Most people have commented about how difficult it is to play my game.

For those who have no idea what is it about, I’ve just added a gameplay video of my Ludum Dare 33 compo entry, My Cup of Fury.

I just fixed some bugs for my game (score not resetting, bad colliders, etc). Check out My Cup of Fury!

I am sorry if playing it is a painful experience.

Just in case if you’re playing the HTML5 (WebGL) build on itch.io, your keyboard controls won’t work once the game is done loading. You need to “activate” the area where the game is embedded by clicking on the “Unity WebGL” logo first or anywhere around there, then click on the game’s screen itself. Now you’ll be able to move around with the keyboard.

With this topic, “You are the monster”, I had 3 different ideas & designs:

1. Swamp thing
   1. B&W art
   2. Swamp scenary
   3. Mechanics: hide & seek, destroy enemies (bad fellas from swamp) ,protect good people, use healing power, and so on, even grow mushrooms and collect green gas from them
2. Spider game:
   1. Steampunk art with a lot of fire and storms, tornados, yeah!
   2. Desert and volcano scene, i missed the arabic buildings, but,wtf i had no time for that
   3. Mechanics: alien spiders –> lavalantulas! Too much power ..ok, but it could be some, more powerful, and innocent, how about a robot said my brain –> yeah, steampunk rocket-robot with rockets,there you have!
3. Scorpion game: the same with the spiders in (2) but with a scorpion and venom in stead of the robot

Other Crazy ideas : the sun as your enemy, fireballs from the sky, oasis, mirror images, sand warriors,…omg, so much imagination

Ah, the Politician as the monster with tentacles, robbing and killing people…

Anyway, stay cool ,play the game.

I have submitted My Cup of Fury. Yeah, it’s a flamethrowing cup riding a flying saucer.

Okay, I’ve decided submit my game for the Jam instead of the Compo because I needed more time to improve the quality of the game.

Here are the screenshots of the game:

Here are the tools I’m using for Ludum Dare 32.

Engine: Unity 5
Graphics: Photoshop
Sound: bxfr, audacity
Music: autotracker.py

Last, but not least, two hints about my project.

Found solutions to both things I was having trouble with in the last post. First, the physics got really unpredictable and less fun when I had the line attached to Wanda’s mouth—you’d sort of wobble around the place, not unlike an actual fish on a line, which is less fun than this is trying to be. Kinda killed the freewheeling feel. Solution: bowl! Voilà: identical physics to the prototype.

Also: fire! I didn’t like the life-preserver rings I was using as targets earlier, and I don’t know why I didn’t go with flaming hoops in the first place—seems much more traditional. This is what they look like. Drew three separate fire images on the ring; would have done more, but I got tired of it, because, as you can see, I am not an artist.

Our team leader made some images to brainstorm! The blocks are pulled from the web though. We’re gonna go with the little blue fire light theme. I’m working on making the flame and sketching some potential enemies. I named the little dude Fia for now. Maybe little water pockets with water tentacles jutting out? Maybe little tornadoes? Adding narrative? Who knows, it all depends on the animator/programmer haha!

In this post I’ll present to you how I take the decision of make this game, how I deal with (many) problems, why I enjoy the results and what is my next steps after my participation Ludum Dare 28.

But you can play the game here first

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Everything! I decide to participate in Jam mode, but I want to participate in Compo. A programmer want to participate with me and them I decide to call one friend who is a artist to help us with the assets.

After our brainstorm, we decide to make a game about Trust. In the game you can trust only in one person, and the idea of the game is make the player survive in the middle of a bunch of assassins wanting more money.

The idea comes from the programmer, and unfortunelly he decide to give up in the second LD day. The artist have issues with his PC, and start to work only in Sunday, and I take a day trying to write a story about trust with many choices. Sounds hard even when you try to imagine such a thing. The wost thing in my opinion is the programmer don’t warn anyone about he’s give up. So the artist take all the Sunday night to make the characters sprites… and we can’t use it.

My first failure was let the theme be accepted (my sugestion involoving beer), and after I make it harder in the game mechanics. The withdrawal of the programmer is expected, so I made a plan B: a text-based game with my script done.

