It was a very fun and productive day!

Play The Game Here! (May take some time to load)

Thanks all who voted and competed along with me! It was fun and exciting to finally join Ludum Dare, and I can’t wait to join again for the 10 year anniversary!

Once again, I’m going to honest (and critical) and try to make this mega-post interesting!

PLAY THE GAME HERE

My goals for Ludum Dare 22

• Before the competition started, I had some goals in mind that I wanted to make.

1. I wanted to make sure “Fun” was the best category, so that people could replay the game, and have a good time playing.
2. I wanted the gameplay to be smooth and the animations smoother.
3. I wanted to beat Notch in at least one category (knowing how hard that would be).

What software I used

• Unity 3d Game Engine
• Blender 3D Modeling Software
• Pixlr Photo Editor
• Cfxr Sound Generator
• Unitron Script Editor
• Garageband Music Creator
• Text Edit Text Editor

How I made the game

• I quickly had come up with an idea for each of the most likely themes before LD22 started. My theme for “Alone” was a game where you would be sometimes alone, and then all of a sudden, you would be crowded with people.
• After the theme was announced, I decided that the game would be first person (the easiest of all the persons) and that you would have to fight your way through endless hordes of cubes (the easiest of default shapes). You could only see the cubes when your glasses were on, but if you weren’t in a shaded zone when your glasses were on, you’d start burning. This was a way to keep the player moving, and a way to make them constantly nervous.
• I worked on the player controls and LockCursor, etc. But the gameplay does not complete a game. I needed an enemy. One that would appear only if your glasses were on.
• I whipped up a cube model and texture and soon came up with this:

• Whoo Hoo! Now I have a cube!
• Next I worked on making the cube look at the player, and then having it disappear when the players “glasses” (A semi-transparent plane) were off.
• By now my Unity Scene looked like this:

• Soon I got Health implemented, and then it started to look like a Test level.
• I kept at it, knowing it would soon look like a game.
• The cube could soon move towards the player, and deal damage at close range.
• The first “Shaded Zone” was created, (using a Trigger) and the player would not take damage while inside it.
• I worked on making the zone a little prettier, and expanding the floor plane. I added a skybox, and changed the ambient light to near black.

• All along I had been slightly working on a music track, but now I decided I needed to finish it.

• The level was extended, the cube had a spawn code and could replicate itself, and the textures for walls and the floor was created in Pixlr.
• I created a variety of sound effects in CFXR like jumping and enemy death noises (my favorite).
• I worked on making an in-game tutorial, by timing when the music starts with the same time that it tells you that there is no one there.
• The menu was easy, all I had to do was come up with a name and choose the font, and soon my game looked legit. (Sorry for the lack of photos here)
• I asked my friend if he could play a test version on his computer (a windows) and I’m glad he did. The font I chose was bugging out on his computer, so I changed it to something else, and it worked fine.
• Now I knew my game was compatible on Windows AND Mac

• I created another music track for the menu, a helicopter to go to as the goal, and a stats screen so you could try to beat your own score.

Rating Other People’s Work

• I specifically rated the games that had the fewest ratings and tried to give most of them a fair, solid score.
• Mostly I gave 3.0s when I thought something was average.
• For a few people that put little effort into it, I had to give some 1.0s.
• I was sad that Notch had not really implemented the theme and pretty much made a different version of Minecraft. (Most likely this was just because he wanted to, or he felt like it.)

How people rated my game

• I can thank my friends, family, and Ludum Dare community for playing the game and enjoying it, especially DontBeNoobish‘s Gameplay Footage:

• I was proud with how my game turned out compared to most of the other entries.
• People mostly liked the audio and innovation of the game, but there were a few things I could’ve made better (More enemies, options, etc)

The Results!

