Hi guys,

22 days into October challenge, and here is an update on the current version of Vox. Version v0.19 has just been released on Desura and IndieDB, so I thought I would share a post on here to list some of the new features and updates to Vox.

http://www.desura.com/games/Vox
http://www.indiedb.com/games/vox

Here are the newest features:

• More Enemies in the world.
• Flying enemies.
• Skeleton archers shoot you from a distance.
• Skelebobs chase you and try to kill your with their deadly swords.
• King Slime boss spawns when you kill too many of his little slime buddies.
• Interactable NPCs.
• NPC movement behaviours – waypoints, world navigation and player follow.
• Questing system.
• Treasure chests.
• Signposts.
• Particle editor in the game.
• Particle effects can be added to character parts. i.e head, body, feet, etc.
• particle effects can be added to created weapons and items.
• Undo feature added to creation mode.
• Much better character creation screen in front-end menu.
• Ore deposits that can be mined for ore.
• Collectable items (hearts, coins, ore).
• Damage text popups.
• Improved HUD graphics.
• Experience bar and leveling up.
• Gradient background and better sky rendering.
• Clouds.
• Better intro animation.
• New custom frontend music and game music.
• Smoother mouse controls.
• X360 gamepad support.

Here are some recent videos demonstrating new gameplay:

Gameplay 1 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnTiGdZay4s

Gameplay 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfU-07RV-VY

New Intro – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq6bR9-OmZU

There is a free version to download and test and I would really appreciate it if people would be willing to try this and maybe provide some feedback. As always I am really curious to hear peoples opinions and suggestions. I really like player feedback and love to hear what people’s opinions are (Unless of course they are just the 500th person to state that Vox looks similar to Minecraft or CW ).

Thanks.
AlwaysGeeky

So after just over two years of development, a beta of my continued expansion of one of my LD entries from nearly three years ago was finally released for sale (buy now, get it cheaper and updates and a copy when it’s done) It’s been such a long time! Here’s a few screenshots from the game:

And some video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59ZOFFUIe1I

It’s been a long process, with a bunch of stuff detailed in my blog (http://magicbane.tumblr.com/) and I’ll be happy when the game is completed and I have all the experiences associated with developing and releasing my own game

That, and the fact TWL has been in development since the first October Challenge, I guess third time really is the charm

If you want to purchase the preview, you can get it via my Sellbox link!

I can’t believe that in the first LD, and the second game I’ve ever written I managed to make it into the top 10 for a category! Not only any category but theme, from the looks of things it is an area that a majority of people work very hard to make a game that fits the theme. I was also please my result of 100th for innovation and for other areas it was what I expected around the 200 mark (there were 400 entries into the jam so they were very average scores) .

Play it here!

I’ve had a fantastic time, learning a new language, object orientation and how to quickly generate an achievable if ambitious goal.  I am very please with the community and the mature approach to constructive criticism.  I’ve had great fun playing, rating and reviewing games (I made sure to comment on each and every rating I made).

I’ve learnt a lot, pleased to have actually taken part at last, even more pleased by my results. I’ll see you all in December!

Rusty Moyher here. I’ve participated before in Ludum Dare, but Super Clew Land is my first experience entering the Jam or working with Shaun Inman and Matt Grimm. After this roller coaster weekend, I know I’ll be doing both again.

A week before Ludum Dare, I asked Shaun if he wanted to make a Jam game. He was interested, but concerned how we’d break up responsibilities. Shaun and I are do-it-all guys, so we didn’t know of a good way to split the work. We decided to sleep on it. (Which actually meant not making a decision until the last minute.)

Day 0

We met up on Skype an hour before the jam to finalize plans and workflow. Before splitting responsibilities we’d wait to hear the theme. Shaun had worked with Matt before and we sent him a Twitter DM in hopes he’d join us.

At 9pm EST we received the theme: Evolution. We came up with a dozen bizarre ideas including a colored vine puzzle game that the player would grow through to proceed. After four hours of brainstorming both of us were wearing thin. We almost slept on it (again), but finally chose the idea we’d spent the most time fleshing out: an evolving Metroidvanian puzzle double-game.

