Last Ludum Dare 48 Hour Compo I failed to make enough progress by Saturday afternoon and I retreated. The next day I decided that I would take a look into the game engine Unity that I know a few people in #ludumdare use. It looked pretty neat so I decided that I would use my “Enemies as Weapons” idea as a test game to learn the Unity editor and play around with the scripting.  A month later, not a whole lot of progress was made, but I did end up getting a little used to Unity and it isn’t completely overwhelming anymore. Last weekend I upgraded to 3. 0, took a look at MonoDevelop and liked what I saw. I am in the process of migrating my JavaScript code over to C#, which may be a smidgen more difficult to deal with than JavaScript in some ways but is much more powerful.

The Game

The working title is LoneStranger’s UFO Defense (How original! It will look nice next to LoneStranger’s Caverns, LoneStranger’s Shredder, LoneStranger’s Islands…. and should also not to be confused with XCOM: UFO Defense). It’s a side view, single screen game where you have to defend your people from the invading alien invasion force. Along the way you will use captured and scavenged alien technology to build up better weapons and defenses. I have a little dude that runs back and forth along the bottom, and a random-moving UFO in the sky. The player can shoot non-lethal bullets at the moment.

An early shot of the UFO Defense game.

I’m currently putting together the full gameplay docs, and along with that, the desired feature list. I will then split the list into “must have” and “would be nice” and “maybe sometime in the future” categories. Furthermore, the features in the “must have” category will be ranked based on an implementation order that makes sense. Anything on the “must have” list should be in before the end of the month, and I should really have most of those implemented before working on the “would be nice” list. The lists will be the topic of a future post.

Platform

My target platform is the web using the Unity web player. I know it’s not as widespread as Flash, but it’s what I’m using and that’s what I’m stuck with.

As far as my revenue making strategy, I don’t think I want to bother with any official sites, though that may change. My current plan is to host it on my own website and throw some ads on the page. I am already signed up with Google AdSense, and that is probably what I’ll use unless I do a little research and find something else that pays better. Advertising the game itself might be a challenge and will have to be word of mouth initially. As with some other PoV Challengers, I feel the goal of October is to make the game, not necessarily make the target profit.

Challenges

TV in general is a big time suck. My wife and I recently signed up for Netflix and added a lot of movies to our queue. I’ll probably be drawn to about one or two movies a week, but if I’m disciplined enough on non-movie days, I should be ok. Pandora and my headphones are a great way to focus energy toward the project. Other web things I usually peruse each day might be another timesuck, but again, discipline will be key.

Artwork isn’t a strong point of mine, but I do have a couple friends that draw. They have both told me in the past they won’t hesitate to do things for any games I make. The plan here would be to finalize all artwork sometime in the next week or so and ship them off my sketches and requirements so I can get it all back before the deadline.

Music shouldn’t be a challenge in it’s most simple form, since Wolfram Alpha can make some really fitting backround tunes. However, I would like to take this a step further. More on this in a future post.

The Future

Of course, I should keep at least one blurry eye on the future and make sure that I’m designing something that could be easily ported to another platform. I’d love to do a iOS game if I felt that this was taking off (and it paid for the Unity add-on itself). Things like control scheme and display would have to take this into account.

And….GO!

I already started, but now that I’ve made my first post it really feels like a compo… only longer and with a better goal!

Tags: screenshot

It’s time we unveil our game! This is the first concept actually created by both me and Smiley over at Area 161. (Technically, there was Tiny the Blog but that was just me at the 360|iDev game jam sans Smiley) Our code name for the game is (drumroll please):

DARTS

Yeah, I understand codenames are supposed to be…well, codes. However, we’re still new to game dev and so we’re saving all of our creativity for the game itself and perhaps the real game name. Remember, I’m also the one that said it was safe to discuss your ideas publicly, so that’s what we’re doing. Now, I know what your thinking, “Darts? Really? All this talk about story, originality, ground breaking interaction, etc and they come up with darts?”

Some key factors to the game design:

1. Multiple devices – Our darts are going to use iPods and iPhones as the dart device with the iPad being the dartboard. It’s something that seems to make sense for us and still unique. We actually had the idea around WWDC, but have been waiting for GameCenter to make it to the iPad which finally is happening with iOS 4.2. It’s not a new idea or even all that novel, but it’s still unique enough to be different.

