I thought, what would be really unpleasant and how could it be worked into a game?

Now, mincing up things is a pretty nasty process and kittens are so cute. What could be more evil then sending out robot henchmen to mince up kittens into breakfast? Not much, so I went with that as the idea.

Next I had to think up a look, by now I’d already decided that I wanted to create a 3d world, erring on the low polygon side of things as much as possible with a minimal amount of effort.

The Evil Minion Robot takes form. Mwahahahaa!

Having recently played around with shaders inside unity I chose a simple, colour scheme of red, white and black and let myself run though designing a simple robot, basically from a collection of spheres and then some appropriately scaled world objects.

A Simple GUI

I started playing with animation in unity and was looking into ranged attacks for the robot minion to perform but kept my eyes on the time left and decided to cut that out and reduce it down to a simple cat and mouse affair.

Keeping everything (with the exception of the robot) as low-poly as I could meant for much faster modelling and by the end of the first day I’d got my 3d models all set-up, the beginnings of the world, some movement, and some crazy voices.

But there was one problem which I had to fix and it was important.

What would a kitten sound like being minced up?

Thankfully I had a hand blender in the kitchen so that was an obvious choice for the blades whirring up but it didn’t feel err meaty enough?

Luckily I was snacking on some hula hoops later on and they’re pretty crunchy, so I tried crunching some up with my fingers on the desk, pointed the microphone, overlaid the sounds and eurghh, it really sounded like what I imagined would be kitten bones breaking. Fairly scary sounds!

A while later I found myself not satisfied with just the noise so added some bloody particle effects and a camera shake for extra effect. You don’t ever see what happens to the kittens just the err….end result.

By this time I was feeling like quite a monster for making something like this so it was the best time to do some more voices for the evil villain and give him some level of radio interaction with the menial robot.

After the final sound effects had been made and cut and testing the packaging for the web went fairly smoothly and I managed to spare time to add an android version with some pretty basic controls. I was worried that despite going low-polygon It wouldn’t run well but it seems to run fairly smoothly, even on mid-power devices which is a relief.

In summary. I had a lot more fun then I expected this time around. I’m a little scared it may have brought out an evil side to me but hey, I can live with that,ha!

I honestly love kittens, sadly the wife is allergic to them but that’s probably for the best otherwise the RSPCA /PETA may be on the phone at me, eep!

Oh yes, the entry is playable here–> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=6823

Adding some effects and actual ending, starting points. I’ve gone for a simple game but inside a 3d world which has been fun to make so far. The Kitten A.I. will probably leave something to be desired however but I’ve never done A.I. before.

Anyhow, here’s a screenshot!

So I figured I’d best post a gameplay video of it in progress.

The last few percent of completing as game are really the longest aren’t they?

View the Video on Youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz9C25nAyZk

I’m grateful for any feedback, there are a few more details on my blog post over at: http://refreshcreations.co.uk/games/2012/11/super-grid-run-gameplay-demo/ Hoping to release to Android and iOS ,paybe PC, Mac also on the 6th of December, just a little later than the..errr end of October…

Looks like I’m going to be a little late for the October challenge sadly. But this isn’t entirely a bad thing.

The event has got me psyched to make a game that I can sell for cash monies and whilst I could rush it out for release before the end of October I’m looking more at releasing shortly afterwards, family and work commitments have resulted in there being fewer and fewer hours in the day for me to crank some code out so things haven’t gone according to plan but that’s just the way it goes sometimes

Super Grid Run will be released soon though! Progress reports are available on http://www.refreshcreations.co.uk/games/ and soon on the games website http://www.supergridrun.com/

I did an experiment with adverts on Gravity Force 3, my first Ludum Dare entry earlier this month which I was thinking of considering to achieve the $1 but really, after seeing the lack of revenue from it on the minor android markets I think I’ll focus on cheap, pay for apps, none of this freemium nonsense.

Although I’ll probably take the adverts in game option, recently been in touch with an awesome guy about use some of their music for a game I’ve just started making recently and free-to-play means I can use the music, giving credits to him, pay for means I should give him some monies, although I’ll probably do that anyway as it is awesome music.

I’ll stick to something simple and (hopefully) playable as opposed to over-complicating things, try to add sheen to it in order to have a small yet addictive game (It’ll be a runner, yup).

I’ll probably try to post updates on my blog over at: http://www.refreshcreations.co.uk/games/

Best of luck to everyone who’s entering, now onwards with pro style!

Dash Dash Dash Screenshot

What Went Right:

• Made a game, a difficult but fairly fun game!
• Made a procedurally generated track.
• Boosted up my Unity3D Skills.
• Quick 3D Modelling in Milkshape 3D
• Ran 10k on sunday mid-dare in 1 hour 3 minutes, ohh rah!
• Made some design decisions on the fly and they held together well.
• The player always has something to do this time around, it’s a fairly intense game if you want to survive.
• The shooting triangles really seemed to make it for me personally, that was the moment it felt like a real game.