Imagine a split-screen or Nintendo DS double view. Players would encounter a platforming world above and unlock new abilities in a top-down gene sorting game below. Even as we shrunk the gene sorting into a HUD minigame, the idea seemed ambitious for 72 hours.

List of evolved abilities

To make the creation manageable, we made a last minute framework switch. Shaun and I were both eager to try out Futile, a new 2D Unity framework. But the scope of our idea required tile map support. Rather than trying to roll our own for Futile, we chose a framework more familiar: Flixel.

We also (finally) decided on the responsibility split. Shaun would design and I would develop, but we’d switch things up as needed. We heard back from Matt too. He would do music and sound. 8-bit Voltron was formed.

Shaun came up with our hero’s name, Clew, before heading to bed. It wasn’t as late for me in California, so I spent my last four hours awake setting up platforming physics and a TMX level loader.

Day 1

I woke up to find over a dozen animations in our shared Dropbox folder.

Hizzah! Clew was real.

I started building the “Protein Puck” minigame as Shaun drew food and enemies. Shaun and I communicated almost entirely through FaceTime on our iPads. (He found it useful during a previous collaboration.) This made it easy to bounce new ideas around while working. By using our iPads as dedicated video devices, we never had to manage a floating iChat window. It was so helpful we left the stream open throughout the entire jam.

By the end of the day we had most of the character animations done, a pretty-much-working minigame and an fun retro soundtrack from Matt.

Recombination MP3

Day 2

All three of us live in different timeszones, but by the second day this seemed like a plus:

Working with a dev in another timezone is awesome. Go to bed with an idea, wake up to a working implementation. Could get used to this.

As Shaun finished up animations and wrote the Flixel animation timing, I started implementing the player, food and enemies. Halfway through the day Shaun switched to code and implemented autotiling to make world building faster. About this time I started adding Matt’s sound effects.

Puck Match MP3

Puck Poof MP3

Death MP3

When the autotiling was ready, Shaun started building the world in Tiled. The pieces were coming together, but a mountain of polish remained. As the day grew long we came to an unspoken understanding: there would be no sleep tonight.

Day 3 (I think)

While the sun rose, I squeezed in a few good playtest sessions. Shaun programmed the enemy pathing behavior and then kicked level design into high gear. Matt had to leave for his day job, but was able to write a few final sound effects in his off hours.

Nearing the end of the Jam, we we’re all exhausted. At some point I took a shower to try to clear my head. Picking the game’s name took near an hour, but this was mainly due to our exhaustion. In the last thirty minutes we added a title, an ending, and Matt’s final piece of music. And….submit!

Epilogue

Working with Shaun and Matt was a blast. Each Ludum Dare I’ve participated in has been more rewarding than the last. I’m not sure I can stop now.

We’re all pretty happy with what we pulled off in three days. If you haven’t checked out Super Clew Land yet, what are you waiting for? Go play it now!

Cheers,
-Rusty

Play it HERE!

ZEIK

Zeik here, the code half of Cake&Code. This being our second Ludum Dare I had a vague idea of the kind of stuff we’d run into and knew that time was going to be unforgiving yet again. This time we did not do a warm-up game but I was messing around in flash days in advance to get back into fighting spirit!

What went right:
- I knew I was going to use Flash and had FlashDevelop all ready to go with a vanilla copy of FlashPunk at hand
- This time around I downloaded Chronolapse and it worked flawlessly to document the days
- We knew that we wanted some more unique music so we had a library of tools available before starting the jam this time
- Despite having work on Monday, we managed to finish at around 5:30am that morning
- Within the first hour or two we had a vision for a game, that vision became AvRvE
- Creating the isometric engine was not as difficult as it might have been, everything seemed to fall into place as I wrote it and extending it was easy enough

