Ludum Dare

About Anshul Goyal (twitter: @goyalanshul)

A game developer.

Entries

My Strange Alien Friend Ludum Dare 35	Drone Racer Ludum Dare 34	GameRoom Ludum Dare 32	Vibrant City Ludum Dare 31
Aquila Ludum Dare 28	10 Floors Ludum Dare 27

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Anshul Goyal's Archive

Hiya!

First of all thank you for another Ludum Dare. This was my 5th and its been a blast like every other in the past. My entry for LD34 is Drone Racer.

I think we can all agree to some extent that the theme for LD34 was a little bit weird. On top of that having two themes makes it even more confusing. Sometime I brainstorm about theme one and other times theme two. I even tried to mix the two themes together hoping that I will come up with an idea that somehow involve both themes. I can assure you now it was a very bad idea. But for some mysterious reason my brain just wants to combine the two themes together. I lost couple of hours in the beginning arguing with myself which theme should I focus on. In the end, as you may have probably noticed in my compo entry none of the two themes were clearly reflected. Oh well…

In every Ludum Dare I participate, I try to experiment with new mechanics and gameplay ideas. My first idea was to fly a drone in a high security facility and steal vital intel without getting detected. The drone is equipped with smart technology that can hack into any remote device. For the sake of theme/simplicity, one button allows you to hack open the doors and the other button allows you to hack into the security cameras and pause them off for limited amount of time. Every time you perform one of those two hacking actions the global threat level grows, guards become more and more vigilant and it takes slightly more time to hack into successive devices. There you go both themes are covered, my brain wins. Yayy. Now its time to write code.

Before calling off my first night, I was able to fly a drone in an empty space. It was a decent progress. I prepared a big list of all the tasks I had to do the next day before saying good night to my computer. I kept pondering in my sleep if the game is still doable or not, both asset and code wise. In any case I have to re-evaluate it again the next morning. As I was going through the list of tasks I have to accomplish in the next 36 hours, I felt that the scope of this idea is way bigger than I originally expected. Producing all the assets that could deliver the right mood and compelling gameplay will be a challenge. Since I suck at art anyway, it’ll be harder and more time consuming for me to create all the assets within such a short period of time. I steered away from it for a while and thought what else I could do that involve minimum art. Lately I have developed an obsession about owning a drone and hoping to take part in some sort of drone racing (just for fun) in the near future. Thats when Drone Racer came to life. Although I was tempted to make a two player split screen drone racing game but my previous game jam experiences reminded me that if you want people to play and enjoy your jam game it has to be single player. Racing with bots is not much fun so I turned myself towards making it a challenge based game. And voila, here is Drone Racer equipped with six unique challenges, each grows in difficulty than the previous one. Every challenge focusses on various aspects on drone maneuvering capabilities.

This looked more achievable compared to my original idea and equally fun. I sat down to work and the next thing I know “its time to submit”. The compo was over and I didnt even realize where all that 36 hours went. I was feeling proud and accomplished. Once again I did not failed. Things turned out great and I had a game. One more fun filled weekend came to an end. Now its time to get away from my computer and see if the world around me still exist :D.

If you haven’t played and rated Drone Racer yet, please do it before the rating period is over :D. Thanks for playing!!!

Till Next Time!

Anshul

Hiya Jammers!

After receiving some valuable feedback regarding game controls from multiple sources, I have prepared a post compo version which includes refined and smooth controls

Check out Drone Racer – Post Compo version.

If you haven’t please Play and rate my compo entry 😀

I am playing and rating LD games as fast as everyone is scrolling through this feed.

This is my 5th Ludum Dare and its a success again. Hurraayyyy! Overall it went quite well. More details in the post-mortem next week

Don’t forget to play and rate Drone Racer

Cant Wait TO

Looks like things are going well :D. I guess or may be not. At least I have a title screen.

Making levels now but they are still a mess. Need to polish a lot. Tons of stuff to do. Super fun!

Sadly I missed the the last Ludum Dare but I am prepared for this one. My computer is all set and my body is ready.

BRING IT ON!

