Hey, everyone! Green Pixel’s artist here! Ludum Dare 26 was a blast and we came up with our Jam entry: Eternal Journey

If you’ve played it and rated it, thank you so much for your feedback! If you haven’t, check it out here and we’d appreciate your thoughts!

We made Eternal Journey with mobile devices in mind (as we have released an iOS title in the past) and we’re happy to read that a lot of the feedback seems to welcome the game – albeit a more finished version – on smartphones

This was our second LD Jam and one thing I realized from LD25 was that I didn’t really learn much artistically – besides learning how fast I could work under a time constraint. So, this time around, I decided to experiment. Why not, right? When I heard that the theme was Minimalism, I thought of triangles and, inspired by games like Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing, I came up with the art for Eternal Journey. Below is a handy screenshot if you don’t have time to play the game

Triangles galore, eh? Now that we’re going ahead with the fully-featured version of the game (that we’re hoping to release before the next LD ), I’m wondering if I should continue with this triangle-istic style. As a game artist, I’ve only really ever worked with pixel art and it’s the most comfortable style for me. I whipped up a quick mockup of what the mobile, pixel art version would look like (note that the background is largely unfinished ), seen below:

See the huge difference? Gameplay aside, which style would you prefer? Do you think pixel art still appeals to the masses or is it played out? Would the semi-abstract triangles fare better in the world of apps?

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Thanks and happy gaming!

Play Here

Well, we are going to start from the beginning. I had high hopes about the theme would be Parallel Worlds so I started to do an idea about a game with this theme in my head.

The day 26 came and the final theme was Minimalism. The first thing I did was curse to the people who had voted that theme. The second thing was start to think how can I innovate and at the same time create a minimalism game, but the ideas weren’t coming to my, and magically I remembered my first idea for the Parallel Worlds theme. This idea consisted in a split-screen with two characters who would interact between they. You would have to get the objects in the ground and go changing of screen for kill enemies who only could be killed by one of the character (ok, this sounded better in my head).

So I made this concept more minimalist. The game would have split-screen and two character running forward, each screen would represent the black or the white and this would create a contrast between the characters and the background.

Then, when I had this in my project of Unity, I added blocks who kill you when you touch him. Although this look like a simple thing but this was one of my hardest challenges in the develop of this game, all because Unity not detected any collider. After two hours and almost come to despair I decided restart my computer, and YEAH! THIS SOLVED THE PROBLEM, FUCK U UNITY!, were my words.

Well, the colliders works good, the characters run forward and when they touch a block they die. And has not spent even one day, this is amazing!.

Is time to level design!

The level design was very frustrating, to each block that I put I needed complete the level until that point, and this isn’t easy, seriously, I wanted to hit something!. It took me a lot of hours.

Ok, the day had not finished and I still had time to do the menus. I made it and finally came the time to sleep after 22 hours of work without rest.

The game was complete and I still had one day more to polish it.

The second day was a relaxing day. I did the music and fix a lot of bugs. I still had more of half day more so I started thinking in what could I add to make the game experience more satisfactory, the first thing I saw was that the graphics were very very simples, I knowed that the theme was minimalism but… I love the pixels and my game had to have pixels!, so I set to worked. I did a wall of bricks and some windows and the game now looked like an ancient castle. The problem of it was that the game was now more hard. But fuck, I really loved how the game looked!, so I add a “button” for choose if you want play with textures or without them.

Finally I publish the game when still missing about five hour to finish the compo.

And this is basically how I did feel while I was develop this game for my first ludum dare.

PD: Sorry for my bad english, I’m not a native

This is an idea for something I had running around in my head for part of the weekend.

From the moment it was complete, it was able to provided me with precisely 3.376 seconds of pure enjoyment.

Then I knew I had to share it with you.

Enjoy.

http://tomc3d.com/other/unitygames/AMostMinimalMachine/AMostMinimalMachine.html

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.

Just a little update on my Ludum Dare game (for Ludum Dare 25, “You Are the Villain”. Yeah, lovin’ the theme!).

It’s one of those endless runners (because I hate making levels, random is the way to go).

