I ended up making a Missile Command clone. I wasn’t expecting that, but the Ludum Dare can take you in some odd directions.  I was really dragging my feet Friday night and Saturday morning. I had a concept almost immediately, just getting around to it felt like a chore. However, once I started, I began coding like a madman. I started at 11 am Saturday and finished by 2pm Sunday, enough time to work on refining the art, playtesting, and adding a boss spacecraft.

This game is set on a small spinning planet with 12 turrets. It’s slow-paced at first, then ramps up after a few rounds. Like Missile Command, you try to create explosions in the path of oncoming missiles.

It was originally going to be a 2-player Missile Command set between two pinwheel-shaped worlds (I called it Pinworlds, the inhabitants would have been called pinheads). I didn’t have time to implement a second player, however, so I just wrote this simple AI that drops missiles at a steadily increasing rate.

I was pretty deleious by the end, making stupid spelling mistakes and embarrassing errors in the code. E.g, not killing the boss spheres would prevent the game from continuing at all. Also, the boss’ rockets would become stuck inside its collider, causing a thousand explosions to generate inside of it in an instance, but without killing it off.

The game is divided into “rounds”, each round has one additional rocket from the previous round. A boss spawns every 5 rounds. The goal is to survive for as long as possible before your planet is inevitably destroyed. Similar to Missile Command, there is no real endgame despite defeat.

So, here is Spinworld! Let me know what you think. You can also follow me on twitter @MichaelPConsoli, and check out my other game Against the Wall (which was my LD 20 project).

I’ve been working on this game non-stop since 11 this morning. It is basically two-player Missile Command set on the rim of  rotating disc worlds. The rim is divided into four sections. Each section has three turrets that hold 16 missiles each. The player can rotate their world so that another section is at the top, in the playable area. This is useful for when the player runs out of ammo or their turrets are destroyed.

At the top of the screen will be another player’s world, firing downward (I may just have everything horizontally aligned, a planet on the left and the other on the right). Rather than have Missile Command’s cities, the world itself will have a health meter. As more and more missiles strike the ground, the atmosphere will become a dark shade of red.

Also, pixels surrounding the crosshair will give you info on the turrets that are out of sight, which ones are destroyed or out of ammo, etc. I may make the world into a regular sphere rather than a disc, but that’s just an art decision. The coming day will really be about implementing the second player, and rudimentary AI.

Unity, Inkscape, GIMP, and Blender have been used so far. I will also employ bFxr for some sounds.

Yesterday I successfully submitted Abandon as my LD22 game. It’s set in a world of turrets, towers, and domes that are all built on top of each other. Your goal is to find your friend who has gone missing in one of these towers, and to collect his belongings along the way.

The game is short by a few textures, and there is no collider on one of the domes, but all in all I’m happy with the project. In the last two LDs, my games were a bit too difficult. This time, I made sure that the game was intuitive, simple, and beatable.

I’ve learned a lot from this experience, and it was a great deal of fun to put together! Play it, vote for it, and let me know what you think.

Hey everyone! So, I spent a few hours pacing, snacking, and scribbling down the silly things that sometimes pop into my head. One idea stuck out, a game where the player is both raiding a dungeon and defending it. Being totally alone in the world means that the player has to act as their own enemy. Yes, logic. Players will have to set up traps and automated weapons, then survive the course that they made.

Then I just started modeling the world. I have a thing for big empty and lonely worlds, in the vein of Myst. This particular game will be dominated by turrets and spires of varying size.

I can see this project veering off of a cliff in terms of fun and playability unless I’m careful. Some of my LD games were beautiful but incomplete at the deadline. I tend to get tangled up in some nasty code Sunday afternoon, will try to avoid that this time.

Let me make a plug, my LD #20 game has been shaped into a full project called Against the Wall. Try out the free alpha sometime and let me know what you think.
Going to sleep, have been up way to late as it is.

Balance is a difficult thing to achieve in a video game, especially in one that lacks any beta testing. My games for the Ludum Dare thus far have turned out to be unfairly difficult to the point of being unbeatable. My game for the LD20 actually had no win scenario because of a bug. My new game, Under a Watchful Eye, is so incredibly difficult that only a handful of people were able to make it out alive.

