I’ve announced my proposal on my blog for anyone interested:

http://www.nickbreslin.com/2010/08/engine-hacking-for-ludum-dare/

Facebook/jQuery/PHP/mySQL. Ludum Dare will basically be the first prototype for this engine. Looking forward to the competition.

Cheers.

While mazes are the challenge and game of The Forgotten Isles, Ludum Dare is about more. Specifically, the judging of Ludum Dare. With 204 entries, time alloted to play each game is only a few minutes. I want to make sure all the other players can experience as much of The Forgotten Isles as possible.

Below I’ve posted the four maps so you don’t spend your whole time frustrated and lost. You should at least try the game, so you get a proper idea of the difficulty, but use the maps below so you can unravel the whole story.

Island 1
Island 2
Island 3
Island 4

The responses to Forgotten Isles on the Ludum Dare site kept mentioning that that the music was missing. At first I just accepted this as a cross-platform issue, or maybe someone didn’t have their volume up (the music is pretty soft). After a few more of these comments it occurred to me that I probably left it muted.

Like during Waddlefield development, I disable the music so that it doesn’t play EVERY time I’m trying to test. Cute tunes are fun, for the first few repetitions, but then not so much after a dozen or two repetitions. So, bug fix for Version 3! The music has been unmuted!

The other tweak is that I’ve adjusted the camera’s position and rotation so that the character’s movement is relative to the camera position. before, the camera was at a 30-35 degree angle, and movement was less intuitive as it is now. While this added confusion to navigating the maze, the purpose wasn’t to make it more difficult.

You can download or play Version 3 now. Version 2 and 1 are still available for download and online play.

Now, responses to some comments:

AClockWorkLemon says …

great game, however i found this extremely easy due to the fact that on the 2nd island, my ‘memories’ glitched up and got stuck at 45.

Yes! A version 1 bug. If you lose, and start again, the timer doesn’t re-activate. This is fixed in version 2.

Jonny D says …

…I didn’t hear audio though…

Audio is now fixed!

Almost says …

…Some more variety in the type of objects within the maze would help to reduce the feel of wandering in a maze and more so wandering an island. (trees, not just bushes)

Yes, Original plan called for many more types of terrain, but maze design and implementation took up a lot of my time.

pekuja says …

…I do think if you work on this further, you should add something more than just the maze. Mazes can be a bit boring unless there’s a lot of different things to see.

I was thinking there could be some “guards” which you have to avoid, or even some platformer elements for jumping perhaps.

I posted a new version with a couple bug fixes and some tweaks. You can find Forgotten Isles here, available on Web, PC and Mac.

Praetor57 says …

Cool art style, nice work!

Thank you!

shrt says …

Pretty nice tune. I really liked the disappearing/appearing terrain obstacles too.

I found the controls weird to begin with, since the character would not move according to the camera’s orientation.

Thanks. For LD18 I plan to get some “real” music. The terrain was my favorite to work on. I added in a shrub in the latest version to help demonstrate the controls from the beginning.

Endurion says …

More like a book than a game.
Navigating the maze was getting tedious near the end, also as others said: Why not move oriented towards the camera?

It is linear, but the game is the mazes. It does tell a story and there isn’t a score, but there are win/lose conditions. The second version makes exploring a bit easier, with an increased timer and the starting locations counting as checkpoints.

I will consider another version with the camera directly behind the player if it’s requested more. I liked the isometric view, I think it helps display the island, and reveal maze better.

The Forgotten Isles is my entry for the second Ludum Dare challenge I participated in. It is a simple game to play, using only the arrow keys to move your character around the island. Frustration will set in as you find out that the mazes become more and more complicated, but there is intrigue and mystery as to why you’re here.

This game has a lot to do with memories. As you wander the islands, you slowly lose more and more of your own. Some of them have manifested themselves in physical form throughout the mazes. These unintentionally serve as reminders of your past and help restore your memories, allowing you to continue to seek out an exit.

