Helkegames’ official website is now finished!
Finally, after LD #26, i made a website for HelkeGames, where i’ll post all my ludum dare entries and generally all my games or future projects!
Check it out now!

What can you do there?

In the website you can download and play my games and my Ludum Dare entries absolutely for free!
Also if you sign in, you’ll be able to write comments, to participate in discussions and actually you’ll get access to a lot of other functions (promotion to moderator, editor…).
So what are you still doing here? Sign in in for free now!

Note: the website is daily updated!

Link:

Helkegames’ official website

A bit late, but here’s the postmortem of our 3rd jam game together: Erase

Play and rate It here !

Foreword:

Sorry for the bad English, we are French.

Design vs Code :

The major problem with our team is that nobody has high knowledge in coding, the game designer has had to take on the programming task. In addition to making something in accordance with the subject, we had two limiting objectives.

The first one was to do something you can do. Obviously, the topic was an open door to an abstract gameplay. The problem is that even though we have the ability to imagine it, it was impossible to code it. We have chosen a simple base (a platform game) as the foundation of our game / topic interpretation. The platform game advantage is also that it’s known by all of us, and allows a rapid progression in the subject.

The second challenge was to make a game really Gamee. We don’t like things auto-claimed Indie in which players are completely inactive. We love indie games, but we love the game over all, and it’s important for us to produce something with a challenge to both brain and skill.

If the game is only a reflexive object, we don’t need to do it in video game (a card or board game is the same) which is why the address aspect is important for us, it’s a unique component of digital game. Conversely, if the game is just a skills game, it no longer carries the whole topic.

Theme :

Among the list of potential topics, Minimalist was the one we liked the least (more relevant to the compo than for the jam we think). A priori, minimalism is a trend to remove all of the work that isn’t necessary to the core idea in avoiding unnecessary emotional or sensitive element.

Quickly, we’re start on the idea of staging the iterative removal of unnecessary elements of the game. The idea was to realize a platform game composed of a series of little level /puzzle with several features and decorative elements that the players have to destroy in order to solve the riddle. However, it was easier to find the idea than to done it, and the concept of clean-up the asset at maximum curlicue was actually very difficult to achieve.

In addition, the theme interpretation makes sense when the game is done as a whole and when you arrive to the final level without assets, with few sounds and a character without features.

Realization:

The first night served to the basis codec implementation (the character and features, feature deletion, camera, collisions etc.). As we used Construct 2, this implementation was pretty fast. Meanwhile Mathilde and Alexandre were able to reflect the visual and audio aspect of the game.

Unfortunately, the game design work couldn’t be done quickly (efforts was concentrated on the code) and thus clear explanation of the game principle documents was missing, and therefore until the second day, the creation been difficult. Therefore the following days were more devoted to the creation of assets, levels and integration.

From a graphic design point of view, for a long time the results weren’t enough satisfactory and concepts were thrown away or converted without success. It was difficult to find a graphic charter in agreement with the theme, graphic and minimalist, which has evolved through the levels to represent the character life cycle and depending on the level design. For reasons of time constraint we had to start to make assets without being satisfied with the result and the guideline was found while the levels integration had already begun.

In the initial audio concept, was to form melodies which are decomposed over the levels outcome; however it was rather difficult to achieve an atmosphere both pleasant and minimalist. Communication between the sound aspect and the rest of the game for more than half the Ludum dare was almost nonexistent, which gave us a too late visibility of the total project, due to poor organization. Thus, inspired by Steve Reich on “Music for 18 musicians”, the audio is a music track that mix evolves through the levels. The sound integration hasty made at the Ludum Dare end, which didn’t allow us to do something up to our ambitions (a number of songs weren’t included).