What went wrong:
- Though we learned last time that sounds take a lot of time to find/make/integrate we still ran out of time to find well-suited sounds to fill in the gaps in the game
- No tutorial level meant that the levels themselves had to ease players into the gameplay, this turned out to be a bigger challenge than I expected
- The preloader turned out to be a huge problem until I realized that by assigning a value to one of my main class’s static variables from inside the preloader code I was forcing the load of all the assets before the preloader could display, after removing that assignment everything worked flawlessly
- Feature creep, as always, seemed to come from every direction; I built an overly robust level loading system, an interaction halting animation scheme, and was even planning on adding more items

What I learned:
- Sounds still take us forever to do, there have been no revolutionary advances since LD23
- Music is fun to edit, but takes forever just like sound editing does
- A weekend game jam is not the time to implement every feature that comes to mind
- Layering sprites for proper render order is not something to procrastinate on, get it done right and get it done as early as possible

Finally, I just wanted to extend a congratulations to all the participants! We’ve been rating your games and even though we’ve only scratched the surface it’s already been a wild ride, full of great experiences. Pat yourselves on the back, then give each other high-fives! Hope to see you all next LD.

CAKE

Wow, FINALLY Zeik and I have the time to sit down and write our post-mortems. To be honest, it’s been a crazy whirlwind of activity for me since LD#24 wrapped up, so neither of us have had the time to really sit down and work out our thoughts on AvRvE. Well now that I had a little more time to mull about it, I think it’s about time I crunched out these thoughts!

What Went Right?
- I struggled to find the right art direction for this game. The initial mockups for the game looked a lot like Pow! Pow! Pow! until I decided to just go all out dark. It was colorful and had great visual impact, just as I intended it to.
- I’m a designer by nature, not a digital artist. This time around I actually had to sit down and draw all of our species out, as well as our character from different perspectives. For someone who typically doesnt do digital illustrations, I think I did alright.
- Having the multiple endings was fun! And I’m glad we went with a puzzle route this time around.
- I ate a lot better this weekend than I did the first LD we did. Granted, it still wasn’t GOOD, but I went out of my way to actually prepare food more often than not. I snacked a bit much though.

What Went Wrong?
- I had company over for a chunk of the weekend. It really decreased my producitivity and I found myself having to multitask working, communicating with Zeik, and keeping my friend occupied.
- Despite the fact I’m really happy with out the game’s aesthetic and look came out, I feel like it lacked the kind of detailing that Pow! Pow! Pow! had.
- Level designing was something I was already not great at. But designing puzzle levels? Yeesh. :\ Zeik took a hold of it for the most part.
- SCHOOL!!! Ludum Dare happened on the weekend right after school started. Seems like it’d be an easy workload right? NOPE. Grad school is kicking me in the butt and threw a lot of work my way. So I was even more busy that weekend than I wanted to be.

Things I Learned for the next LD:
- FREE UP MY WEEKEND. Make sure I don’t have any work in the way and that I don’t have any unexpected guests.
- Get BETTER food. I ate well this time, but there was a lot more room for healthier and energy-packed snacks. Also…less coffee plz.
- Do more art research and experiment with styles. I don’t want to look like a one-tricky pony, so I’m going to experiment with more in-depth illustration styles.

And of course, congrats to those that finished!

Introduction and special thanks

This was my first LD, and I came here fully expecting to faceplant from over-ambition or poor time management. But I submitted my puzzle game, ‘Additive’, polished and complete with hours to spare. It’s the first complete game I’ve ever done, and it’s gotten more positive feedback than I had dared to dream, and the process of making it shoulder-to-shoulder with all you other fine people (especially on IRC) was awesome.

Before I start the post-mortem, I want to thank ‘Cake’ from IRC for giving me a quick pep talk around six hours into the compo, when I was feeling particularly unprepared. I also want to thank all of the IRCers who complained that my first release candidate was too cryptic, and especially ‘Tau’, who played through the entire thing and deliberately found ways to break it. My game would be half of what it is without such playtesting. On with the post-mortem!