What Went Wrong:

• Lost a lot of time on Saturday due to an unforseen physics problem.
• Lost more time on Saturday due to a lack of naming scheme for my track tiles…silly me!
• A lot of the design was more on the fly than my past idea.
• There’s 2 bugs still inside the game. Read – Lack of testing.
• One of them involves the jumping machanic
  the other Only appears on your second play through, forgot to re-initialize the animation.
• There’s no real ending, except for your own demise, hahaha!
• Didn’t get to add some of the features I’d planned on putting in there including:
  • On-line high scores
  • Improved Difficulty Tiering throughout the game
  • An Actual Ending
• I forgot to put an exit button on the Windows / OSX Builds….Ha!

What I’ve learnt during this Ludum Dare.

• I can really push myself harder than normal when I’ve got the time free to dedicate to one project.
• Working like this is probably the best thing for me if I get the chance.
• Tripping up then nearly running into traffic downhill is not advisable.
• Some more things inside unity, mostly physics based, ha!
• Keep to a nomenclature with assets, I rushed then neglected this to my cost.

Will I carry on development of this game?

Probably in a couple of weeks time, just so I can take a breather, my next weekend is fully booked also!

Might look to porting to Android / iOS in the future when some more bits are fully implemented.

Oh yes, a linky, I nearly forgot –> Play Dash Dash Dash Now!

Current build (wasd and space controls) http://www.gravityforce3.com/ld24/

This jam has proven slightly tougher than the last due to my astouding number of typos. Think I might have strecthed the boat out a bit far this time round still got te following to do:

1. Optimize level loading / streaming
2. ending / win condition
3. scoring
4. hi-scores
5. visible evolution on main char, not just in abilities
6. menu src
7. difficulty balancing / progression
8. other standard gui stuff

8 things, 10 hours, maybe a couple more depending.

The Dr Pepper is chilling out in the fridge downstairs, aww yeahhh, smooth sailing

Did a quick tally this morning of how themes were positioned before final voting, feel free to use / ignore the data below:

Kittens +9001
Abandoned +405
Survive +299
Parallel Worlds +253
Creation and Destruction +233
Evolution +219
Curiosity +167
Castles +167
Afterlife +158
Colony +158
Tunnels +152
Chain Reaction +146
End of the World +89
Companion +67
Don’t Go Outside +58
Break the Rules +48
Beginning of Time +35
Deep Space +27
Ruins +25
Secret World +19
Time Travel -28

Gooo kittehs!

After the first great fun journey that was LD#23 ,made an actual game, soo happy!

It’s still got a bunch of stuff I want to do with it but just been busy with other stuffs, you can play it on yer putoid / android below:

Gravity Force 3 on Google Play, Web – Kongregate
I really can’t refuse to enter LD#24 after last time soo…

I’ll be using the tools I know best for this again so that’ll be:

Unity with javascript
Photoshop
SFXR and Audacity and Zerius Vocoder, that was fun to play with last time.

Some sort of server interaction too, through PHP an MySQL would be nice, even if it’s just high scores, that would be cool to do.

Midway through Sunday I’ll be taking part in a 10k run also which will either save or destroy me.

Good luck to everyone out there, can’t wait to play your games!

Wow, Ludum Dare was an intense experience for me. My head is only just about recovered now. It was a lot of fun too chatting to people on irc and now there’s so many games to play and review if anyone gets through all 1100+ of them that is true dedication to reviewing as you’ll have played each game for under half an hour and probably not slept for 3 weeks. You insane person out there that actually manages to accomplish this I salute you. Because otherwise I fear you will do terrible, terrible things to me.

Anyhow. Made a game, that works okay, in Unity3D, called Gravity Force 3 – viewable here –> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=6823

Not the most amazing or unique take on the tiny world theme but it encompassed the lmitied knowledge of unity3d that I had gained before the weekend. some other ideas involved a penguin trying to defend it’s ever shrinking island from flaming hoodlums by kicking ice blocks at them and some other tomfoolery but those didn’t end up being my entry as I figured it was too far beyond the 48 hours of time available.

I think I balanced my time well. thought I’d finished at 11pm GMT on Sunday but noticed some final bugs and my final submission was at 1am. I’m currently adding some more featurse to Gravity Force 3 so it can be played nicely on mobile devices and hope to pubish it onto kongregate and indie city in the future.

Gotta say this Game Jam has been an amazing learning experience for me and I’ve been introduced to some new software for audio creation and I really hope I can enter again in August. Thank you once again to all the people involved in organising ludum Dare, it has re-kindled further my interest in making games which makes me feel great, yay!

Coolies, I’ve got Saturday free now for sure!

Looks like I’ll be keeping it simple and hopefully fairly polished (hopefully) as it’s my first time.

Guess the main thing is to complete a game in the time so I’ll have to rein in my over-ambitiousness! So I guess I’ll be using the following:

Pen & Paper

Unity3d – Javascript

Photoshop CS3

Sfxr, Audacity, possibly Musagi if I can figure it out.

Milkshape 3d for some low poly models.

You just never know what the next weekend will bring with an excitable toddler around.

But I think I’ve learnt enough in Unity now to get something or other working in unity next weekend.

I’ll be probably using the following:

Unity3d, Photoshop, sfxr, audacity, Milkshape 3d and textpad for one thing or another. might put some time-lapse software on the compy to see how it all goes!