In this game, you are the captive of a giant floating eyeball that is patrolling a mountainous region. You cannot leave its immediate vicinity without it firing a laser at you. In order to escape, you need to use the terrain and rocks as cover while making a mad dash for it. At this point, the eye will rise into the sky and begin hunting you. The player then needs to reach a control point in the middle of the map to deactivate the eye’s hostile mode and survive.

The problem is, there was only one real escape route in the whole level, and even then, one needed to think just like me in order to make it through. Some people would run into this route backwards, unable to see the obstacles ahead. Others were unwilling to get hit by the laser at all (you can survive the laser for a few seconds before dying). Most just couldn’t find the exit, dying in a hopeless rush and giving up.

I spent Friday on the concept, Saturday on the basic code and art, and Sunday on refining the code and AI. I should have put some time into the actual level! I’ve leared a great deal from this past weekend’s competition. It was an exhilarating experience and I loved every minute of it! Next time, I’ll be sure to complete the whole game before devoting so much time to art.

I’ll be working on a post-compo version of my game to have a little something for my resume. I wish to break into the game industry, but it’s tough being a solo act! I’ll be incorporating some of the things I learned this weekend into my main project Against the Wall, which is itself a giant learning/portfolio project. I’ll see you at the next LD!

Anyway, I had some trouble submitting my posts during the outages this weekend, as every single one of you contestants have also experienced. Here is a Saturday update with a production shot of my game, Under a Watchful Eye:

Today [Saturday] I’ve spent several hours testing the mechanics and putting together all the art. I took a digital camera into my back yard and snapped shots of the grass, moss, trees, stone, and one cloud. I cut this cloud out, made the sky color an alpha, and put it on a billboard. Spent far too long coding the movement of the clouds and the way they fade away/are recycled. Ah well, it looks nice at least.

I also created a number of meshes in blender for rock formations and boulders. They are all just extruded cubes that have been displaced using perlin noise, sub-surfed, and UV unwrapped.

Anyway, the enormous glaring eye now twitches and looks in random directions. If you step too far away from it, it will go into alert mode and warn you not to go any further. If you keep going, it will fire at you, killing you unless something is blocking its path.

So, I managed to get my game in on time. I’m so burnt out from the past two days! The game puts you in the role of someone caught in an unfortunate situation that I’m sure we’ve all experienced from time to time: A large double-irised disembodied floating eyeball creature has trapped the player in its circle of protection, and you need to escape before it bisects you with a laser. It actually loves you, it really does, almost as much as it hates anyone outside of its circle.

Under a Watchful Eye is by no means complete. I planned on building more escape routes, for instance. Right now there is only one way out of the circle that the eye has you running. I’ve already added a few more here… just check my site for updates. If I have any post-compo editions, I’ll post them here once the voting is over.

After a number of half-starts and fierce nonsensical scribbling episodes, I’ve finally mocked up and have begun production on my game.

I call it Under a Watchful Eye. The player is essentially the prisoner of a floating stylized Wadjet eye that travels through a large countryside full of obstacles (a first person maze, essentially). The eye projects a red ring around itself on the ground. If you cross out of that ring, the eye will begin to attack you. You need to rush through the obstacles on the ground to keep up with the thing, all while searching for an opportunity to escape. Once the player breaks free, they’ll need to hide out for a certain amount of time before they win the game (either that, or I can give players an exit point to run to).

In the pic below you can see some of the basic assets that I’ve whipped up. The yellow diamonds are nodes in a pathfinding system that the eye follows. The green dot is the current heading of the eye, and is the object that handles basic movement.

More to come.

Another exciting Ludum Dare! Got an idea and I’m rolling with it. Using Unity 3 pro, Blender, and Gimp.

Last Ludum Dare, I started a project that I’ve been hammering away on until today. It’s a first person platformer called Against the Wall. If this new LD project turns out to be any good, I’ll be sure to develop it further. Here’s to a good LD, and good luck to all you folks out there!

