I’ve had a break, but I’m mentally ready for this!
I’ll be using Unity to put together an arcade game, bent to fit the theme.
Expect silliness and rad controls!!
Can’t wait. I am excite!!! 😀
Hey Everyone,
I’m going to be streaming some more work on my 7dRTS game, if you’d like to check it out, here’s the link: twitch.tv/0creds
I Hope To See You All There,
– 0Creds
So this is a postmortem on my experience with the 7 Day RTS mini compo. It was fun while it lasted, but real life (and another game jam) got in the way. I did experience great progress on my game: “Aircraft Command”. In fact, I experienced way more progress on this pass of the game than the original 2009 attempt. I credit my fast start with using a pre existing code base, and a scoping appropriately.
The initial concept was solid, a reverse Tower Defense. The player must escort bombers to a target using their resources (fighters and helicopters) to take out the computer’s turrets. With this concept in hand, I was ready to give this game a shot.
Used existing code base: My main project is a shooter named Sky Hawks. Although the game is an action game, I was able to use a lot of the code for collisions, projectile instantiation and etc. A friend of mine had already had given me models from a previous project. This was a big help as it gave the game a nice look right away.
Scoped Appropriately: This is a bit debatable. Had I scoped really well I would have finished. I got the main game win/loss condition going by day 3. Unfortunately because of my week’s schedule, I only had about three days to work on the game. I am happy that I had something on screen. It’s imperative to get something going as fast as possible, Playmaker and using old code helped me get to the first playable fast. The only problem was, once I attended my second game jam, I lost the momentum that I had on this project. Suddenly the task list seemed way too much. Game Jams are fun but they are draining. In the future, I’ll make sure to get a playable demo on day one. Everything afterward should be polish.
Spent a bit too much time chasing rabbits: I was trying to get Unity Playmaker to work for my game. One of the original goals was to use Playmaker’s visual code to simplify development. Like any new tool, the time saving is only achieved after getting over the learning curve. A short development cycle is not the time to learn new tools. Luckily, if a feature didn’t work, I reverted back to doing it through code.
2 Gamez Jams!!: (That’s a 2 Chainz reference. )I attempted to do two game jams in one week. Initially, I was going to skip the 7 Day RTS, but it is one of my favorite genres. I have wanted to make one forever. The only issue was, I had another game jam planned at the Field Museum here in Chicago. On top of that, I was taking engagement photos with my lovely Fiancee . Three of the original 7 days were gone. I tried to get a head start on Sunday. This helped a bit, but in the future I will have a one game jam at a time policy. (no matter how tantalizing)
What now?
I really like the original concept for this game. In the future i plan on pursuing this project using something like Game Maker. This isn’t the last you’ve seen of Aircraft Command. I think that this game has the potential to be really fun. Working on the 7 Day RTS project rekindled my energy in my main game. I learned that I need to get the game in a shoawable state as fast as possible. It’s not a game until someone can play it. I also learned to keep the game in a scope that allows you to finish. These things sound fundamental, but a game jam situation managifies that. I’m off to play more of the games. Jam on Jammers.
Hey all, the game we made is finally live!
Contaminate is a simple and fun puzzle game where you must destroy all the viruses from the field. And how do you do that? Just click on the field to spawn more viruses, if two viruses hit each other, they both die!
Gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjIfAHI0BzY
Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jogability.contaminate
Although there are less than three weeks until the August 23-26 Ludum Dare, there is yet no “real world meetup” sticky post yet! I noticed the guys in Montpelier have posted about their meetup, and so I am posting regarding our meetup, and maybe it’s time to poke PoV or sorceress or someone to ask them about the sticky post.
Meanwhile, I am thrilled to announce that despite plans to be in Portland OR, the Maker Fair in Dover NH that I wanted to go to, other game jams in the bay area I could be at that weekend, the feast day of Éogan of Ardstraw, father’s day in Nepal, and a million other things I could (and should) be doing and places I could be, I am hosting the Ludum Dare 27 meetup at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland, California!