From the game design point of view, there were a lot of things to balance without having the time to do it (notably find a compelling collision box for the triangle character). It was paramount for us that Character is pleasant to manipulate (as Easy-fun sense). It was important to gain momentum (especially the jump), and Dash feature inspired by Rockman X or Sonic in which the feature isn’t fundamental for finish the level but brings dynamism in control, the goal is to push the player to use the exhilarating but dangerous non-core features (the dash is required just in Level 4). But the fundamental interests of the number of features comes with the Erasing and self-Erasing feature. As a first step the player clears level elements to solve the riddle, but from level 5, player has to self-destruct its own features (Jump, Dash or Shoot) to finish the level which requiring a strategic choice in the level course.

Where we failed to use the self-destruct feature is because we don’t have enough levels to a slow difficulty progression and establish levels in which the destruction choice is a real dilemma. In other words the time devoted to the level design was too short and therefore the level is far below the potential that allows the erasing and self-erasing features combined with the three features.

Conclusion:

This is the 3rd jam that we did with the same team and we met some difficulties we had never encountered before such strangely more stress and lack of sleep than in GGJ for example. Nevertheless we are happy to have finished on time a version of our game, a game that far from being perfect, who despite the lack of polish, shows anyway few good ideas and quality realization.

What went right?

1. Mechanics coding: construct is a powerful tool for jam.
2. Graphics: Because lot of people congratulated Mathilde’s graphic design.
3. Game is realized in time (but with few bugs), and it looks nice.
4. The erasing and self-erasing mechanics could be used through lot of level, the idea could be developed with better (and harder) level design.

What went wrong ?

1. The theme was pretty hard for a team with a graphic designer and without a real coder.
2. Coordination on the theme interpretation
3. Resource integration time.
4. Graphic research, it was difficult to realize different assets for the different levels, keep a graphic style and represent the life evolution of the character with abstract shape.
5. Time devolved to Level design.
6. Not enough time to test.

This week has been hands off tragic for me with multiple parents having cancer, and an old friend dying… life is rough… Broken 1 has morphed into this project: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-tale-of-persephone-and-hades/x/2513003#share

And combines with this adult artbook: http://goingclassical.deviantart.com/

And more I cannot bear to write up. Stay tuned…

Preparation

There’s no real way of preparing for a Ludum Dare. The theme on which people make games on is only revealed once the event starts.

So, in the week leading upto LD, I focused on finalizing the tools I’ll be using. I had previously used GameMaker,XNA and Stencyl in varying measures but Unity had always been my ultimate target. Besides Unreal Engine, it is the only top-tier, professional-grade game engine available for hobbyists and indie developers.

Since I had never worked in Unity before, I set myself a task to atleast get a basic feel of its’ features. It was more difficult than I thought. It took me some time to wrap my head around its’ coordinate system, scripting of main camera, particle system and I had to even brush up some of the high-school physics and math concepts.

It was fun and challenging to learn but I knew the real challenge lay ahead.

Challenges Ahead

It was never going to be easy. In that very week, I had THREE back-to-back practical exams. So, I spent Wednesday,Thursday and Friday on them. Also on the day LD was going to start (with the announcement of the theme) I had to give my Senior Year project seminar in the college. So chances were that I was already going to start a good 8 hours later than everyone. Plus, I had a birthday lunch I was obligated to attend to on Sunday and I couldn’t excuse myself out of it.

It only got worse.  My Internet provider called up saying the maintenance of Internet would mean it would be down till Sunday morning. Just great. 

Basically, if I was planning to aim for the 48-hour deadline, I was already going to have to work with 10 hours less and without Internet to help me. Not a good start for things. I told myself that even if I wasn’t able to finish it, I’ll learn something.

With that positive mentality (hear O Pro-Life Preachers!) I went into the weekend.

Theme

When I woke up on Saturday morning, I immediately checked the site and found that the theme was “minimalism”. Since I had a project seminar in few hours, I had to get ready for that but I kept thinking about the theme and what ideas I could adopt into a proper game that is fairly unique but not too difficult to make.

Surprisingly by the time I reached my college at 9, I already had charted a rough concept and I wrote it down. By the time I was done with the project seminar (which was delayed no thanks to the lovely professors of our college) and I had returned home, it was 2. I took a short nap and began at 3.