And, in the spirit of my Irish Indie Challenge, I’ve gone for a crazy art style – everything is in shades of red

So you’re running and jumping and trying to escape. Because what kind of villain are you if you’ve never had a daring rooftop escape?

Keep in mind that I haven’t made the player sprites yet, they’ll be red too (same fella as on the title screen). I’m really happy with the art so far – it’s unique and not all that bad, if I do say so myself!

Altogether I’m having loads of fun, in the Ludum Dare spirit. Game-jamming is a fantastic way to spend a weekend.

This is a sneak peek at the game I’m making with kddekadenz! Actually its a FAKE sneak peek since he has the code and I don’t; I put the objects together in Game Maker like they would appear in the game.

All of this is made with Game Maker’s sprite editor (yes, that’s right)
since 10:30 this morning most of these are animated too. And theres more that I couldn’t fit in there, too

kddekadenz is doing some pretty cool stuff with the game engine, too!

edit: lol fixed your name, sorry about that

Hi all,

I discovered LD48 9-12 months ago. I’ve always been interested in programming, and I now how some experience in it.

My current goal is to be proficient in Java (maybe fluent, if possible) by LD25, about hopefully make something which I can submit to it. I also want to improve on my pixel art.\

Anyway my next post will probably be between now and LD25. Maybe in September-October to report on my Java progress and then just before LD25 if all goes well.

Crosspost with my wordpress – seagaia.wordpress.com

This past weekend I made a game, “Naos”, for Ludum Dare 23, around the theme “Tiny World”. If you haven’t played Naos yet, you should do so now, the blog post will make more sense.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7853

The sound.

Aesthetics were very important for me in this jam game. So I tried to pick carefully what kind of music I wanted to write. The game wasn’t supposed to represent a wholly realistic thing, so the music sort of reflects that in a haunting/minimal way (the organ-like house loop, the chime-like thing in the forest). The more action-like piece at the cliff helps to show that there is some action going on there (i ended up redoing this one the most…). As for the intro/ending thing…I couldn’t really think of a fitting melody, so I added some fancy-ass white noise that I thought fit.

I like the chimes piece the most, and would like to expand upon that. I feel like part of it was definitely influenced by listening to the Fez OST ( http://disasterpeace.com/ )way too much over the weekend – especially with the bitcrushing it uses, which I felt I may have overused in a place or two. Two pieces in particular I found salient were Spirit and Nature.

https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F44156155 Seagaia – Songs from Naos (Ludum Dare 23) by seagaia

Graphics style…WHY? MY EYES!

Admittedly the game’s blur was a bit much. I did think it suited the quiet/haunting/ethereal-esque nature of the game, though. I wanted to try the scribbly style. Spending more time would have of course improved…well, everything. In a normal setting they wouldn’t be that rushed, I’d use a tablet, etc. Right now, it looks just good enough to not seem completely sloppy. (But is, still, of course, sloppy  )

I was playing a lot with BitmapData objects in AS3 (surprisingly for the first time…why? I don’t know…but now I’ve got a level of comfort). They more or less represent what will be drawn to screen. And you can do interesting things like pull out certain color channels, transform them, and superimpose them on the original graphic. Or, you can blur things at different levels. The way I did blurring wasn’t ideal, I surely could come up with a more plug-and-play way of doing it, rather than the somewhat terrible way I have now (at least it’s organized terribly), which was to copy the sprite’s data, and keep some external data that determines how much to blur it – essentially, I have a copy of the data – I copy it to the displayed sprite, blur it, draw that to the screen, etc. The same idea goes for the color offsets. I played around until it looked okay.

I also played with a new logo for Seagaia today. It shows up on the intro screen. I like it. It’s a bit of a rip-off from. It was fun to make, at least the top part. There’s this nice thing in GIMP where you can copy and paste every other row, and then you make it a bit transparent, modify it a bit and superimpose it to get this neat shadow-y effect.

oh so how was the coding

Straightforward for the most part. Every room was a different state, with its own events and so forth.

