For our 9th straight entry in Ludum Dare, we created Galactyc Budget Flights. Unlike our previous entries, we knew we didn’t have a full 72 hours to work on GBF as it was our weekend before exams. This ended up just allowing us to create a more focused experience, and we are quite happy with the results.

We created this entry using Unity 3D 4.6 with C# for programming, Paint.Net for graphics, Audacity for sound recording, and Soundation for music creation.

Games Description:

“Hello, and welcome to Galactyc Budget Flights!

To keep you paying as little as possible for one of our value flights, your flight will be void of crew members.

Please ensure yourself a safe trip by overlooking all the ship’s subsystems.

Fear not! The ship’s onboard computer will prompt you every step of the way to ensure you have a safe and relaxing flight.

Thank you for choosing Galactyc Budget Flights. “

We learnt some important things from our entry this year:

• Unity 4.6 (at the time of making this game), really did not handle multiple Canvases in the root of the project well, as we would experience crashes when swapping out images and other like tasks.
• Controls need to be really well explained as people don’t want any experimenting to figure out how things work.

Galactyc Budget Flights

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=12839

We really have enjoyed playing peoples games, and will likely have a favourites post soon. Keep up the great work everyone.

Galactyc Budget Flights Radar

For our 8th straight entry in Ludum Dare, we created The Asteroids I Call Home.

“Using your super powered cat spacesuit, bash through those that threaten your home.
Mining ships have invading your peaceful asteroid sanctuary. Defend your home the only way you know how: violently bashing through spaceships.
Fly at highspeeds with the help of your jet pack and the gravitational pull of nearby asteroids.
Stop the minors by breaking their chains, ships and defense droids. ”

The Asteroids I Call Home

You can play our entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12839

What went wrong:
– Rigging problems
Since this was the first time our artist was doing 3D work, we had a lot of trouble
at first trying to rig our 3D model, due to automatic weight painting.

– Unity animation problems
As we were unsure of our animation pipeline, we had some difficulties
with getting our animations into unity. Although we worked it all out,
it definitely took up more of our time than we would have liked.

– Lost day for the artist
Our artist still had work on the Monday of the jam, which lost
us a day of polish and touch ups we would have liked.

 
What went right:
– Picked a game idea and finished planning out the details quickly
After just a short brainstorming session, we had an idea we both liked,
and quickly made a few nice pages of planning, so we could focus later on
creating the game, and not having to stop constantly to work out details.

– Doing 3D
Although rigging was stupid, and we had trouble with animations in unity for a little while,
we are quite happy with our results of making a 3D game in just 72 hours.

– Completed all the planned features
Although it took a ton of work, we were really happy that we managed to get evertyhing
into the game that we wanted, including timed mode

– Our best entry yet
We really feel like this was our best entry yet. It had more polish than many of our
other entries, and definitely felt a lot smoother and controlled better than
most of our prior work.

Our 256x speed timelapse can be viewed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F0_s6mz3Bs

64x speed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJrYeUrR9Yg

We are having a blast playing the other entries for Ludum Dare 30, and as always can’t
wait for the next competition. Good luck in the voting everyone.

The Asteroids I Call Home death

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=12839

Just a short post as we are quite tired, but we wanted to show what we’ve
gotten done at this point. Everything is coming along slowly but surely, and
were really happy with what we have so far.

Our progress so far

Good luck to everyone else in the competition and jam, and we can’t wait to see what you all create.

Elves’ Eve Poem Wreath

We have pretty much completed our entry for the Jam, but still
have 8 hours left. If anyone has time, and wants to play
our current build to provide some helpful feedback, we
would be very thankful.

Link To Game

Congratulations to everyone who has already completed a competition entry,
and good luck to everyone else working on their Jam entries!

That was a close one! After last minute problems our game was submitted closer to the deadline than ever before. (3 minutes before submission hour :P)

With our fifth Ludum Dare game down, we would like to present to you:

Trench Coat Tunes

You play as C.T Plaear, a fashionable music connoisseur with a magical cassette tape player.

Trench Coat Tunes protagonist, C.T. Plaear

This competition we tried to focus more on interaction with and exploration of the play environment. This included things like almost all game objects being physically reactive, to needing to find hidden items like keycards and passwords to progress. We also experimented with a combination of 2D and 3D art style, and like how it turned out for the most part.

We ended up with a bit more difficult of a game this time, with players often needing to find the best path through a level if they want a chance to progress past the difficult security guards.

We’ve already received some good feedback, including:
– Player movement is too slow/not as tight as we would have liked.
– Instructing the player on what they need to do could have been done better
– More polish in a few key areas (as we would have liked) could have made a world of difference.

Thank you all for the great responses, and as always we had a great time with this event!

And again, we hope everyone with check out Trench Coat Tunes.

A gif showing some early work on Trench Coat Tunes AI, and a bit of the style of the game.

Wooh to figuring out gifs!

Our Jam entry is still making progress. It will be close, but we think we might just get something good finished in time.

Looking forward to having time to play all the lovely competition entries, and good luck to those still working on other Jam entries.

A small image showing some teaser progress for our entry

Hello everyone! We hope your jamming is going well.

At the end of the first day, we have made some progress towards the game we are hoping to complete.

Here is a video demonstrating physics and other setup we performed earlier today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhVliOAyYWU , footage taken from before the image above.

Anyways, we wish you all the best of luck, and look forward to seeing what you create.

Unfortunately, we were not able to meet the mini LD 44 deadline. This was due to several factors, the main two being part-time work and windows drivers related casualties.

Though we did not finish Pile O’ Pirates in time to have a working game, we fully intend to complete it. So look out for progress updates and videos in the coming months.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElementalZealGS

Website: http://www.elementalzeal.com

Game Features so far

–        Zoomable 2D game

–        Selection/Movement of pirates constrained to boats.

–        Movement of Ship without screwing up pirates.

–        Saveable settings (Such as resolution and Fullscreen)

–        Over 300 styles of male only (as of now) pirates

–        Random name picking from list of popular male names.

Here are some screenshots of what we have managed to accomplish.

The beginnings of Pile O’ Pirates title screen.

A zoomed in view of a selected unit and his comrades.

Selecting some units in Pile O’ Pirates.

Moving a ship in Pile O’ Pirates.

See you all for the next Ludum Dare.

Our entry to Ludum Dare 26, Bridge Crosser, has been turned into a larger project due to popular request.

The game now boasts over 15 levels, with new environments, better optimizations, and new features.

The game trailer can be seen here: Bridge Crosser – Release Trailer

Promotional art for the full release of Bridge Crosser!

The game can be bought from our site here: elementalzeal.com/ourGames.php

Bridge Crosser is now up!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12839

We had submitted it early (last night), but now have all the builds available, as well as a trailer for the game.

Video Here:

Bridge Crosser – Ludum Dare Trailer

Good luck to those still finishing up their jam entries, and we can’t wait to see what everyone makes.

http://elementalzeal.com

We’re done all we can for the day. We made a lot of really great progress on our Jam entry. We decided we would go minimalistic on the goal for our game, but that is a surprise for later.

We are about 75% done audio, 95% done graphics, 80% done programming, 60% done level design. Overall though it will still require polish and touch ups, so we’re still looking at a tight deadline.

Below we have included 2 rough images from the games artwork.

It’s great to see all the work everyone else has accomplished, and good luck to everyone on their projects.

-Elemental Zeal Game Studios

Our Chicken Hero

A meteor