I’m in too. @zoombapup on twitter. Using Unity this time around. Dunno what for art and the rest. Might just hum into my mic for sound/music. Going full-on low-fi for everything hopefully. Hope the theme doesn’t suck. Livestreaming at some point too, will maybe make a timelapse of that if I’m not too lazy during the compo

Ok, about to go and play some battlefield 3 but quick update before that happens. Some of the AI is in place. It’s basically a lemmings like game, only in 3D. The “lemmings” have to build towers of a certain height to leave the level. But there may be enemies (if I get round to it) that will try and steal the blocks from the tower!

Well, thats the theory anyway. As usual I’m wrestling with Unity to bend it to my will. There’s some clunky editing crap that makes Unity less than a brilliant experience for a programmer, but other than that things are coming along nicely (if a bit slow).

A builder class entity picks up a block

Help me to decide what to make for Ludum Dare! (youtube link)

Help me to decide what to make

Ok, so its not exactly looking like a “cavern” as such yet. But it will once I get the main part modelled.

Essentially, its going to be a real-time level thingy. Created using 3DS Max and GLB plugin. This is a mental ray ambient occlusion bake. I guess I’m actually going to end up doing more of a content-based LD than a game based one. I’ll try and get some simple gameplay in there too (robots to kill or some such).

Ok, so the theme definitely threw me. I was expecting Burrowing to win (and kind of hoped it would, because I was going to subvert it as a theme). But seeing as we’re doing caverns, I’ve had to rethink quickly.

A while back, I saw a post by Chris Delay of introversion talking about thier game subversion and I remember him using Doom based level content as test material and it sounded like a fun thing to do. Given that Doom is the ultimate “cavern” shooter to me. I figure, first step is to get a doom file format working. So my plan is to make a Doom->Obj converter. From there, I’m going to load the .Obj in 3ds max and convert it to collada. Bake some stupid texturing into it. Bake some stupid lighting into it. Then concentrate on figuring out some combat based gameplay.

Tools I’ll be using:

• Horde3D
• 3DS Max
• SFML (for the windowing)
• Visual Studio (duh)
• Some kind of doom map editor
• Some kind of physics engine
• Recast for navigation (AI)

I’m not sure I’ll get everything done, but I guess having some fun content to play around with is a good start.  I guess just using Horde3D’s parallax offset shader thingumy is going to make it look half decent at least. Maybe I should add quake support too. Bleh!

Yep, I am hopefully going to get time to participate. Using SFML and a bunch of other little libs. Should be able to publish source. I’m hoping to create something that will serve as an example of a game gems article I’m writing as a way of motivating myself

See you there.