I wanted to create a digital board game in Unity. Not having much experience in Unity here’s what I ended up with.

While working on Scoria, I had a simple goal to finish the game, make sure there was sound,music and graphics. I  had  base gameplay in mind where I would build a tactics style game where the background would attack you. Originally there were going to be graves everywhere and hands would come up and grab random surrounding tiles. The goal was going to be to push your opponent towards the hands and attacking background elements. Once basic moving was put in place I realized it was almost impossible to push in the desired directions hoping to get the right cards. So how did I get that far before coming to this?

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So I’d say enough time has elapsed since I released Quality Television for me to look back on it. The concept is simple yet silly: your only weapon is a television, and placing it anywhere will hypnotize any guards caught in its entrancing rays. Developing this thing was a lot of fun, as you might imagine! First up, the development process:

1. First afternoon- Brainstorming! It actually only took about 5 minutes of brainstorming for this idea to pop into my head. My first idea was a JRPG where you use words as a weapon, but I’m terrible at JRPG design. My next idea was BANANARANG!, which is exactly what it sounds like, but that seemed too indistinguishable (mechanically speaking) from a normal boomerang. Then I hit upon the idea, loved it, and started prototyping. It was all engine work today, but not much else.
2. Second day- I made a phenomenal amount of progress on the second day; most of the content you see in game is from this stage of development. Level design was top priority, and I finished all but level 8 (which was a story level more than anything else).
3. Final hours- From here was the aforementioned level 8, the beginning and ending sequences, and sound and music. I wasn’t as productive here as I was the previous day, but I’d say I’m pretty happy with how complete the game feels.

I guess I’ll go straight to what went well and what didn’t:

PROS:

• Core Gameplay: The core mechanics of the game worked out really well. I ended up with the game alternating between action and puzzle levels, with the final levels (Levels 6 and 7) being an effective mix of both. I feel like the Level 4 difficulty spike was a bit too much though, maybe I should have had an additional level to better teach the unusual light mechanics,
• Technical Stuff: Aside from a Windows version crash that was fixed within a couple hours after release, there weren’t any major bugs.
• Sound and Music: I had enough free time on the final day to put together a decent (albeit short) soundtrack in Renoise. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that additional instruments come in when the TV is in play. I even made the added instruments low-quality and static-y, as if they were coming from the TV itself.
• Art: Well, it was there. I do think that its simplicity worked well.
• Story: This was a lot of fun. The story is, again, simple, but the opening text really set the tone, featuring the “Sinister Governing Body” (or SGB). I’d rather not spoil the ending here, but suffice it to say that it’s pretty crazy– and a natural extension of the game’s mechanics, too!

CONS:

• Scope: Generally, when you see “scope” in the “cons” section of a LD postmortem, you expect the author to have overstretched themselves. In fact, the opposite ended up happening. There are only 8 levels, the last of which is entirely story-oriented. I feel like I could have done a lot more with the concept with the time allotted.

So here we have the pros vastly outweighing the cons. What a successful success this success has successfully been! Successful.

Download Quality Television here. Successfully.

I reviewed a game called Drop It on my channel.  Check it out,  and give the developers some love. Null DIES

Here is a post-mortem of my #LD32 entry called Weapon Regulator. Your are sent to a battlefield, and your mission is to seize any unconventional (i.e. illegal) weapon that you’ll see. You are neutral, so the soldiers won’t hurt you, but beware of the stray bullets!

It’s my third Ludum Dare, and the most challenging one for me so far! All in all, I’ve been able to work 23h on the game during the weekend, which is more than my previous entries (18h and 20h). I’ve been working with Flash, Photoshop, AS3SFXR, and cgMusic/GXSCC. Here is how I roughly spent the weekend:

Day 1: idea + gameplay prototype

I live in Europe (France), where the compo starts at 3:00 in the morning. Usually, I sleep and discover the theme in the Saturday morning when I woke up. But this time, as the compo hopefully took place during a vacation week, I couldn’t resist and stayed up late to discover the theme. My initial reaction was “meh”: I found it quite limited and it didn’t inspired me at all. Anyway, I went to bed with the secret hope that “sleeping over it” will help me to have original ideas in the morning. I did have a lot of ideas, but none of them that convinced me really, or ideas that were way too ambitious for my current skills and the limited time frame.

