Finished! Well, submitted, at least. You’re a little bit invincible, which does hurt some of the gaminess of it all, but I feel like it’s still fun to throw goats around and summon golems to blow things up.

What went well:

• My wife Angie got to play with Blender and Unity for the first time, and did a significant amount of stuff! The camera/movement code and enemy, princess and goat models/animations are all hers!
• She also made sounds.
• Working together on this was fun.
• I looove the golem model.
• Throwing things in the game is fun.

What didn’t go well:

• I slept too much because I was dangerously close to getting sick.
• Teaching as you go isn’t a way to do things fast, but we knew that when we started .
• Monday.

Angie played with Blender and made these sweet clouds while I was packaging up the various versions of Hell Guy:

Great work, everyone! I’m looking forward to playing some games, but for now we have a birthday to go help celebrate !

You can check out Hell Guy Hells It Up here.

Goated! The most important addition possible. What are goats for? Why, they’re for throwing into portals to hell. Of course.

Our little devil guy can bash farmers over the head with his pitchfork and throw skulls in a portal to summon golems, but most of the actual game logic isn’t there yet. We’ve got a plan to get a decent amount of functionality in before the Jam’s done, but I doubt we’ll consider it complete.

Poor Angie ran into some rather ridiculous bugs with her models in Blender that were fixed, in the end, by completely blasting all animation data via exporting and reimporting only the mesh and redoing animations. I was hoping she’d be spared such pain on her rookie lap . Oh well! She made some pretty great farmers and knights to battle in the end and is working on sounds now.

We’ll only be able to spare a few hours tomorrow! It’ll be tight.

Well there’s an art test with the assets I made today! It’s… okay, I guess. I need to work on other things now.

My wife (who’s doing OO programming for her first time for this!) got the movement and camera code down today and is currently animating this sweet knight dude in Blender (another first for her):

This all took a fair amount of assistance on my part, but I did my best to make an educational experience where I didn’t drive for her. I’m very impressed! Unfortunately, my lungs have insisted on filling themselves with fluid for most of the day. That makes speaking a generally painful experience, and this all required a fair amount of speaking. I guess we’re doing this on hard mode!

The Hobbit was really good, and really long!  Today kind of disappeared. We won’t be able to work much on this on Monday, so late Sunday night is probably going to be as far as we go with this. We’ll see what we can do!

It took some morning fumbling but I got a shared mercurial bitbucket repo going to help my wife and I share our work and started on the art while Angie works on some basic movement and camera code.

After the initial bit I believe she wants to work on some game art herself; she’ll have a go at working on the enemy models next. Sorry for the somewhat sloppy post. I’m writing this out quickly on my phone before The Hobbit starts.

Good luck, everyone! We’ll get back to it soon .

First, a moment of silence for my wife’s phone, which we failed to retrieve from the canal after the dog did a sweet spin move and kicked it in there. I like to think that our attempt was inventive, at least.

In a similarly genius move, I’ve convinced my wife Angie to jam with me for this. She’s well versed with MATLAB and I explained “what the dot does” yesterday, so this’ll work out great! It’ll probably be quite a bit slower than otherwise, but it’ll be great to work together on something. Or horrible. Probably great!

We’re doing some tabletop gaming with friends right now, but here’s our plan for a “You’re the Villain” themed game that we’ll start tomorrow… eventually, after The Hobbit, I guess:

A beat ‘em up base expansion game where you expand outward while defending your base and building walls/bombs/golems out of your defeated enemies for fun and profit!

It appears I’ve made a grass growing simulator disguised as a game.

I’m okay with that. (more…)

I spent a lot of time tweaking the performance of my plants.  Hopefully the game will be hard enough that you won’t have a world this full of plants very often, but I don’t want performance to tank just because you’re playing well .

I definitely burned a few too many hours on art today.  Cities and plants are fully animated and looking pretty decent.  I’ve got quite a bit of logic to work on still, but I’ve got plants growing and spawning new seeds.  I’m pretty enamored with how pretty that process looks.  My biggest challenge will be avoiding staring at them for the rest of the compo.

My game design is much more concrete than it was earlier today even; hopefully I’ll be able to get something close to that vision out tomorrow.  Good luck everyone!

My first hunch with this game after the visual design and goal was to make a mouselook top down shooter with world building elements (i.e.: get powerups from terraforming your world).  Sounds like it could be fun.  I don’t really have time for a second hunch!

