The game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15943

Here’s the walkthrough (spoilers):

Tools used:
Engine: Unity free
Graphics: Photoshop, Flash, SAI
Animation: Anim2d
Sound: FL Studio + Massive VST + Goldbaby drums

The main goal was to field-test my animation system – animation editor and animation playback libraries for Unity.
The animation editor looks like this:

A lot like Flash with layers and nested animation clips, but with float frame values, “bones”/layer hierarchy, double keyframes for sprite changing.
And here’s the usage in Unity:

Fun thing is that you don’t have to manually import textures/sprites for animation, you just drop them into folder named “Sprites” and the system automatically picks them in editor, makes a library in Unity and stores textures into atlases (for now i’m using TK2d for atlas generation, but later i might remove this dependency).

In runtime there are 2 ways of playback – “rigid” – switches frame immediately, and “interpolated” – with possibility to crossinterpolate multiple animations, and overlay multiple animations. Rigid is faster and more useful for simple things like bullets, ui elements etc. Interpolated mode allows to smoothly switch between animations for characters. With overlayed animations in interpolated mode i could make the character shoot in 4 directions while standing, running or jumping, also landing squish was an overlayed animation too, so you could see the character counteracting the landing impact while continuing to run and shoot. And another fun thing is, it can be called with 1 line of code, like:

if(just_landed) anim_inst.OverlayAnimationReuseLayer("land", "stand", ...);

You can use different shaders and materials in one animation, it will create different meshes during playback, and if you use one material it will use the automatic batching.
Anyway if enough people are interested in this system, i’ll release it later.

I also used my polygon editor with some adjustments:

//that’s how you not use it, since physics only works good with convex polygons

In the last day i was kinda tired and sad, so i decided to screw around with FL Studio for some time, and made a simple electro-screechy thing using 4 Massive channels and funk-drums. I think it gave me motivation to finish at least something playable. It’s the first time i’m doing game music.

Wat left:
- I’ve spent most of the time fixing bugs in animation system, finding a way to correctly sort sprites by depth, learning how to use materials and shaders. In other words i ignored most advices about using only reliable tools that you are familiar with (again).
- I like to do detailed sprites and was anticipating to draw something with shading and stuff.
- The game is too short, with very few game objects and only one level (too little time was spent on actual gameplay, most of it went into technical stuff and debugging).
- There are severe memory leaks (materials and meshes) that i haven’t noticed (due to my poor knowledge of Unity) and that may crash your browser.
- It was too stressful.

Wat right:
- I did fix a lot of bugs in animation system, and made it work.
- I learned how to shader.
- Now i know how not to update procedural meshes and materials.
- I’m still new to Unity, and i’ve learned a lot from this jam.
- I did music.
- I managed to finish something playable, YAY!

Timelapse:
!MINIMAL DISCO WARNING! PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

… I NEED TO WORK, DAMMIT!!!

Hello everybody! This is the third of a series of four postmortems for our LD25 game “President vs Eevol“. Every article will cover a different aspect and point of view on the game’s development. The following post-mortem is on the game’s art design and is written by animator Daniele Piscitello.

President vs Eevol
Postmortem #3 of 4: Art

Good day! I’m Daniele Piscitello, and I worked as the only artist for Team OmniaRing’s first game “President vs Eevol”. As the other members of our team are doing I’ll talk a bit about some aspects of how the art and the animation of “President vs Eevol” have been done.

The game’s main idea was to have a sort of evil british gentleman infiltrating in the President’s mansion. The player’s objective is to find the hidden key and take it to the door in order to reach the next level sneaking silently and fooling the president’s armed bodyguards. When we came up with the game’s design I understood that, in order to properly follow the theme, we needed to give our protagonist an high level of characterization. In a few hours the basic look of “Eevol the evil” was ready. Most of the first of the three days was spent only on making that exaggerated sneaky tiptoe animation that immediately gave life and an evilish look to Eevol.

I decided that our protagonist should have had a very peculiar and evilish walking animation.

After that I designed his signature bomb. I opted for a classical looking bomb immersed in a teacup. That was very funny to do and I hope that it made the players smile for a moment.

