Happy 2012, and thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to rate my (and everyone else’s) entry.

Don’t have the time/patience to actually play the game, but still want to justify a 5/5 Theme rating? Check out the walkthrough:

Also, if you can figure out why I apologize to Stephen King, Tweet at me and I’ll give you a prize.

If I can.

Now, back to trying to win this pot of gold…

I did a timelapse/commentary thing:

Actual thing here.

Super busy trying to win this, but still rating like mad when I can. Seriously, would a 3-month rating period really be all that bad? I don’t think so.

Happy ho-ho days! Hope you get to stuff all the stockings your heart desires

TOOLS

• FIRE
• IRON
• BLOOD

Or the same stuff as last time. I’ll figure it out when it starts.

Hey, just scrolled through a dozen pages of posts, collecting people on Twitter like Pokémon, and I noticed that a few had entered the entire Twitter URL into the field on their Ludum Dare profiles.

You only have to put your Twitter name in the field, with or without the @.

Not a huge deal, but makes it easier for folks keen to Follow you up

It seems that my chief problem with getting rank on my LD entries has been the distinct lack of kittens. Hope to rectify that this time around.

I’ll be using:

• Unity 3D for the vroom vroom.
• FL Studio 10 for the boom boom.
• Photoshop/Illustrator CS5 for the pixel pushing.
• 3D Studio Max for the polygons and shadows.
• pixelplacement‘s iTween for the bits that move.
• Still standing!

I really should assemble a basic code library but it’s more stressful fun to do it all from scratch.

Best of luck to everyone, let’s make some killer games!

Hey all!

Excited for the upcoming compo/jam? I know I am!

If you’re on Google Plus, and want other LD’ers to Circle you, would you mind adding your voice to this thread here? It would be a great help in gathering everyone, and facilitating Hangouts during the events.

Looking forward to see you all!

Here’s the last push for a bit of attention to my LD submission, if you have a second and haven’t already done so, please check it out and toss me whatever rating you feel it’s worth.

This whole experience has been absolutely fantastic. Thanks and much love to the organizers and participants for making this such a great ride to be on!

There’s a walk-through video, a time-lapse, and a self-hosted project page if you’re interested.

Here I present the “edited and abridged for LD’ers” version of the post-mortem:

What Went Right

1. Leveraging the Power of Unity Prefabs

All of my past projects up to this one had been done almost exclusively in C#, with almost no special use of the Unity environment. They were done that way to help me come to grips with coding in C#.

For this LD, I threw that mentality out the window and crafted nearly everything in scene, using prefabs. What an amazing difference it makes! Defining game objects, exposing the variables on them, and using drag-and-drop to configure game play is really what Unity is all about, and I’m glad I had this LD to finally realize that.

2. Scripting Tight

Sort of a knock-on effect of switching over to prefabs, code bloat was immediately reduced to a negligible amount. With all the variables explicitly used and exposed on the game objects in scene, it was far easier to manage what was going on and limit the overall messiness of the scripting process. That’s not to say there’s no kludgy-hacky nonsense going on, but there’s far less than there was when I was in pure code mode.

3. Winning the Theme Roulette

This time I followed the theme selection very closely. I hadn’t before because I didn’t want to set my sights on any one theme before the final was announced, and avoid any kind of disappointment. This time I didn’t really fixate on a theme, but I had a very strong feeling that ‘It’s Dangerous…’ was going to be chosen. The night before the compo I dreamed a fully-formed concept for a game that used this theme, so you can imagine my relief when it turned out to be the one that made the cut. Lucky advantage.

What Went Wrong

1. Uneven Production Process

When tackling any long-term project, I tend to break things down into manageable chunks and then assign levels of ‘completeness required for play’ to them. This means there’s a round of building, and producing passable assets so that I can start to see if a game is going to be fun or not.