• Coolness – 52% Bronze medal | At first I thought that the bronze medal meant third place, but then I realized Coolness didn’t have the same rating system. Oh well, it was still good to see that my playing of all those low effort games went to good use!
• # 40 Community – 3.55 | Wow! Community? I didn’t realize I was that popular! I guess this rating makes sense because of all the excited posts I made with links to this game. I did a LOT outside of the game (Time-lapse, post mortem, gameplay video, tips)
• # 108 Innovation – 3.20 | Good, people liked my idea of the sunglasses and whatnot!
• # 113 Mood – 3.20 | I think the music accomplished the overall feel of the game.
• # 118 Audio – 3.00 | Once again, the music, but also the enemy death noises made this count.
• # 113 Theme – 3.33 | Well, you are sometimes alone…
• # 202 Humor – 2.29 | I wasn’t even going for this (other than the ReadMe) so I have no clue how it ended up higher than overall.
• # 323 Graphics – 2.67 | Although mine was one of the few 3D first person games, I guess people didn’t really like the low effort GUI and enemy textures.
• # 435 Overall – 2.50 | Oh no! Overall score seemed like an important one…
• # 487 Fun – 2.06 | Really? This was the category I was focusing on, but yet it got a 2.06! Yes, I guess I did better than almost half of everyone else, and I’m not complaining, but this ended up at the bottom of the list, when I had worked for it to be the top.

Comparison To Notch

• My goal was to beat Notch in at least one category, and it turns out that was too easy:

• I ended up beating Notch in 7 different categories!
• A comment on the community rating: Last LD, Notch won third place (if I recall correctly) in the community category, but now he received a #49! And I received a #40! So after all the years Notch has spent on Ludum Dare and Minecraft, and the entire fan-base he collected from the Top Computer Game Of 2011, I was able to receive a better score than him from 3 weeks of posting on Ludum Dare!

I send out a huge thank you to all who rated my game (yes, even those of you that got me that horrible “Fun” score) and hope to join again for LD 23! Please remember Rob Productions again for next Ludum Dare, and you can expect a post-compo version coming in time!

Links:

TIPS ON MAKING A UNITY GAME

POST MORTEM

TIMELAPSE

THE GAME AGAIN

Hello happy LD community !!

I just upload a tiny video from the creation of the game.

Mr. Treevil’s Lonely Heart – Timelapse – José Eduardo Terán

And you can play the game here:

Mr. Treevil’s Lonely Heart

Thanks for watching.

Hey everyone! We’ve finally got our time lapse videos up!

For our programming timelapse, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cU2_m4gkz8&feature=youtu.be

For our art timelapse, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb6UBkAgrfg&feature=plcp&context=C3854edbUDOEgsToPDskJvdVApGT52a5yIinw4kVse

Please play and rate us here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7415

We hope you enjoy!

I did a timelapse/commentary thing:

Actual thing here.

Super busy trying to win this, but still rating like mad when I can. Seriously, would a 3-month rating period really be all that bad? I don’t think so.

Happy ho-ho days! Hope you get to stuff all the stockings your heart desires

Here is the Timelapse Video:

Alone In Space… Timelapse

And a Gameplay Video:

Alone In Space… Gameplay

To Play or Rate Alone In Space… Click Here.

So this is it. This was my first time participating in Ludum Dare, and it is definitely not going to be the last time! It was incredibly stressful, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Wow. Thanks for the great experience everybody!

I am very proud of the result.
We are talking about this.

The Good

• The idea — I had a pretty strong image of what I wanted to do in my head. It wasn’t very innovative, but I was sure not to stumble into a situation that I did not know how to get out of.
• The language — Using C++/SFML has been great. I considered using HTML5/JavaScript at the beginning, but now I am very happy that I changed my mind. Everything went smoothly and none of the expected cross-platform issues arose (even though I did not have the time to package it for Linux, yet).
• The tools — I used Photoshop for graphics, SFXR for sound effects and the NetBeans IDE. I did not have trouble with any of them. Everything worked like a charm.