Part 1: The pre-feedback post-mortem

This is actually the second post-mortem I’ve written for Additive. The first one, written immediately after submission and before voting opened, can be found here. Its salient points are:

What went great

• I knew my strengths and weaknesses at the start of the competition, and this guided me towards reasonable ideas and goals.
• Making a puzzle game was a great decision because the very nature of a puzzle game works against feature creep.
• I used a notebook to organise myself and work through problems.
• I set some time aside to brainstorm ideas.
• I developed a quick way to make levels, which was more efficient and accessible than building the game board in Unity’s editor.
• I avoided crashes by limiting sugar and caffeine intake.

What went poorly

• It was very difficult to design puzzles.
• The game is not colorblind-friendly because I had a hard time letting go of the aesthetic I had developed. This is not the kind of developer I want to be!
• I didn’t have enough time to deepen the game’s mechanics.

Part 2: The post-feedback post-mortem

 More things that went great

• I decided on a feature lock after the first day. By the end of the first day I had a working game. The second day was dedicated solely to polish and level creation: no gameplay changes allowed.
• I did early testing. Sticking the game up on my Facebook delivered exactly zero constructive criticism. Posting the game on IRC for fellow devs to play got me immediate blow-by-blow feedback, and my time budgeting on Day 2 allowed me to work on every single one of the issues that were raised.
• I put a lot of effort into visual player feedback. I changed the buttons on the main menu at the last minute to make them look more buttony and clickable. There’s a nice marker to indicate the selected block. The marker and the selected block pulse with color. Blocks animate towards their new positions instead of just teleporting over.
• I spent even more time on aural feedback. When you click on a block, it makes a sound. Deselecting a block makes a different sound. You get a different sound again when you try to make an invalid move. When blocks combine, the sound they make depends on the outcome. Sound makes a game feel alive and reactive. Skimp on graphics before you skimp on sound.
• I think I picked a fairly cohesive style. The game is an exercise in minimalism (like I said in Part 1, I knew I was bad at art). Its presentation was informed by the effect of parenting a spotlight to the camera and tilting the camera 45° towards a plane. I felt that an understated look deserved an understated and elegant sound, so I used single piano notes in GarageBand iOS for sound effects. The game would have been a dissonant mess if I had used SFXr.
• Having the tutorial levels was a good idea. It gave me the opportunity to dress the game up with prose, and it also communicated the essence of the game efficiently and enjoyably. It became even better when I added explicit instructions on suggestion from the IRC testers.

The only other thing I can think of that went poorly

• The black squares imbalanced the game. It was intentional that you’d be able to walk the black squares around in the last level, gobbling everything up with wild abandon. I didn’t know that this was possible in the other levels, and the game’s difficulty suffered as a result. Some of the levels have black squares adjacent to each other because I was actively trying to avoid this exploit. If you poke through my timelapse and my source code, you’ll see that I actually did have other ideas for color combinations and win conditions (some of them were actually suggested by players in the game’s comments), but I knew that the game was already pretty good with black squares as they are, and I had no time to change the mechanic and playtest it to my satisfaction.

In all, I’m incredibly proud of what I made. It turned out far better than I expected, and the experience is invaluable. I am already feeling the itch for some rapid prototyping, so you know I’m going to be back in December. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to play Additive if you haven’t already!

A surprise for you, dearest reader!

I’ve uploaded pictures of the dev notebook entries I made during LD24 to Additive‘s page on my website. It starts the day before LD, and ends with the list of things I wanted to address in this post-mortem.

Instead of a postmortem I wish to provide a journal of my thoughts and actions during this Ludum Dare. One of the things I like about Ludum Dare is watching other people’s creative process in action through their blog entries. Unfortunately I was too involved in my own creative process to blog about it during the event. So I am writing this after the fact, using my best recollection of the events. I felt I had a pretty successful Ludum Dare and want to share what I think made it successful.

