Hallo!

Some of you may remember “TRI“, the game I made for Ludum Dare #20 with Unity. The theme was “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this!”, which was good luck, as it fitted the idea I had the night before. It also was my first real Ludum Dare back then.

 The original TRI

The game was about triangles; you created them by shooting three little spheres onto gray surfaces. These triangles could then be used as platforms and reflectors. That’s about it. TRI didn’t feature any story, but some texts on walls here and there, for hints and to somewhat simulate the voice from some god-like entity, like GlaDOS. Overall it worked pretty well and there were some people who liked the game although the controls were pretty flawed.

A year later, we (my partner and me) decided to make TRI into a full commercial game. Only the idea of the triangles was adopted, so the setting, the “tri gun”, the maincharacter, the story and the everything changed, or are due to change. (We still use Unity, though.) This basically means the new TRI isn’t a sequel to the LD game.

 The new TRI – WIP

We added some gameplay elements, most prominently the wall walking. Yes, the triangles can now not only be used as platforms to walk on, they also temporarily change  the personal gravity of the player. This way, she or he is even able to jump into a hole in the ceiling – this needs a little bit of exercise though.

Walking on walls

Also, instead of deadly lasers only there are also non-fatal light rays now, with which you activate crystals in order to open doors and do other things. And then there are those little flying ghosts (the Kami), which lead the way and later can be reflected, too. They will be more important later in the game.

 Reflecting light rays

The new TRI is still named TRI, as most of the names we came up with were just too silly or too complicated (Some examples: “Trinsane”, “Trizarre” (thanks Cell), “Tri and Error”, “The Third Eye”, “Connect the dots”, “Konstrukt”, “Trigonomancer”, “Trimancy”, “Triception”, “Triplex”, “The Right Angle”, “180 degrees”, “From Point To Point”, “neuTrino”, …).

TRI can now be pre-ordered for $5, which guarantees access to the pre-alpha. The current  build has one big level (with three sub-levels) which basically serves as a tutorial. There’s also a demo, showcasing the first sub-level. Oh, and here’s a trailer:

The final version hopefully will come out end of the year, and have a price tag of $10. There are far more informations on the official website, tri-game.com, so you might want to give it a look.

Thanks for reading!
- ratking

LD20 was lots of fun for me as I got to learn a bit of Blender modeling/animation,have fun making a game, and reading all the status updates from everybody. Here is the timelapse  video for my LD20 entry.  I hosted a dinner party on Saturday evening so if you watch long enough, you’ll see some of the kids come down and sit at the desk to color.  I never thought to tell them that I was doing a video. The song I used is called Love Found Me by December radio as covered by my church band.  Check out the game here

Here’s the timelapse for my entry this past weekend.

I haven’t embedded it because I’ve just realised my desktop wallpaper has a huge Portal 2 spoiler. (I’M SORRY, SOPHIE!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e-Gj9-4bcg

This LD48 took me to my limit, everybody to the limit, I said come on Fhqwhgads!

…ahem…

So yeah my ‘game’ is ‘done’ and ready to be ‘played’. You can check out the official LD entry page HERE and check out my personal site with game info, controls, and downloads HERE.

It’s a 2D beat ‘em up with a twisted theme interpretation. The majority of your entertainment is gonna come from the audio and basic mechanics, as there is not challenge at all… since you CAN’T DIE. Or win. You just go through the rooms and then the game resets after the last room because I didn’t have time to make a ‘win’ screen or whatever. I prefer to play in full-screen… which you can do with F4, or you can manually change the game window size.

GAH I’m tired. Going to sleep now.
I can’t wait to dig into these games!

Almost There! All I need to do now is make the music!

Here are a few screen shots:

I had a few crazy setbacks today and it looks like I’ll be falling short once again.

I’ll get a few hours of rest and then wake up and work like a dirty rotten sumbitch.

Ran a few art style rendering tests and I’m still not sure what to go with. Performance takes a huge hit, but I have a monster rig so it doesn’t reflect well on my end. I’ll have to turn the knobs down a bit before releasing it for the compo so more people can play at a steady frame rate.

See you suckaz tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll be there… at the deadline… with an unfinished game.

CURSE YOU, OH FOWL FATHER TIME!

Instead of just saying SCREW IT, IT WON’T WORK, I decided to mess around for nearly 3 hours trying to create a specific death animation/scenario for the enemies.

What a waste. Now I’m behind schedule AND I can’t make it the way I wanted to.

PRO TIP: If it can’t be figured out in 30 minutes, simplify it and move on! NO TIME TO WASTE!

BACK TO WORK!

And all I could think about was my game…

RUNNIN CROSS DAT MEAT!

SO YEAH. Back to work! My plan is to get the core gameplay down TONIGHT and use tomorrow for SFX / MUSIC / POLISH.

Does anyone know whether making a(n almost exact) Zelda clone would be a copyright infringement? Also how about the rules of LD and using the same graphics as Zelda?

PS despite the fact that I am planning an almost exact copy, the difference should be worth it, so yes, I know that just copying Zelda defeats the purpose, but I do have a reason for wanting to make it as reminiscent of Zelda as possible.

