This game, as always, started with the typical “fly up a wall” climbing system. This worked fine, but I knew I wanted to allow the player to reach higher places. I started doing some research and it turned out the best method for a climbing system was triggers — invisible “hot spots” that detect when the player is inside them. From that I was able to detect when a player was near a climbable object, and then disable the entire movement controller and hand over movement to special custom-made climbing controller. The details from there get a bit complicated, but so far this character is the most complex I’ve ever done in a game, with (right now) 5 layers of collision boxes, 3 state controllers, over 20 animation matrices, and more than 60 basic animations. I’ll do a more detailed write up (and maybe a video) about development once the game is announced.

And finally, here’s another hint on the title and theme of the game, to keep you on your toes:

Remember you can follow me on twitter @RobProductions : https://twitter.com/RobProductions

You’ll be sure to here more development news soon!

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare <3

Hey, Ludum Community, Rob Productions here. For a while I’ve been working on a third person action game, just to test out if I could do anything different then my usual first person stuff, and I started to see potential in this. The “test game” was actually coming along very well, introducing many new challenges and concepts that really pushed my programming skills to advance. I started looking at my previous works and at my current project, and at other games around the web, and I realized… this project is professional enough to be released! Like, for actual money!

I’ve been doing a lot of research and planning on getting this game released, and I think I know how to start. Details on the release and the game itself are still super-secret, but here’s a hint on the name and concept of the game:

Let’s see if you can figure this one out!

Also, if there’s anyone out there with any experience releasing a game, I’d really appreciate some tips on getting my game publicity and hype during the preorder and pre-release stages! What’s the best way to promote a game and make people want to buy it?

Thanks and Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare! P.S. I’ll be sure to release some free stuff for those of you low on funds

This was my 4th Ludum Dare, and for it I made a game called Complexity, a first person shooter/platformer in Unity3d! Timelapse:

From the start I knew it would be some sort of first person game. In LD24 I had made a puzzle game, which surprised me. After LD24 I tried working on some more action-based mechanics: I had begun work on a 3rd person shooter adventure game and spaceship simulation game.

So with my newfound curiosity of the action genre I wanted to make a game that would prove my profound knowledge of fun mechanics. Like most of my games, it started looking like this:

After the basic movement was achieved I started thinking of a plot. From the beginning I knew there had to be a bad guy, because without a bad guy there would be no purpose to shooting things up! And with the theme Minimalism, I decided early on that you were trying to stop some sort of bad guy from making things too simple. From there I came up with a weapon to counter his efforts — the complexity gun.

Alright, so now I had a weapon. After working on putting some basic shapes together I started a simple AI script. From this I had my enemy. If there was one thing I learned from LD23 it was that the more the character interacts with the level the better — basically keeping the immersion. So I came up with a second purpose for the complexity gun – what if it could shoot objects and make them more complex too? Then I tied this into a gameplay perspective — doors that could only be opened by making them more complex. With these new mechanics I pieced together a level.

Audio and music are pretty self-explanatory, if you want to see exactly how I spent my time on them check the timelapse above!

After working on more important game mechanics such as health and enemy lasers, it was time to work on the final boss! Obviously you all know what it had to be:

Sorry to whoever worked long and hard on that animation

Anyways to add story to the game I quickly came up with a splash screen and tutorial section and after that it was done!

What went right:

1. Gameplay
2. Mechanics
3. Boss Battle
4. Story
5. Animations
6. Sound

What went wrong:

1. Graphics
2. Textures
3. User Interface
4. Incomplete side-objectives
5. Goal of game

Why don’t you PLAY THE GAME?

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare! <3

PLAY :: RATE :: TIMELAPSE :: WALKTHROUGH

Minimalism exposes the essence of a subject, through eliminating all non-essential forms…

Managed to get my time-lapse uploaded. I think I might have cranked up the speed a bit too much haha. May cause eye strain.. Also cheesy funk music

Game Page:

www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=rate&uid=22035

PLAY :: RATE :: TIMELAPSE :: WALKTHROUGH

Minimalism exposes the essence of a subject, through eliminating all non-essential forms…

Essense is an atmospheric serene first person “puzzle”. Really cool for a relaxing moment before going to bed.

In this post-mortem, I’ll try to explain what things of the development process made me mad, what made me sad, and what made me glad.

