Squeaked across the finish line. Put in about 27 hours of work over the weekend. The game is short but has some variety to it. Also liberal checkpoints. There are only 7 “rooms” so it’s not hard to get through. Obviously influenced by the great Eric Chahi and his seminal work, Another World (Out of this World). Hope you like it.

Please rate and comment and I will try to do the same. http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=8631 Look forward to trying your games!

3 hours last night and 13 today. Got a lot done. Still a ton to do (sounds, boss, 4-5 more screens/levels).

Wish I had another full day. Good luck everyone.

Here’s a shot of where I am. I didn’t start until midnight and spend a couple hours on some art and animation.

I want to make a small adv game where you run around and do stuff. Right not you just have a character that animates a run sequence. Long way to go, and not sure I can get there. I’m not experienced enough at animation. Maybe it just ends up being 5 rooms or whatever.

As for the themes…I disliked both (surprise!). I think I’m going with “Growing” and your cranky sci-fi uncle has dropped you on an alien world so you can go through some trials and become a man (mon and dad have coddled you too long). Think Rick & Morty

So we’ll see where I get. This is the first time in 10 LD’s that I’ve gone to bed early and not stayed up till noon on Saturday. my plan is to wake up by noon and stream most of the day. I can hopefully come up with a design for the levels/rooms off stream so it’s just implementation on stream.

Good luck, everyone. I’m rolling the dice on this one haha.

Testing out the WebGL stuff in Unity 5.3 (and 5.2) and it seems ok on Chrome and Firefox.

On Safari, I get the following error (and I assume Safari is just not as well supported yet).

Anyone else?

What are your plans for Unity web distributions since the web player is pretty much toast? Seems like the official way is to upload the WebGL build to a server somewhere?

UPDATE

Looks like you can get Safari to work if you turn off Data Caching in Player Settings/WebGL. It will have to re-download the game, vs using a local copy, but for most games we’re talking 7-8megs (if it’s sprites and not heavy on art/sounds), so should be ok. Tested this and it’s fine. Unity forum thread here about it: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/webgl-issue-with-safari.371450/

Also, hosting on Dropbox, seems ok, as well as on a web site. Just upload your entire WebGL directory with the .htaccess file, and /Compressed, /Release, /TemplateData files. Also note that in Unity 5.3, the /Release directory is zipped/small vs being huge and bloated in previous versions.

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Ludum Dare is a lot of work to maintain and run. Imagine if it went away some day? If you regularly participate or if you spend a lot of time enjoying the games people make, consider supporting Mike’s Patreon for the cost of one coffee a month.

Meet Chompy. A little baby monster. His parents are running him through a training course for young monsters where he attacks human dummy targets and avoids obstacles.

Please drop by and play/rate if you get a chance. Leave a note or link to your game and I’ll try to do the same. The game has some meat to it, and is 9 levels long, some of which are very hard. May require some twitch reflexes. Just be patient.

Tools

• Unity 5, c#
• Pixen (osx) for pixel art, animation and level editing
• Sublime Text 3 for c# coding
• cfxr for sound effects

What went right

• I knew I wanted to do a top down 2D game and I knew I wanted to read levels from an image in a pixel editor. So I had initial momentum.
• I didn’t start right at 8pm or start streaming then. I waited until about midnight. I wanted to plan and form up some opinions for the theme. It’s hard for me to think on stream, as you can have pressure to “go”.
• End result was level based, which I planned, as I wanted to have a longer/meatier game that in the past. Curious to see if that’s reflected in scores at all.
• Art style. I purposely selected super lo-fi art so I could do more of it.

What went wrong

• Inexperience with Unity’s Animator system – again. Lost at least 5-6 hours to this in couple hour chunks. This time I will play with it some more post-compo and take detailed notes and shots on setup and use of animations. This could have been solved with more work between jams.
• Didn’t start making levels until Sunday. Most of Friday (8 hours) was lost to implementation and tech stumbling. Saturday was more of the same and although I had all my mechanics programmed and test maps, I hadn’t done any real maps. With 3 hours sleep Sat night, I woke up with 5 hours to go for finish and had to make levels, sounds, title screens and that was too much. The levels are ok but I think a couple suffer from this.
• Had a minor meltdown as we entered the last hour or so and sounds were having issues. It was just an issue with tools, but with 3 hours sleep and the pressure of the end of the jam, it was a nightmare for me. Takeaway is I should have imported 1-2 test sounds Friday night to test the path and make sure it was all good. I assumed I was good since it was the same stuff from last LD. But surprises like this in the final couple hours are heart attack inducing. Do 1 of everything as soon as possible.
• Lost 2-3 hours on the level import tech. It reads pixel colors from an image and spawns objects. Simple. Should have been 30 mins. Turns out the issue was my texture was being scaled since it was a non power of 2 so all the pixel reads were off. This, again, was a lack of experience thing. Takeaway is 1) more practice pre jam and 2) always count on losing hours to unexpected issues until you’ve mastered more of your tools.