Became an ugly mess near the end with the event coding since I haven’t figured out a nice way to do events with flixel yet…want to definitely figure that out. I’ve been asking around a bit, but not much in the way of detailed cutscenes. x_x

Since I already talked about the graphics coding, the only really interesting aspect was the events. How do they work? Well, for one, it helps to draw a tree of your dependencies with state variables. For example, “E_CLIFF_2″ represents the 2nd cliff cutscene, “DRAWING_1_DONE” represents finishing the second drawing. And so every iteration of the game loop, depending on what screen we’re in, we check to see if we need to start an event. Essentially, events just freeze character controls, and wait for some condition (my player’s x being at some point, pressing x to advance text) to occur. Each event has an “event_pos” variable that is incremented when that condition is true, bringing the event to the next part (text, movement, whatever).

While this method works for a game jam, it doesn’t really scale well (see the other game I’m making) when it comes to moving many sprites that you don’t want to have to hard code into the game…and it’s a bit hard on the coder with the repetitive switch statements (see.https://github.com/SeanHogan/seagaiald23/blob/master/src/CliffState.as JEEZUS.)

An interesting bug resulting from this was that I didn’t nest one of the “if you press x increment the event counter” things deep enough, so if a player pressed X before they should have on the forest screen, you would be frozen when you actually pressed X over the right thing. Thanks to my friend Runnan for showing me that issue…gah!

One way this could have been done better is to have only checked for events once upon entering a screen, or have had some single “an event happened” variable to be checked, rather than all of these conditions on every iteration of the game loop. While this is okay because performance didn’t really become an issue here, it would be something to think about in some sort of later implementation.

so what the hell was this about?

it’s a secret! well, a few people have messaged me on NG about it, surprisingly. My interpretation of it is more or less solidified, but it’s interesting to see other people’s takes on it as well. In lieu of not looking all pretentious, i won’t write about it here. but if you’d like to know, shoot me a message.

that’s all for now.

if you found this interesting, you should follow me on twitter . http://www.twitter.com/seagaia2

Meet Chii! He has been performing a support role in the team since last Ludum Dare. Here you can see him PURRFECTING our art!

We are currently working on our idea, but we don’t feel like lifting the veil, yet.

Tune in for more updates in a while!

This is my first Ludum Dare. I’m a programmer and i’m looking for an artist. As for what language i will use, my first thought was to use Java + Eclipse + Libgdx, but for the sake of speed and being my first time i chose GameMaker.

If you are an artist and are interested in joining, here is some of my work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn1Rf1BP-d8  <- Metroidvania like game

Language: GML(GameMaker Language)

Sound: Sfxr, Audacity

Music: Musagi(maybe)

In case i don’t find an artist:

Graphics: Paint.net, GraphicsGale

Other:

Timelapse: Chronolapse

Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/cerdus/

Hey guys, just thought i’d toss this out here for anyone interested.  Finished a first “stable” release of my new sprite editor, It’s QT4 and written to be cross-platform but at the moment only downloads for linux are up, as I’ve yet to figure out how to use the mingw cross compiler with QT.  Tailored for my engine’s format but the toolset can also easily export to png spritesheets.

Short version of the features (full list on download page)

• Onion skinning to help with animating
• customizable palletes w/ full save/load/rip from image support
• more color picking tools than you’ll ever know what to do with
• fully integrated with system clipboard so you can freely select, copy,cut, paste, etc..with other image editors
• large undo/redo bufers, specific to each frame
• live animation preview
• fast control scheme (mouse + command keys, or hotkeys control every action, all hotkeys are listed in the edit menu)
• customizable UI, all toolbars can be reshaped, floated,  pushed behind tabs, hidden….etc

Still got a lot of bugs to work out, and missing features, but it’s at least stable and capable of image editing at this point. You can download it and try it here http://www.midnightfragfest.com/sprite-editor/

Edit: Windows download is now available, but somewhat untested, I would appreciate any feedback on how it runs.

The Main Character is ready
(Now i’ll catch some sleep, good night everyone!)

Job Description: Lighthouse Keeper at Styx River, you got to persecute souls trying to escape hell, lonely but comfy.

