Merry Christmas – Happy Holidays! Just for fun, here is the snowy SANTA version of my LD22 game, Greeble. Can you revive all your Santa Claus clones? Can you find the Christmas Kitty? It was made in HTML5 and runs at 60fps in all recently updated browsers. Enjoy! Hope your holidays are filled with friends, family and fun!
Greeble is an HTML5 game where you are the captain of a crashed spaceship. You are ALONE but need some help to survive. Collect the cryo-keys to activate the stasis pods in order to free your friends.
What went right?
Was very familiar with my tools, both engine, language and art creation pipeline. The amazing JAWSJS game engine was a breeze to work with. Had a very easy time making the art, since my level editor was just photoshop. Enjoyed screenshotsaturday, twitter and google+ as a means to stay motivated. I did well in the time-management arena, and planned ahead of time. I used placeholder art during programming and coded everything first in an ugly room with rectangles for characters. Only after the first day (when all coding was done) did I dive into the art, so I had tons of time to make it real puuurdy. I spent 75% of the time on the art and was feature-complete the coding by noon on Saturday. Total time spent on the game: 14 hours.
What went wrong?
Ran out of time before I could add sound effects. No user instructions or intro. No GUI. Had to cut features and simplify to finish on time. Got a bit stressed about it on the last day, racing to finish. Drawing the level took more time than I predicted. Overall, had TONS of fun regardless.
About the game:
Features pixel-perfect, non-grid platforming, bounce-pads, transparent glass tubes, a fun retro “scan line” effect, silly AI followers and A KITTEN. Your objective is to navigate to the exit where you will be rewarded with a trampoline party!
Use the ARROW KEYS to move around. Try to find a way to revive all your friends (including the hidden secret kitten, which signifies my enthusiastic participation in the “kitten challenge”) so you can all bounce on the trampoline at the end.
I had so much fun making this game. I even had time to hang out with friends, go for a hike, and decorate my house for the holidays! There is a lot of room for improvement but overall I’m really happy with the final product. Created using ippa lix’s wonderful jawsjs game engine.
The word “greeble” comes from the original Star Wars ILM special effects artists who used the term to describe generic “tech” bits and pieces that adorn sci-fi hulls. There are thousands of greebles in this game’s level art.
How it was made: I drew two “techno” textures as the base texture for all the world platforms (one brown and one silver). These patterns were covered in “greebles” (panels, buttons, wires, lines, etc.) In photoshop, I made opacity maps for each and turned everything transparent. Then, I drew the game map itself by drawing black and white pixels on the alpha (opacity) channel so that certain parts of these materials would become opaque. An effect filter that added a little emboss to the edges completed the look.
In the game engine, the entire world map is one gigantic .PNG image, which is layered on top of two parallax-scrolling background tiles (set to move slower than the foreground). The retro “scanlines” effect is merely another overlay image that sits on top of everything.
This is the entire map image I drew, as used in the game (click to zoom in):
… and this is the scanlines overlay I created:
Making “Greeble” was very inspiring. I now have an HTML5 platformer game engine that allows me to create freeform worlds in photoshop. No tiles or level data files required!
If you participated in the Ludum Dare compo or jam – even if you did not finish – I warmly encourage you to fill out the POST-MORTEM SURVEY for use in my Game Jam Survival Guide book. Thanks – and happy holidays! www.mcfunkypants.com/survey/ (EDIT: over 600 surveys so far! Keep them coming! Results will be posted in two weeks or so.)
Remember the KITTEN CHALLENGE! Don’t forget your fine furry friends and add a kitten somewhere in your game as an easter egg. If you are participating, be sure to post to the blog using the “kitten-challenge” and “easter-egg” tags and put this icon on your title screen or screenshots.
This is an official challenge to all Ludum Dare gamedevs.
This weekend, your quest is to put a KITTEN somewhere in your game as an “easter egg”.
This “kitten challange” will be like a meta game in which everyone tries to find the kittens in each game they play. You know you want to.
Do it – for the love of kittens. For the love of meta. For the love of all things LD48.
Edit: Dock was cool enough to make an icon that you should put in your game title screen or game thumbnail screenshots so we know to look for your kitten:
I’m looking forward to watching everyone make amazing games this weekend. I have a request: please connect with me so we can encourage each other to do amazing things! Be sure to post tons of screenshots on twitter using the #screenshotsaturday and #LD48 hashtags.
I’d be grateful if you followed (I’ll follow you back!):
Just wanted to join my fellow honoured gamedevs in declaring my intention to join this weekend in Ludum Dare 22. The themes so far have been absolutely amazing and fill me with ideas. I’ve been doing a lot of hardcore, low-level coding recently with book projects, client work and 3d gamedev, so I’m going to take a break and go LOW TECH. Here are the new tools of choice for me:
HTML5, using Ippa Lix’s lovely JAWSJS canvas-based 2d sprite lib.
No grid, no tiles, no level editor: all art will be hand drawn.
No IDE, no server, no database, no 3d: just a text editor and photoshop.
Low bandwidth, low resolution, low workload: simplicity is my goal.
No physics, no AI, no multiplayer, no optimizations: so simple it runs well.
No installer, no plugins, no downloads: an .html file, a .js file and a png or two.
No stress: I’m aiming to finish a playable working prototype a day early.
Lots of sleep, lots of playing with my baby son and going out with the wife.
Lots of free time playing Skyrim and going outside.
I’m not here to win, I’m here to grin!
Happy holidays, everyone! Can’t wait to play your games.
Anyway, just thought I would share the happy news. I’m also 95% done my second book “Game Jam Survival Guide” which already has a contract and ISBN number, and a third is in negotiations!
I must have saved the universe in a previous life since so many good things simply fall into my lap. Okay, a little hard work doesn’t hurt… but overall I feel like the luckiest guy in the world on a daily basis. Perhaps just believing that you’re lucky makes it so.
I’m happy to declare my participation in this month’s most awesome game jam: the ZERO HOUR jam. I may live in Canada and have to suffer with the Nov. 6th daylight savings time date, but just for kicks (and because jamming with friends is half the fun) I’m doing it tonight. The jam starts in 45 minutes and lasts one hour. My plan is to hack my bullet hell shooter engine to make it a top down arena shooter called 999 zombies. Wish me luck! =)
Reddit