Last weekend (May 29th – May 31st) I participated in Mini LD #59 with four of my acquaintances from reddit. This is the first time for me to participate in a MiniLD as I am usually a full LudumDare Compoplayer. MiniLD usually runs for more than two weeks, but since we all have time commitments to other things in life we all decided to jam it out on its last weekend.

All of us originally met on gamedev reddit and started a gamedev text chat on google hangout where we often talk about games, show our progress what we have been working on in our spare time, share and exchange ideas etc etc. Its a lot of fun to hangout with like minded people.

Everyone in our group appreciated the MiniLD #59 theme which is basically swapping your sprite sheet with someone else’s before submitting the game. The demo sprite sheet was released on the website, which introduces us to the dimensions and layout of the sprite sheet we needed to create. The impact of this is that you have no idea how your game is gonna actually look like until the end. For e.g; you might have created a sheep in your game and it may get replaced by a turtle or spikes or a blank tile or anything else that you cannot even imagine of. This makes the game design a little more challenging because the game should not be art driven. We cannot rely on a certain style or objects with specific representation and let it drive the gameplay. We have to make sure our game will be understandable and playable even after replacing the sprite sheet with a random one.

We started our 48h game jam around 9:30PM on Friday (May 29th). Everyone was equally motivated and determined to deliver a finished game by the end of 48 hours. We used google hangout as our primary communication tool since all of us reside in different towns and cities.

The Beginning

Like any other game jam we began with a brainstorming session that lasted for an hour or two. We discussed few game ideas within the limits of the sprite sheet layout as it was an obligatory to follow the standard. We also discussed our skill sets as it was our first time working with each other. To comply with the theme (Swap) we settled on a mechanic that that will allow the player to swap their position with any other object in the world provided the object is configured as swappable. We also had this notion that the player has somehow acquired a super power that allows them to slow down time and swap any two objects in the world provided the objects are configured as swappable. For e.g. if an AI unit is shooting towards the player, they can swap their position with another object in the world in order to dodge the incoming attack. Cool, right? Everybody liked the idea and the work began.

BUT.

Whats the setting of the game? we don’t know.
Whats the purpose of the mechanic? we don’t know.
How the game will be played? we don’t know.
Whats the win or lose condition? we don’t know.
How the player will progress in the game? we don’t know.
Is it a puzzle or a brawler or obstacle avoidance? we don’t know.

We never bother to ponder long enough on these questions and left those unanswered and this is exactly what bit us hard in the end (IMO). Not having a clear vision about what the end product will look like kept us unproductive from time to time. We often question each other about the kind of game that we are trying to make.

Work Distribution

Stephen was working primarily on the art assets and also learning how to make music using Reaper at the same time. He came up with this cool business man looking dude and other assets in the game. Here is our sprite sheet that we submitted. Hopefully someone is using it

Zach was our main sound guy. He started pumping out awesome loops within two hours using his big stack of musical instruments. Listening to those kinda makes me feel like making a game similar to Audiosurf. He was also involved with level creation and contributed to art as well.

John, Larry and I was mainly working on programming tasks.

John helped us in overcoming all of our git nightmares.

BTW, Larry loves drawing on people’s faces. See what he did to my face 😀

Progress

As we set sail into the development, we had some intermittent discussions about the overall look and feel of the game. The style of our game was completely dependent on the art direction so we had to stand by a little before we had some mockups. Once we had those we came up with the style that the player will play as an angry office worker. An angry office worker who somehow acquired a super power that allows them to swap positions of two objects in the game world. The player will then have to disrupt a normal working day and wreak havoc in the workplace that they hate completely.

By this time, we had a somewhat clear idea about the type of game we are working on but we were also a little ignorant about the way the game will be actually played. We continued working on these smaller game mechanics (while not paying attention to the overall bigger picture) that we hoped will come along nicely in the end. When most of those individual components were ready, I personally had a lot of trouble giving all those features a purpose that may or may not constitute a game. At this time I knew that we are quite behind in our deliverable. We stayed focussed and tried to push it through as much as we can but unfortunately it all fell apart in the end. Our first level was incomplete in many aspects and there weren’t enough art assets ready to populate the level. Clock kept ticking and only 4hours left to submit the game. It was then I proposed that we must call it off and accept failure :(.