Timeline

I had decided on a dynamic rhythm game with simplistic two-control scheme that had a rather deep underlying concept but absolutely no exposition.  Dynamic in the sense, the players could adjust difficulty of the game through their own actions. Create/destroy musical objects which repeat to form a pattern imitating one’s daily routine.

With the basic premise on paper, I began getting the setup ready. The LD’s “Compo” rules state that all the content — code,art and music needs to be made within those 48 hours. It took me a 4-hour sitting to get the engine set up exactly how I wanted for my game.

I then began coding the individual behaviour of the player “cube” and it was around 10, I could finally start working on the chief concept of the game — recycling objects. This required creating a custom module. Something which a newbie to Unity like me obviously suffered to do.

Unable to find solutions, I decided to plug in my MIDI keyboard and create some tunes in the meantime. A rhythm game needs to have some good tunes after all. I stuck with ambient music as the background soundscape as I felt it was minimalistic and sparse enough to suit the theme.

I used FL Studio for the beats. I really liked the simplistic interface and how easily one could mix. For the MIDI, I used the typical MAGIX Music Maker and stuck with the traditional play-record-mix-master technique to get the appropriate sounds. I liked how I could imitate sounds of a flute and of a violin using a low-pass filter applied onto lower keys of the keyboard.

While I was doing this, I was constantly trying to rack my mind to solve the issue  I was stuck on. It was around 3:30AM when the migraines started creeping in and I finally gave up for the night and went to sleep.

New Day, Late Beginnings

I had set my alarm at 6. I snoozed it.

When I next woke up, it was 7:30AM. Ugh.

Within 10 minutes, I was back to work. And tell you what, it took me just 10 minutes to crack the problem that was plaguing me for almost 4 hours last night. Just ten minutes.

Over the next three hours, I was on a roll speeding through the lost time last night. If this were the popular Kairosoft’s Game Dev Story, I would be a programmer “on fire”.

Unfortunately, my mean streak came to an end when I had to go for the birthday lunch. I came back at around 2PM and graciously avoided the comforts of an afternoon nap and set back to doing. I had been feeling weirdly confident since morning. As if, despite all the odds that had been stacked up against me, I was going to do it. At the same time, I was a little wary of being like a hare in the Hare and Tortoise and not getting too overconfident of where I was.

So, I continued working without a break. More tunes were created by 4PM, some of which were recorded live using my iPad and SoundCloud app on it.

Then I set aside everything to work on my primary weakness – art. I believe I have a decent visual aesthetic sense, but when it comes to creating them I’m no good. There’s this inherent phobia that drawing instills in me which seems to sap all the confidence I generally have for other things.

So, I got onto it. Using Inkscape and Photoshop, I created simple designs that described the type of instruments each track was imitating and keeping the color palette fairly simple.

I did not believe that minimalism = black & white. In my opinion, minimalism is something which conveys a deep concept through limited usage of aesthetics and exposition(if used in a narrative context).

So, as you can see the colours I used were a lot more vibrant than what most of the others used for their games.

It was about 8PM when I was done with art and sound. So, I started implementing them into the engine one by one. Surprisingly, art didn’t result in any obstacles. It was Unity’s sound design which gave me trouble as I couldn’t wrap my head around how I should use it to fit the purpose of my own game.

I tried to look up at the Internet.

Still no internet.

I was seeing visions of yesterday, where I was stuck on a problem and without help from the Unity forums, I wouldn’t be able to get past them. But somehow, a few workarounds later, the sounds worked pretty much like how I wanted. I guess that is an important aspect of design as well. “Trying to adapt things as much as possible”.

Late Run 

Around 10PM, I had this crazy idea. An idea that could certainly have a positive effect. Now, I despite this being my first time in any game jam, you need not tell me that even entertaining these ideas was basically signing a death certificate. Given the time constraints, you had to stick with the idea you had originally thought. I had managed to do it thus far — but this idea seemed too delicious to not implement it.