I Suck At Making Levels

Yeah, now I know. Usually I don’t play puzzles, so it was a real challenge making one. I was trying to figure out good puzzles to include in the game, levels that would be fun to play. I guess I didn’t chose well, because…

Levels Are Really Hard

I think it’s a problem of communication. I wasn’t able to find an effective way to communicate what the puzzle was about. Sure, you have to grab the red cube, but what’s the mechanic of the level? That and some difficult controls (which I modified now), has led my game to be almost unbeatable.

Power Outages And Plain Bad Luck

I guess the world didn’t want me to participate in Ludum Dare. I have gathered a list of things that happened to me this weekend:

• 3 power outages of about 2/3 hours each.
• Computer broke the first 3 hours. I had to waste 2 hours fixing it.
• Laptop has temperature issues and I couldn’t use it to develop at all.
• Internet went down for about 3 hours.
• One of the outages corrupted my Unity project so I had to start again.

Lot Of Time Testing

If you watch my timelapse, you will find that I was spending lot of time testing my game. That surely was one of the reasons why my game is difficult: the more I tested my game, the easier it was for me, so the more I increased the difficulty.

But why I tested it so much? Well because the atmosphere was really cool so I played lot of time to hear the music, read the messages, etc. That’s because I was…

Not Organized At All

So I had to make lots of things, but I couldn’t make a list like my previous Ludum Dare. I don’t know why, I just didn’t think it was necessary. So I wasted a lot of time working on the atmosphere first (I had the music very early on), and not much time in the mechanics.

Unity3D Editor

So one of the wonderful things about Unity3D is that you can extend your editor to make custom tools. I created tools for the logic puzzle and the jumping puzzle, which allowed me to modify them quickly.

Parser

For creating the blocks in the dodge level, I made a parser that reads a simple script, describing how the level should be created. Then Generate creates all the blocks in the corresponding positions.

The first letter correspond of where the block will be coming from, North, East or West. The second letter correspond of what position the block will have, Left, Center or Right. If there’s an X at the end, then a Checkpoint is created instead. The special letter S is speed, and O is offset, both followed by a number.

Visual Handlers

For the logic puzzle, I needed something to tell me how was the level being connected. I figured I could do it using the Handles class, using a white arrow indicating a floor that turns on another, and a black arrow indicating a floor that turns off another.

Visual clues helped me know what’s happening. Click to enlarge.

Unity3D Pro Effects

So with Unity Pro it is really simple to add fancy post-process effects. I added vignetting and reflection, which lot of people told me it was really cool looking. I was about to add more effects, but that wouldn’t be minimal.

Easy Way To Make Music

I used Paul Stretch along with Audacity to remix a version of Four Seasons of Vivaldi. It was an easy and hacky way to have a beautiful dreamy music. I also was worried that it would be against the rules to remix a song, but I asked in #ludumdare and it was ok.

Here’s the post-mortem I wrote for my blog. Great way of reflecting on the game dev process!

My last LD experience in December didn’t quite go as planned, but was still lots of fun. This time I had even less time than the meagre 48 hours given to compo participants. I had played Volleyball all Saturday and was too tired to even switch on my computer in the evening. Sunday morning I slept in, woke at 11 a.m., had breakfast and only then took a peek at the Ludum Dare theme: minimalism.

(more…)

The Side Factor is a local 2 player turn based strategy game. It explores the idea of creating a strategy game with a minimal number of unit types, in this case only 1. The core mechanic is shooting through things.

What went right

1. Paper prototyping – We used a Chess board and some folded pieces of paper to iterate over the concept of shooting through things. Originally we played with a rule that you could capture enemy pieces by straddling it on both sides and shooting through it. That was abandoned in favour of gameplay where players never lost any pieces.
2. Audio design - One of the reasons why I entered the jam instead of the compo was to work with a fantastic audio designer, Gordon McGladdery. I spent a lot of time implementing it and adjusting the animations so it felt right.
3. Visual design & polish – Gameplay was completed on Sunday so I spent all of Monday polishing it. It’s one of the prettiest games I’ve made in a game jam. Below is a series of progress shots from the end of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

What went wrong

1. The Theme – Minimalism is not a great theme when you assemble a team ahead of time to create a highly polished game. Instead of focusing on aesthetic minimalism we tried to explore it through gameplay. When I created the instructions on the website I realized even though there was one unit type the rules weren’t that compact.
2. Playtesting – It’s really difficult to playtest a 2 player game by yourself and writing an AI was out of the question.
3. Publishing on Android – One of my goals was to release this on the Google Play store. It runs surprisingly well on my Nexus S but still needs some optimizations, buttons need to be bigger, and support for different aspect ratios. It’s still in the cards but a post jam version with playtesting and tweaks instead.