The Bad

• The time management (who would have expected that?) — Everything went nice until I hit a very ugly bug in my collision/line-of-sight-detection system and got stuck. That caused me to loose many hours, resulting in limited content. I should have skipped it to deal with it at a later moment in time.
• The planning — I should have laid out more of the game before starting. I had to re-do my map system after discovering that it simply would not be fast enough to edit the map in Photoshop. I could have avoided that by realizing that a tile-engine would fit my needs best at the very beginning.
• The communication — Even though the IRC was permanently running on my second screen, I totally missed to socialize with other participants. I also planned to post status updates with screenshots on the blog, but that did not happen either. This will change next time!

Nonetheless, I am really happy with how everything turned out. I could adjust my path in time, so that the game ended up being fully playable, even though some planned content was missing.

Please feel free to play and rate my entry here!

Finally, here is my timelapse for this LD:

Also, NO DAMN KITTY IN MY GAME!

Finally got my timelapse up for Voxterium

Found out I’m not good with video editing software.  Just another thing I’ve learned from this compo…

I finally prepared the timelapse for my entry, Alone in the Mansion. Enjoy!

Timelapse of Alone in the Mansion on Youtube

Here is the link to the original entry.

Edit: I also put up the soundtrack if anyone wants to check it out!

What Went Right:

Time Management…?
I was able to plan out most of my time pretty well, so thankfully I was able to implement nearly all of the features I wanted, with just a few minor ones going undone. I spent about 5-6 hours on audio, probably roughly the same on graphics, and the rest coding, which is about what I expected (and planned) going into the weekend.

Audio
I was already pretty experienced in making this style of music (and making music in general, which I’ve been doing since 2004) so it wasn’t too horrible of a prospect to make a bunch of game tracks in a short amount of time. Having done a whole ton of album-a-days (http://crapart.spacebar.org/aad) helped on that front too – thanks Tom 7! Trying to come up with a variety of original material was probably the most creatively difficult aspect of the whole weekend but I’m really happy with how the music came out. And of course, working with bfxr was a pleasure.

What Went Wrong:

Game Balance/Playing My Own Game
I think the biggest issue with the game as it stands is the balance or difficulty – depending on how you play it, it’s probably either way too easy or way too hard. This wasn’t really obvious to me until around Sunday when I little else to do but play my own game and do lots of polish. It’s kind of funny to think that I didn’t spend enough time playing my own game in a 48-hour game dev competition, but it actually makes sense, especially considering the sort of game I was going for. I’ll try to keep this one at the forefront when I do my next Ludum Dare.

Slight Unfamiliarity with Tools
This wasn’t too much of an issue, but I had to look up a few XNA-related things to implement certain features, particularly graphics-related ones. I also struggled with GIMP a bit, which is probably understandable to anyone who has ever used it.

All in all this was an awesome experience. Can’t wait for the next challenge!

I have finally finished my timelapse. My screen recorder crashed during the compo and I had to download all 23 parts of my stream, join them together, speed it up and add music. After over 3 hours of rendering I can finally present my timelapse:

I made the game Space Rescue Mission. I am pretty happy with how everything turned out, except that my game was very buggy. This was my first Ludum Dare  and I should have managed my time a lot better. Anyway, looking forward to the next compo!

Blurry, stupidly sped up, and crazy alt tabbing so you can’t see anything. Enjoy.

LD22 Timelapse

Play the game here.

This is the time lapse of the full 48 hours of development, trimmed slightly so you don’t have to wait 30 seconds while I’m sleeping.

I like the concept of a timelapse, it makes it look like I know what I’m doing when I code something, as opposed to making it up as I go.

And again, if you could please play and rate my game, as well as leave any constructive criticisms, that would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks

The entry page.

Cross-posted from my blog:

• http://www.gavpugh.com/2011/12/21/ludum-dare-22-postmortem-journal-and-timelapse/

So, this past weekend I participated in the 22nd Ludum Dare competition. You have just 48 hours over the weekend in which to create a game. The crux of the competition is that you create all code and content within that 48 hour period. No re-used assets at all. Only engine/middleware/framework code is permitted to be prepared beforehand.

