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!