One of the monsters of our game, where you can exchange all their pieces, from the ears to the feet.
The goal? you need to be the cutest thing for the kid you are going to eat, you have to atrack them according to their likes and dislikes.
Hey Guys!
Only a few days left to play and rate Ludum Dare games. If you havent rated Vibrant City yet, please go ahead and give it a try.
Finally I got some time to work on the improvements highlighted by you all in the comments. Thanks a lot for playing Vibrant City and leaving your valuable feedback. Each and every comment gave me a better understanding about how to improve the game. Some of those improvements have been implemented in this first post compo release that you can play here. A few more complicated improvements are in the works and will be released later in the next update.
First post compo update release Notes:
– Increased the size of vibrants and civilians
– Added controls/instructions screen
– Added line of fire pointer in order to avoid confusion if the player can shoot at a specific location or not
– Refined line of sight/fire calculations
Thanks again for playing Vibrant City and dont forget to rate my compo entry :D.
That is all!!!
Anshul
We did a crummy job blogging about it while we made it, but it’s been my hope to do a few posts looking back on Team Lazerbeam’s experience during Ludum Dare 31 and our process in making Bionic Bliss. But before that, I guess the right thing to do is just a small post introducing our team and our game!
Hello from Team Lazerbeam!
We’re a three-man team of friends; Richard, Jason and Ben (me). We live in Cape Town, South Africa. Richard works as a programmer with excellent people known as Free Lives (who’s upcoming title Broforce was itself born as a Ludum Dare jam). Jason and I work together in a small animation studio called Cool Your Jets. I’ve only been into game development for a few months, but in that time have made some great friends and worked on some little games that I’m very proud of. Jason has made music for all of them, including Star-crossed Lovers, an interplanetary dating sim created for the last Ludum Dare. Richard and I had jammed together once before (making a supernatural sports game called Child Ball), had a great time on that and deceided to team up again for LD#31! And so, Team Lazerbeam was born!
And now, I’ll jump to the end! Out of this union, we created a cyberpunk customer service gamed called Bionic Bliss!
I’m excited to write about this game, our thoughts and processes in making it and the awesome three days we spent together doing this. But I’ll save that for another post. For now, let me just say;
Ludum Dare is my favorite game jam and this time I made a game called Vibrant City which you can play and rate here.
Friday Dec 5th 9PM – Theme Announcement
As soon as the theme (Entire Game on Single Screen) was announced I was a bit confused like everyone else and started pondering whether it is a theme or a constraint. I remember participating in one of the global game jam and one of the constraint was this ‘Entire Game on Single Screen’ but whatever. The theme is announced and I have to make a game in 47h 50m. So I started walking around my little apartment trying to think about new ideas and/or existing games that can be played on a single screen. To no one’s surprise the first few games that came to mind were Pong, Pacman, Tetris, Space Invaders :D. As I progress through the time period I started thinking about brawlers, tower defense, 4p local multiplayer shooters, bullet hell and survival game where you have to fight waves over waves of enemies. Nothing was really clicking to me at this point.
I was getting tired walking around when suddenly I had this idea of a beat’em up game inspired by movie Edward Scissorhands. The player will role play a character with Scissorhands and can switch hands to like hammerhands, axehands, bullethands etc etc. This sounded really cool and different to me so I started thinking about it in detail. A beat’em up game is not quite fun to play if it is missing different combos and variety of attacks. Having different combos means lots of art and animations and this is just for the main character. The same follows for all the AI characters that I am going to have in the game. For someone who is not very fluent in art and animation, this sounded a little bit out of scope to me in 48h. And I went back to the drawing board.
After a while I was enlightened with this rooftop shooter idea. I immediately discarded it thinking that “meh, its not good enough” but then I gave it a little more time and attention and I realized its not actually that bad and it could be a really good game. So this was it, I finalized the initial plot and started working.
Friday Dec 5th 10:30PM – Work Begins
I began by doing some initial research on different rooftop views that could influence my level design. I started working on first draft of level design plus some initial player movement for the next 4 hours or so. This was important to have as it will give me an idea whether I am going in the right direction or not. Fortunately, it went well and I was happy with the implementation. I can sleep well now :).