Play Now (Unity web – Mac/Win/Linux binaries too!)

Team SquareWars Postmortem

It didn’t end up looking like that at all.

Check out the entry here.

What went right:
- We came up with an original gameplay mechanic that is simple, yet fun to play but also to translates well to pc and mobile interfaces.
- We honed on the core of the game almost immediately and stuck with it to the end.
- A quick sketch for the battle field gave us a good starting point of how the game would look.
- The initial was for to use a 2D top-down view for an old-school look. Halfway though, it became apparent that the look would be too simplistic, and was changed over to full 3D. This improved the look of the game and allowed us to add 3D specific features like the camera following the units which gives a better feel of the “action” in the battlefield.
- Unity proved a good tool for rapid game prototyping and production.
- Using a Google docs spreadsheet for managing tasks. Although we tried a bug tracker, a simple task list with multi-user editing is perfect for managing tasks as well as a brain dump for all good (and not so good) ideas and features for the game.
- We had lots of ideas about what the unit AI should do, and spend some time implementing infrastructure for supporting it. Luckily time constrains forced us to simplify, so most of the behaviours of units rely on a randomness, which produced surprisingly good results. In part it was also an experiment to see if players would be able to sense any intelligence behind the unit AI, something like a cheesy Turing test.
- The fact that we always planned to keep going on making this game a success even after LD was over. This helped us push back features that would have taken way too long for the 72 hour limit, otherwise we would have ran out of time. “Will the time spent implementing this be good enough for the increase in fun in the game compared to other features?”

What went wrong:
- The Visuals. Even with a favorable theme like “minimalism” the visual quality of the entries was higher expected. In the end graphics proved to be very important and we spent a fair amount of time improving the look of our game, but programmer art has its limits.
- Although on average turnaround in Unity is fast, there were many cases that things need to be done in a certain way.
This invariably means scouring the internet for a Unity-specific solution and generally wasting time on trivial things better spent working on the game itself.
- Source control. We used TortoiseHG and BitBucket for managing and sharing our assets and code. Although Mercurial is an excellent tool for source control, Unity’s reliance in part to binary scene assets which cannot be merged, file commits that generate unwanted branches, added with the complexity of the TortoiseHG UI become an occasional obstacle to our work-flow.
- Not enough time to actually  implement all that we wanted.
- The UI is not good, it’s functional and does what it’s supposed to do, but I wish we had had more time to actually make it nicer.
- In the end, one of us had made much better explosions (the current ones aren’t that good) but after trying them on the web player it would break the game, units wouldn’t die. A bug that made us go back one revision because just eliminating nice things from the explosions wouldn’t fix the problem. Same thing happened with reflected lasers (they don’t reflect in the final LD version).
- Unity, although great in some aspects, holds too many nice features for the pro version, which is pretty expensive actually. It also means that what you do is tied to their engine and not really portable to anywhere else.

What went weird:
- Shouting “Square Wars” repeatedly at the laptop to record a sample for the title screen. In the end sample was not used. (Best for all concerned!)

Conclusion: 
Overall it was surprising with how much of a game can get done in just a few days. Focusing on the core mechanics was very important, as well
as resisting the urge to implement things the proper way. Prioritizing everything by the how much they will improve the game as it is at that point in time is also critical, as this will prevent you from wasting time developing stuff which may or may not be used in end.

http://www.youtube.com/RpkhuqspuYA

stem

Welcome to “stem”, our first game, based around the theme ‘Minimalism’.

We are ‘Fuzzy Pixels‘, a small team of newcomers to Ludum Dare, and to Game Jam’s in general. Having worked with each other before on a few other projects, we decided we wanted to throw our own coin into the proverbial pot, and this is our entry!

Our game actually started well once the theme was announced on Friday. After a good few hours of brainstorming and catching up with each other  we had fleshed out a great concept for our game; A simple design about a young, solitary flower wanting to break free out of a stagnating and decaying world.

Even with the busy schedules that come with having “real lives”, we still managed to work together to create a stunning and simple game with a very solid game mechanic. Using the mouse to move the direction of the sunbeams, you help encourage the flower bud to grow towards the light, and help it escape the doldrums  Collect water along the way to make sure the constant decay does not catch up to you, while avoiding many obstacles that flowers have when trying to grow. Rocks, hungry beetles, and even frosty snow.

stem is currently a web-based game, created with Unity3D and exported to be played on nearly any internet browser. We have hopes to further this project and see it on other platforms as well, including mobile devices.

We hope you enjoy our game, thank you!