I’m happy with the end results. Possibly more than my past efforts. I think the gameplay is there and there’s enough meat to warrant people’s time. And there’s a serious challenge as well. It’s pretty balanced and nothing feels “off” to me. I wanted to incorporate story more and have a nice little animated beginning and end, but that was sacrificed due to time loss.

Please play/rate and leave a comment. I’d appreciate it.

Here’s a shot of where I am now:

And a Vine: https://vine.co/v/eDtuJEDeXv0

Happy with player movement (smooth and fast). No animations yet. Didn’t start until about midnight and ran into a few snags due to being out of practice with Unity. Can exit and load levels and win the game, though.

Probably going to do something along the lines of – you are a baby monster and to learn to be a big, strong monster your Dad is making you run a series of brutal obstacle courses. We’ll see.

Graphic style is super lo-fi. 8×8 sprites and largely 1-2 color. Should be fast art and should also look decent and stylish.

Few hours sleep, then hitting it hard tomorrow. Good luck, everyone.

Will be streaming over here tomorrow: http://www.twitch.tv/georgebroussard

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Well I was going to try not to stay up all night Saturday, but that didn’t happen. Been up and working 24 hours now. Maybe 45 mins total breaks in that time.

Pretty proud of the game. Didn’t have any super major roadblocks. I didn’t even start until 1am Friday night as I couldn’t come up with an idea.

Will post more details later once I’ve had sleep and after I get it all packaged up. I’m pretty foggy right now.

Here’s the title screen.

An unconventional murder of a King.

I didn’t really start until about 1am. Not really in love with the theme and went through 2-3 solid ideas and paper design before nearly bailing Just couldn’t get motivated.

Then I had a new idea. You’re going to walk around and talk to happy people in the kingdom, and make them unhappy with the king and his ways (think Monthy Python or Game of Thrones) :).

You need to be wary of guards because if they are too close to you when talking to people they will try to kill you. Need to add a way to hide, etc and lose aggro. If you convert enough of the kingdom, when the King arrives to walk through with his knight guard, the peasants will rise up from discontent and kill everyone. Your work will be done.

You’re the shifty looking guy in the middle (new clothes coming).

I have to basically make the game Saturday after sleeping, but I feel pretty good about things. Hopefully the gameplay goes well. Spent most of the night wrestling to get Tiled data imported via JSON and various tech things. Not a lot of gameplay at present, but you can walk around and bump into people.

Good night and good luck you you guys.

Heading to bed soon, so I can get a few hours before the kickoff. I may not start streaming right at 8. I may give it 2-3 hours so I can work on an idea and to-do list. Harder for me to focus and idle while on stream. Will try not to put in a 12 hr night tonight, but we’ll see. Would like to get the core in, sleep early-ish, do some planning before streaming, and hit the ground running Saturday, earlier than usual. In the past I’ve gone to bed at Noon on Saturday

Goal this LD. Try to avoid a 24 hour non-stop stretch.

My desk is ready. I am not. My cat Buzz will assist me I’m sure.

Where the magic happens and the cat sleeps.

Unity/C# (engine)
Sublime Text (editing)
Pixen (pixel art)
cfxr (sound effects)
Tiled (maybe if I do a tile based game)
OBS Multiplatform for Mac streaming
Logitech c920 webcam, Blue Yeti mic, etc
2010 iMac, 16 gigs

Will stream over at www.twitch.tv/georgebroussard so feel free to follow in advance if you like.

I think the 20 final theme choices are worse than usual this time, but everyone has an opinion 😉

I just realized this will be my 8th Ludum Dare in a row!

Good luck everybody!

Time to start digging through all these glorious LD games.

If you get a moment, I’d love it if you’d step by and check out and rate/comment my game, PENGIE. It’s about penguins.

Click the pic for a GIF of the action.

Here’s a Vine of my current progress.

Controls feel great and physics are good. I also like the art style.

Tonight is basically “make the game”. Enemies, mechanics, score, death, power-ups/downs. If all goes well then I can get about 12 hours of work tonight and sleep and tomorrow can be 6-8 hours of menus, polish and sfx and straggling gameplay.

No real idea what I’m doing Spent most of it making this penguin jump around and not suck (too much).

Today (after sleep!) will hopefully by art, enemies and gameplay.

Not in love with this theme. I’m sure someone will do something very clever with it.

A penguin needs enemies, like an evil Snowman?