Nap Time – zzzzzzzzzzz
Saturday Dec 6th 8:30AM – Resume Working
Since I already had the basic player movement working from last night, I picked up from there and implemented player navigation from rooftop-to-rooftop. Then it was just non-stop working on level refinement, adding graphics and shaders, adding civilians and vibrants, implementing spawn logic, game progressions, menus/UI and various other stuff. Fast forward to Sunday Dec 7th 3:30AM, I had the game playable with some bugs here and there and some balancing issues. I was completely exhausted by that time as I was working non-stop since morning. Seeing the game in such good standing, I decided to take a nap for few hours.
Nap Time – zzzzzzzzzzz
Sunday Dec 7th 8:30AM – Final Day
Woke up, played the build from last night and read my todo list to remind myself where I was. The next 4 hours just flew by in play testing, bug fixing, polishing, UI and balancing gameplay. Then comes the sound and music part. I spend some time on freesound website to find the right sounds for my game. It took me a while to download them and mixing them up using Audacity. By the time I was done integrating the sound it was already 4PM. I still had plenty of time (~5h) to playtest and fix the remaining issues. I spent next two hours or so playing the game several times in the Unity Editor, in the browser and also the standalone build.
Everything was looking good and I was super excited to submit my entry. As the hour hand of the clock approaches 7PM I was done with my submission (YES! 2h early :D). It was an exhilarating moment. I feel accomplished!!
What went right:
What went wrong:
Thanks a ton LudumDare for this wonderful 48h of creation and fun!!
Thanks again for playing and rating Vibrant City!!!
Till Next Ludum Dare!!!
Anshul
PS: I am gonna start prototyping that Scissorhands game soon!!
We were able to finish our game in time 😀 Do check it out! After some much needed relaxation, I’ll be sure to rate and play a whole lot of games!! Good luck those still working, condolences to those who dropped, and a high five to those who made it~ Night all.
Hey everyone, hope you are having a great jam so far.
This is our first Ludum-event, but it’s been a lot of fun and we will most likely do this again in the future. Our team consists of a 4 people from Guru Games, and normally we work on games that are a lot different from this one. Games that take more than a year to finish, and take up most of our time, day and night. This weekend we decided to take some time of though, and just have some fun. After all, that is what got us into development in the first place, and making something small without the added pressure of milestone-deadlines or budget limitations has been really refreshing. For me, as a CEO, it has been great getting to do real development again, and not spend my time with answering emails. So, what have we made then?
Well it’s not done yet, but the game is about our art director, Johan Zdybal, who btw is not part of the jamming group. He is also the one doing the VO in the game, even if he does not know about it yet. We really don’t like being without him, so we decided that if he is not working with us we will work with him, by featuring him as the main character of our game. Now Johan loves Coffee, it’s almost an obsession and we wanted to show the whole world that side of him. So in the game you are on the hunt for coffee beans and you steer Johan towards the beans by rotating the screen with A+D or the arrow keys. Johan will roll around, bounce and fall towards the beans, and when you have collected all of them A cup of coffee spawns in the middle. His roomies are not to happy about his plans to make coffee however, and will chase him through the levels. It plays a lot like Pacman, but instead of having direct control of the character you just rotate the screen where the game takes place.
Special thanks to @doublezeroonezero who created the music for us, and to everyone who has been supportive on twitter. We will do some minor additions to the game, but we have to work tomorrow. If you want to see what we do when we are not fooling around making games about coffee you can follow me, @cardanai or our marketing dude, @ttrengil on twitter.
Have a happy jam, looking forward to see more of what you are working in!
-Daniel Ström
Boss-Guru
Guru Games
Yep, I’m done. After around 12 hours of dev time due to school, I have no more time this weekend and so have drawn it to a close, with a bit of a clumsy win condition. But hope people enjoy it!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=46925
Are we allowed to use freely available music on the web or does it have to be completely from scratch?
Say hello to Last Call prototype.
We had enough of placeholder art, so this is our artist working live now!
Not so much but Im like what I have. =)
First time having a go at LD. My prototype is basically done: Player, Target, Bullets, Borders, Bouncers, Loopers, Level Exit, Next Level Randomness.
Now the big question….. Art. What to do? probably best to stick with something abstract and just tidy up the palette a little.
Oh, and sound effects. How did I forget sfx. There’s fun to be had there 😀
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!