I wrote my game with Unity. It’s the first project I’ve ever undertaken in Unity, and I had very little experience of it. I came out of the other side with a very positive impression, I really liked using it. As much as I love C/C++; given the time constraints, it seemed a good idea to go with Unity. The other big upside is that you can deploy the game to be played via a web browser. This was definitely what I wanted. I didn’t want people to have to go to the hassle of a download-and-install, just to play the little toy game I made over a weekend.

(more…)

Here is our double timelapse for Braille:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

Play It | Rate It

Origin

When I heard Alone was chosen as the theme, a set of bizarre ideas immediately appeared in my mind. I really wanted to explore about the feeling of being alone, about the psychological effect of it. Also, I had read The Knock recently so I wanted to explore more about that subject.

Development

The tools I used included:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Lightroom
• Adobe Flash
• Flashdevelop / ActionScript 3
• as3sfxr »
• Aviary »
• A standard Digital Camera
• Some burned papers
• A friend (lol)

The art is rather simple, I took some photos of my house and I asked a friend to model for me. We did some shots of him walking, but because I lack equipment (tripod, marks, etc) the result looks a little bad. I did my best to correct the photos in Photoshop. The room is a part of my house, that isn’t even a room, but I couldn’t take a picture of a real room because the camera angle was too short. I applied Exposure and Posterize to all the images.

The programming was done entirely in ActionScript 3, using some features of my own library, but the vast majority was to be made from scratch. I used Flashdevelop because I’m really fast with it… Just press Ctrl+Shift+1 and it’s like magic!

What now?

I think I’ll work more time on this game. I’ll add more puzzles, make an easy mode, add language support, and maybe more rooms to explore, or explore more about the story. For example, what happened upstairs?

This was my second time on Ludum Dare, and I think it was a really good experience. I don’t think there’s something that went wrong, maybe next time I’ll add more features to my framework, like effects, sound support and embedding support; but at the end I managed to do what I intended to do.

Good

• My zombie! I’m really proud of my ugly zombie. Yes, I spent a lot of time on it and it isn’t good art by any standard but I don’t care. It was worth it to see it “alive” in my game
• I only realized that after I was done but I kind of made the game I wanted to do for December 2010′s LD. Except then I had found myself making an alien instead of the zombie I had planned to do and then gave up before I had gameplay anyway. So it’s like I tied up a loose end.
• The jam. If not for the jam I wouldn’t have been able to finish my game and the LD would have just ended in bitter disappointment for me.
• My trusty ZBrush was awesome: sculpting/painting the zombie was the most fun part of this LD, Blender was also great for animating it.

Gray Area

• Making the low-poly retopology took more time than I thought. I tried TopoGun which I had just bought a few days before the compo and never used.  That added a few hours of work but then TopoGun worked really well for generating the color and normal map from the sculpt.

Bad

• I missed the compo deadline and had to do the jam
• I was generally not very fast. Lack of concentration maybe? Everything seemed to take just longer than it usually would.
• I spent the same amount of time on the environment than on the zombie and yet it really doesn’t show.  I just wasted time noodling with bits cut from my original hallway model and just made a mess and had to restart again. It was a time sink for no reason.
• Simplistic gameplay. I wanted to make the game more about stealth.
• I still suck at using Modo. It’s a great software I have no doubt of that and I mostly knew how to use it. But somehow I still find myself struggling against it every step. I don’t know how to explain what it is exactly. It’s weird and it’s probably just that I lack the practice to have the right instincts but it’s really annoying when trying to speed model and everything reacts in a slightly unexpected way and I keep having to undo and try again. I’ve got to spend more time using it.
• Still no time for particles effects. I put them on my priority list for this LD and still neglected them.

Time use

• Code: 11.2h (includes setting things up in Unity)

• Model: 9.3h
• Texture: 4.7h
• Animation: 3.5h
• Sound: 2.4h
• Level building: 7.6h (half of it wasted on a discarded version)
• Sleep: 24h
• Doing other things: 3.4h
• Misc: 5.5h (probably 50% actual work the rest being posting WIPs, chatting on the IRC channel, etc)

• Total spent on zombie (including sounds, code, etc):  15.5h
• Total spent on the environment/level (incl. medkit props and ambient soundtrack): 15.4h

The World Of Arzea

During this past weekend, in addition to streaming, I made sure to screencap my main monitor every 10s for the duration of the competition. From this, I created a timelapse for you to watch how Arzea was created from start to finish.