Lastly, the island itself doesn’t allow you to remember its own features, not for very long anyways. Terrain features only appear when you’re near to them. As you approach they’ll rise out up from the ground and when you walk away, they’ll disappear. This makes navigating a maze much more difficult.

The Forgotten Isles can be played on the web (Unity plugin) or downloaded for PC/Mac. Please take some time to explore the isles, and unravel the story.

Well, the past few hours haven’t been that productive. I think my main blocker has been the simpleness of this game. I’m putting off “level design” because I want to get more of the code done, but the truth is that the coding is actually finished. Events, game logic, etc are all done.

So, I’m happy to announce that Level one is complete.

I’m going to draw out the other levels (4 or 5), make sure they’re challenging enough and that the story makes sense, and that’s the goal for today.

My entry for LD17 is Forgotten Isles.

You are a character who awakes on a shore, with a quickly fading memory. You will travel from maze island to maze island trying to figure out why you’re on on the island, with the intent of escaping. Click the screenshots to enlarge them.

Don’t Be Forgotten
One of the major elements here is memories. The character has a timer which represents how much of himself he can remember. It will decrease incrementally. If it reaches zero, then he’s forgotten who he is, and will fade away, into the Forgotten Isles.

You can restore memories by finding people or items which you have memories of (such as the dead shipmate in the screenshot above). These act as checkpoints, and restore your memory timer to full. You can return to them as many times as you like, attempting to restore your memory, and retain your sanity.

The Isles
The island itself is a maze which tests your own short-term memory. Environmental elements, such as the shore, trees, ruins, etc will rise out of the ground based on your proximity. This prevents you from ever seeing the full island, and therefore finding a way through the maze ahead of time. Only the elements in your immediate proximity are revealed and once you leave, they’ll sink back into the island.

The Game
It’s a maze game with a story. The challenge likes in being able to make it to the next checkpoint in the alloted amount of time. It will progressively become harder and harder to reach the next checkpoint because the maze will become tricker and more complicated.

I wanted this game to have some deeper message, which will probably not be finely polished by Sunday, but it will be present, in a rough form, within the story.

Here’s a collection of my food photos thus far.

Freshly baked bread, coffee grinder and press (with cozy), dinner (Friday night). some extra drinks in the fridge, and a Limonata.

I’ve written up my first update (6 hours) here, with a screenshot.

It wasn’t nearly as productive as my first Ld16 segment, but I’m feeling good about it.

Heading to bed, but pictures will be posted in the morning!

My long-winded post-mortem for my Ludum Dare #16 entry, Cubees.

(more…)

Cubees Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=rate&uid=1481

Ludum Dare 16: Cubees – Timelapse Video

Ludum Dare 16: Cubees – Gameplay Video

Cubees: Age of Exploration.

This was my first LD competition. I took nearly the full 48 hours (definitely down to the last 30 seconds). I enjoyed the experience immensely and look forward to seeing what others think of Cubees.

For more details about the development, I’ve kept a log on my site. Now, I’m going to sleep.

Dev Updates:
LD48 #16: Playable Demo (33 hours)
LD48 #16: Screenshots Batch #2
LD48 #16: Log 4
LD48 #16: Log 3

I wasn’t going to have characters in “Explorers”, but I just couldn’t resist this. Viking helm and monocle? Yus.

More information at Waddlefarm.

Hello,

This is my first LD competition. I found my way here thanks to Dock, and his entry in LD 15.  I’m using Unity for my game engine (and models), Photoshop for textures and will be using cfxr for sound.

For anyone who has the Unity web plugin, you can play the 12-hour demo of Explorer here.

In addition, here are some dev notes:
LD48 #16: Screenshots Batch #1
LD48 #16: Log 2 (0900-1500)
LD48 #16: Log 1 (0300-0900)

I’ll be posting another update in 12 hours. Good luck to all.