I have now submitted my entry Beth and Maggie.

It’s a puzzle adventure thingie.

I did get a bit of hubris, thinking I could write a story and narrate it myself. That might have been a mistake.
Also I didn’t have time to model and animate the two characters. I left them as boxes.

Other that that, I think this came out fine, for what it is. A 48 hour Unity game from someone who don’t know Unity.

Unity have been a dream to work with. Just one or two gotchas along the way.
I won an edu license at GGJ earlier this year, but would be nice to get that watermark off, and be able to make commercial stuff.
Looking at one of those subscription deals.

Try the game at my dropbox.
Tell me what you think, here.

Thanks
//Hannes

So, being time-zonedly-handicapped, I got up about 5 hours in to the compo.

The idea is in place and a horribly looking grayboxed prototype is running in Unity3d.
Considering I don’t know Unity, and that I have been away from game development for many months I think this is a good place to be.

This time I tried to not push the narrative parts to the very end, and thus hopefully I will not get rid of them totally.

The story is very much inspired by Thomas was alone.
The gameplay idea came from watching a “Zelda a Link to the past” video through tired eyes.

Now time for some visual development!

Hugs
/Hannes

Weekend schedule cleared.
The lady is away on business.
Only thing left is to stack up on snacks and soft drinks 😀

Been toying around with Unity the last couple of days. Maybe I can get something working in there?
If that poses too much of a challenge, I’ll fall back on flixel or plain flash.

Prolly going for a Jam entry. We’ll see!

/Hannes

So, lost the whole first day due to travel. I thought I might use the travel time to get some ideas thought out, but nothing really came to me.

Hard to focus on a train I guess.

Today I woke up not only early, but also with an idea in mind.
I think it might fit the theme well enough and could be atleast prototyped in a short amount of time.

Not sure if this will actually go somewhere, but, lets try it out for the lulz, so to speak

Now, shower and breakfast, then rock’n’roll!

/Hannes

Turns out I am going to Stockholm for work and won’t get home until the evening of saturday.

I hope I am able to get my laptop out and start hacking on the train.
Probably going to have to go for the Jam thing even if I’m going at it alone.

Probably going to be something small in flashdevelop, flixel, photoshop.

/Hannes

Had some friends over for dinner tonight, so not much time to work on this but I have added the powerup system and tweaked a couple of things.

You can now pick up powerups. They replace your current powerup.

Some powerups I have planned. Only Machinegun and Double pistols implemented at this point.

Play beta 8 here

Might get some music from another talented indie tomorrow, fingers crossed!
Prolly gonna use bfxr for sounds.

Now sleeeeep!

/Hannes

Allrighty. Put a bit more work into my untitled bullet-hell doodle-jump thingie.

Have added a couple of ways to die, scores and such.

Also tweaked the controls and collisions a bit, hopefully to the better.

Not sure what to do next. Maybe I should do powerups like other guns, a jetpack, a shield etc.
Maybe more obstacles too. Have some lasers and such in my concept.

Another Question: Should I keep the One Hit Kill or add a health system?

My high score is 4498 cm at the moment. Can you beat that? 😀
Play here

/Hannes

Apparently I’m going to spend this Ludum Dare at the Free Lunch Design meetup in Gothenburg. Beyond pumped!

Not sure if there will be jamming going on or if I’ll go solo.
If solo, I’m prolly going with flash+flixel.

Pretty sure it’s going to be a fun ride, just like last time

/Hannes

What went well
Except for some flixel hiccups the coding went very smoothly. Granted, this kind of game isn’t really rocket science.
Art was 80% done in the first hour but the good ole’ 80/20 rule applied big time. Spent way too long animating the characters. This is partly due to that it’s the first time I animated in this top-down perspective.
I am pleased with the end result.
What went worse
My initial idea didn’t work at all. It just wasn’t fun and didn’t convey the feeling I was going for.
So at the end of day 1 I kinda paniced, scrambling for ideas. I think my mind got a bit locked in due to the fact that I had put so much time in the art and basic gameplay. I wasn’t ready to ditch the multiple characters and mechanics. Maybe if I had prototyped using red and blue boxes this wouldn’t have happened…

In the end I turned it around and figured it out. If I had more time I could have put more stuff into the world that told the story and guided the player a bit more. I havn’t user tested this at all, I’m pretty sure that players will give up due to lack of clues.
I should have implemented a simple checkpoint system, playing the same parts over and over again in a game that already has quite a bit of backtracking is not fun at all.

Lessons learned
The combat in the final version is not super awesome but it’s a lot better than it was in the beginning. The turning point was really when I added the little particle effect. It made you feel the impact a lot more. Thinking about it now, I really should have added the same sort of thing when the player got hurt. Deaths kinda feel unfair and random, stronger feedback to when you get hurt would have made this better.
Next time I will try to NOT start with the art until I have a solid grasp on an idea and have basic prototypes. Having someone to bounce ideas off would have helped greatly.

Conclusion
After a weekend of almost non stop solitary game development I’m surprised how eager I am to get started on the next project.
While this was my first Ludum Dare, I have been making games for a while now and I can’t say that I’m getting tired of it in the least.

I love making games.

/Hannes