Technical Problems

Unity3d and source control don’t like each other, at least from my experience. Often times we were facing problems with merging each others changes and losing library references every time we try to pull new changes from the repository. The solution wasn’t straightforward and every time this happened we either have to search the entire scene for the missing references, fix them and push it back to the repository or stash our local changes, pull the latest commit from the repository and redo all the changes. This was getting annoying and it wasted a lot of our precious time.

The End

This is the second time I failed in a game jam. At least we tried.

“Trying and failing is better than not trying at all”

It was a bit disappointing that we were unable to produce anything after spending 48h on it. But again:

“If you have never tried, you have never learned”

And we definitely learned a lot of new things in our quest to make a game in 48h. This learning is not only limited to the game development or third party unity plugins that we used in our game, we learned about each other, the dynamics with which we work, our interests and familiarity with variety of tools and tech and everyones thought process. This will definitely benefit us in our next undertaking.

A screen capture from our incomplete game:

Till Next Time!

Anshul

GameRoom is my 48 hours compo entry for LudumDare32. GameRoom takes place inside a flashy arcade theme park which is filled with multiple game arenas. Each game arena offer a different kind of game with its own challenges. This game arena focusses on Ring Toss.

Now sit back, relax and allow me to tell you a tale where in 48 hours a game developer went through the process of creating

Dragon’s Den

To GameRoom

gameroom

Before the theme was even announced I had already decided that I am gonna try a 3D one person game this time. This will be my second time attempting to make a 3D first person game. The last one I did was a while ago during 7dfps(7 day first person shooter) challenge. I was thrilled to hear the theme (An Unconventional Weapon) as fits perfectly with the genre of the game I had in my mind. Now all I have to do is to come up with an unconventional situation that could possibly use an unconventional weapon and I am gold. Out of nowhere I thought of Ring toss. Its pretty unconventional to use ring toss as a weapon and using it in first person makes total sense. Great, I said to myself. How about hunting dragons using ring toss? Similar to what Hiccup did with a hammer in How to Train Your Dragon training arena. I patted myself on the back, “brilliant idea! (or may be not)” :D. This feels doable in under 48hours. So lets jam now!

First Few Hours

Within few hours I had the player movement working in the first person. The ring toss mechanic was also fairly functional. I was making really good progress so far. I started looking for level design inspirations that are not constrained and offers enough freedom of movement to the player in a relatively small world. I setup a very simple level with walls surrounding the entire arena and few walls here and there creating a sense of disconnection and at the same time dividing the arena into small rooms and corridors. I placed few ammo fountains that will spit out ammo at a fixed rate. The player is free to collect the ammo whenever needed. The ammo is used to shoot/throw the ring. I had this notion where the game will offer 3 different types of rings consisting of three different shapes: square, triangle and circle. Each ring is composed of a fixed number of particles or cubes and the player is required to have those many particles or cubes in their inventory to be able to shoot the ring of that shape. The player can easily switch between different types of rings. Each ring will differ from other in some attributes like damage, size etc. This all worked pretty well. Bed time 😀

A Second Thought

As I woke up the next morning, I added my first AI unit. As soon as that happened, I started seeing some troubles with the way the game is played. It wasn’t as fun as it looked in the movie :p. Not that I was aiming for it exactly but something wasn’t right. I spent some time trying to figure it out but I wasn’t sold on it completely. I lost my entire Saturday morning and half of the afternoon trying to make it right but no success. Now I am at a point where I need to make a decision whether I should keep iterating on this or change the gameplay completely but keep the same mechanic. I took the hard decision of converting the game into a simple arcade style ring toss simulator. It was a bit disappointing but I rather have something working as opposed to something that is half done.

A New Beginning

New beginnings offers new excitements. As I work toward turning my game into an arcade theme park simulator, I was flooded with some really good ideas and I had to convince myself that this is a 48 hour deal and not a 48 month deal. My overall vision is to create an arcade game theme park. The park consists of several arenas. Each arena is dedicated to a different style of game with variety of challenges. The more and better you play, the more you get to play. For eg; if you beat the high score at a challenge or win a special timed challenge you will earn in-game quarters that you can then use to access more games. Of course, GameRoom (aka Ring Toss Room) is just one tiny part of the park, its like one bit in a 64 bit integer. The possibilities are endless here. Every challenge will showcase the names and avatar pics of the top players. Beating the high score and having your name showcased in front of every challenge is a dream of every player. The game will not impose any restriction on the player as to what they should play and when they should play. If the player thinks they have got the skills to do it (with or without practice), the game is ready for you. There will also be sufficient arenas for training and practice that will help you hone your skills.