2. Dart types – This is where we will differentiate ourselves. There’s a ton of serious dart games out there for both the iPad and iPod. Ours is NOT going to be joining their ranks. Ours is going to be completely different. While we are taking the basic game of darts as the basis for our mechanic, that’s about where it stops. See, it’s not that we think that darts as a game isn’t fun. However, let’s face the truth. Darts is not world’s most favorite past time. Therefore, we have an idea of how to introduce some more fun into the game. To give you an idea, here’s some concept art for the darts:

A couple of dart types

That is what you’ll see on the dart device whereas this is an idea of what you might see once the dart lands on the dart board:

Concept Landed Dart

We have some other creative ideas as well, but we haven’t fleshed them out yet. Therefore, you’ll have to tune in to our next week’s post to get a deeper view into the game.

The main artist for the game art is my dad. Smiley and I are way rusty on our art skills, so we needed someone who actually knew what they were doing. My dad has been an artist all his life, most of it professionally as a graphic artist. He’s retired now, so he needs something to keep him busy. According to him, the sketches above show how “rusty” he is. His “rusty” beats our best efforts, hands down. LOL It’s also neat to have him contribute to the design of the game in addition to being “just” the artist. How can you not look at that concept art and get inspired?

Technical Update:

The past week was getting a rough game engine in place to put up screens, load/play sounds and figure out simple sprites. We coulda used Cocos-2D, but I figured that we’re going to eventually be pushing the boundaries of iOS as far as interaction, etc in future games. Therefore, rolling our own will likley be an eventual thing, so we better get our learn on now. This week is going to be nailing down the throw mechanic. I have some ideas of how to do it technically in my head, but we’ll see if I can actually translate that into compilable Objective-C code!

All in all, it’s a pretty exciting time for us as a company. We’re in the throes of building our first game and we have a crazy deadline to hit. We’re starting to feel like real game developers for the very first time and we’ll be honest, the feeling is pretty intoxicating.

Tags: Area 161, concept art, iOS Game

I’m accepting PoV’s October Challenge: Make a game, sell 1 copy. I’m going to extend and polish Stacker, my Ludum Dare 12 entry. It is the most complete game and best of all my Ludum Dare entries. I also have some ideas about how to make it more interesting than the current scheme of moving the goal line higher and higher each level.

Serendipitously, Unity 3.0 was released last week. I’ve been eyeing using it in future projects for a few weeks now, and have actually done several tutorials and watched a bunch of videos online. I was particularly impressed with the Visual Studio integration. If I had known about that earlier, I would have tried it much sooner. In the past, engines, frameworks and languages have caused me much gnashing of my teeth because their IDE was so painful.

Stacker in action

Here are some screenshots of my October Challenge Entry: Explosive Love:

Start Screen

Instruction

Gameplay

Gameplay2

End screen

Well progress has been coming since I last posted the Splash screen.  I have been working on some tools, in particular the track editor.  I remain vague about my game idea for the current time, but it will be a racing game; for all intent and purposes.  I am focusing efforts on being unique, and a thorough google search only brought up 2 other “personal” projects/attempts at what I am doing.  I am hoping that serves to my advantage, but I am happy to know I have an idea that is more original than just making an Pac-Man clone with different theme.

So about this track editor; I spent my day Sunday working on starting it, and Monday night after work I lost about 3 hours of productivity.  I was beat, muscles aching, etc… and couldn’t concentrate.  However I did manage to get a few productive hours and managed more than I expected for the night.  Undo/Redo capabilities for all current actions:  Add/Delete TrackNodes as well as the ability to Move/Edit the node.  This editor is within the game*, however it will likely be stripped from the release build.

An editor under development for my Sell-a-Game Challenge.

I have been wondering quite a bit whether or not I should implement undo/redo.  I estimate it will take 3x or so longer to maintain the actions, but I also believe it will save time when designing/developing more tracks.  I plan on a minimum of 5 tracks, but hope for more than that.

