I’m having a problem getting SDL2’s Renderer to work. So I’m behind.  Oh well, that’s Ludum Dare for ya!

But, here’s some pics:

Dinner!

Pie!

My cat Jack, monitoring dinner closely.

My Game Dev Lab

I’m hyped.

Also, it looks like my cat will be monitoring my progress very closely:

After trying out some new software yesterday, I’d like to offer the following public service announcement to all people composing their game music with GarageBand like I have been: migrate to Logic Pro X, right now. The “old” GarageBand (v6 I believe) was pretty good, then the new and castrated rewrite came out which made me very unhappy. Logic Pro is better than both of them, not only as far as being more powerful (duh) but it has excellent usability to boot.

Aaaand I’ve been dicking around with Blender for the first time. Feature-wise it looks kinda okay, but I couldn’t overcome my hatred for its UI… this time. I’ll try again soon, maybe when I’m in a better mood 😉 The thing about Blender so far is it’s not an absolute nightmare like, say, Gimp – but it still feels pretty unintuitive. So I’ll be sticking with Cinema 4D for this LD, again.

I didn’t get any coding done until after sundown, but this Phaser-thing seems quite straight forward. So far.

The little pod is flying above the surface for now even though it is contrary to the theme. It’s because the level generation is tomorrow’s task, and as of now there’s nothing down there:

(Thanks to Cat for lending me her hair as a playing-field)

Tomorrow, I need to add sounds (if Cat cooperates) to the pod.

The Dermites will need a culture, there has to be a reason for all the Fistulae Foraging!

And the world needs structure and content.

Hey, just wanted to make a post talking about the game I made (azuritereaction) with a friend (sweetielise); it’s called A Catastrophic Date. (Hey, we only had a few hours to come up with a name!)

It’s a cute little visual-novel-esque game (no nudity/sex/romance in it though) that we thought up, and it was the first time I’d completed a game project since… probably 16 or so years ago, when I was making games with Klik & Play and Multimedia Fusion 1 back when I was about 12 years old or so.

The game itself is really short, there’s about 10 or so possible endings with 7 of them being unique, including a secret ending, too

Sweetielise did the art in probably 8 hours, and the coding took me about the same amount of time, but we got continually distracted by Awesome Games Done Quick during most of Saturday, haha.

That said… I will probably NEVER program a visual novel game like this in Multimedia Fusion 2 again. Easily one of the most frustrating programming experiences I’ve ever had, for sure. Still had a lot of fun making it though, and I hope a lot of you have fun playing it!

Additionally, feel free to check out our main work on YouTube, Twitch, and a webcomic that I write with the links below! Looking forward to the Jam sessions coming up, we’ll likely do another game for that (and any future MiniLD’s too)

YouTube
AzuriteYT
Sweetielise

Twitch
AzuriteReaction
Sweetielise

Era of Errors (webcomic)
First Page of the webcomic

remote… remote control.

Well, that’s 9 for 9 in a row for LD compos. Happy, exhausted, all the usual emotions plus a handful more. Congrats to all successful entries. The following is reprinted from the official project page:

What Went Right

1. Continued Apolicy
Once more total radio silence on the theme proved a good strategy. I wonder what would happen if no one voted? But then again I think about that every time there’s any kind of democracy.

2. New Environment

The new Dark Acre office in Nanaimo is game development heaven compared to the apartments in the West End of Vancouver. I felt more relaxed, focused, & at ease throughout the compo, despite complications (see 1 below).

3. Outside Time
Went for walks, something I hadn’t purposely done in previous compos. Also smoked a bit of pipe tobacco, a dirty habit I hadn’t really touched much for the past 5 years. Not advocating, do what you want. Did it help me think clearly? I believe so, health concerns aside.

4. Riding a Wave of Successful Ludum Dare Compos
I’ve done this so many times now it’s become routine. It’s a major advantage but also something of a drawback (see 2 below).

What Went Wrong

1. That Damn Cat

The Dark Acre cat, Pon Pon, escaped a few days before the compo began. We recovered her with a dislocated jaw and chip in her spine. This was stressful in itself, but we were glad to get her back in relative safety.

Then on the Saturday of the compo I was carrying her to the vet for a progress check up & she broke out of the carrier. She holed up in an inaccessible crawlspace under our apartment for 10 hours, causing stress & distraction. We once again recovered her, & were forced to re-schedule the check up for the Sunday of the compo. More lost time.

I’m never one to make excuses, but accidents do happen. Due to the lost production time I was unable to process audio & expand the level design. This was the first time 9 compos that such a thing happened, so I count myself lucky in that regard.

2. Familiarity Breeds Contempt
I love the compo. It’s the closest I’ve come to feeling like there’s actual value in hardcore production. The sweat, the tears, the neglected health & family members. But in the last year it’s come with ever-diminishing returns on educational value, & only reinforced my belief that long-term projects are where it’s at.

3. Overall Lack of Practice/New Tools
I think I executed well, given the circumstances, but it could have been better not only with the full amount of time but with a little more time spent in the new tools. I’d recently upgraded to the ’14 versions of my Autodesk stuff, 3.6 of Substance Designer, & I hadn’t even opened Unity3D since the last compo. There were a few minor hiccups, like losing all my keysets for Max, or completely forgetting how to assemble a Substance, but overall I was pleased with how the coding went & the discovery of the improvements Unity’s made to its engine.

Here’s me working furiously on Every Ten Seconds A Kitten Drowns

Timelapses makes that always look awesome

Play | Entry

-Matthias

Not sure if it’s going to be something.
I did not prepare at all compared to the previous contests.
I’ll copy one of the following repositories as basecode:

Html5, Javascript: github-repo
C SDL: github-repo
Rust SDL or OpenGLES: github-repo

Obviously I will throw away the existing games and only use the technology utils part of the code.

If I feel like it I might use SFML and C++ without any basecode except from my eternally unstable monster of a serialization library.

Other Tools like always:
Gfx: gimp, inkscape
Editor: gedit or Eclipse (might try emacs for Rust)
Sfx: that flash tool everybody uses, autotracker.py
Timelapse: neosam’s scripts, his ld-profile

Set sail for fail!