My second failure is that I’m not a good writer. I can tell some stories but not using only words, specially in english. This game makes me training my english a little, but I believe it was too earlier to make a text-based game like this. At least I’ll try to write more stories.

And finally, people don’t like to read, and I write a lot in this game. My story have this problem: have too text and nothing seen very important. I will try to improve this storytelling ability.

WHAT WENT RIGHT?

The visual for a text-based is AWESOME, i admit it. This experience I got from another game that I made in September, which this same developer let this job to me to do and take vacations.

You can play it here, but it’s only in Portuguese

This experience help me a lot in the visual concepts and ideas. I also have to say thanks for my girlfriend and his sister to help me with the intro video. The video gives to the game a good visual effect that I particularly like in the Start Menu.

With the grammatical errors, I have the help of @TomoAllTheWay, a nice guy who make the copywriting for me. I also have the help of Christina Nordlander to some basic errors that I let it pass. Advices about how the story fails in trying to give the player care with the characters was received too and I want to study more about this technique.

But one think that surprise me a lot it was Twine. This text-based engine is so good to make games, that I take two days to learn it and do the game. I also learn how to use the CSS to control the background and how to improve the game with audio. There’s a lot of things on the internet that you can use with Twine to make a better visual to your game.

The most important lesson that I learned in this LD is: the game sometimes can reflect the reality you live. I try to trust in someone to make a game with me. I let another programmer out of the group to let this one make the development as he want, and yet he doesn’t. I let he decide the theme, and yet he simply give up. Meanwhile when I need someone to make a video in Sunday night, my girlfriend make it. When I need a copywriting Tomo decide to help me. In his work. Choose wisely when you gonna trust in your jobs.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Christmas, New Year’s promisses and a lot of work to do in January. I’ll decide my path and simply do it. And you, play the game. It’s harder to do this text-based game than you think.

I just realized I haven’t posted an update on the site yet!

I’m making a 2-player co-op fire-fighting game. Fire monsters appear and set trees on fire, and you can spray foam on everything! What could be more fun?

Here’s the title screen:

Not all the art is in the game, and I also have to add sound effects, actually save highscores, and do more playtesting. I’m glad I’m doing the jam this time! It’s been a good experience.

Final game looks like this:

It is an asymmetrical 2 player (one with a mouse and keyboard, the other with an Xbox 360 gamepad) 3D fire sim toy thing. You only get one match’s life (if you’re player 1). Water and fire interact in the usual way. Strike the match on the rough rock to start. Points are awarded for tree/ house voxels burnt to the ground. There’s no sound.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32538545/LudumDareFire/WebBuilt/WebBuilt.unity3d

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32538545/LudumDareFire/LinuxBuild.zip

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32538545/LudumDareFire/WinBuild.zip

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32538545/LudumDareFire/FireLudumDareSource.zip

This was my second ever game jam and I learned lots from this project – obviously fire simulation, but also the particulars of Unity’s particle systems and I’m sure lots of other things I can’t remember now.

Obvious bugs include the match floating up at certain times, due to unity’s physics collider. The match probably shouldn’t float on the water either…

I started lots of things that didn’t go into the final game – independent voxel fire grids that could interact, procedural generation of terrain. I guess the maths was a bit too difficult after nearly 28 hours of programming for my brain! I really shouldn’t have eaten so much sugar. Maybe next game jam I’ll remember!

Thought of a name: Perfect Match

The gameplay is coming in now: one match can move, and burn itself (also burning the environment). – I want to make it multiplayer, so one player controls the match and has to burn as much as possible, and another player controls a ship with a hose to put out the fire.

First every Ludum Dare, decided to make a 3D fire sim – spent a while researching after a lot of lying in, but been working for a few solid hours. Hopefully will get some “you only get one”-match-to-burn-everything-with gameplay going on tomorrow. Some screenshots – currently everything burns, including underwater stuff, and it doesn’t yet leave a black trail where it’s burnt. Pretty happy so far though!