I decided to work on art first, since the theme made me think about a lot of artistic references, I’ll work in the mechanics tomorrow.

I posted earlier that was in for the Competition. Actually I want to change my plans a little: I’ll be part of this LD as an opportunity to improve my drawing and modeling skills.

I’m a full time game developer, and by developer I mean ONLY developer. I totally suck on the art side; I have the technical knowledge on Photoshop, Inkscape and Blender, but it stops there. When it comes down to creating something, oh please… run away.

I’m tired of only doing crap art. For that reason, I’ll stick on this LD and try to draw and/or model something minimally good for once.

And if there is still time by then, I may bake a game.

So we settled on a story and gameplay style. I can say robots and aliens are involved.  here’s a silhouette of our cast!

Hopefully you will find them as amusing as we do.

I’ve been thinking lately about how unsatisfied I am with my work. Shooter after shooter, generic RPG’s, and other sorts of recycled ideas.

I can’t go on doing that. I’m bored; I’m restless; I feel my passion slipping away.

So here’s a promise. I will make something creative, whimsical, and arty for this weekend’s LD. I’m not going to do the same old thing over again.

I thought about this earlier today. While I was taking a nap, I had a bunch of ideas for really creative games that I could make and would be excited to make. So here I am, promising to you folks that I will fulfill whatever potential I have as a creative person.

I will avoid being pretentious. I will avoid being haughty, arrogant, and deliberately obscure. I will create work that expresses what I mean for it to express.

Not everyone will like my work. I know that. Not everyone wants to play through my whimsical daydreams. Some folks would rather blow s**t up than be involved in any sort of peaceful activity. Some folks won’t appreciate the weird, playful ideas that I have.

Some people will really like my work. Some people will enjoy having fresh ideas in games that express something meaningful rather than simply giving them entertainment. Some people will understand what I’m trying to show them, and will enjoy the silly things that I have to communicate.

I’m not trying to change the industry. That’s stupid. I’m trying to bring something fresh to games; I’m trying to use this medium for something that I can do well.

I’m not trying to be morally superior, though someone, somewhere might think that. I’m just frustrated with the traditional idea of what a game should be.

I’ve rambled a bit too much, perhaps. I hope that I’ve expressed myself well, though.

Peace, love, and a new way of thinking,

— Henry

Okay I have had an hour now and I have spent it trying to come up with an art style and game ideas. I have chucked a load of screenshots down into a google doc here: https://docs.google.com/drawings/edit?id=1W7ILlCI3mODPue3oW25gb0maryxfTIo7XZRv8XlXbHM&hl=en&authkey=CIO9wIcM I think I have a rough idea of what im going for.

I really like the World Of Goo art style, plus im hoping the shilloette like style will be much easier for my poor drawing ability

As for gameplay, “Enemies as Weapons” instantly reminded me of the flash game Boom Stick for some reason. So in that game you shoot enemies flying by overhead with your shotgun. You then run around and pick up ammo that drops from them. You then use that ammo to shoot more of them, simples!

The great thing about this idea is that I have done work in the past on LieroXNA and Worms 2 Mobile so hopefully I can use some of the experience I have gleamed from doing those games to make this one

With design out of the way now, I think im going to setup my environment and get cracking!

UPDATE: Experience my poor art in a game, thanks to JonathanW!

I get peeved about things for no good reason a lot. One of those things is crappy art in games. I’m not really a great artist so I don’t know how to make good art, but I do know what I don’t like about bad art, so I decided to complain about it in the form of this exciting tutorial! I figure knowing what to avoid is at least as important as knowing what to do, so here is my guide to making really bad art for your game! (more…)

Or experimental lava / rock texture?

Got some basic graphics sorted now just need to write the actual game…

The blue army disembarking...

Just concept in art package at the moment but… I’ll be back (still 13:05.30 to go!)

Breakfast was store-brand golden grahams, cranberry juice, and a bit of leftover blackberry cobbler.

Changed the dirt image a bit, gave it some friends: Walls and floors:

dirt.png

wall.png

floor.png

Now to get a level rendered and up on the screen!