GameRoom is a reflection of this thought process. Its not perfect but it proves the point that such things could be fun and enjoyable either solo or in multiplayer if implemented properly and on a large scale. GameRoom comes with a practice arena located right in front of the main entrance. In addition to that, there are 7 other challenges that the player can partake. The road ahead was very straightforward as I have clear vision as to what I am trying to deliver at the end of 48 hours. I added one challenge after another and without any realization the compo time was up.

Thats all folks!

If you haven’t played and rated GameRoom, please do so. Thanks for playing!!!

Till Next Time!

Anshul

Hello to all Ludum Dare’rs,

I cant wait to get started. All my software are updated and my body is ready.

Unity3D, Pixen and Photoshop.

Good luck everyone!

Hey Guys!

Only a few days left to play and rate Ludum Dare games. If you havent rated Vibrant City yet, please go ahead and give it a try.

Finally I got some time to work on the improvements highlighted by you all in the comments. Thanks a lot for playing Vibrant City and leaving your valuable feedback. Each and every comment gave me a better understanding about how to improve the game. Some of those improvements have been implemented in this first post compo release that you can play here. A few more complicated improvements are in the works and will be released later in the next update.

First post compo update release Notes:

– Increased the size of vibrants and civilians

– Added controls/instructions screen

– Added line of fire pointer in order to avoid confusion if the player can shoot at a specific location or not

– Refined line of sight/fire calculations

Thanks again for playing Vibrant City and dont forget to rate my compo entry :D.

That is all!!!

Anshul

Ludum Dare is my favorite game jam and this time I made a game called Vibrant City which you can play and rate here.

Friday Dec 5th 9PM – Theme Announcement

As soon as the theme (Entire Game on Single Screen) was announced I was a bit confused like everyone else and started pondering whether it is a theme or a constraint. I remember participating in one of the global game jam and one of the constraint was this ‘Entire Game on Single Screen’ but whatever. The theme is announced and I have to make a game in 47h 50m. So I started walking around my little apartment trying to think about new ideas and/or existing games that can be played on a single screen. To no one’s surprise the first few games that came to mind were Pong, Pacman, Tetris, Space Invaders :D. As I progress through the time period I started thinking about brawlers, tower defense, 4p local multiplayer shooters, bullet hell and survival game where you have to fight waves over waves of enemies. Nothing was really clicking to me at this point.

I was getting tired walking around when suddenly I had this idea of a beat’em up game inspired by movie Edward Scissorhands. The player will role play a character with Scissorhands and can switch hands to like hammerhands, axehands, bullethands etc etc. This sounded really cool and different to me so I started thinking about it in detail. A beat’em up game is not quite fun to play if it is missing different combos and variety of attacks. Having different combos means lots of art and animations and this is just for the main character. The same follows for all the AI characters that I am going to have in the game. For someone who is not very fluent in art and animation, this sounded a little bit out of scope to me in 48h. And I went back to the drawing board.

After a while I was enlightened with this rooftop shooter idea. I immediately discarded it thinking that “meh, its not good enough” but then I gave it a little more time and attention and I realized its not actually that bad and it could be a really good game. So this was it, I finalized the initial plot and started working.

Friday Dec 5th 10:30PM – Work Begins

I began by doing some initial research on different rooftop views that could influence my level design. I started working on first draft of level design plus some initial player movement for the next 4 hours or so. This was important to have as it will give me an idea whether I am going in the right direction or not. Fortunately, it went well and I was happy with the implementation. I can sleep well now :).

