Greetings! here is the post-mortem / dev-report for Turbo Transform.

I will focus mostly on some technical background as i have received some questions
about this, perhaps it will be beneficial to you.

I’m very satisfied how the compo went for me. I really tried to focus and stay close
to the simple concept of the game, it has worked out well for me. This was the first
time i have made the compo deadline in stead of falling back to the Jam.

Before the compo started I had a rough idea that was applicable to some of the ‘upgradable’
and ‘adaptation’ theme’s of the final round. ‘Shapeshifter’ was just perfect and i could start
right away on development.

First thing was to tackle the morphing shapes. I found some examples on the Unity Wiki:
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=MeshMorpher
But this didn’t really work out as the normal smoothing got all messed up.

I flirted briefly with just animating all the transition and exporting a mesh for every frame.

But this was creating a problem for morphing to a shape while already in morph to another
shape. So I used the morphing technique as explained in the wiki. In my case i cut the shapes
up in 3 meshes: back, front and side, so despite messed up normals, the shapes would have sharp
and smooth corners where applicable. This worked out very well.

The voice is actually the windows narrator, with some vocoder and pitch effects. The Music i trew
together in about two hours or so. One of the beats accidentally moved to the same channel as
the vocal effects and it sounded pretty nice as a break, so i went for it and expended from there.

I used the same cut-off front sides of the shapes for the walls. The trick with getting the graphics
walls nicely lined up is all in transparent texturing and calculating the proper tiling and offsets.

For the levels and camera movement i used a Catmull-Rom spline interpolation technique i had
already researched for another game. Basically I created a virtual spline from a couple of control points
and then create a few thousand objects along that spline. the walls are positioned on the spline and
the movements are lerps between the objects positions and rotation, with a lot of smoothing optimization.

Finally some game-optimization, ordering the shapes in a logical way, adding some in key sounds
for the transitions with the music, testing and fine tuning of the levels. I though the in key transition
sound were a nice touch, although they do not yet have any significance you play some tunes
if you need to replay the earlier levels. Some people have commented about there not being
a checkpoint or a possibility to start at a later level. I’m still debating this somewhat. The first level
could indeed be a tutorial level you do not need to replay, but i do feel having to restart creates a lot
of tension while playing and a greater satisfaction on completing a level. On top of that there are
only 5 levels right now.

result:

Big thank to everybody for playing the game and leaving such wonderful comments,
it really inspires to continue developing the game.

play some Turbo Transform

You already enjoyed this when you were 2 years old.
But now experience the same thrill of discovering what shapes are about, Turbo charged!

play TurboTransform

why not unwind with Turbo Transform
hope you like it!

Made the compo deadline this time!
let me know what you think about turbo transform :

Turbo Transform / LD35

I’m from the Netherlands so there is no real friday-night start as the theme is announced around 4am. Anyway somehow i felt i needed to incorporate both theme’s and i went for ‘not growing’ or ‘prevent-growing’ with 2 buttons as a start for a kind of snake game, where you are not the snake. I liked my idea but it didn’t seem that much fun yet, and I really wasn’t feeling the theme’s. So I spend the rest of the day making music, hoping it would get me more excited and it did, I used some of the free 8-bit VST’s by Odosynths: 38911 Bytes by Odosynths (free vst) for the retro feel.

So next day,  I went on with the idea and wanted my snakes/worms to grow from eating and to show their paths, I guess I chose the most difficult rode to achieve this but a big part of the LudumDare experience for me is always trying to learn something new, so what the hell, I thought a voxel implementation of this idea would solve all my problems, I had already decided to go for the jam in stead of the compo anyway..

I found this excellent: Voxel Tutorial by AlexStv for using dynamic changing voxels

Since I hadn’t used a voxeltechnique before it took me about half a day to understand, implement and tweak it. My implementation is loosely based on the tutorials and has quite a lot of modifications, mainly for speed and memory usage, as i was running into problems with webgl memory size, and most of my planet needed no dynamic voxels. The Slice on the other hand uses a lot of dynamioc voxels, so i made different voxel-chunk sizes for different parts. In the end I spend about another half day getting it to work properly within a 256mb webgl app and having a decent framerate and I converted most of the generated voxels to static unity meshes. All in all very educative but this took a big bite out of my compo-time.

I’ve added some cheap perlin-like noise for selecting different offsets in a texturemap

to create the animated planet core I made a map-creation-texture:

which selects a voxeltype dependent on brightness. so on the outside of the planet/map it will use the perlin noise voxel I already had in place. On most of the slice it will use a voxel with a fixed vertical texture offset depending on the brightness of the creation-map. both voxeltypes use the same material/texture, the difference is only the vertical texture map offset:

texturemap is constantly scrolling to the right.so some of the color animate, while others stay the same. The worms use a simple wander technique but when they get to the edge a steering vector towards the center of planet takes over. Just a few hours left for the real gameplay which is kind of sad and it shows in the game, i had a lot more idea’s like worms splitting in 2 when they are hit, worm being able to destroy the towers and so on. I always try to keep it simple but I’ve never managed to on Ludum Dare so far and graphics and music took a big bite out of gameplay again. But I fininshed in time with a playable game so i am still satisfied with the result, next time I will try gameplay first again.

If you were interested, I hope this gave you some insight in some of the making of the game. If you feel like checking it out, here is:

C.I.P.C. the Center for Interplanerary Pest Control

Back to promote the Center for Interplanetary Pest Control!

use the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ keys to select your preferred TeslaCoil
and save the planet from the ever-growing, all consuming megaworms.

gameplay needs some more love, but hope you enjoy it

try it here if you like

Do you Like Balls ?

play with GAMUBòRU GUMBALL!!
the next best thing in procrastination..

Hi here is the mini post mortem..

I had lot’s of fun, but alas as usual too little time,
I was aiming for compo but it came out jam.
Also my job got a bit in the way and I spend way too much time on
the graphics (again) and the physics system, so the focus is more on
playing around than a solid game, but i think it already shows a lot of
promise…hope you like, let me know what you think, comments very welcome!!!

link link link