I usually enjoy using the theme in an original way, but this time I had a very hard time to do it. I needed about 2 more hours to stick to the one idea I liked the most (or I hated the less):I wanted to make a game about “weapons” where the player wouldn’t be using one. I then went to the “Geneva convention” angle: the player has to collect “weapons stated has unconventional” by politicians. And, as politicians often change their mind, the “weapons convention” change regularly, to make your job of spotting unconventional weapons harder!

With this idea in mind, I spent about 12 hours working on a gameplay prototype, trying different weapons, movement, goals, ways to make you feel like you are on an actual battlefield, and designing a set of “weapons convention” with an increasing difficulty curve. In the end I got this very ugly but already enjoyable prototype:

After several tries, I choose to split a game session in two “parts”: for the first 60 seconds, you can’t be hurt. As you discover the game, you can then focus on the “spotting & collecting weapons” mechanic. At 60 seconds, the first fire weapon (a gun) appears on the battlefield, and the player can now be injured, so an “avoid the bullets” mechanic is added to the core gameplay. Originally, you could be hurt if you tried to seize melee weapons when soldiers were fighting each other. But I finally decided it was to complex for players discovering the game, and I cut all code related to this aspect.

Day 2: graphics and sound

With a working prototype in hand, the second day was the time to work on the visual and audio aspects of the game. These are my weak points, and I’m trying to improve them over time (especially on the graphics side). Due to my limited skills and time available (but also out of personal taste), I chose to go with a “pixel art” style. I drew a single sprite for each weapons / character, and to save time I then animated these sprites using “tween animations” directly into Flash. Here is a sprite-sheet of the main active objects in the game:

While it isn’t much, drawing and animating all those elements (+ misc graphics and various GUI screens) took me… 7 hours of work! As I said, graphics are one of my weaknesses…

It also meant that I had about 4h30 to work on audio, which is more than I usually do. One of my personal challenge for this compo was to try to add some music into the game. None of my previous entries had music, so I wanted to do it this time. As I have zero music composition skills, I choose to use cgMusic, a music generator. It can produce very nice result when coupled with the GX-SCC synthetiser. I’ve been inspired to use this tool after playing the wonderful Tightrope Theatre by Adventure Island, which has an incredible music soundtrack created with these two tools.

But having a good tools and using it wisely are two different things. I spend about 2 hours toying with cgMusic, only to produce quite ear-tearing music tracks. The best result I was able to get was a 17 seconds loop. But I feared that people might find playing a 2 minutes game with 17 second of music looping too annoying, so, as the clocks was nearing the “end of compo” time, I made a strange decision: I decided not to loop the music, and only use it at the beginning of the game. I’m still unsure about whether it was a good or bad idea.

Anyway, spending so much time on the music left me with too few time to create as many sounds as I wanted. It also meant I had to rush through the “finishing touches” stage. While I usually spent the last couple of hours polishing the game, this time I weren’t able to do it for as long as I wanted (for example, I couldn’t add in screen shake or nuke weapons). Hopefully, so far, it doesn’t seem that the game suffer from balancing issues

Play the final version of the game

What went wrong

– Music: cgMusic is a great tool, but I wasn’t able to use it the way I would. Even if I suck at creating music, I think it would have been better to use a “tracker-like” tool, than spending hours tweaking random seeds in this program. Next time, I’ll try to use Bosca Ceoil, for better results I hope!

– Time management: I spent too much time on music for a unsatisfying result. It was also a mistake to stay up late to discover the theme at 3:00 am with the hope of having a better idea – I had too much ideas and it was difficult to choose one in the end. Next time, I’ll do like my previous LD: have a good night sleep and discover theme in the morning.

