background music

credits (Snowmään! song)

Wanna play a puzzle game? – Snowmään! Factory

At last, I have recovered from yesterday’s long night, as well as the sheer volume of stress that comes from trying to take on such a genuinely serious topic as my game did.

More on that in the postmortem, whenever I write that. Probably when I have some good feedback to work with.

In the meantime, I finally figured out how to make game gifs!

…I say that, it’s not doing much of the whole “animated” half of “animated gif”.

That, and I just uploaded the OST onto Soundcloud. Have a listen! Let me know what you think!

You can find Esc over here, if you want to give me some feedback.

Happy jamming, everyone!

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These are the tunes for my game Trina of the Depths . Only the first two made it into the game. The encounter theme was to be played when you met the crab seller.

Here they are in .ogg format

1. Trina of the Depths – exploration theme

2. Battle theme

3. the Encounter

Made with FLstudio and lots of free soundfonts and my own samples of a gameboy bass

Thank you for a fantastic 3 days! I’m just beginning to scratch the surface of what all you people created. A definite improvement in content, I feel

So it’s time to look back at my 48 hours of game-making, like many are doing. Let’s see what happened during the development of A Steampunk Axebot Supply Run.

What went wrong

The Theme - “It’s dangerous to go alone” was the one on the bottom of my list. Why would anyone vote for it, I thought, when there are so many interesting alternatives, like nihilism, or climbing? Why, indeed. I had nothing prepared whatsoever for this theme, and spent the first 2 hours panicking over what to do.

The Level – It occured to me only later that I could have made this in 2D, or using tile-based movement, either of which would have made creating this stuff considerably easier. Oh well.

Textures – As in “I don’t have any”. Adapting UVs is a grueling and time-consuming task,which I would rather avoid, and spend the time otherwise. Using the toon-shader for all 3d-objects was a great choice, but it would have been prettier with added textures. The terrain clashed with this. I couldn’t use the toon-shader on it (so far I know), and creating extra textures for it alone was not efficient.

Preparation – Slept too little the first day. Woke up at start-time (4am), but forgot to check the theme. Felt unmotivated and guilty for first 36 hours, bevofre I finally kicked into non-stop game-making mode.

What went right/not-so-wrong

Timelapse – It felt weird, at first, knowing that my every move was being recorded. But the video makes everything seem ultra-efficient

Music – this one actually surprised me. I never really composed anything bigger, and I just aimed for something unobstrusive. I ended up with a sweet theme which fits the game awseomely, complements it, and people actually like.

The Title – No matter how good or bad this was going to turn out, “Steampunk Axebots” sounds awesome.

The Scoring system – Your profit is determined by several systems, which are based on enemies killed, health of the robots, extra fuel left, and over-healing. Each robot has an own pattern and unity set of enemies at different times, so it is quite challenging to figure out the best combination. I still haven’t.

The fuel gauge – The rockets can travel only for a limited time, before they crash. I intented this to stop players from hovering over the playing  field or leaving it, but the time-constraint added another tactical layer. The rocket takes some time to reach its target, but once it passed a certain point, reaching the other targets would be impossible. It was however possible, that the robot you tried to heal died while you were on your way, meaning you had to carefully decide where to shoot. But since all robots converge on a central point later in the game, it became at that point possible to switch targets should something happen.

3D-models – My first though was a little knight, which I would have need to animate. Unfortunately, there was no time to either animate one or learn how to include animations in Unity (note to self: learn how to include animations in unity).

Biff-Particles  – They are quite a good substitute for fighting-animations.

Healing-Particles – They look much better than I planned.

What I would have liked to add

More stages – which become increasingly complex and tell a story

A menu – Which I already had  around, but no time, and no good reason (with only one level) to implement

No introduction screen – I’ve always hated these. Dammit, I want to play the game, not read a novel! There are ways to start the game at once, and teach the player on the fly.

Destroyed robots and rockets – Which I would have added were it not for a game-stopping bug I encountered with only 40 minutes to spare

Having the title of the game appear somewhere in the first level – Like I did in Unstoppaball. I love that gag.

-Matthew

RL-friends pointed out that my soundtrack is kinda neat. If the embed doesn’t work, click here, Or just go play here to experience the entire thing. Or see the Ludum-Dare-Entry. Either way, go play

-Matthew

will use this one easy and fast http://tones.wolfram.com/

then will save the midi file and record the sound in the audacity while it plays on media player.

here are some pics of the setup in audacity to allow you to record from the computer audio.

The hit soundtrack for You are me now has been released, courtesy of Indie Funk Electronic Newbie Records.

• Intro/Extro
• Island Theme

If you haven’t played the game yet, it lives on the Megastructure development blog.

Questions, comments, and criticism are all welcome (Ludum Dare entry page). Thank you to all those who have commented! I have learned much, and next time will be even better.