Tonight I’ve started by writing this post, soon I will begin working on building the actual track from the nodes above.  I am hoping that doesn’t take me all night.  I want to do more than just that, but at this time I have nothing else planned, as I can’t think what comes next.

*Although it is within game, I have an EditorFramework that acts as an external editor; giving me advantages of a professional looking interface, menus and more.

A few hours later. . .

Well, I did manage to get somewhere tonight.  Even further than just getting the track surface built from the nodes.  Although, I didn’t get the track textured, yet, I did manage to build it quickly.  Also I sent it off to a partner of mine, and fixed several small editor ‘issues’.  Added saving/loading of editor settings for convenience , undo/redo still fully working.  (Redo for the move action was previously broke!)  Here is a small image of the track being built from the nodes:

A track being built from the nodes!

I’ve made some serious progress tonight.

I’ve gotten the basics now working in Unity:

• Yellow Blocks
• Physics and stacking
• Mouse position determines place of new block

I like the 3D-ness the block have now, even though the gamer is interacting purely in a 2D fashion.

Total hours so far: 11.5  This probably means that I’m already ahead of the LD12 pace.

Tags: screenshot

Still Haven’t got a name yet for my game. I’l work on that later.

Today I’ve been working on getting the enemy spawn thingy to work. I should have it done soon, I hope…..

The game isn’t in a playable version yet but my goal is to have one by the end of the weekend, so thats fine. Been tying to get my friend to give me the login details for the iPhone dev centre so I can test the app on my iPad, He wants to see a playable version first…. I don’t think he’s realised I need to test my app every 3 seconds(I’m not joking).

I’m wondering how long it’ll take apple to approve the game,  if I knew It would give me a better idea to get the game done. I’ve heard it can take anything from two days, to three weeks.

-bear

Going for the October Challenge with a Million Dollar game, just need the one sale an I could win! ;o)

A small step forward.  Worked on getting the win condition to trigger.

Stacker Progress Screenshot 10/6

The trigger is firing, but I need to animated the target zone and the fact that you’ve hit it.  The text looks awful too.

I also got some business hat things done as well: signed up for Intel’s AppUp Developer whosywhatisit, Google Checkout thingy and a couple offical business forms with my county.  Can you believe you have to file for a permit to do work in your own home!?!  What is America coming too?  Anyways… tired… must sleep.

Total Hours To Date: 13.75

Hello People.

I’m jayden, 14 years of age, and want to start getting into making small little video games, and thought these challenges would be a good place to start. I was planning on making a 3D FPS in Blender, using it as the main 3D tool, and as the Game Engine, but I thought that was kidna cheating. i am looking at using Unreal Engine, and am looking into the legalities and licenses of that. I am not sure if I should od a simple flash game, or something like that. iw ant it to be simple, but not too hard.

This was my first entry into a Ludum dare and I’ve got to say I had a blast, and most of all I learned a lot.

It started with a Friday afternoon pixel sketch of a guy on a BMX. And with that I went full steam ahead and created a game with a wry sense of humour. The game has generally been panned as not being fun, and I have to agree. It’s hard to take creative criticism seriously, even harder when it comes from 4chan, but the fans will be your harshest critics, so you should listen when they speak.

Hit the jump for the specifics and nitty gritty of the game.

To make this game I went with Flixel and FlashDevelop. Firstly, I’m a huge Canabalt and Gravity Hook fan, so it made sense to use what they use. I’m still pretty astounded that Flash gives away their whole deal for free! You can make Flash games without paying Adobe a cent. I chose to take advantage of this.

I used Photoshop CS5 at work to make some of the pixel art, and they have made some great improvements if you are a pixel artist. If you zoom in the pixels are shown with grid lines automatically. I thought that was a great move by Adobe.

I coded using Actionscript, and I highly recommend the book Flash Game University by Gary Rosenweig if you’ve never coded games in Actionscript before. Or if you are a pro, dive right in, it’s not hard at all, and Flixel has made it super easy.

High scores and ads are by MochiMedia. These weren’t as easy to implement using FlashDevelop as it was when I did earlier games using Flash CS3. But I got them working. I am thinking of doing a tutorial for getting them working, but I want to try out getting Social elements of Mochi’s API first. If anyone really wants these tutorials let me know.

