One more sketch before hands-on training tomorrow. UNICERNS VS!
Ludum Dare 29 | Ludum Dare 28 | Ludum Dare 27 | Ludum Dare 26 |
One more sketch before hands-on training tomorrow. UNICERNS VS!
Good news, Ludum Dare: challenge accepted.
Unicorns and horses, rainbows and balls.
We’re building this game in unity, and the three of us extremely excited. First step has already been decided: sleep for 10 hours, then build the game. Simple enough. Also, we’re really sorry our games get so weird when all three of us get together. it’s basically unavoidable.
Well, I’m in. I guess I should mention that. In fact, WE are in. After three compos last year, I’m entering the Jam with my designer Sam and my artist Jessica. We’re making an endless faller thing. With an octopus. This is really happening.
OK. Fine. I did it. I broke down and made a weird game about love. It happens to everyone.
My game is Better Half. The goal is to collect cool things and meet everyone without breaking your special connection to your better half. If someone walks between the two of you when you are close together, you all become friends; but if they walk between you when you are far apart, your relationship breaks and you lose. Very sad.
Anyways, this is my 3rd completed Ludum Dare in a row, and my 12th game in 12 months. I’m exhausted and now I don’t know what to do with my weekends. Congratulations to everyone who finished a game!
She might like him too.
Alright, my concept is set, it’s time to work. If you guess what I’m going for, you get a shiny new award! Here’s a picture of my whiteboard:
Guess away! Good luck everyone!
This will be my 3rd Ludum Dare and will finish out my 12 games in 12 months! (onegameamonth.com/skyleanderson) Plus, with reviews on my previous LD games like these, it’s bound to be at least marginally acceptable:
Language / Engine:
HTML5 / JS, melonJS
Graphics:
GIMP, GraphicsGale, ASEPRiTE
Audio:
Audacity, SFXR(?), Chirp (?), FL Studio (?)
Base Code:
My customized melonJS boilerplate. (Simpler directory structure and with a basic info screen class, feel free to use it!)
I just kind of realized that I haven’t made any LD posts this weekend. Well, despite being quiet, I’ve been working hard, and I finished my game. It’s about aliens that come to capture the world’s geese. And an experimental spaceship that can fight the aliens for 10 seconds at a time. There’s drama, passion, danger, and geese!
Come rate my game here, you need the ratings anyways :
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=20933
This will be my second LD compo, it’s going to be a good weekend! This time I’ll be using:
Language / Engine: melonJS
Graphics: GraphicsGale / ASEPRITE, maybe GIMP
Sound: iNudge + Audacity worked well for me last time, but maybe just SFXR
I’ll be using my barebones melonJS base project (https://bitbucket.org/skyleanderson/melonjsbaseproject) which is just a pared down version of the melon boilerplate. Anyways… details details; I’m ready to get to work!
This was my first Ludum Dare, and I was thrilled to not only finish my game, but actually kind of like it a lot! First things first, big thanks to everyone involved in hosting and running LD, thanks to everyone reviewing games, and a big thanks and congratulations to everyone (all 2437 of you) who finished a game!
Minimal Design
I spent about three hours Friday night watching videos of other games. I had come up with several game ideas for most of the top themes from the early rounds of voting, but I distinctly remember thinking there was no way “minimalism” would win… Shows how much I know. I ended up coming up with an idea for a simple shooter with no actual shooting; just a bunch of things that can be cleared with horizontal and vertical lines so that you can position yourself to maximize the number of things cleared with each shot while ‘minimizing’ the number of shots you need to take. I think this idea came through cleanly and it allowed me to finish the main player mechanics quickly and add more depth by adding different types of enemies. Finally, the theme let me save a lot of time on art by using solid colored rectangles for everything.
Audio – A Risk Rewarded
Things were going smoothly on Saturday, I had player movement, particle explosions, basic enemy types and some simple sounds all done. Then, after dinner, I had this mental conversation:
Idealist Me: “This game would be a lot better with dynamic music and sound effects that sync with the music!”
Realist Me: “I’ve never done that… How am I supposed to do that..”
Actual Me: “Oh well, no time to think about it, time to get it done!”
So, over the next 5 hours, I programmed an audio controller that counts the time to play sounds on beat, made some music on iNudge and recorded it track by track, had the controller randomly add and remove tracks during gameplay, then finally sent all audio effects through the controller to sync them with the music. I also got to bust out some math / music theory to figure out the frequency ratio needed to scale the sound effects by 5ths for more dynamic sound.