——

Crystal McNair – Art, Programming
George Georgeadis – Game concept and level design
Kevin Laity – Programming, Level Design
With music from Jason Tsamalidis

——

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=17724

I had a pretty relaxed time making this game for the most part!  This entry turned out alright and I feel happy about it.

Theme

Thanks to the theme I learned a lot about minimalism!  There really isn’t so much a category for minimalism in art, music, etc.  In art, it seems to take from other forms, mostly from abstraction. It really is just a lifestyle.  At least that’s the conclusion I made.  It seems similar to buddhism, but not exactly.

Development Summary

Post-screen FXs

I wanted to do something neat for the visuals to add that extra immersion in the game since I’m gunning for an adventure sort thing.  First I wanted to try to refrain from using what Unity 3D provides and roll out my own.  I’ve coded shaders before, but that was such a long time ago that I’ve nearly forgotten the bizarre conventions it has.  So I tried to convert my old bloom effect to cg and things blew up left and right.  Compile errors for shaders are never helpful.

What I got working though are two things: color quantization and de-resolutionizer.  The color quantization basically just lowers the resolution of each color channel with a given value.  For this game, I basically set it to 8 colors.  De-resolutionizer just gets the center pixel of each row and column based on a given x and y dimension.  This is an effect you see a lot back in the Super Nintendo days.

The rest of the effects are pulled from Unity: Bloom and noise effect.

Mixing both bloom and color quantization gave that nice effect.  I had fun just moving around the level seeing the colors mix in an interesting way.

Flocking/Boids

I’ve coded this a while ago and I decided I want to try it out and see if it turns into some sort of interesting game mechanic.  Turned out to be a big pain.  Flocking is actually not that bad to implement.  The difficulty is making it behave right and, like anything physics related, tweaking it.  Between post-screen effect and this was pretty much my entire Friday night and early Saturday.

The game took a different direction when I didn’t have time to further work on the flocking.  I actually wanted it so that you sort of herd triangles around and avoid other flocks, in this case, the squares.  I played around with it and never got anything solid.  The squares still use them though.

Level Creation

Levels are mostly comprised of: 2 types of square, a triangle, 3 spikey things, and a roundish-polygon.  It got a little tedious tweaking the levels since I manually placed those things and wasn’t really grouping and organizing them.  That’s my bad.  As a result, I manage to only make a hub level and 3 other ones.

The flower is made the same way.  I basically just drew different pieces and just placed them together.  I wanted to make each one unique, but I never got enough time, so it was mostly copy/pasted.

Music

My favorite composer, the cgMusic comes back for this one.  This time though, with the added bonus of: http://solmire.com/ Having the right sound-font to converting a midi makes a huge difference!

Everything Else

Some of the code I used in the game were pulled from my collection of Unity core scripts.  Some of those are such a time-saver.  Things like: dealing with input, changing scenes, saving game states.

Fun Facts

Compared to my old postmortem entry, only a few energy drinks were consumed for the entire time.  And I got to sleep!

Play Here

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

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

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

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

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

Is time to level design!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I made the decision to not submit to the compo.. It’s playable, but I need to finish a few more levels!

Vine video of the gameplay: https://vine.co/v/bxHV2qmLe3n

Hit me up on twitter @travisirby I’ve been having a great time on there this weekend… Prob why I’m not finished!

Here’s my entry:

The Sentient Cube

It’s like Katamari Damacy and Crazy Taxi put together. Although I call it an Action game, it’s more puzzle-y than it looks. To spice up things a little bit, I did add a few power-ups and physics changes.

Also, obligatory potato screenshot:

WOo just finished with minutes to spare. Check out my pirate rogue like here.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16170

LD26 / Minimalism / Dehoarder Retrospective

It was very exciting participating in my first ever Ludum Dare. I had written a couple of games in the past using very few hours, but never had I tried to do it in 48 consecutive hours. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be successful or not. It turns out, as I write this, there are still 4 more hours in the compo, and my submission is already entered. Honestly, I thought I would be scrambling madly to get things done right now, not working on my retrospective.

What went well?

Pretty much the whole thing. But here are some specific highlights.

At first, I was concerned about the theme. I didn’t want to just make a game with minimalist artwork and gameplay. I wanted to actually use the theme within my game. I looked up minimalism through Google, and from there, came up with the meta-concepts “Elmininate all X” and “Do X using as few Y as possible”. I stared at the Google results some more, and was noticing that more were about minimalist lifestyles, i.e. living without junk, than about minimalist art. Bingo. My “Eliminate all X” meta-concept quickly became “Eliminate as much junk from your hoard as possible”. Theme ideation success.