Edit I just realized that this post takes up a huge ammount of screen space. Probably because it is an almost hour by hour account of my actions during this Ludum Dare. I have copied the main text to my webpage, here is a link:

http://www.monkeydev.com/unity/ld24/devlog.htm

Hi people,

Just wanted to let you know that I have put Vox on the Steam Greenlight process.

http://www.steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92967555

What was originally started as an entry into the Ludum Dare competition a number of months ago, during the april competition, is now being made into a full ambitious game!

Would really appreciate it if you could visit the game page and hopefully show your support (favorite and rate up) and this would make me very very happy indeed, and I would be forever indebted to you!

As always if you want to follow my voxel engine tutorials or articles, they can still be found at the site:

https://sites.google.com/site/letsmakeavoxelengine/

I am happy to hear any feedback you guys have, or answer any questions you might want to ask.

Thanks!

AlwaysGeeky

So, for our first Ludum Dare ever me and Regus made The Joining, a centrally hosted 2D shooter MMO. Against all expectations, including my own, we made a relatively complete game by jam’s end. Unfortunately a 3-day-mmo is kind of like 5-minute-cake, a cool idea, worth doing to be able to say it’s doable, but the end result is infinitely less satisfying than what you’d get if you put the proper amount of time in. While running around pewpewing evil robots is fun, a lack of players and general aim and finetuning makes it only playable for 5-10 minutes before boredom sets in.

What went right

• We knew our tools. Despite the fact that XNA isn’t the best thing to use to get a lot of people to play your LD game, we decided to stick with what we knew in order to finish in time.
• Teaming up with Regus was extremely enjoyable, we’ve known each other going on I don’t know, a decade and a half now, but we’ve never made a game together. Working together was great, we had complimenting skillsets and we didn’t step on each others toes or had to wait for the other to finish to continue working.
• I’m mostly pleased with the pixel art I did. Pixel art is something I consider myself good at but I rarely get to do it anymore. Being able to do some again was very nice.
• The game is pretty well feature complete and stable. Our code design was mostly to thank for that, until the last day when cleanliness kind of went out the window and some of my rendering functions turned to spaghetti.
• We made an MMO, complete with combat, enemy AI, A* pathfinding and a neat sort of “level up” system. In three frickin’ days. How awesome is that? Worth it just to say we did it.
• I got to remind myself that even if your art and particle effects are only 50% as awesome as you want, it’s still a more satisfying experience to have a bunch of half-awesome stuff and a more complete experience, then an incomplete number of perfect things. The perfectionist in me needed this reminder.

What went wrong

• No music. I’m bad at music and didn’t have the tools or time to modify even an autotracker song. I subbed in ambient sounds instead and it works okay, but not the way I wanted.
• We didn’t actually have time to add some features that would’ve given the game a goal, like a boss at the center, better tuned distribution of enemies, and a global win/lose condition like we planned.
• The game wound up being not very fun. See my opening paragraph for thoughts about that.
• I felt kind of sick after the third day cause I pushed myself so hard and my sleeping patterns are completely shot now.

Overall a lot of things went right, far more than went wrong. Our first LD experience was enjoyable, and taught me some valuable lessons, or rather reminded me of them. And it was a chance to do a few things I don’t normally get to do, like make an MMO and work on pixel art. I consider it a win, even if I doubt our game will be getting top ratings.

We probably won’t work on the game for a post-compo version, I think. Nobody’s asked us to, which is a pretty good sign that it’s not actually wanted. Comment if you think we should, though. I’m tagging this SuccessStory even though the end result is lackluster, because… well, 3 day frickin’ MMO man.

Eniko, signing out.

I had a great time this Ludum Dare. The theme threw me for a bit of a loop, like I’m sure it did to a lot of people, and I wasn’t sure I could commit to the weekend like I did last compo but I knew it would be fun so I was in. Plus, even if I didn’t succeed it would still be a learning experience, and who couldn’t use more of those?