I tried to follow a priority list for the graphic and the animation, so, after completing all the main character’s animations I noticed that half of our time had already passed and I still had to make all the other graphics. After I completed all the tiles that compose the game’s levels I understood that I didn’t have enough time to make a proper walking animation for the enemies. At the beginning the idea for the enemy’s design was to make them human. I have to admit that I never liked the idea because I thought it was too common to have human guards and that something different could have make the game atmosphere funnier, so I decided to make some floating robot bodyguards, which were easier to animate due to their lack of legs.

You need to make some compromises if you develop something in 72 hours, and
animating a floating robot was easier than animating a human.

I would have loved to make animations for the enemies in all the four directions, but the thing I regret the most is that the levels are too much empty for my taste. In my mind, the levels should have been full of furniture and little things, but I fortunately understood in time that such level of detail is almost impossible to achieve in only 3 days.I hope that with the help of all the experience I’ve earned through this Ludum Dare, by the time the next one comes I’ll be able to produce a lot more in a shorter amount of time, even though I realize that animation is always a looong process.

I’m an animation student, but I started my course just this October so they haven’t even started teaching to animate anything yet, and therefore everything that I made for this game was absolutely self-taught. This was also the first time I seriously animated something and I’m very happy of the result and of all the amazing feedbacks I received for my animations. Thank you all! It was very important for me. If you want to know more about me in the future be sure to check out my Twitter account!

You can reach Daniele Piscitello via Twitter at: https://twitter.com/danipiscitello

Next up is the last of our four postmortems for President vs Eevol: the music postmortem by composer Matteo Gagliardi.

Baby don’t hurt me,

Don’t hurt me,

No more…

Some gameplay comming in the next few hours.

In the past week I’ve totally fall in love with Paper by FiftyThree. A drawing application on iPad. It’s simple, nice, get the work done and have a really awesome feeling. So as I wanted to make my game in 2D and use my Bamboo to make all the art. Then I was thinking… why not use this application to make all the art ?

And that the challenge within the challenge that is Ludum Dare (as it’s my first time). So, here’s my useless announcment : I will make all art with Paper by FiftyThree.

Well… not exactly… As I don’t yet have every in-app tool yet I can’t do some things in it (don’t have Outline and Write), and will export the line in Photoshop to colorize. They are taking ideas in consideration so it would also be great to have feature like copy/past sheet (would be great to decompose the character or other for animation) and have at least a second layer before LudumDare. If not, I guess I’ll have to work on photoshop.

As for the animation of all that. I’m considerating using Spriter. If you don’t knoow what is Spriter here’s their KickStarter page. It’s now on beta phase so I must not count on it that much, but it’s really a great software to become. I didn’t yet give anything to them but hope I can (at least $25) before the end of Kickstarter’s founding. You must check it out… now!

Anyway, I’ll say what software I use at the right moment, but that is my plan at the moment.

< Previous post: Here comes a new challenger !

Next post > LD is coming…

Yesterday I got around to a bit of sfx/coding, today I started it off with some graphics!

One leg is lacking a frame (poor planning) but that’ll come as a later fix, for now it’s time to put him in the game! Segmenting the body will allow me to easily aim in 6 directions with the upper body while the lower body reacts to movement/jumping/falling. Looks a bit stiff in the end, but it’s a marine!

Screenshots to come once I get some tiles and stuff going!

Well, that was manic. I had family stuff to do this weekend, but I didn’t wanna miss LD, so I’ve cobbled together what turned out to be pretty much the tutorial level of what I originally had in mind…

So here’s what I learned:

Don’t try to Ludum Dare on a weekend when you have other commitments

Well I spent a couple more hours and got the basic functionality in. It’s actually pretty fun. And the artwork is beautiful of course, because it’s Kandinsky!

I’m doing all the animation in the Flash IDE rather than programatically, which I’ve almost never attempted before – so it’s fun, but I’m an amateur.

Two playable levels are up at http://davidrlorentz.com/files/OndrianFordrian_v01.html.