Ludum Dare 29 | Ludum Dare 27 | Ludum Dare 25 | Ludum Dare 24 |
 you have been in Helevenium #LD29 Awarded by alvivar on May 19, 2014 |
Using Unity. Depending on the theme and my idea I’ll probably be using some pre-existing scripts to draw chunky pixels.
Here’s a pretty unhelpful page with links to the scripts and custom editor, but in the off chance someone wants to use them after the jam feel free to ask for instructions
Finished a lot of my visual polish yesterday… going with a super minimal style made things go a lot quicker… besides not having to make the assets, I didn’t have to waste time fiddling with a sprite manager, etc.
Very happy with the little level editor I made (just for myself, not for players). Gotta make some more levels today, should be a lot quicker and less painless with the editor.
Besides levels, still have SFX and music to add, and some more polish I want to do. Don’t know if I want to add a leaderboard yet.
Pleased with what I got done today… basic mechanics pretty much finished.
And almost done a janky little level editor to create .txt levels:
Unity
maybe RagePixel
probably Terry’s music thing
I’m pleased with how my game MISSILE RIDER turned out. I was going for a challenging control scheme with lots of room to experiment and improve, and I think that plan worked out pretty well. It does seem slightly more challenging than I expected… which I’d say is a good thing… though I haven’t been able to beat that Yir guy yet…
I used Unity and the free 2D pixel framework RagePixel, which I highly recommend for jams. It does feel a bit janky sometimes, but the speed at which you can create and animate art is fantastic. I ran into one major problem with it during the jam, which is that moving the camera around messes with the way the pixels are displayed. I wanted to be able to ride rockets in an area larger than the screen, so I spent a large portion of saturday making the world move around the player to simulate a moving camera.
I had a bad bug (might still have it, but haven’t been able to reproduce any longer) for awhile that was caused by clicking the PLAY button on the main menu screen (since removed). It called the exact same function as hitting spacebar did, but for some reason starting the game with the button messed up my camera system. Probably gonna try to stay away from Unity GUI buttons in the future… I would have discovered the cause of the issue sooner in the jam if I myself was actually using the PLAY button, but I was just hitting spacebar to start every time. Guess the lesson is to make sure to… test things… that players will do…
Not sure what’s up with the frog guy… I wanted someone to yell tips and instructions at you instead of a boring real tutorial… a frog just seemed right at the time…
Since my biggest regret is that I didn’t get time to make the clouds not look like big white turds… overall: good jam.
Can’t think of a name besides Missile Rider… I kind of like how explanatory it is… though it is a pretty stupid name…
Core gameplay is all done but it feels more like a toy than a game right now. Graphics need work obviously. Should probably make the things look like missiles at some point.
You can try it out here if you want.
Arrow keys to control the guy (down holds on to missile), try to destroy ships. Probably too many missiles. I don’t feel like simply hitting ships is taking advantage of the mechanics… any suggestions would be welcome. Name suggestions are welcome too… sigh… probably just gonna end up calling it Missile Rider…
Spent awhile creating a mode where you can battle the AI instead of another player. The AI isn’t great, but oh well. Thinking of having the game be free in the app store with the AI mode, with a $0.99 IAP to unlock multiplayer. Thoughts?
And if anyone has an ipad and likes testflighting I could add you.
I was planning to polish up my 2-player versus LD24 game Triple Threat and put it on iOS soon, so this challenge is well timed for me. Definitely shooting for ipad, not sure about iphone, and will explore options for selling/distributing mac/pc versions. Post-Ludum updated version is available here.
Feedback and suggestions are very welcome!