THINGS I WISH I HAD OR KNEW BEFORE HAND

I had a lot more knowledge coming into this ludum dare about what was possible in the time frame and what was going to eat up most of my time. My first LD entry I did in flash punk, and while I liked it I thought I would try something different and went with Construct 2 this time which is a great engine for fast prototyping. I think I would have liked using FlashPunk again but I need to sit down when I’m not in the middle of a compo and actually design a generic engine on top of it to make LD faster.

I wish I had a better way to do graphics. Right now I’m creating all my pixel art in Pixel Editor for android on my Asus Transformer and while it’s not bad, I’m a pretty bad artist and I need something that will allow me to make better looking art, even if its simple looking, faster. Although, I am getting faster at creating pixel art in the editor, I wouldn’t even know how to start animating them.

THINGS THAT WENT RIGHT

First, I knew when the theme was announced that Ididn’t want to create a game based on cells, or bacteria, or mutation. I figured those ideas would be beaten like a genetically altered dna consuming deceased horse. So I thought about evolution and what we where doing and came up with the idea for an evolving game, and even better, showing the evolution of classic arcade games. I think it turned out really well, especially near the end when I came up with the idea to go one step further and create a new game from the elements of all the previous games.

Construct 2 was an awesome choice for an engine. I never felt rushed, it did everything I wanted and I generally enjoyed using it.

SFXR, again for making arcade sounds easy. I was even able to make sounds I think closely resembled the arcade originals in a lot of cases.

Pixel Art Editor for Android, it’s free and is a great simple pixel art editor. It’s what I made every graphic in the game with except the Start and Replay buttons.

Having fun, because that’s what its all about, right?

IN CLOSING

Ludum Dare is awesome and I am glad I got to participate again. I’m glad I was able to finish my entry and I am happy with how it turned out. Please check it out! Especially if you like classic arcade games.

I reproduced 4 classic arcade games, evolving one into the other and finally evolving them all into a brand new game.

Congrats to everyone who finished a game today for LD24!

I crashed and burned early this time round…

On a positive note, though, I just found out that my LD22 entry, “Quiet, Please!” went live tonight in the iOS App Store.

If you look back at my journal history, you can see the evolution of “Quiet, Please!” from the initial Ludum Dare entry, to the post-compo version, to an Xbox Indie Games release and then to Android.

I want to encourage people who have created games in the last 48 hours to not just leave it at that.

Put some more work in. Expand the game. Polish it. Release it to a wider audience.

You might just find that there is an audience for your game outside of the Ludum Dare community.

Making a game in 48 hours is hard – so if you do end up coming out of it with a game on your hands, considering moving forward with it.

Hey guys,

So one day, I thought, “What could make this game better? What could make it more fun?” The simple answer, of course, was multiplayer. What’s more fun than playing a game with your friends? However, multiplayer in Unity is harder than you think. After several failed attempts, I watched a few simple tutorials, and finally came up with a working… thing. Not really even an alpha… Anyways here it is at it’s ugliest:

Since then, I’ve added tons of stuff, fixed over one HUNDRED glitches, and added a lot of simple features! (Such as Chat, Ragdolls, etc)

I’ll cover the latest update in a new video hopefully posted sometime this week. But for now, Update 1 is here. I hope to continue this update series like Overgrowth Alpha update series, so check back on DontBeNoobish and RobProductions channels for the fastest way to hear about them.

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare <3

Here are a few videos I put together showing progress of my game Vox…

http://www.facebook.com/VoxGame

This is a direct continuation of the voxel engine/game that I made for Ludum Dare #23.

Hope you like… feel free to ask me any questions or comments yo might have?

Alwaysgeeky

The official trailer for Isolated Assault 2 is here!

PLAY THE DEMO HERE

DontBeNoobish recently asked for an exclusive look at the game so far, so I gave it to him! <3

His gameplay video is now up, check it out, and don’t forget to Subscribe to him!

SOUNDCLOUD: http://soundcloud.com/robproductions-1

Game should be coming… soon. I hate to go Gabe Newell on you guys, but really there’s still a lot to do!