So,leaving all my scheduled plan for the game aside, I started focusing on this. It was not before 2AM when I had finally finished this. With the deadline date, just a mere 5 hours away, I decided I needed to wrap up ASAP.

So, as I was finally getting the win/lose conditions implemented, I realized something.

I had not even made the Main Menu.

Again chucking everything out of the window, I frantically set to making the Main Menu, the “How to Play” screen as well as the Win and Lose screens. This took art and some new scene scripting to implement but I finally did it.

The GUI needed tweaking, so I set on doing that.

It wasn’t until 6AM when I was finally done. But then I just recalled that I could make the background music vary according to different “phases of life” or the progress bar atop.

So, I spent another hour doing that. Then, almost frantically, I baked the native version (Windows) of it and quickly set about uploading it on Dropbox. It was just around 7:10AM (the deadline was 7:30AM) that I logged onto the Ludum Dare site and filled up the submission form, describing my game and uploading various screenshots.

I had made it on my first Ludum Dare. I had finished making my first “complete” game and that too within the 48-hour Compo deadline as I had initially aimed. Despite all those obstacles that the world threw at me, I managed to do it.

Post-Mortem

In retrospect, I am rather proud of myself. Not because of the game. But because of the dedication I never knew I had within me. I don’t recall ever waking up for the entire night for something I was working on. On occasions, when I have done that, I’ve done it if I was reading a really interesting novel (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle),watching a really interesting TV series(Twin Peaks) or playing an addicting game(too many to name).

But never for something related to work or even a hobby. Something where I wasn’t getting entertained. I lost motivation while developing a number of times before and this time I had plenty of opportunities where I could have table-flipped and just quit. But I didn’t. I stuck to my target and that makes me really proud of myself. This past year has been great for a number of reasons and I think I might have found another good reason for that.

What’s better is that the game has received some really good praise from fellow LD-ers and their comments both on the game page and my Twitter were really encouraging. Even the criticism has been helpful since I apparently had messed up on a number of small factors(resolutions on Web browser etc) but it’s all cool.

The best part besides finally having a “finished” game? THE MOTIVATION! I have loads of it now. I had heard people say how a finished game helps and now I am experiencing it first-hand. I’ve already made plans on reviving some of my older “ideas” and seeing if I could implement them. All while implementing some features I left out of the LD48 game due to the time constraints.

So expect to hear more of this “new” side of the old Ansh in the coming weeks.

Of course, here is the game page on the Ludum Dare site. Currently, I’ve managed to port it on all versions — Windows/Mac/Linux as well as Web through Unity without any major issues. I explain the underlying concept and the mechanics much better there. So,it’ll be better if I keep it simple here.

Any feedback is appreciated. I’m new to this and I’ll take any words — praise or criticism alike with a pinch of salt and take it as part of my learning process.

That is all for now.

–Ansh

EDIT: Indie Game Mag featured my game as their “Indie of the Day”

www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1

[Cross-posted from Omiya Games blog]

So much fun, chaotic, fresh and sweet.
-McFunkypants

Katarami + Cube + Original Design = WIN
-EdoMiyamoto

I love the music. I also love the reinvention of katamari. And the visuals are fantastic. By the time that I figured out what the game was about, i had a huge smile on my face.
-eteeski

There’s something to be said about a game that, within the first 3 hours of development, felt instantly magical. It’s one of those moment where you stop asking questions about the game, and instead just make it. Nothing could go wrong.

Usually, that feeling never lasts.

I’ve went to many Game Jams before: some 48 hours, some only 8 hours, some with team of up to 7, or as low as 1. Generally, in all of these cases, I’ve always felt like I had to compromise the vision to create a more popular game. I expected this when joining Ludum Dare for the first time. After all, I’m doing this alone. The lack of resource is a significant limiting factor.

The Sentient Cube was different. For one, I never felt limited by the tools I was given. Two, I never compromised with anyone else: it was just me. And three, making and playing the game remained fun even through the bug fixing phases. I can say with great confidence that this has been one of the best projects I’ve ever made in my Software Engineering career, and the comments above more than confirms it.