And now the game!

Picking Up Chicks is Hard When Your Car is a BMX

I tried to troll 4chan with my own advertising campaign but no one took the bait.

And yes, I did earn a dollar! $2.04 so far, making a grand total of $55.05 over my game making career at Mochi.

I think I may have got a name now! I’m thinking of calling it space waves.

Today I’ve fixed the accelerometer so that tilting the device now works, and I’ve also been able to get my iPad to run the app. My friend gave me the login and I spent like 2 hours tying to set it up, still better than him though! ha.

The next thing I need to do is make the enemy spawn thingy work, which is the main part of this project. The game is turning out to be relatively simple to make, which is good for the time I have left.

Oh and also I have a screen shot now! Shows how far I am though the project very well.

-bear

Well, I don’t have any screenshots to share tonight.  I could make one of the MainMenu, but really – not worth it.  Just take my word.  I do have drop-shadows on some text, which is pretty neat.  But besides that, it is extremely bland, rotten colors and just needs to be touched up during the next phase of the project.

Alpha is all about getting all the features finished and working, and the main menu is working.  Both keyboard (up,down,enter) and mouse (movement, left-click) selection support.  I wasn’t planning on starting the MainMenu and linking up a few other game-states (with no actual implementation yet), until later, but I made a mistake yesterday that I need to be aware of in the future; especially on this project with such limited time.

BlackBird’s Lesson:

I hope you can learn from my simple mistake; Don’t get caught up in things that don’t matter. Yesterday I was working on the editor, I got the track textured – looking a bit better now, and a handful of other little things.  But most of my time 3hrs or so, was spent on a specific tool.  It does have a use, but it also was a waste of time to spend more than 15 to 20 minutes on such a tool.  Yet I added all sorts of little features/behaviors to this tool and I must brag, it came out awesome.  But afterwards I realized that it didn’t do anything to the actual track.  It helps edit the track, but it doesn’t edit the track.

So I didn’t actually make much progress since the tool I added is just a nicety, and not a requirement.  I decided to take a step back from the editor tonight and start working on the gamestates for a change of pace.  I know a lot of you LD’ers are shooting for Oct 31st to release by, but I won’t be releasing until early to mid December at the absolute earliest.  Although, I will be completing Alpha by October 31st.  Any features not completed by that date, will effectively be cut from the project.

I expect it to take the full month of November to polish up the features, and reduce the bug count as much as possible before releasing.  This process will likely go into December, however after October 31st I can not, and will not, add any new features.  I promise I won’t.  (Hmm, will I?)

It was a real fight tonight getting the “Win” to be displayed nicely and in red. Took me a while to understand the relationship between the GUIText and a font material. Brother, sure wish I had figured it out faster.

Stacker Progress 10/7

On the business hat side of things I discovered that PayPal now has a microtransation option to their pricing structure and signed up. I have my reservations about the trustworthiness of PayPal after all the stories I’ve heard, but this will be my best option if I price Stacker at $1 like I was thinking.

Next Action: Some sort of visualization for the target area you are building the tower to.
Total Hours To Date: 15.75

Tags: screenshot

I’m still going along rather slowly, but I think I’ve made enough progress in the last couple of days to justify an update again :). I failed to stick to the promise I made myself that I won’t add graphics until the gameplay is working, so here’s the much nicer 2nd screenshot:

Towns, Terrain, Basic Trade Goods, Basic Town Simulation, Basic Random Map Generation, Loading data from file - all working :)

Gameplay isn’t really happening yet, so the priority list of features to implement next are:

1. Airships (essential for gameplay)
2. Trade Interface (essential for gameplay)
3. Better Town Simulation (essential for sustainable gameplay)
4. Better Map Generation
5. Fog of War / Exploration

This project is probably more than I can do in a month, but I’ll be happy if I can manage about 60-80% completion, I can always still polish after October and then start selling it (it’s at least designed to have enough gameplay to be salable ;-)) . Still having lots of fun with this project! 😀

A week ago I announced my entry for PoV’s October Challenge, an old-school 4X space game (ala Master of Orion) for the iPad called Distant Star. I’ve made a fair amount of progress since that announcement; Distant Star has gone from a pile of half-finished tech and ideas to a rough playable prototype. Almost all the core features are in place: ship construction, exploration, colonization, combat. Of course, to be properly playable I needed a few basic AIs — at the moment, you can play against two simple, deterministic AI players, each with their own play style (one colonizes recklessly, while the other builds up small fleets and attempts to capture one system at a time).