I’ll keep you posted, have a good one! <3

It’s screenshot Saturday and I thought I’d share this with the Ludum Dare folks:

I’ve been making some variations to some of the cubes to add some… variation. The stronger cubes will be less rare as the game progresses. And I’m currently on level 4… Which means I’ve only completed 1 level since the demo… sorry guys! :/

Looks like now I don’t want to release another level unless it really stands out. But keep checking for updates and previews – the full game will be a blast!

So I recently added water to my voxel engine and have been playing around with it…. one thing I have found out is that water is sooo much fun to code, it’s tricky to get a decent simulation and hard to get something that is stable and looks nice, but once you make something you are pleased with, you just wanna play around with it so much!

At this rate I might have a full voxel engine ready by the time the next LD competition drops… be able to spend the full 48 hours on actual gameplay and making a game to suit the theme…. that should be fun.

Here is the link to my article/guide/tutorial site for voxel engine resources:
https://sites.google.com/site/letsmakeavoxelengine/

AlwaysGeeky

“Quiet, Please!”, the game that grew out of my LD22 entry is now available on Android devices. I released it last Thursday, and so far it is doing well.

If you want to check it out, here are the marketplace links:

Google Play: Free Trial – Full Game

Amazon Appstore: Free Trial – Full Game

It is also available on Xbox and Windows Phone.

Starting to add more and more functionality to my voxel engine and it is starting the slow evolution into a game, with fun elements. I’m still aiming for daily videos showing progress and hopefully each one showing a new feature or something cool.

My guide/tutorial site is taking shape, but I am still coding lots and lots and finding it hard to put a massive amount of time into writing articles. More will come with time though…
https://sites.google.com/site/letsmakeavoxelengine/

I have some questions for the community and gamers.

• What sort of creating tools would you like to see in a voxel sandbox game?
• Do you think it would be good to offer a library of common objects that the player can import/export to re-use as they are creating?
• What parts of a game would you like to customize (and share with others)? Your character model, weapons, items, NPCs, quests, particle effects, world regions?

Also anyone who has played Minecraft (or other sandbox games) can probably help me by answering a couple of questions below:

• During the creative parts of the game, i.e crafting, building, customizing… do you prefer to still be emersed in the game while in this mode or do you prefer a more abstract tool/interface? For example when crafting or building in minecraft you still have to walk around as the player, rather than having a fly around ‘god-mode’ when you can craft/build with a mouse pointer.
• Is there anything frustrating about collaborative creating, Do you wish you had more control over allowing others to modify what you create, tools for information exchange?
• How much do you think a sandbox game should be released with actual story content? i.e should the game already have a main quest, completion goal, or just be totally open?

Thanks
AlwaysGeeky

Hey Ludum Dare folks, just wanted to keep you updated, so here’s a few… well… updates:

Update #1 – Earlier on the week, a local art show held a video presentation that had short movies and videos from sent in by people from the area. One of them was my Isolated Assault 2 Trailer. I was excited, as over 100 people filled a theater to watch it. Yay for video editing magic!

Here’s the vid, in case you haven’t already seen it:

Update #2 – I’ve been working a lot on music… and on Star Trek Online… and I’ve made a new playlist that you may want to check out! It includes songs from my previous games at Ludum Dare and in general. I’ve also released a cool dance song that I think sounds pretty good. I’m going to add it to the battle arena playlist.

Coming out with another demo real soon, but until then you can check out the first one if you haven’t already!

Happy gaming, Ludum Dare! <3

Been working away on my Voxel engine that I first created during the last Ludum Dare and just created an SSAO shader (As per requested by Vigrid) and I am so pleased with it, I wanted to show it off and also show my general progress…

I have put up some more videos on YouTube too:

Please checkout my channel.

Also people have been asking for guides and tutorials, I am in the process of making these and posting them here: https://sites.google.com/site/letsmakeavoxelengine/home so if anyone wants to learn about making a voxel engine, or even follow in my footsteps, I am documenting my steps there…

Enjoy

AlwaysGeeky