Ludum Dare 36 | Ludum Dare 35 | Ludum Dare 34 | Ludum Dare 33 |
Ludum Dare 31 | Ludum Dare 30 | Ludum Dare 30 Warmup | Ludum Dare 29 |
Ludum Dare 28 | Ludum Dare 27 |
My entry is all done and ready to go. Go ahead and check out 9(!) levels of puzzly goodness! This is my first puzzle game so it was definitely new to me, I only wish I had more time to design the levels. Anyways click the picture or here to check it out!
Well I haven’t gotten much done other than some art and my main character, but I’ve got an idea and I’m going with it!
He’s a cat!
For me it is the end of day 1 of Ludum Week!
For today I decided I would make a wallpaper! Let me know what you think. 
Thanks!
Alright, so the week of the Dare is here and I’m in!
I’ve participated in the past 4 Dares so this will be my 5th!
Last time I made this little game:
Click to play the game on my website!
This time around, I’m excited to try and make something completely different.
I will be using Unity alongside Visual Studio 2013 for the programming side. For 2d stuff I will be using Photoshop and Pickle Editor, and for the 3D junk I’ll be using Blender. For sound, I’m not to sure what I’ll use. We’ll see.
Anyways, I’ll be trying to stream the whole thing to my twitch.tv channel, so check it out if you get the chance, I’m happy to have a chat. 😀
Well, Good luck and have a successful Ludum Dare all!
After submitting my game with nobody other than myself testing it was apparent that the difficulty was a bit much. So I decided to do a little bit of fine tuning for those that want a less frustrating time. You can play this updated version here: http://mactinitegames.com/ludum-dare-30-interplanetary/
And if you could, play and rate my game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26320
Please rate my game based on the compo version and not the new one I posted on my site. Thank you!
Alright, Ludum Dare 30. My fourth dare, and my fourth completed game, though this one had me worried, but I’m still batting 1000. This time around I was working alone like my first Dare and as such I entered the compo. Here is the link to the ludum dare page to play the game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26320
Connected worlds was a good theme for the most part, I had no real connection to any of the themes this time around so I didn’t have a problem with it. It took me awhile before I figured out exactly what I wanted to do; The first 6 hours were spent on a game of a totally different design, but after a restless nights sleep I was ready to tackle my new idea: A space shooter.
There was some interesting new tech to be used this time around: The New Unity GUI! So as excited as I was about this new GUI solution I got over the initial shudders of using a beta system and it actually works really well! It really fits in with the Unity workflow and makes setting up HUDs and Menus a breeze. It felt like NGUI without the tweening library and significantly lighter. All in all, the new GUI is a rock solid GUI solution, especially for the sweet price point of free!
I am not a n excellent artist by any stretch of the imagination so I decided to go with something with less pixels to mess up, and I think it went pretty well. Calling this pixel art wouldn’t be fair to true pixel artists, but with the help of the Facet and Spherize filters I was able to make some convincing planets!
I also used a new program for my animated things called Pickle Editor! So how do I feel about that program? Well I’d like to see some new features added, and it didn’t play well with my drawing tablet but all in all it was a cool program that has some sweet game-centric features like the terrain document type ( Which is fricken sweet!), but I didn’t really need to use those in this game.
Early on I wanted to do something with procedural content and connected worlds was in the top for the perfect themes for that. I wish I had time to refine it more but the game world is generated at runtime and each system is randomly placed accounting for overlap (mostly) that gives a nicely spaced (no pun intended) universe to play in. The generation Consists of a few components, the first of which is the WorldManager; In short this component manages the worlds in case you were confused, what it does is it places the planet-moon systems and then checks it’s overlap by getting a rectangle of the entire system. The second wheel in this machine is the Planet components, these are what are placed by the world manager and the handle some things like how many moons they have and if the moons are enemy bases or not. The last bit is the simplest bit and it is the Moons. There are two types of moons, either an Enemy Base or a normal moon. The enemy base spawns enemies, two at a time, only when the previous enemies it spawned are dead, and the moons are just moons.