Nap Time – zzzzzzzzzzz

Saturday Dec 6th 8:30AM – Resume Working

Since I already had the basic player movement working from last night, I picked up from there and implemented player navigation from rooftop-to-rooftop. Then it was just non-stop working on level refinement, adding graphics and shaders, adding civilians and vibrants, implementing spawn logic, game progressions, menus/UI and various other stuff. Fast forward to Sunday Dec 7th 3:30AM, I had the game playable with some bugs here and there and some balancing issues. I was completely exhausted by that time as I was working non-stop since morning. Seeing the game in such good standing, I decided to take a nap for few hours.

Nap Time – zzzzzzzzzzz

Sunday Dec 7th 8:30AM – Final Day

Woke up, played the build from last night and read my todo list to remind myself where I was. The next 4 hours just flew by in play testing, bug fixing, polishing, UI and balancing gameplay. Then comes the sound and music part. I spend some time on freesound website to find the right sounds for my game. It took me a while to download them and mixing them up using Audacity. By the time I was done integrating the sound it was already 4PM. I still had plenty of time (~5h) to playtest and fix the remaining issues. I spent next two hours or so playing the game several times in the Unity Editor, in the browser and also the standalone build.

Everything was looking good and I was super excited to submit my entry. As the hour hand of the clock approaches 7PM I was done with my submission (YES! 2h early :D). It was an exhilarating moment. I feel accomplished!!

What went right:

I manage to keep the scope of the game doable. I didnt feel any rush or panic during the 48h.
I am glad I didnt chose to build a game that is art/animation heavy else I would have definitely regret it.
I wanted to try something different. Something I have never build before and I manage to achieve it.
I slept well without getting bothered from the incomplete work which is very rare :p

What went wrong:

The writing in the game is not that great and I should have spent more time on it.

Thanks a ton LudumDare for this wonderful 48h of creation and fun!!

Thanks again for playing and rating Vibrant City!!!

Till Next Ludum Dare!!!

Anshul

PS: I am gonna start prototyping that Scissorhands game soon!!

Vibrant City, my compo entry for LD31 is almost ready. Its now time to add sounds then some more polish and I am done 😀

Pretty happy so far with my game!!

Cant wait to submit and play other games!!!

So finally I managed to create my level. Here is the view that will be used to play the entire game on single screen.

Aquila is my second submission to ludum dare. I am pretty satisfied with what I have achieved in 48hours. There are few things that I could have done better but there is never enough time for everything, eh.

My first impression about theme:

The theme ‘You only get one’ didn’t excite me very much in the beginning. My first thought is to fill in the blank ‘you only get one ______’. Of course, the first word that came to my mind is ‘life’, ‘You only get one life’. Then ammo, chance, opportunity and so on. These words are taking me no where. I even thought what if I could make a game where you only get one chance to play the game. If you try to restart/reload the game again the game will tell you “thats it, you had your one chance”. Glad I didn’t do it because someone actually did it :D. Then I started thinking about procedural generation, in procedural generation the game generates a “unique” level per play session and that could fit the theme (you only get one “unique” level). This and I also wanted to try something with procedural generation for a long time. So this felt like the right time. Without any further delay and without having any idea about the game mechanic I decided to start implementing the algorithm.

What went right:

I started working on my procedural generation algorithm very early, within 2 hours of the theme announcement. This gave me enough time to refine and test the algorithm in great depth. Although, I do end up spending a lot of time fixing some hard to find annoying bugs.
I kept the game simple in a way that it is less heavy on art. I am not an artist and didn’t want to aim for something that I cannot deliver on time.
I successfully manage to keep the overall scope of the game to a minimum. I had so many other ideas with this procedural generation that I wanted to implement but I ruled out every single one of them.
I stayed awake most of the time 😀

What went wrong:

Since I had no clear idea about the gameplay in the beginning it felt a little short in the end. There is no sense of progression in the game as mentioned by someone in the comments and I totally agree with that.
I based my gameplay on the procedural generation of the level (as it was my primary objective) and not the other way round.
The game is lacking in delivering a proper context to the players in the sense that why they are doing what they are doing in the game.

Overall it was a great jam for me. I fully enjoyed my 48 hours. May be gameplay felt a little less satisfying in a way but at least I have got the foundation laid out. I have some positive vibes about this game but in reality time will tell how much this game will actually grow in the future.

Thanks a lot everyone for playing my game!!