Without further ado, here’s the post mortem of The Sentient Cube, and how I made it happen:

What went right:

1. Being prepared.
   As mentioned earlier, I’ve been to enough Game Jams to know what to expect for this event.  The only real difference I felt this time was that I was going to work alone (I rarely do that).  Just in case, however, I did get in contact with MrPhil, and he helped address parts I may not have considered, including the food situation.
2. Having a schedule.
   My schedule was pretty simple: first 30 minutes is brainstorming, and the first day was to test an idea out.  Since this idea worked great, I went straight to developing more concrete features, using Fossil’s ticket tracker system to keep trackthem.  I aimed at submitting the game an hour earlier from the deadline, to have a decent chance at submitting the game before the site crashes, and decided to make any final touches the hour before.
3. Great tools.
   If there’s one thing I learned from Game Jams, it’s to take as many shortcuts as possible.  Unity, Garage Band, Photoshop, and others greatly helped this capability.  Additionally, the Fossil ticket tracker proved to be a great device to prioritize which tasks were more important, such as the tutorial, score-keeping, and so forth.
4. Minimal modelling and texturing.
   I love cel-shading, from an artistic perspective (yay, Windwaker!). Both this theme (minimalism) and Unity’s toon shader gave me a great excuse to spend the minimal amount of effort modelling and texturing. Add that with the edge-detecting post image effect, and you’ve got a masterpiece! I further minimized the work by generating the object’s color random, and automatically calculating each object’s size on loading each level.
5. Starting with the third level.
   In what seems like a counter-intuitive decision, I made the second level first.  This was a tip I took from the famed Mario creator, Miyamoto Shigeru-san (sorry, I’m Japanese.  I have to be extra formal to this legend!), and it worked wonders.  By creating the later levels first, I got a brilliant insight at Katamari Damacy‘s level design (an article I may write later), which helped plan how to create the first tutorial level.  With the exception of Credits, the rest of the levels came very easily.

What went wrong:

1. Realizing I forgot to put the splash icon, and spending an hour on it.
   It was a complete waste of time for an inconvenience on the player. Worse, I attempted to fix this in the last 2 hours, and realized it wasn’t worth it.
2. Tunnel vision: the controls.
   The biggest complaints I received were the controls and the floaty physics. The thing was, I knew I had this problem, and never bothered to fix it. For some reason, I didn’t think it was as important, which in hindsight was ridiculous! First rule of game design: a game is not fun until it’s playable.
3. The scoreboard.
   I realized after playing other people’s games that during judging, the scores and replayability of your games aren’t all that important. All judges expect the game to be playable within 5 minutes, so they wouldn’t be too concerned about the longevity of the game. Programming stats tracking takes quite a bit of time, so I felt I wasted a lot of time on a feature very few people would be concerned with.
4. Live-streaming with webcam.
   I deliberately keep myself as transparent to the internet as possible. Using my real name as the display name on the Ludum Dare’s website is part of this. But even I have my limits in privacy, and in this case, the webcam portion of the live-streaming really went over the edge. I failed to realize until too late that you can actually see me washing the laundry, cooking food, eating, and other aspects of my life I’d rather not reveal so openly. I think the live streaming is great, but on the next event, it won’t be with the webcam (only microphone).
5. Timelaps fail.
   I didn’t have much hard drive space left on my dev computer, so I timelapsed every 10 minutes. Terrible idea: the resulting video just flashed meaninglessly. This is hilarious in hindsight, because I had 2 external hard drives available with plenty of GB to spare.
6. No Linux export.
   I am so very, very sorry. Signed, Arch Linux user.