The AI was pretty simple. Just follow the player and shoot at him if he’s close enough, if he get’s too far away give up and go home. The last bit of the AI was a little more complex. My problem was that they were overlapping with each other and bunching together, so my solution was that each of them cast a circle in front of them and adjust based on what they hit then sprinkle in some Random.Range to stop the from locking up with eachother and voila you have some obstacle avoidance!
The controls were pretty simple: Asteroids movement, click to shoot and two specials.
After successfully submitting my game and feeling crazy satisfied I hit my first problem. My game is damn HARD. Now, I’m good at it, but I’ve been flying this spaceship all weekend. First run through, you will probably last 10-20 seconds, but use your specials and don’t be afraid to run away and you could get away with making a few deliveries, but really making just one is an achievement.
The thing’s I would do differently if I could is get someone to test it. If I had someone tell me it was too hard before the deadline I could adjust and then have a game that is not so frustratingly hard.
Here’s the real question, should I even think about a post compo version? What would I add? Maybe some leveling up, better procedural content probably, some special items, and probably more skills that you can assign to your two slots. What do you guys think? should I look into this game to release as my first full game? If you even read down this far I thank you and you are a nice human being.
Alright, So I decided around 3:00am last night to go with a different idea. Since that happens to be the case I am playing catch up, rather nicely though I think. Here’s a gif to highlight my progress!
So I think I have an idea, so here’s a mockup of what I have so far:
So with Unity releasing a beta of the new GUI I figure, what better time to test a new system than with a 48 Hour competition with no time to wait for bug fixes?!
So here I am, again, for the fourth time.
Unity3D 4.6 beta
Photoshop, Pickle Editor.
BFXR, Audacity, LMMS.
Anything else I can’t think of right now. But I’ll see you all out there! Good luck, and have fun!
Hey everybody!
So I got bored today and made myself some Unity Webplayer templates that use bootstrap (a little overkill maybe, but it works just fine.)
Anyways since some people may get a bit tired of the standard Webplayer templates or want something to add that little polish go ahead and use on of these guys! I did throw in a little attribution for myself at the bottom with a link to my twitter, but feel free to remove all of that if you want.
Here’s the link to download the unity package: https://db.tt/mLPb3MNP
I personally prefer the darker theme, but maybe a light theme will be more appropriate for some games.
Let me know what you guys think!
Thanks,
Mactinite
So, after I already put in my submission I remembered that I wanted to add a bestiary! The bestiary will help you best your foes with journal-like entries for each enemy.
If you can, go play it and check it out! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=26320
Bestiary location in pause menu.
Bestiary location in main menu.
So we finished up our game and posted the entry before the end of the jam so we could get some feedback before tomorrow! This is the third Ludum Dare in a row that I’ve completed and I have been good about getting a game in all the time so that’s a big accomplishment for us. This is another new thing for me with putting in controller support and fully animated windows and transitions, the game feels really complete. 99.9% of all the pieces was made by us (only exceptions being NGUI and Unity as well as some controller images and a font) So without further adieu we give you:
Popping up behind some tawls
This game is kinda hard.
Choose your arena!
Blasting some tawls
The title screen!
So if you want go and play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=26320
If you guys have any feedback please let me know either here or on twitter @mactinite.
Thanks in advance!
It’s been a good one!
Finally, after a few hours of main menu design we got an idea for a game. We’re not letting details slip too soon but we think we got a good one 😉
What I can share is the title screen with the name of the game!
Robo Drill! err uhh wait…
The Good, The Bad and the Drill. No wait that’s not it…
Drill Harder! What? No…
Drill Bill! I think this thing is broken…
This Ludum Dare will be my third, and the second one I’ll be attempting with assistance from a friend. Every time I have participated in Ludum it has been a positive experience, often resulting in becoming a better programmer/game developer because of it. I have limited formal education in the ways of software development yet Ludum Dare allows me to flex my current, albeit small, library of knowledge and the community is top-notch (Thanks for that guys, that’s amazing, really). Back on track with my obligatory “In” post; Not much has changed as far as tools and stuff goes, but here’s what we’ll be using:
With all that said, anyone else out there got some engine stuff that would be better suited to a programmer in development? Unity is amazing and a very deep tool that can do almost anything I would want it to, however I want to broaden my mind. With that said I have some questions for the community:
What are you guys using?
Are you a programmer or an artist?