If you’ve been before it will be very similar – a bunch of tables, never enough extension cords and power strips, internet, we have a coffee pot this time!, food down the street, and we’ll have a couple of video games set up for the occasional break (and I really do hope to set up Dance Dance Revolution again). The only real new thing that I’ve done is organize a meetup page so I can get a good idea of how many people will be coming. Sign up here!
Okay maybe it doesn’t look that exciting and yes the chairs could use a little work but no really it’s awesome! Come join us!
Hey Everyone,
I’m gonna be streaming some more work on my 7dRTS game, if you’d like to check it out, head over here: twitch.tv/0Creds
Hope To See You All There,
– 0Creds
Hey Everyone,
I’m gonna be hopping on Twitch and streaming some more, if you’d like to check it out, please go to twitch.tv/0creds
Hope To See You All There,
– 0Creds
I know it’s still 18 days out approximately, but I can’t contain my excitement for LD much longer. I may explode as I sit here in my cube.
HELP. ME. 
This entry was posted on Monday, August 5th, 2013 at 10:18 am and is filed under MiniLD #44 / 7dRTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hello world this post is just for respect the rules.
For the next ludum dare i will use Flixel 2.55.
You are aware :).
While Ludum Dare is typically an online event (make a game from the comfort of your home), many real world events happen around Ludum Dare. Here’s the list:
If you want your event on the list, post a comment letting me know where your event is. Be sure to include a link to further details (either here on the blog, or elsewhere).
Getting super pumped for #27!
I will be using Unity or Flash or HMTL5 depending on what strikes me fancy come theme time.
Can’t wait to see what you all come up with!
So, after some thinking and recent job developments, i decided to scrap my plan of using Java with Slick2D and will rather use HTML5 + JavaScript with the Impact.Js Engine.
So i now have the next 19 Days to work on those rusty JS skills to deliver a better game then last time… wish me luck!
It’s kinda early, ain’t it? Well, I just want to say I’m participating in Ludum Dare 27! I’d love to work in Unity3D and Maya, but I’m pretty inexperienced with both programs. I guess I know what to do the next eighteen days.. practising!
In my new action adventure game, one of the biggest goals I want to accomplish is to tell a compelling story. At first, this seemed like a difficult thing to accomplish… being that I didn’t have time to render and model a lot of cutscenes while perfectly lip syncing dialogue… In the end, I came to the conclusion of having little cutscenes and instead telling story through mechanics and visuals. How do you do that? Seems impossible, right? actually, if you go the basics, it’s quite simple.
Mechanics. Text can tell stories. Audio can tell stories as well. Together these become vital aspects in presenting an easy-to-make story mechanic. Character biographies, journals, radio messages, all of these can easily show story without complicated cutscenes or even modeling other characters. However, this can get repetitive… The trick is telling the right story in the most interesting way.
Word Choice. My original idea for the story of this game was a unique, slow paced action adventure that had the main character going through mostly the same locations over and over again, just in different scenarios. I quickly realized this was a mistake. You don’t need a ton of side characters… you need a few main ones that can do different things to help advance the story. It’s important to make sure all dialogue somehow progresses the story, and that the dialogue is from main characters. I want this game to be dramatic. I want to create scenarios that are unique as well as intriguing, and I want them to all affect the main character in some way.
Making it Interesting. Start off with a story. Then think “How can I change this in the most dramatic way possible while still making it believable and understandable?” It’s hard to put what I’m trying to say into words… but basically you need to create dramatic suspense. Characters need to be at an even match, they all need to have something to hide, they all need to have weaknesses and strengths.
Sorry that jumbled mess haha, here’s the LAST hint before the official announcement of my new game:
Note: That is NOT the main character 😉 or is it????