I’ve got running, jumping, and mouselook working.  I probably won’t have any need for jumping; I’ll use it for something cool looking to do during a special attack.  I think it’s time for a second lap on art assets and then I’ll have to buckle down.

Keep on burning, everyone!

I’m in!  Per the norm, I started with an art test.  I’ll be working in Unity.

I’m playing with dynamic shadows this time around, which are pretty sweet so far.  I’ll be trying to make a small world building game here.  I’ve got some ideas for cute looking terraforming, but am troubled as to how game-like I can keep it.  I’m going to work on basic controls for the main character and stew on actual gameplay for the remainder of the night.

Good luck, guys!  Watching the flurry of action at LD is inspiring as always .

I’ll admit to being a little shocked/saddened at kittens not winning LD#22.  Fortunately the Unity Flash in a Flash competition came up shortly after LD #22, though, so I was able to make a game called Pile of Kittens for that.  It’s a platformer where you can herd and throw your plentiful kittens to overcome obstacles and deadly robots.  I spent ten days on it.

It’d look a bit better with anti-aliasing, but that’s not yet supported in Unity’s (still beta) Flash functionality.   I encountered a lot of performance and implementation challenges with that version, but it was worth it for the competition and motivation .  I hope you guys like it.  You can read my dev log here.

A Lonely Moon

After some last second bug fixes, I’m calling this done for the 48 hour compo .

My schedule was pretty lax for this (until the last second omg-get-the-sounds-playing-and-post-it-now rush).  I took plenty of breaks, hung out with family, and saw the new Mission Impossible movie.  I’m pleased to be able to finish something like this while still enjoying my weekend, but now that it’s done I do wish it had a more solid ending.  It’s a very short and simple game, and it doesn’t have an arcade-style high score hook like most of my others, but I am proud of it.

I feel like I got the lonely parts of being alone:

and the fun parts:

Gameplay:

I was dangerously close to just having running and jumping being the only game mechanics.  I went back and added a dash powerup to the game with about 5 hours left to go in the competition.  It enabled one of the more pleasingly lonely scenes I’d envisioned when designing the art style: flying through an empty desert with no other living thing  in sight.  I also added some falling blocks to add to the challenge and force more dashing, which isn’t particularly notable except for the last-secondness of it.

Graphics:

I tried to take advantage of the ease of animation and physics/collisions calculations in Unity and 3D engines in general to make development faster than it would be with a 2D engine.  Given the cubetastic style, things were pretty easy

My pretty baked lighting did bite me in the end; I regenerated it all in one huge time-eating chunk after my patient piece-by-piece method inexplicably failed on me.  It’s a fun, fast and clean style, though.  If I can figure out how to do it in a more pipeline-able fashion I’d be thrilled to use it again.  Unity’s built in light baking is damn pretty.

Music:

I tweaked the settings for atrk-bu.py for my music and kind of lucked out with how nice this particular generated song sounded.  It was about my 20th song generated, though.  Maybe that’s more persistence than luck .

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol:

It’s okay.  I had plenty of fun and the cinematography was generally gorgeous and impressive.  It tried to be smarter and more introspective than it was sometimes and those were its lamest moments.  The ridiculous plans and gadgets never disappointed.  That 95% on Rotten Tomatoes is probably going down once it’s not IMAX-only.

The Last 10 Minutes of Rumble in the Bronx that I saw while waiting for the submission to upload:

A “YEAH!” freeze frame after running over a mob boss with a hovercraft?  Yesss.

Check out A Lonely Moon’s Ludum Dare contest page.

I’ve added some timing-based platforming challenges, but I’m going to swing for a new gameplay mechanic/powerup.  It’s probably a horrible idea with this much time left, but I’ll be thrilled if it adds more game to my game.

I fixed some bugs in my jump/animation code that I wrote last night, and added some camera zooming/panning zones that seem like they’ll be pretty necessary for the vibe and gameplay.  I thought I had my light baking atlas work figured out for a decent workflow that wouldn’t result in hours-long bakes before release, but I was wrong and I’ll need to figure that out after lunch :’(.  Still though, I’ve added animations, fun feeling movement, a smooth panning camera and the all important player shadow dot since last time I posted.  Feeling good.

I plan to use some of Artist of the Fortnight‘s sweet CC tunes in my game. (oops, rules.  Maybe after the compo!)  I worked with him on Subatomic Kangaroo and was thrilled to see that most of his music is CC and thereby usable in the LD compo.

I’m in!  I got home pretty late tonight because I was metal-detecting a volleyball court to find my wedding ring.  I also found eight cents, so I think the night’s going pretty well.

