Wowsers!
Thank you to everyone that rated our game, we never dreamed of finishing so high!
We knew Nigel Wimble was an award winning filmmaker but he never expected the humour award, or simulation (Thanks Brenlo!).
Ludum Dare 37 | Ludum Dare 36 | Ludum Dare 35 | Ludum Dare 34 |
Ludum Dare 33 | Ludum Dare 32 | Ludum Dare 31 |
![]() The Barrels and Barrels of Water Award Awarded by yuigoto on January 3, 2017 | ![]() Best Simulation Game - LD 37 (Jam) Awarded by LDA on January 3, 2017 | ![]() Best Game - 1st Place - LD 37 (Jam) Awarded by LDA on January 3, 2017 |
![]() Humor - 1st Place - LD 37 (Jam) Awarded by LDA on January 3, 2017 | ![]() Audio - 3rd Place - LD 37 (Jam) Awarded by LDA on January 3, 2017 |
Wowsers!
Thank you to everyone that rated our game, we never dreamed of finishing so high!
We knew Nigel Wimble was an award winning filmmaker but he never expected the humour award, or simulation (Thanks Brenlo!).
Thank you to everybody that played our game and left a nice comment! We appreciate your feedback and we’re thrilled that you all seemed to enjoy it. Neither of us had the willpower for this Ludum Dare but we’re glad we did it, it was loads of fun!
What Did You Make?
How To Cope With Boredom & Loneliness – A Guide For The Isolated – A Documentary Filmmaker Simulator
So, our game is a create your own documentary kind of thing. You play as Nigel Wimble, hard hitting filmmaker. To complete the final episode of your series you must create a film about Harold, a man who has been grounded to his room for the past 30 years.
To do this you must examine items in his room and choose the ones that will elicit the best responses. You then sit back and watch the documentary unravel.
Our game is light on gameplay but we hoped it would be entertaining enough anyway.
How Did You Make it?
A few days before Ludum Dare we had briefly spoke about framing our main project as a mockumentary. We decided against it but thought maybe we could do something similar for Ludum Dare, depending on the theme. Once we saw the theme was One Room an idea popped up for a documentary based on someone who has been grounded to his bedroom for his entire adult life. It seemed like a daft scenario so went with it, as we usually do.
We created ten items of interest which when selected would trigger a short cutscene. We then had to tie the player chosen ones together with an intro and outro which would play once the player confirms their selection.
We added clues to the examinations and a point system based on how relevant the item is but there’s no winning or losing. You enjoy the scenes you’ve picked or you don’t!
Day One
@poffle
I always spend the first morning working on placeholder graphics with music on and a steady stream of tea. At the same time trying to work out what the game actually is. Once Rodo wakes up I bombard him with assets and bad ideas.
Rodo is in charge of scope and can be down right mean with it sometimes, so when I said we needed 10 fully voiced cutscenes I was surprised he went along with it. He even said yes to writing and singing a song too! I spend the rest of the day drawing and writing the examinations for the items.
@rodobodolfo
I always wake up the first morning with a massive list of bad and ridiculous ideas to reject. Mainly due to the fact that most of the time, they would take a lot of coding time to implement just to gain a few seconds of features.
This time, however, I woke up with only a really ridiculous but hilarious idea, and on top of that all the hard work would be on Poffle’s side, so it was a no-brainer for me.I’ve been working on adding speech support on the Unity Adventure Framework for our Vic Raider Trailer so this seemed a perfect time to test it in a real project.
Day 1 for me was setting up the rooms on unity, defining actors, cut-scenes, hotspots. In short, making the game world playable.
Day Two
@poffle
I like to do the writing on Day 2. I take my dogs for a walk in the morning and that seems to help with ideas opposed to staring at a blank text file. I came back and wrote the cutscene scripts and handed them over to Rodo. Then we had the monumental task of recording all the voices and processing the audio for lipsyncing. This went surprisingly well though. I recorded the lines in about an hour, Rodo processed it all and we had a playable build by the end of the night that was pretty funny and surprisingly low on bugs.
@rodobodolfo
I woke up with a lot of hilarious recorded lines to process. We had to process some lines before for the trailer, but now the amount of lines were a lot more, REAPER was a blessing for this task.
Essentially, I would open an objects speech line and then split it into multiple chunks of audio.
Then with the amazing batch/convert tool, I added all chunks and with the $track$itemnumber variables I create a consecutive sequence of audio clips.
Don’t forget to add the FX Chain!!
After that, we needed to add a suffix for all lines that will be dubbed.
::Narrator::I noticed a poster for an old children's movie.
::Narrator::For some, movies are an escape from reality. For Harold, his reality is like a movie.