Let’s see if you can guess the title! 😀 Hopefully next time I’ll have the official announcement ready
Happy Gaming! 😀
So, I’ve decided that this Ludum Dare I would use C# instead of Java or Actionscript. I am starting to learn and use it using XNA and the Unity3D engine. I am really enjoying it much more than Java or Actionscript. It is a very powerful language that just feels right. For Ludum Dare though, here’s what I am using:
Language: C#
IDE: Visual C# 2010 Express or MonoDevelop
Engine/Library: Unity3d
Graphics: Photoshop CS3 and Paint.NET
Sound: Sfxr
Music: Reaper DAW with Guitar.
I’ll also be streaming at: http://www.twitch.tv/thejeremystark
#27 is going to be my first LD ever, so my expectations are probably unrealistically too high! Yay!
My only experience with gamedev compos is PyWeek, so you know where I’m coming from. I’ll be developing in Linux and Python (with Pyglet), with a dedicated old laptop to build a Windows bundle. I’m still thinking how to improve Mac OS X support, without owning a Mac.
OK, see you around.
EDIT:
Apparently posts are more specific about what you plan to use in LD, so…
Language: Python (2.7; Linux)
Library: pyglet 1.2 alpha1 (repo version actually) / parts of cocos2d
IDE: vim
Graphics: Gimp / Inkscape / Wingd3D / mtPaint
Sound effects: SFXR / Audacity
Music: SoundTracker / Ardour
Other: py2exe
My second ld but unfortunately i couldn’t finish ld 26 cause of unforeseen stuff…so hope i finish this time…
Going to be using – Blender3d,python and photoshop…any way is it permitted to use royalty free textures from sites?any response greatly appreciated.
– Good luck to us all
This is an early “I’m in!” for LD 27 as well as spam. I mean, an advertisement for my base code. I mean, declaration. Yeah, that’s it. Declaration. Of base code. Right. Also, I’m in. And there’s some new base code you can check out. It’s probably terrible.
You wouldn’t know it from looking at my LD 26 entry, but I’ve been making (more accurately, trying and usually failing to make) game demos using LibGDX for well over a year. In fact, I attempted LD 25, but at the end of the weekend all I had was a Santa Claus sprite running around a tree. The idea was for you to unload gift-wrapped bombs from your sleigh while the computer-controlled Grinches tried to save the children. I think it would have been worth a giggle if it ever became playable but I spent way too much time being a software architect to get anything done.
What’s a software architect? You know, one of those useless people who spends all day drawing boxes and arrows on a whiteboard, somehow getting in your way despite doing no actual work. And how bad was it? Oh, it was bad. Real bad. To illustrate, here are the first few commit messages I made on the project:
Fri Dec 14 18:12:45 2012 -0800 Initialize repository Fri Dec 14 18:12:59 2012 -0800 Maven skeleton Fri Dec 14 20:56:07 2012 -0800 Ignore generated files Fri Dec 14 20:56:14 2012 -0800 Title/Loading screen Fri Dec 14 21:00:29 2012 -0800 Exclude source images from JAR Fri Dec 14 21:02:14 2012 -0800 comment Fri Dec 14 21:03:09 2012 -0800 Less logging
And it went downhill from there. No question, this game was doomed to fail.
You see, I have a problem. You could even call it a disability. Let me tell you about it. Okay. Ahem. Here it is. By day, I am a senior enterprise software developer. I lead the design of big fat enterprise applications that process many millions of records every year, that have to process every record perfectly or else there’s trouble, that have to be built automatically in a reproducible way after every commit so that every change can be tested, that have to withstand daily development and feature requests and frequent about-face design changes, yet remain maintainable for a decade or more. So there you have it. Feel free to hate, laugh, ridicule, or take pity; go ahead, I’ve had it all, and I deserve all of it and more. But the point is, I have developed a need to feel that my software has some essence of correctness or I become very uneasy. It has to be right, or I am compelled to make it right. Like I said, you could even call it a disability.