If you havent tried it yet, play Aquila now 😀

Till next Ludum Dare!!

Just wrapped up my game called “Aquila”.

A brief description:

Aquila (also known as a constellation in the northern sky) is a top down arcade game. You play as an ancient soul who is trying to escape from the ruins. The level is generated dynamically as the player moves from tile-to-tile. I think may be I can call this “Procedural Generation”, as there is no randomness involved. The goal of the game is to reach the end tile while avoiding or killing enemies. You can also collect some ancient artifacts as an added bonus by destroying the ruins.

The game fits (I hope so) the theme in the following two ways:
1) Enemy bullets can also destroy the ruins. In that case artifacts wont be revealed. So you have only one chance.
2) Since the level is dynamically generated, so you only get one “unique” level per play session.

Thanks for playing Aquila

PS: I will write a detailed post-mortem about this jam later. Need to rest and sleep and eat and … .. .

I am in. All set and ready to crank some code over the weekend.

My standard toolset: Unity3d

In Ludum Dare #27 I manage to create a game called “10 Floors“. In this game, the player have to reach the goal in 10 sec by avoiding enemies on their way. Its a very simple and classic concept but this is not what I came up in the first place.

As soon as I learned about the theme, I also thought about building a game where you can finish every level within 10 seconds. Its funny that when I see the games, most games have the same approach but of course the execution is completely different. Some games have totally nailed the mechanic.

My first thoughts about the game was to build a game where the game world will change every 10 seconds. As a player you have to predict in advance what the state of the world will be in the next few seconds and based on that the player will make their moves. It was more of a puzzle game than just a runner. I had the world changing logic in but it didnt seemed that appealing from the gameplay point to view. I gave it some more thought but then I moved on as I couldn’t came up with anything that looked like it’ll be fun to play.

It was saturday afternoon and I had nothing. The chances of finishing the game were getting bleak so I went back to the drawing board without wasting any more time on my first idea. The clever decision to take at that time was to turn things around in a way that doesnt involve trashing all the work I have done so far. I reused my level assets, refactored a small section of code and quickly came up with this enemy avoidance idea. It looked fun and challenging at that time. I implement the first level within an hour and felt confident. After that its all non-stop work until I reached a point where the game is fully playable. I felt really relieved on sunday afternoon after seeing the “final” results. I then spent rest of the time polishing and fixing bugs. This is my LD #27 game making story.

What went right?

– No mysterious technical issues. Yayy!

– Able to change things at the last moment without breaking too much stuff.

What went wrong?

– Struggled while creating the puzzles, didnt quite like the implementation of what I had originally in my mind. Lost too much time on it.

– Didnt gave much thought to the mechanic itself. I felt like I was interpreting the theme (10 seconds) as a mechanic. But I guess those are two different things. This slowed me down a little in the beginning.

– Controls are not refined and smooth. I received some valid criticism on it. I wish I had spent more time on it.

Overall, I had a lot of fun making this game and learned couple of new things, especially about shaders and lighting. Shaders really changed the look and feel of anything whether its a 3D model or just a simple 2D line. Its magic.. lol.

Thanks Ludum Dare and I am definitely looking forward to the next Ludum Dare. In the meantime, I have other games to make :D. This shit never stops, eh.

Thanks everyone for playing the game. If you haven’t tried it yet, here “10 Floors“. After you beat the game, you can enter yourself to the online leaderboard. GET ON IT!!! 😀

About Anshul Goyal (twitter: @goyalanshul)

Entries

Anshul Goyal's Trophies

Anshul Goyal's Archive

How a Stealthy Drone Game Evolved Into a Racing Drone Game – Postmortem

Post Compo Changes

Survived the madness and finished the game

Progress So Far…..

I am IN once again

How our decent start got swapped by a disappointing failure – A Mini Ludum Dare #59 Postmortem

an unconventional game for an unconventional theme – postmortem

I am doing it once again

Vibrant City first post compo update

How I spent 48h making Vibrant City

Vibrant City is almost ready!!

Progress so far

Aquila – postmortem

Aquila = FINISHED!!!

Troisieme Ludum Dare

LD27 – 10 Floors – post mortem