I’ll be working in Unity (free), and this is my LD 22 project’s first art test (click for a 1600px-wide version):

I’m not sure how into the baked lighting I am.  It could easily become a time issue.  I’ll try to have a basic platformer character running and jumping around this scene by the end of the night.

Also, this stereomood has been providing me some inspiring ambiance for this dare .  Good luck everyone!

We did it!  Three days, one game.  Hooray!  There were some scary last minute bits due to out of date drivers on a testing machine, but everything came together and Run Run Robot got released.  You can check out our game here or read on for my clumsy summary of the development process.

The Process:

We used LÖVE as our game engine and wrote our game logic in Lua.  I did a lot of art and direction, but the vast majority of code was pumped out by the heroic and capable Brian and Eric.  Art was done in the copy of Photoshop Elements that came with my Wacom.

We used Mercurial and the excellent Bitbucket for our version control.  I’ve previously only used Mercurial for individual projects, but I have to say that having multiple people work on the same project on this time scale meant a lot of merges.  I hope I was doing something wrong, because I don’t want Mercurial to be that hard.

Day 0:

The topic was announced at 7PM our time, so our first day of work was just discussion, design, concept art, sleep.  Designing and talking over IM was a pain in the ass.  We’ll try to meet in person next time, or at least have a shared whiteboard and voice chat online somewhere.

Day 1:

Brian wrote animation loading code, made a random level/enemy spitter-outer and handled our basic collision code in top notch time while Eric wrote most of our weapon/shooting code and added the boss.  I painted all of the level graphics and player animations.  Lame croppings of the original concept art were used for the initial boss and enemy graphics.  Our animation loading code uses individual PNGs instead of strips, which seemed totally worth the performance hit.

Day 2:

Powerups, health, tons of discussion and tweaking to make the game as fun and playable as we could manage while still keeping it a little too hard.  I drew the boss animations and finished up the win/lose screens.  I’m pretty new to 2D animation in general, but this watercolory style of animation was especially new to me.  I enjoyed it.

Eric also took it upon himself to sneak a Jedi mode into the game, which was way too cool to hide behind the Konami code as originally intended .  The only way to kill the boss is to reflect his own shots back at him with a light saber.  I suck at it.

Day 3:

It was Monday!  We had to go to work .  During our lunch breaks and after work we fixed a couple crucial bugs, added more instructions and added a life bar to the boss so the player can know just how close he is to winning.  We also made Jedi mode easier to get to as a rather good last minute decision.

Submission time was mostly composed of Eric screaming at me to redraw the victory screen for Jedi mode to have a light saber in it and me insisting that we just didn’t have the time.  ”WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DRAW HIM IN THAT POSE??!” he shouted, fists clenched to heaven.  The cries shall haunt me forever.

The victory screen really does look like he should be holding a light saber.  Sigh.

You can view Run Run Robot’s Ludum Dare page here.

I got a fun chase animation for our boss going, which was an interesting bit of practice/experimentation for watercolor-style animation.  I’ve been trying to fill in art assets where I can and we’re all buckling down and trying to finish those last bits that really make the thing playable.  Enemies drop weapons and health now, things can die, and there’s a high score screen.  Go team!  I’ve proven less useful in this code than I’d hoped since I sent myself to art-land, but I still poked around in there a bit to make the game end properly when the boss dies.  I’ve written up the todo list of things left before submitting.  It’s bigger than I’d like, but pretty doable.

Good luck everyone!

I spent a weird amount of time of my first full LD Jam day in the shop for my car (doodling on my laptop/Wacom with people staring at me like I was making a bomb) or lying around lame/sick, but I did churn out level and player graphics.  I hope I kept the watercolory look of the concept art.

We’re still using crops from my original concept art for the boss and enemies, but progress on the game overall looks pretty encouraging.  We’ve got two types of enemies, one flying and one grounded, that both attack the player and a big bad boss.  I’ll be focusing on making the boss more alive and scary today, both with code and art.  Now, it occasionally shoots red dots now whilst hovering around on the left side of the screen.  While hazardous, that’s not exactly the scale of threat I was hopin’ for .

I agreed to do the jam for Ludum Dare #21 with a couple coworkers, and after hashing out multiple gameplay ideas we arrived at something that sounds like it’ll be pretty doable and fun.  While I usually program in these kinds of things, I’m probably doing mostly art and design for this contest in the interest of time/teamliness.

Good luck, everyone.  It’s really fun to see all the work that’s happening now.