We’ve been having a great time here at the Ludum Dare 33 real world meetup hosted by ArtsTech in Kansas City, MO! We’ve had two teams working in our space from the Kansas City Video Game Developers meetup group, but I can only cover one of them.
The team I’m with consists of Xander Villasenor, venue host and Unity 3D whiz, Justin Moore, 3D artist/modeller, Aldo Calderon, coder, and myself, Ben McLean, coder, composer and (obviously) blogger!
The game idea we’ve gone with for this Ludum Dare is inspired by Rampage, the 1986 arcade classic by Midway. The goal is to put the player into the role of a giant monster from classic monster movies like Godzilla and King Kong!
Although apparently the monster in question is going to be a mutated cow, to give it a bit of a Kansas City cowtown theme. Like in Rampage, the goal is to smash as many buildings as possible. But unlike Rampage, our game is going to be in a first person perspective and, as Strong Bad put it, it will have, “my amazing videogame styles in all three of the glorious Ds!”
If time permits, we may even put out a Google Cardboard version, since we have several phones and headsets here to test with. Technical assistance from anyone who knows how to convert a Unity project into a Cardboard app would be appreciated.
Justin, our modeler, sent me this picture of the buildings he has been making for us. Note the lines of Hollywood-esque fakeness which indicate where these godforsaken structures will soon be broken asunder by the awesome might of the player’s uncontested 3D video game fury!

As for myself, I’ve had to struggle with switching over from libGDX to Unity. However, I found some great tutorials intended for programmers which got me started. As I was learning, first I created this pretty fractal:

Then I came up with a way of procedurally generating the city our monster is going to destroy:

The idea is to replace those white cubes with Justin’s buildings! It’s just a simple 2D white noise using xxHash, but it’s a start! 😀
While Justin and I have been making content, Xander’s been working on the mechanics. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to show that yet, but all three of us are gonna be staying up late tonight to try and hack something together! I’ve also got to compose some music, make a trailer for our game at some point and write more blogs posts like this one!
Kansas City is a great technology city! OK, enough chitchat. Back to working on the game! 😀