Somehow, it all worked, and was really awesome. The music isn’t all that good, but it’s passable and syncing the effects with it is a great subtle effect. I have been getting a lot of positive feedback on the sound, and I think it really adds a great extra dimension to the game.
Finish Early, then Polish!
This was the approach I took to making the game. After the audio controller was finished late Saturday night (and I got some sleep), I had a basically playable game. I spent the early part of Sunday throwing in a scoring system, then adding as much polish as I could. First was XBox controller support. I think these types of game are better with a controller, and Slick has the option, so why not? Then I added a simple menu, controls screen, and credits screen. These don’t take that much time, but it makes the finished product look much better. Finally, when all of that was done, I worked on making the game more fun by adding more enemy types. I had horizontal, vertical, and diagonal movers, and, realistically, they should never kill you. So, I added the orange following enemies and added a little bit of random behavior in them so they wouldn’t just stack on top of each other. Then the light blue enemies… They were supposed to be sinusoidal, but they’re also at a random diagonal, so they are actually pretty hard to follow (for me at least). Finally, I added a system to spawn enemies at the end of every 4 musical measures (to sync with the music) and I was out of time!
Room for Improvement
First, I had sketches for at least four additional types of enemies that did not make it into the game. Oh well.
I have also received some feedback about the player stopping movement while shooting. This was actually not a bug , but a conscious decision. Before I made that change, you could stay alive forever by constantly moving around and spamming shots. You can probably still do that, but this makes it a little harder at least, and I think it looks nicer.
Sometimes the enemies spawn on top of you. There, I said it. OK, well, I did write in a system to make them not spawn on you, but they can still spawn VERY close to you and moving in your direction, so that could be better. I had plans to have a spawning animation so that you can see where they’ll be and plan ahead, but I didn’t have time for that.
Right Tool for the Job?
The other major complaint that I have received is that sometimes the game doesn’t run! Which is bad!!! Particularly, it seems like it doesn’t work at all on OS/X and the applet does not work on Linux (the executable JAR works on Linux, though). I chose Java and Slick largely because I like the idea of code and compile once to get full cross platform support. I want to make it easy for people to play my games. However, something apparently went wrong with bundling and linking OS natives, and I haven’t been able to figure out the problem yet. (I haven’t tried all that hard, sorry).
So, I think I need to switch languages / engine. Right now the plan is javascript and html5. That way compatibility is up to the user and their browser. I am tentatively set on using melonJS, does anyone have other options I should consider?
Submission
Thanks for reading! You can play and rate “I Dream of a Beam” here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20933
Whew! Got the game in with about 90 seconds to spare
Part rhythm game, part bullet-hell shooter, with minimalistic, procedurally driven art and music. Play I Dream of a Beam and check out the submission here.
I’m feeling pretty good about what I’ve gotten done today. I have a “playable” version with the basic mechanics all good to go. And music! (It sucks, but still.) Tomorrow I add scores, losing conditions, more enemy types, additional levels (or just continuously spawning enemies), and start and pause screens. Here’s a screenshot, you can click to play the WIP:
Feedback appreciated!
*Edit: Uhhh. Oh yeah. Controls:
Movement: Arrow Keys or WASD
Shoot Horizontal: X or ,
Shoot Vertical: Z or .
Also, XBox controllers should work.
Alright, I’ve got my concept mostly worked out. My game will be a minimal arena shooter; something like Robotron meets Everyday Shooter meets BIT.TRIP Core. You’ll move around on the screen and be able to shoot a beam either horizontally or vertically. The goal is to stay safe and clear all the enemies, possibly in as few shots as possible by lining up enemies. Here is a quick mockup gif:
*Edit: Apparently you have to click on the pic and open it in a new window/tab for the animation to work. I guess there’s no animated gifs on the blog…
Obviously you’ll be moving around. And there will be more / different types of enemies. So now the hard part is over and I just have to make it!
I’m in for the compo! I’ve been wanting to do a Ludum Dare for a while, and now One Game a Month has helped me get myself in gear. I’ll be using:
Language/IDE : Java + Eclipse
Libraries: Slick + my personal library*, maybe TiLED
Graphics: GIMP, ASEPRITE, GraphicsGale
Sound: SFXR, Audacity
*My personal base project with slick can be found on BitBucket here. It’s not much, basically a base class for in-game objects and a simple camera.