If you would like to play or rate the game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=4155

Otherwise, enjoy:

http://youtu.be/WcFZQaoMdCM
http://youtu.be/WcFZQaoMdCM
(Issues with embedding…) 

Below is the timelapse vid for my LD22 entry: The Lonely Arena.

If you haven’t played/rated it yet, please do so here.

That was hard! It was a trainwreck of failures.

• First, i had about 143.472 image files captured. That looked a bit worrisome.
• The images were having serial numbers in the ld22-frameXXXXX.png format. However, as mentioned, there were more than 99.999 images, so half of them were using an extra digit and, thus, not sorted correctly.
• So i had to write a script to fix that.
• Then there were a lot of gaps. I’m using the screencapture Mac OS X command-line program to take the shots, but if the screen has blanked out, nothing is saved.
• So i had to write a script to fix that by using a filler image for that.
• Then i had to wait for almost a half-day for them to be converted to a (huge) .mpg file with ffmpeg.
• And after that, iMovie (the editor i usually use and so far has worked well) decided that it won’t support .mpg files.
• So i had to wait for a few extra hours for the huge .mpg file to be converted to a huge .mp4 file that iMovie can open.
• iMovie, however, saw through my scheme and decided that, no, it won’t open the file. It didn’t even tell me why – it just acted as if i decided at the last moment to cancel the import process.
• So i had to search for another editor. While doing that i noticed that all open source video editor for Mac OS X are either abandoned old editors from the PowerPC era that Mac OS X Lion doesn’t support anymore, or experimental ports of mostly Linux-based tools that may work if you are lucky enough and willing to compile from source.
• Fortunately, i also noticed that Blender, the 3D tool i use, has a video editing mode. Wtf, how i missed that for so long (ok, i had heard of it, but i thought it was some sort of simple annotations or whatever…).
• So i spent an hour learning how to do video editing with Blender.
• And finally made the video as i wanted it. That is, i added an intro image and removed the big delays while i was sleeping.
• Then i had to wait for another half-day (or so) for Blender to export a huge .mp4 file. I hoped it wouldn’t be huge, but it actually was about 2.2GB :-/
• So i decided to do the conversion properly with ffmpeg to H.264 and MP4 myself. And these formats were mandatory since i wanted to have (a bit of) control over the video quality and YouTube doesn’t seem to mess with the video encoding with these formats.
• Unfortunately the ffmpeg version i had wasn’t compiled with libx264 support. So no H.264 encoding for me.
• So i tried to use a version from Linux using VirtualBox since Debian would probably have it an apt-get install away and i was so tired of all of this.
• After another hour configuring repositories (because, apparently, Debian didn’t have it an apt-get install away due to licensing issues…) i managed to have a x264-capable ffmpeg converting the file.
• Only it was way too slow. Like, 1fps slow. Making that video would take more than the game itself.
• So Debian idea scrapped, let’s go back on Mac OS X. And compile our ffmpeg with x264.
• And thus i downloaded code for libx264 (i already had compiled ffmpeg previously), yasm (that libx264 needs) and a couple of others.
• I spent a couple of hours just trying to get ffmpeg compiled. Incompatibilities between (default) flags, the installed version of gcc, features, etc and almost no mention of it on the web. Bleh. But i finally managed to do it.
• And so, yet more hours of waiting to get ffmpeg convert the 2.2GB video to something i can upload…
• That would be a 415MB video.
• So, i left it uploading and went to sleep fully tired… and finally:

Making of
“She Loves You”
Ludum Dare #22
timelapse
Sorry, i couldn’t figure out how to embed a YouTube video

After watching it, i also figured out what exactly was missing from the game:

What was missing from She Loves You

Next time i’m going to fix that