Introducing some simple AI players helped point out all kinds of multiplayer bugs I’d introduced so far — turns out none of my fog of war code worked at all, and resource accumulation was completely borked. The first game I played the AI wiped me out almost instantly.

Things are not looking good for the red player...

Based on some early, vicious usability feedback I’ve made some subtle changes to the map interaction, restricting scrolling outside of the galaxy and highlighting fleets or systems when they were selected. I also played around with a real-time version of the game, but quickly realized that, while it made the early game much more pleasant, things got way too hectic once the AI acquired more than a handful of high-quality planets. They started building ships far faster than the player, especially if the player’s empire was quite spread out. Back to turn-based I went.

Can't. Keep. Up.

Up next: research management. Bring on the tech tree!

Tags: screenshot

Well I think I’ll try to make something for the October challenge. My only possible chance of making a sale, I think, is to make an iPhone game, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Because my free time is sparse, I was thinking I’d port over a game I made for an 84-hour compo. That way, I can spend less time drawing and planning and more time just finding the bits about the game that were fun. Also in the interest of saving time, I might make this in Unity, although I hadn’t decided. If I don’t, I’ll just use the iPhone framework I already have and find some iPhone 2D physics library I can use – does anybody know any good ones?

I’m going to port over “A Lasting Impression.” You can find it here: http://www.javagaming.org/index.php/topic,19135.0.html

I think its main improvements will come from creating a challenge before the time limit is up. Currently, you can get kids angry when you take their bubble gum and they run around and knock things over, but that’s the only challenging bit at all. What I’d like to do is add in more things that can potentially mess up your stack of stuff if you don’t deal with them, like angry dogs, popping-up prairie dogs, gusts of wind, and the like. Plus, I think I will get rid of the whole items falling from the sky thing and replace it with every single item being added by something. As in, an airplane might fly by, and if you throw something at it then it crashes and explodes into debris you can use, balloons float by occasionally or are attached you kids (and you must pop them to get them to come down), etc. These sorts of things will make the game much more fun that it is, I think.

Today I made it so if your ship went to the edge of the screen it will come out the other side. Other than that I’ve been working on the title screen.

Didn’t do much today, but this weekend I’l properly be coding for hours on end. I’m would like an proper running version by the end of the weekend for bug testing.

Thats the title screen so far.

Contrasaurus: Defender of the American Dream

We’ve been working on Contrasaurus for some months now, and with the opportunity to partake in the October challenge we now have double the reason to push hard to wrap it up. The premise is your standard dino-action-thriller. You are summoned into the future to save America from the dark Communist forces that are amassing in Nicaragua. After completing the mission and receiving the highest honor a top-secret military dinosaur can receive a terrible truth is revealed. Finally you seek out those whom you depend on most, only to have your darkest suspicions confirmed.

The game is nearly complete. Although it’s been publicly available to anyone who knows the url for some time, we’re aiming for a real “launch” on Sunday. You’re all invited to the pre-launch, starting now, to help us find out any last minute issues and iron out any bugs. Please leave comments and let us know about any bugs or comments you have, we’ll really appreciate it!

The game is HTML5 based, so requires a modern browser to play. For best results I recommend Chrome. (Firefox “works”, but is generally unplayably slow, Safari and Opera may work as well.)

We added a donate button for now, though we’re not entirely sure of the best strategy to actually make money. Do we still win the challenge if we sell at least $1 but are still way in the red profit-wise?

I created a nice visual target, literally, to aim for. It took me a little bit of time to figure out how to visually display the target separate from the collision mesh. Including, a slow walk down a lane called Child-Parent Scripting Confusion. But, now it is functional.

October Challenge Progress 10/8

Next Action: Level Two
Total Hours To Date: 18.25

Tags: screenshot