By 4 hours into the compo, I had a working prototype where you could walk about a room, and zap newspapers with your mouse. Having an early working prototype was a huge win, as always. I could turn in for the night satisfied that I was well underway.

I was very glad that I had recently done some work in blender 3D. I always have so much trouble with that program, as I find it very not-user-friendly. Fortunately, I remembered how to do most of what I needed to do. At first I wished I could pull in models from prior projects, but then later in the weekend I realized that I had actually created several general-purpose models that I can use in all of my future projects (except future Ludum Dares). Another win.

Keeping scope limited is key to something like a Ludum Dare, and I managed to limit scope very well. I did not feel a need for any kind of supplemental game engine with this project. I didn’t even have to pull in my code generator, though it was all warmed up and ready to go. There was even one point where Unity forced me to reign in my scope – originally, I had planned to model a 2-bedroom house, have specific types of junk for specific rooms, etc. It was immediately apparent upon a proof-of-concept test on my prototype, though, that Unity would not support the number of physics rigidbodies necessary to populate an entire house with junk. There would be no time to write any sort of complex custom engine to augment Unity physics to make it possible. So I had to scale back to a single-room design.

Since the project continued to go well all weekend, I was able to ensure myself adequate rest, and even spend some time with my wife, which contributed to my productivity at the keyboard. At no time this weekend did I feel harried or stressed about getting the game done. I was able to work at a comfortable pace and explore some tangents that bore results, such as the generated background music. This is how knowledge work should be done.

Speaking of the generated background music: the music was at the very bottom of my priority list. I think music is very important to a video game experience. It is a very effective tool for setting a mood. However, with no access to my Creative Commons resources, I had doubts that I would be able to put together something listenable for the music. I did some research before the compo, but did not find a tool that worked for me, until near the end of my work when I found cgMusic. I was able to quickly put together a soothing, generated piano piece that to me, was somewhat reminiscent of some of the Minecraft background music.

Keeping a constant, prioritized list of what needed to be done next helped to keep focus on important tasks and prevent scope creep. Constant integration and testing made sure that the project never strayed too far off track.

Unity3D continues to be a solid game development engine. Without it, such rapid development of a 3D game would not be possible. Everything just worked, as it usually does.

What Could Have Went Better?

It’s hard to come up with much for this category. There were no epic fails, no cases where hours of work had to be thrown away, no stubborn bugs to chase deep into the night.

I struggled for quite some time with how to balance/utilize the money mechanic. In my testing, I had quickly concluded that the dominant strategy in early prototype builds was to completely ignore the selling and money mechanic and focus solely on trashing. I was worried that I was going to have to remove these interesting details in the name of minimalism when I figured out to use some of the special events (one of the last features implemented) to give the player some motivation to keep some money on hand.

In conclusion

Ludum Dare was a lot of fun, and I’m glad I did it. I now have another game under my belt, another portfolio piece to showcase, some art assets I can re-use elsewhere, and the confidence of knowing I can deliver a game based on a given theme inside of 48 hours. I would recommend this experience to any journeyman game developer.

If you haven’t already, check out (and vote when the time comes) on Dehoarder in the compo entries! Thanks!

As of right now I am completely finished with 1.5 hours to spare!

I had the majority of the game working and complete a few hours before the deadline but when I checked out the submission requirements I had a mini heart attack. This is my first ludum dare, and I didn’t fully read the rules. I just learned that you had to create all of your artwork AND sourcecode during the 48 hours. Originally, I had sampled all of my audio from freesound.org. Luckily, I had time to spare – so I recreated all the sound by recording my own voice and distorting it as best I could in Audacity.

I enjoyed these past 48-hours and I look forward to the next one!

Play and rate please: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22072

The game is done and I am exhausted. Time for sleep now and looking forward to your entries!

After thirty hours of work, I can proudly say I finished my game for this Ludum Dare.

I called the game “Nothing is impossible”. Is a platform game where you must control two characters in a split screen, each screen represent the black and the white and this create a constrat between the character and the wall.

The game consist, as I said before, in the control the two characters dodging the boxes and stakes you will find in the way, all this while they run forward.

My intention was do the game very very difficult, but at the same time do a addictive game and I think I finally achieve.

But well, let’s cut the talk. You can find the game here.

Thank for read and play!

Sorry for no add potatoes, serious, i’m very sorry

I just submitted my entry: i.
It’s a minimal shooter game where you have to survive 60 seconds to win.

Click the image to play it.