What went right

– Gameplay / Idea: The comments I’ve received so far on the game page are quite positive about the originality and playability of the game. I’m actually quite happy about how the game turned out – the many hours spent on tweaking the gameplay prototype weren’t wasted in the end :)!

Conclusion

Even if I had to rush things at the end of the compo and had some disappointments, I’m actually happy to have been able to finish this game in time. I didn’t liked my idea that much at the beginning, but in the end it seems that the game is quite enjoyable. In the comments, people who have rated it seems to enjoy the original idea, and have fun playing it, which is the greatest reward I could ever hope for!

If you hadn’t already tried it, please click here to play Weapon Regulator and tell me what you think of it!

Welcome, fellow Ludum Darer!
Do you wish that somebody would try your game on stream? Wish no further, for I am here just for that purpose!
Come to my stream, enter your game in the chat and watch! I shall proceed on a first come – first served basis.

www.twitch.tv/eemmbbeerr
And if you wanted to repay me for my kindness, look no further than my/our Drunken Quest for the One Vodka game, found in the link below. I hope you will enjoy playing it!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=26778

EDIT: Done for today, thanks for watching!

http://rd124p77.itch.io/simple-squares

What that Hell-ish Black Sheep?!?!

Try the “new update” version of Scaresheep!
Scaresheep

Enjoy!

There is only few Textual Adventure Game on the Ludum Dare, so take a look at these two :

TLDR OTT by wooltech.

Escape The Killer by me.

PS : I’m searching for someone who can help me proofreading my textual games, show yourself if you’re interested !

This was our fifth Ludum Dare and we had some goals this time:

•  to make just one mechanic – failed!
•  polish it – kinda failed!
•  will not work untill 5 in the morning – totaly failed!
•  all went as planned? – YYEEEEEYYYY!!!!!

We spent 2 days in a coworking with people playing Mortat Kombat near us, and table football tempting to be played (which we did ^_^)

Overall concept was that the player would collect resources to craft weapons and give them to the clients.
The first idea was a game about worker placement – you would have a worker and a few places for him to work – like a forest (to get wood), some place to get stone and so on. You would get requests from the clients that require specific amount of that resource. You would get money for it and spend it on getting more workers and improving storage space. But that felt like the player would not have a lot to do, and would just watch what happens. We didn’t think it would be very fun to play, and we didn’t want to spend most of the Ludum to check if it is true or not.

So we scraped the idea and thought of other ways you can collect resources (still keeping the clients) and so the “match 3″ mechanic came to mind, but as any managment games we thought we should give the player more things to care about. From the setting – really quickly Forge machanic was added (where you would click on the Thermometer to increase the heat of the forge, and specific weapons require specific heat that you should maintain.)
And so we started implementing it, thinking how should we make a win condintion and what could you spend your money on.

Here are major pros and cons:

The Good:
– Fun
– Game’s visual and sound feedback that we had time for (like needed temperature and its highlight)
– Had time to test and fix bugs at the end
– Potential for improvment and full release
– Some things are intuitive
– What you need to complete the request
– Event heat becomes obvious after few iterations of trying to get how it works

The Bad:
– First day was spent designing the game, and coming up with something interesting
– Didn’t have time for proper health implementation (in not much thought put into it, and because there is low replayablity (without permanent power ups and stuff) we thought for the Jam it would be best just to remove the loss condition
– Didn’t have time for everything else
– Almost no strategy, only twitch skills
– No visual feedback for successful/failed orders (like screenshake and specific labels)
– Upgrade button is not attracting your attention after first appering, some people didn’t see it even after 20+ minutes of playing
– Bad tutorial (nobody reads it):

•  not a swap match 3
•  diagonals are allowed
•  bad final goal explanation

Timelapse of the development process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sX_46eaI1k

For some pic’s and updates on other games we develop you can follow
https://twitter.com/TheBrenor
https://twitter.com/Svetozzzar

Play!

Anyway, tell me what you think about my fire effect and what I might do to improve it.