What will I do next:
I’m a busy guy, so the short answer is improving on games I was already working on long before Ludum Dare. In all seriousness, though, I will revisit this game. For one, it opened my eyes on what it’s like to produce the game online for free, and this was extremely gratifying. I’ve been eyeing on Kongregate and GameJolt, so I’ll probably start working on the game to make it compatible to such sites. It’s been stated by my colleagues that the game must distinguish itself from Katamari more, so I’ll be strategizing on that while covering all the other stated complaints. Lastly, I’ll probably learn Garage Band a little more to compose better music.

Interested? Try The Sentient Cube here, and please rate the game!

Please join me today on my stream for the follow up around 6:30 pm PST (-8 GMT) on 5/1/2013 an hour and half from now.

I will play your Ludum Dare game or one requested, just as I did during previous Relax Streams and follow up during next day.

Just a quick post to let Ludum Dare raters and reviewers know about Ludum Legacy, a twitter bot set up to post one LD48 game every hour. There are so many games, this takes us into August – the time of the next Ludum Dare!

Follow Ludum Legacy here!

Well done for a great LD as usual. See you in August

Please join today on my stream now.

It’s time to play your LD games live or request to play other LD games.

Please join me today on my stream around 6 pm PST (-8 GMT) on 4/30/2013 (about three hours from now).

I will play your Ludum Dare game or one requested, just as I did during previous relax streams.

Thought I should write a small post that will help people understand the theme/logic of my #LD48 entry
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=rate&uid=21211

The game by itself is intentionally not self-explanatory.
I see couple of people getting back to me trying to reason about some design “suggestions” … some were really good, and then some made me feel that people are thinking in a quite different direction / not thinking at all.

So here’s what I’ll do mysteriously help all confused gamers

Explaining some design with FAQs.

Q1. The game doesn’t have much controls and is confusing.

Did I forget to mention tough choices?
No I didn’t.

A1. Meant to be so. The theme was “minimalism”
When I thought of the game design, I thought of vagueness and scope for making people think when they play the game. Everything converges when scores are shown.
Yes, I could have made a big 5 stage coin collecting platformer, but that’ll be out of theme and nothing new to experiment.

Q2. I did not select the Red Girl but I still got % on perverted scores

It’s not wrong to be attracted to sexy dressed girls, now is it?

A2. Those are just one of the places where I want people to think. On a second thought, you should be thinking all throughout the game.
I was kinda serious when I wrote this in game description.
“You are supposed to make “choices”, which sometimes are difficult than a “RedPill vs BluePill” question in real life! ”

So here’s my question to you, WHY do you think choosing the red dress girl would mark you as a pervert, but the purple dressed girl will not?
What is wrong you are attracted to skinner/sexily dressed girls? Is it really wrong?  It’s a choice and a personal preference IMHO.
The girl in red dress could be a very kind and good human, while the girl in purple dress could be shady. Who knows?

These are not meaningless messages friend.

The other problem here is people are trying to “assume” some stuff about the algorithm behind it but are fixing their thoughts to a linear assumption.
The algo is complex.. it considers stuff from real world.  What could be an act of kindness in a particular level, will be a goofy choice in another.

So “Think”.

Q3. The sounds are too loud
A3.  Yeah I’m terribly sorry about that. My bad.
Laptop speakers aren’t that great.. although I  tested my sounds at 100% volume while mixing.. I still hear less
Point noted and will remember that for my next game. Thank you

Q4. Any tips on how to play the game?  In other words how do I fake it to make scores look clean.

What game?

A4. I am not going to tip anyone on how to fake it , but yes I can help to reach a point where you can make ‘clearer’ decision on whether to fake it or stick real.
Here’s my mysterious way of helping you guys.. remember 3 things while playing the game
1. Watch the level “name”
2. Level ‘name’ is a ‘situation’/'time’.
Evaluate the both choices along with the level name.  It’s not just about choice1 vs choice 2 .. its choice 1 vs choice2 vs levelname.
3. Think a lot.. get real life decisions as examples to help yourself .

I’d be happy to answer any other queries you might have.
Please leave your valued suggestions in comments

For now, I’m gonna go and play games of other participants and earn some more knowledge.
Signing out.