Becomes
::Narrator::I noticed a poster for an old children's movie.[#beeposter01]
::Narrator::For some, movies are an escape from reality. For Harold, his reality is like a movie,[#beeposter02]
Day Three
@poffle
Day three on a good Ludum Dare is spent on music and polish. On a bad one it can be 60% of your game which is what happened last time for us. This time it was a good one so it was mostly music and polish. There were a few more things we wanted to squeeze in but didn’t want to kill ourselves so polished what we had. I am pleased with what we managed to complete.
@rodobodolfo
Poffle broke all the lip-sync tags and almost had a nervous collapse. Hopefully he managed to re-tag every line!
Meanwhile I had the task of making the score system, the intro and outro scenes, post production effects and tie it all together.The result is this guy making an awesome film.
What Went Wrong?
Nothing too harrowing aside from Rodo having a power cut. If we had more time we would have added an interview with Harold’s mother and extra intro/outro scenes. It was exhausting like every Ludum Dare but it went smoothly and never felt like a grind. It was a fun weekend and we look forward to the next!
Here’s one of the scenes you can choose in our game How To Cope With Boredom & Loneliness. A create you own documentary kind of game about a man who has been grounded for over 30 years. Learn how he copes with isolation.
People have been crying out for a bloody good create your own documentary game so we thought we’d make one. Help Nigel Wimble pick the scenes for his award winning docu-series How To Cope With Boredom and Loneliness.
How To Cope With Boredom and Loneliness – A Guide For The Isolated
A Documentary Filmmaker Simulator
You play as Nigel Wimble, award winning filmmaker, as he completes his final episode of ‘A Guide For The Isolated’ series. His previous episodes include deathrow inmates, lighthouse keepers and the tribe of Mantitteewahwah. Tonight his focus is on 43 year old, Harold Fletcher, who has been grounded to his room for the past 30 years.
You are tasked with choosing the relevant scenes to shoot for the show. Examine the objects in Harold’s room and pick the ones that hold the most potential for hard hitting television! Every item holds a story but not every story is relevant. Use your filmmaker intuition to pick the best scenes to make television gold!
Pick your scenes then sit back and watch the show. Viewers will rate the show at the end. Try to get a perfect score of 30!
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Our game is less of a game and more of a create your own documentary type of thing. It’s really silly and we had a lot of fun making it. We hope you enjoy playing!
Be sure to have your audio turned on!
Hello Everybody,
Thanks for playing and commenting our game!
I’ve played some really good quality games and this was an overall funexperience.
Just in case if anyone is interested Ive uploaded a timelapse video of the development process.
A long timelapse video (1hr)
and the same but at 5x (10 min)
We finished our entry which turned out to be a simple little point and click adventure. We really enjoyed making it and hope you enjoy playing it!
Link: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=44770
The theme this time was “You are the monster”. This is an interesting theme as it’s open to many interpretations. We decided to avoid a typical monster scenario and went with an idea about someone having a monstrous personality instead, a real jerk. This lead to an idea of a speed dating sim with the twist being the player character is cursed with this monstrous personality and has to somehow “Win” a date.
Before entering the Ludum Dare we both agreed that we would only take part if we could come up with an idea that could also be implemented into our real game (we’ll talk about that later). With the speed dating idea we knew we could do it with a simple dialogue tree system. Our real game needed a dialogue tree system. We could kill two birds with one code! We agreed to subject ourselves to a weekend of torture.
You know what? It was a pleasure! It couldn’t have gone any smoother. Our last LD entry was pretty stressful. We completed a playable game but we could have done so much more. We worked really hard but in hindsight I wish we had worked that hard on our real game instead. Creating a system for this LD that benefits our real game meant that if we didn’t finish the Jam or made something truly awful (verdict is still out) then at least we’ve made some serious progress on our dialogue system. Which we have!
We needed some simple characters first. We came up with cardboard box characters. I had literally just woken up and it was the first thing that popped into my head. We needed something simple and quick to draw, a box is easy to draw so we went with it not stopping to think if it was stupid.
Then we thought we could call the player character Carl Boardbox. We didn’t need to stop to think if it was stupid, we knew it was yet we kept going anyway. Why didn’t we stop…?
Then we needed the dialogue and the dialogue system. The dialogue system came together nicely with features such as camera and animation control within the UI so the idiot writer can help the programmer. We wrote the dialogue and slapped it in the game and for the most part the whole thing worked!
We added the Win/Lose conditions and a final cutscene and we were golden. Tweaks and polish later and we have a silly, simple game that’s left us with tools to continue making our real game. All in all a very rewarding Ludum Dare this time around. I look forward to #34!
Please give our game a try if you haven’t already!
Visit our Website: http://pointbleepstudios.xyz
First jam ever.
Unity c#
GIMP and GraphicsGale
Audio: BFXR,
Music:Studio One and Free chiptune VST