Game development, I’ve discovered, is the polar opposite of enterprise software development. It’s all about struggling to add whiz-bang features and faking it until it’s barely working. It’s all about fine-grained performance optimization and hunting the elusive framerate increase. It’s all about how the game makes the player feel while playing. (That’s the big one. Watch Extra Credits if you don’t believe me.) Get one more change in, and as long as the player’s overall interactive experience is better for it, the game has been improved, and nothing else matters. Ship it, and you never have to deal with the tangled unfathomable mess again, so don’t bother cleaning up. This way of working makes me very excited, but also very uncomfortable. Very, very uncomfortable. I know it doesn’t matter. I know the purpose of the software is different. I know it doesn’t need to be good software to fulfill all the requirements of being a good game. But it still makes me uncomfortable. It’s like an itch that I can’t scratch. And the more I work with the code, the itchier it gets, and the harder it becomes to let it be instead of taking off to a whiteboard, with the deadline ticking down, to figure out a way to make it right.
So after this painfully unproductive LD 25 experience, and after considerable thought in the following months, I managed to make a deal with myself. It consists of two parts. The first part is that, during a LD or a mini LD, for the entire duration of the event, I would let myself be messy, and I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d be a pig in mud. I’d enjoy adding features to make a better game, sparing no thought to what may need to be changed later. I’d do whatever it takes to deliver my game design by the deadline. Software architecture wouldn’t matter because I’d never have to touch the resulting colossal tangled mess ever again. I wouldn’t care that it’s piling crap upon crap upon crap — by the way, huge Gordon Ramsay fan — because it’d all be over soon. Everything would be permissible in the name of making the game design come to life.
And the second part is, after it’s over, I’d take my time performing a postmortem on whatever I ended up making. I’d reflect on what was cumbersome, what was pleasant to work with, what changes I had no choice but to make in order to implement a feature. And then I’d take these lessons and incorporate them into base code so that I could build upon them for the next iteration.
After all, I embrace agile software development in my professional life, so why not be flexible and iterate towards sustainable, maintainable, understandable, sensible software architecture for games as well?
And so I am reservedly pleased to refer to my LibGDX Maven archetype project. I worked on it after gathering my thoughts following LD 25. And I kept working on it, until it seemed complete. And after using it as base code for MiniLD 44, I caught a second wind and worked on it some more, tearing apart the changelog for the game, learning all the lessons I could, and applying them in code form. I think I can say it’s something, now. It can be more. The work continues.
And at last, the story takes us to the present time. Who’s that snoring? Oh, it’s probably me. Wake up anyway.
Do you believe that Maven is the one true build system? (I don’t. Gradle is cooler. SBT is pretty neat, too. Just agree if you understood the question.) Do you spend days agonizing over whether something should be a Singleton or a static field reference? (You shouldn’t. That’s a stupid decision. Both are faulty, but one is worse.) Do you wish you could put everything in a J2EE container? (I hope not. Spring is way better.) If you said yes to all of those questions, then kindly stay away from this project. I don’t need any more enterprise software developers telling me what they think. I’m enough of a liability by myself.
Did none of that make any sense, or the least bit of difference? Are you more excited by rendering realistic hair and sweat in a sports game than ensuring that your game engine can be used again next year? Do you yearn to give the player a unique experience? Then please look at my skeletal software architecture. Please help me find all the ways that it will prevent me from turning my game ideas into a reality, so I can fix them.
After all, I’m no artist, I’m no designer, I’m no musician, I’m no game programmer, but still, my game ideas aren’t terrible, right? Worth a giggle, at least?
Right?
Well, I’ll show you! My LD 27 entry is going to be awesome!!!
Later.
wrongcoder
I’ve been waiting for a while to get another go at the Ludum Dare. I just hope I have a little more luck than last time.
What I’ll be working with:
Language: C++
Libraries: SDL
I’ll do my best to get both a Windows and Linux version.
This will be my first try in a Ludum Dare, just hope I can make something different, I don’t want anything spectacular, just different from everything else is enough for me.
I’ll use Unity as Dev Kit and as an extra challenge will try to make something not only for desktop (Windows) but for Mobile (android) too.
let’s see what happens