For Ludum Dare, though, it seems that one thing that makes games stand out and get recognized is the end quality levels of art. I’ve always envied these 2D wizards that can crank out beautiful pixels for their projects that really make them shine. So, I told myself I was going to push it to the limit with the 3D assets this time out. The problem was I focused so much on making the 3D nice that I had little time for audio and controls polish.

It’s always a trade off, a fine balance of managing just how much to produce in the time given.

2. Not Enough Kitties

Apparently this is also an important thing to producing a popular entry, and I’ll endeavor to add more cute meme-cats to my future entries.

3. Not Enough Zelda

Looking back at it now, I probably could have taken the time to insert at least a few nods to the venerable Nintendo classic, but I’m still happy with my interpretation of the theme and glad that it left enough leeway for all the other creative entries that weren’t strictly focused on emulating the Tri-force hunter in one way or another.

It’s really important to note that this LD sparked enough of a creative fire under my butt to finally abandon another project that I wasn’t really having much fun with and shift all of my production over to creating an improved version!

Thanks again and congrats to all that participated in this LD, I’m looking forward to seeing you all and more come the next one.
-
Jack

<click here for Dark Acre Jack’s entry>

Hey all,

Thanks everyone for the feedback thus far on my entry, most notably Daniel X. Moore’s comment about not being able to run Unity on Linux. I’ve put together the above walkthrough of the game from start to finish.

So, for anyone having issues running it or beating it, you’ll get the whole experience here and hopefully still be able to contribute a rating!

I’ve also prepared a version of the video without commentary. Thanks again for checking out my stuff, I’ve had a blast playing through everyone else’s!

If you watched the first one I tweeted, this version has a bit of commentary added.

To everyone who has completed this Herculean task and come out smiling, I salute you.

To those that fell to the mighty and unending blows of concentrated content production demand, I say this: fear not! For though this was an even-numbered competition and that makes it a very cool one to have completed, there will be many, many more. Many more chances to test your resolve and prove that you can, like some of the very stalwart few, produce ass-kicking games in a fraction of the time the people in big pants do.

Thanks for coming out, and we’ll see you in the time lapses!

Jack’s Back!

How convenient is that that LD20 rolls around just as a break appears in the Dark Acre development cycles? Uncanny, that.

Hoping to bring the improved levels of skills to craft a far better entry than the last one, but mostly just hoping to stay conscious and lucid enough to finish.

Bringing the usual suspects to bear:

• Unity 3D Pro.
• C# scripts programmed from scratch, same as before.
• CS5 Suite, mostly Illustrator/Photoshop.
• FL Studio 10 Producer Ed.
• Pixelplacement’s iTween
• The powers of darkness.

Looking forward to another weekend of madness and torture!
-
Dark Acre Jack

For those who are interested:

Jack’s Ludum Dare 19 Post-Mortem

Yeah, you gotta click that.

For people who like this kind of thing, I tried to keep it light-hearted.  It’s got a stellar cast, a decent script, and a happy ending.

Enjoy!

INSERT “A WINNER IS YOU” IMAGE HERE

In all seriousness, crafting a game is hard.  It’s harder when you’re constrained by time and theme.

To all my fellow successful Dare-ers, I salute you.  For those that didn’t make it, you’ve got the intervening months to lick your wounds and prepare for the next one!

Now, to the best part of it: hours and hours of freshly-baked gaming goodness!

This should be good.

I’m Jack, and I’m entering LD #19.

I’m not certain where to put the library declarations?  So I’ll put them here.  I’ll be using:

Unity 3D free version.

Pixelplacement’s iTween.

The powers of darkness.

I’m fairly certain these are all available to all?

I look forward to testing your might!

-

Christopher ‘Jack’ Nilssen – Dark Acre

EDIT:

Art: Photoshop CS5, 3DS Max 2011, Crazybump.

Sound: FL Studio 9+

Additional “base code”: Pixelplacement’s just-released “Backdrop“, just in case.

EDIT+=1:

Font: Imagine Font.