–
Mikhail Rudoy

The competition started 04:00 local time and it’s now 08:15 – I’m still half asleep and I have no idea what kind of game to make out of this theme… going to go have breakfast somewhere and stock up on supplies while I try to come up with an idea…

In the meanwhile here’s picture of my chaotic little workspace:

Well, nothing much for now.  Just look at this guy and go, hmm, now what could he be?  Besides a penis-headed robot.

Go ahead and consider me in.  What will I be using?

• Flash as my platform.  Flixel as a graphics helper library.  Custom Flixel that I will be using is available: FenFlixel
• My GWSlib for some common gameplay functions, such as A* and geometry manipulations and so on.
• Graphics:  Either Cosmigo’s ProMotion or Photoshop.
• Sound: Probably Flexi MusicGenerator or something like BXFR.
• Music: Unknown as of yet!

I have a good feeling about this LD. I missed the last one so I’m going to make up for it this time with extra awesomeness. It’s a 4-day weekend here in the UK, thanks to some guy getting married or something, so I’ll have extra time to get my environment, tools and libraries ready beforehand, maybe get some food in the fridge in preparation, etc. And on the Monday I’ll be able to do that jam thing that all the cool kids are doing these days. It’ll be fun to see how far the momentum takes me, post-deadline.

My toolset:

• nano – yeah I code in nano. Shut up.
• Myrmidon – a PyOpenGL-based 2D framework by Fiona
• pythonutils – a small collection of miscellaneous util functions I wrote
• py2exe – creates standalone Windows exe from a python program.
• Graphics Gale – still my favourite pixel editor for animation. Luckily it works reasonably in Wine
• The GIMP – open-source paint program
• Rosegarden – an open-source sequencer I’m still getting to grips with
• sfxr – MSPaint for sound
• Audacity – sound editor for cleaning up stuff
• PyCatcher – for making a timelapse. Fiona fixed it!
• Lots of paper – for brainstorming

And some rules I’m laying down for myself, to help avoid the mistakes of previous attempts at this:

• Prepare – I’m going to make sure I get enough sleep beforehand
• Keep it simple – I’m going to pick an idea that I believe I could make in half a day, and if I really have it done by then, I’ll give it some serious polish
• Don’t be clever – I’m not going to try too hard to be clever with the theme or to invent a whole new genre
• Suppress desire for clean code – I decided after the last competition that I would put less focus on code quality
• Make it fun – I’m going to put more focus on tweaking my gameplay until it plays well
• Make time for audio – I never get any sounds or music done. But this time will be different!

Hey. I’ve decided that for my game I might just go back to the roots of games like ZORK and Colossal Cave Adventure.

Expect hardcore getch() action!

Jack’s Back!

How convenient is that that LD20 rolls around just as a break appears in the Dark Acre development cycles? Uncanny, that.

Hoping to bring the improved levels of skills to craft a far better entry than the last one, but mostly just hoping to stay conscious and lucid enough to finish.

Bringing the usual suspects to bear:

• Unity 3D Pro.
• C# scripts programmed from scratch, same as before.
• CS5 Suite, mostly Illustrator/Photoshop.
• FL Studio 10 Producer Ed.
• Pixelplacement’s iTween
• The powers of darkness.

Looking forward to another weekend of madness and torture!
-
Dark Acre Jack

Anyone who has read some of my previous posts on here would know that I was going to make games for all the old LD themes. Well I’m still doing that! I have a vacation this next week-and-a-half-ish and I plan to get at least my LD0 catchup done. Now I agree that that’s not so much for 11 days but I’m not sure whether I’ll finish even that as there is practically a literal ton of work for me to do. Here are some of the things I plan to do this vacation (and I might be forgetting some):
- LD0 catchup
- study for my SATII English test (this will involve at least two practice tests and therefore at least 2 hours)
- study for the USAMO math exam (this will involve taking at least two old tests and therefore at least 18 hours)
- go to the Queens Hall of Science (at least 2 hours commuting + at least 1 hour there)
- write a small math paper
- do all my Homework
- visit some colleges
- clean my C drive and install all the stuff I want to have but don’t
- start learning to use Unity 3d, Python, and LaTeX (not necessarily in that order and with Mathematica as a much lower priority)
- there’s a very small chance that I will go back and make my miniLD24 game idea
- figure out a way to make music for the games
- read a large variety of books which I’ve had lined up for a while (i.e. Lord of the Rings, Elementary Geometry from an Advanced Standpoint, some physics book about non-Newtonian fluids, The World is Flat a Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, etc…)

As you see, I’ll be extra busy. And this extra-business will carry over well past the vacation. The two days after vacation is USAMO and the second is also college night at my school. This is not to mention that I have tests in a lot of my classes. And after working through USAMO, will I get some rest? Not until after LD 20! I have every intention of participating in that as well (but of course shit happens sometimes so I won’t be too disappointed if I don’t finish).

Anyway, that’s what’s going on in my world. So thanks for listening to (or rather reading) my rant, and if you have any suggestions for how to do some of the programming or sound stuff from the list above, please comment.

–
Mikhail Rudoy

I’m mega hardcore into Molehill (the new 3d Flash) and am considering using it for the upcoming Ludum Dare game jam. If I were to make a 3d game using Molehill for LD20, how many of you would be able to play it? You will need to be running the incubator build of flash 11, which you can get from here.

My most recent Molehill demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_BjV-R8W1A