Is should note that I’m developing my entry, Against the Wall, into a full game. You can check out my progress on the game’s new site. I’ll post a non-compo webplayer there in the near future.

Now for some self-analysis: On the Friday evening of the competition, I initially tossed around a number of ideas that in retrospect look like the ramblings of a madman. The best one was about a herd of cattle that get telekinetic powers and rampage through a city. Not wanting to do the animation for that, I eventually settled on something simpler: a 3D platformer where the player must climb something by using a special item that forms ledges. I was hoping for something Mirror’s Edge style with the platforming, but the eventual hasty execution of that game mechanic left something to be desired.

I made a bunch of boxes, wrote some C# code that made them react to the player’s input, and limited this input by requiring the acquisition of a special item. What the item was, I had no idea at this point. I was wavering between a tk glove or a magnetic device before calling it a magic wand and moving on.

Saturday began with a texture hunt. I grabbed a digital camera and took pictures of some marble and granite surfaces in a nearby park. Other elements photographed were a blue bath towel, a bookcase, and a random metal box. I applied the stone textures to the boxy models which I created the night before with Blender.

For the procedural world, I bit off more than I could chew. The number of bricks that would exist on even a small chunk of the wall would quickly add up into the thousands, causing my PC to chug. I spent almost all of Saturday on this feature.

Sunday started with mesh creation. I made a model for the quest giver and faced him away from the player’s starting point, so that the player may initially think it was a human silhouette in the distance. I pinned a note to him (that pops-up and goes away far too quickly) that quoted the theme of the competition, and placed the wand in front of him. I crafted the city-ledge high above the player, made fake walls for the unplayable areas, and scripted some code that would trigger the player’s “winning” of the game. Problem is, I didn’t test it. The blocks that I had placed in a gap under the city that were supposed to be movable were prevented from moving due to a glitch. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my compo entry couldn’t be beaten!

The take-away? Primarily, I need to budget my time better. I spent almost all of Saturday on my ambitious procedural generator. Placing the bricks by hand would have been well enough and would have taken less time. I should have focused more on the platforming gameplay and level design. Second, I should have set aside the last few hours of the compo for testing my game. Instead, I left everything to the last moment, resulting some major bugs. Third, I went into an eleventh-hour panic when I couldn’t log into my server and Dropbox was my only alternative, then panicked because I did not load it in the right compression format, then panicked that I didn’t initially put up a webplayer, ending-breaking bug, etc. In other words, I need to chill out.

The competition was a fun challenge, and its constraints forced me to think outside the box and make something unique and interesting. My objective now is to flesh-out the game world with some story, add a variety of gameplay mechanics, and form this mess of hastily assembled code into a game.

Please take the time to play and criticize the compo entry. If you like what you see, you can follow my progress on Against the Wall ‘s site.

Download it Here.

The game turned out perfectly, and I had a lot of fun making it. You play as a person stuck on a ledge on a world that is just one flat vertical surface. You must rise up to your city above using a ledge-creating device. I got the random generator to create an infinite world but my computer’s memory overloaded quickly. Rather than resolve the problem within the last few hours, I limited the size of the worldto about fifty chunks, with fake wall streaming off into the distance. Maybe I’ll fix this in an actual release! I really enjoy the Ludum Dare, and hope that I will be able to compete in the future as well.

Edit: I originally submitted a .7z file and did not know that still had 15 minutes to correct my submission to .zip! Thanks to PaperCutDoom for the save!

Another update to “Against the Wall”. The scripts for creating the ledges and making the blocks pop out of the wall are pretty much done. There are two ways to do it. LMB makes the block pop all the way out/in from the wall. RMB lets you drag it slowly into or out of the wall to the degree that you choose. Also, I’ve baked some textures/normal maps and applied it to the block model. In addition, I’ve created some preset “chunks” that are 64×64 units in size. In Minecraft style, new chunks will be loaded as the player nears the end of the world.

Also, special black blocks will be added that cannot be moved. These blocks will house static elements such as cities and story related elements. The blue block in the pic below is the player’s current target, in the middle of the screen.