Im very happy
I have finished my game.

-Chickens
-Dungeons
-Goblins
-Monsters
-Bosses
-Adventures!

I hope you enjoy!
Thx a lot for playing

So today I posted my first entry into a Ludum Dare competition ever. How fun!  The result is Euphoria. The first thing that jumped into my mind when I heard minimalism was visuals, clean and crisp. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try make a good looking game.

So let me talk about the game before you get too bored by all this visuals talk. It is a short story about a child that gets hit be a car. While the child’s soul is trying to come to peace, you gain memories as to their final moments. Many memories of which have parallels with what the child is experiencing.

For any decent gamer who gets annoyed at the symbolism do not worry, there are puzzles. Once collected an orb, the player can “phase shift” switching between two realities in the spirit world making for a few interesting puzzles.

I couldn’t have been happier with the final product and hope to get some feed back from some of the best indie developers out there. Good luck to the rest of you!

Finally after about 30 hours of programming and a lot of coffees (and potato ^.^ ), Earth Defender is done!
Check it out!

For more news and download  Click here!

Hi all!

This is my 1st time doing the Ludum Dare, and I’m working in (read: actively learning) Unity. Although I could have pumped out a text adventure, with the theme I wanted to focus on environmental storytelling. There’s a conflict tomorrow, but I’m hoping to have at least all of the narrative pieces in to explore before then.

I’ve checked in several times, and have been blown away with everyone else’s progress! Truth be told, I was a little worried that I was back in grade school and not doing the assignment correctly. If you feel at all like me, don’t worry! You’ll do awesome!

All The Best,

-Greg

Tiny Hut Games

Here’s some of what I’ve got so far:

Crash Landing

Error Code

Hello,

Last time was a while ago, and I won’t have the whole week end, but I’m in !

I will use Unity3D and whatever is necessary for graphics and music for a guy that is neither a graphist nor a musician

I’ve updated the dead line countdown for the occasion in the unity asset store (totally free tool) :

Chrono Egg v1.1 : http://u3d.as/content/equilibre-games/chrono-egg/2wn

Et si tu parles français, viens sur le canal IRC #ludumdare-fr sur irc.afternet.org que l’on partage tout ça ensemble

My first ludum dare !

Hello all , I’m a french guy , I have seventeen and this is my first participation for the ludum dare !

During this ludum dare I’m going to use Game Maker for programming and GIMP/Paint for all the graphism and maybe FL Studio for music .

You can watch my stream here : http://fr.twitch.tv/cotontoudoux/videos

My first Ludum Dare, and if I succeed, it’ll be my first game.

Engine: Unity3D (using the Web Player)

Language: C#

IDE: Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express

Sound: BFXR

Music: LMMS (if I have time)

Art: Microsoft Paint and maybe GIMP for transparency (or for when MS Paint annoys me too much)

Misc.: I will also be using some personal code that I’ve built up over the months of never finishing a game.  This includes miscellaneous functions in my ‘Toolkit’, and my ‘Environment Editor’, which is a simple, dirty 2D level editor I’m whipping up before Ludum Dare starts.

I think it’s OK to plug my stuff now:

My new blog (pretty much brand new)

My Google+ if you want to talk or become pals

• Libgdx (Java)
• GIMP
• Eclipse
• Sfxr

Glad I can do HTML5 port now, which means I step on 5 zones now! (Please Santa, give me a Mac this year)

I don’t know what engine I’ll be using yet but I’m already honing my skills in preparation this time!

Probable Engine: Twine, Ren’Py, Construct, GameMaker

Audio: Audacity, Goldwave, Ableton Live

Writing: Notepad, SciTE

Art: Traditional watercolor, fractals, 3D from Zbrush, Photoshop, Paint Tool SAI, Artrage

I’ll be kicking butt and taking names!

We’re also hosting an IRL meetup! http://www.meetup.com/East-Coast-Artists-Guild-S3-Branch/events/114543632/

You can follow me later here: http://artwithoutprediction.tumblr.com/