Meh. Still not passed the demo/simulation state. Without some input of the player (except clicking the “fight” button) I am not going to call my project a game. As it’s quite late now and I have to get to office early tomorrow, I have to give up at this point.

Nevertheless it was a great experience trying to make a game for this miniLD which has been my first LD. I am still convinced that my basic idea could make a working game so I will proceed programming during the next days and post some update.

Hmm, having a bit of bother here, thought I could just add Stats as a GameObject and then hook it all together, well it’s not working so far but going modular is definitely the way to go with Unity IMHO.

So going for tea break… then giving Damage stats another go!

Also need to sort out some mechnic for aiming/locking on nearest target either mouse or automatic.

Is this a strict miniLD or more relaxed?

As I started late ;o) !

Tags: unity

I wasted a lot of time today, and bugs jumping out of nowhere all the time, it’s not my lucky day I guess. I feel depressed and I don’t think I can finish it on time. I like the idea though, so I guess I’ll finish the game another time soon anyway.

Completed! Didn’t have the energy to do the achievements anymore. But I’m still pretty happy with my game.

Entry here.

See ya, I’m off to sleep!

Co-coder is not the enemy. (However, I commit faster.)

Yay, damage works but still need auto targetting, very hard to aim in 3rd person with locked forward firing!

Tired going to miss the deadline but will continue with this tomorrow on my own 48 hour timeline (one day to go!).

Good Night!

7. Energy / Resources / Unlocks

6. Hubs / Decoding

5. Shooting / Damage / Explosions [22:32 – 27 hours in]

4.  Turning Turrets and Shooting [13:57 – 21 hours in ] and Moving Shooting Robots  [16:09 – 25 hours in]

Sleep – Day 2 11:23 UK  [Zzzz from 23:59 – 19 hours in]

3. Marine Moving  [Done 22:48] 7 hours in

2. Sub Movable [Done 19:45] 4 hours in

Tea Break

1. Landscape Sea and Islands [Done 16:40] 1 hour in

Phase 1 – Mechanics and Gameplay – First 24 hours

Started –  15:41 UK 30/07/2011.

Tags: unity

I’m really tired, but finished.

The game is done, I’m really happy with it, although I was hoping for XP working too. There is a menu, some polish, sounds, and a fairly fun game, so I think this went well. The end result is much more playable than my entry for LD19. Starting on time and coming up with a solid idea beforehand made everything easier.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16895250/miniLD28/dinner%2031%20july.swf

I feel sorry for those people that couldn’t finish, better luck next time! 😀

I just learned that I could slap together something with at least minimal gameplay and a reasonable end-game condition in less than 8 hours of work.  While I got very little actual game out of the exercise, it instilled a strong reminder to structure one’s software properly from early one.  I still look forward to writing up the full post-mortem later.

Good luck, everyone!

Addendum: I just added the keyboard control scheme to the webpage.

Here’s the Android .APK: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11816173/shootout-android.apk

It will currently work on all 2.2 and up Android devices at 800×480.

Give me a bit and I can widen the support. Just wanted to post this as the deadline just hit!

Edit: Here’s the entry write-up.

I’m going to be out of town for a week with no computer (scout camp), so here’s a little post mortem.

We are gathered here today to talk a bit about my first (Mini)LD game, To End The War, available for download here.

Timelapse: Timelapse

What went well:

1. I got a taste of Game creation

2. I learned how hard it is to focus

What went badly:

1. I was very distracted, most of the removed clips were of me playing games online

2. I didn’t get too much sleep, as I stayed up playing FFVII

3.  I aimed WAY to high!

Let me know if I missed something.

See you guys later!

Tags: post-mortem, thePalindrome

And here it is, my miniLD#28 entry.

I’ve got to say, I didn’t expect to get it done in the end, and I overshot by a few hours… But it’s finished.
I did have some ideas given on IRC that could be very fun to put in, but I just didn’t have the time.

You can find it here : here

Good night, and good luck to those still coding.

Guns to Roses is finally complete! You can check it out under all the entries for this Mini LD. Your feedback is really appreciated, as I will continue to update this game!

I know it’s late notice, but I haven’t had any time to work on this or anything else. The past week I was swamped with getting a website together that I’ve been working on for the past three months and on Saturday I had to help at a yard sale and ended up with a pounding headache for the rest of the day that even Motrin couldn’t cure. I know there’s time, but I still have work to do on my other project. I want to finish what I started, because I did sneak a little time in to work on some really basic stuff during the week, but there’s no way I’ll be able finish anywhere near what it would need to be playable by the end of this contest. So I have to tap out, but after the website is done I’m going to take a day or so to rest and then get started on the idea I had for this contest. I was excited about it, but it wasn’t meant to be for me.

I have spent the last few hours tinkering trying to figure out a strategy that would let me have a more playable game without having to spend too much time. Could not think of anything. I then spent some time tweaking the existing game to see if I could find the fun. I couldn’t So I slapped a score on it, and made it restart the level when you die, and am going to “ship it”. I feel like there might be something there but I kind of hate it right now and don’t want to poke around anymore.

Can download here: http://code.google.com/p/mini-ld-28-unitformations/downloads/detail?name=salukminild28.zip&can=2&q=

You can toggle formations with 1 and 2, and press the arrow keys to change the direction. Formation 2 is kind of broken and useless, and the level is easy enough I think you can “win” without pressing a key, although you won’t get the best score. My best is 22, with only a few baddies missed. Not sure if it’s possible to hit every grunt but it might be.

What went wrong :

*idea too hard to pull off in 2 days, needed more upfront design

*Spent most of yesterday playing with formations and tweaking controls without level data. How do I even know if the controls are good or not without something to test against?

*Spent too much time tweaking at the end when a bit of extra polish could hide the bad gameplay

What went right:

*Got formation and base code up quickly first night

*Not much else

For next time:

*levels first controls second

*try to find easier idea

*limit tweak time for each feature so I have more time to see how well elements fit with each other

*dont make a scrolling shooter ever again, it never works out for me 😛

Unfortunately, due to power outages at home, and dealing with bugs and headaches I wasn’t able to finish in time. I will be completing it anyway and posting it our site (http://fatcowgames.net) When it reaches the quality I think it deserves.  You can see the latest build using the following link.  Congrats to all those that made the time limit!

I learned a ton and was totally worth it, looking forward to more LD!

http://fatcowgames.net/ludumdare/miniLD28/WebPlayer.html

Good Morning Ludum Dare,

Well it’s day 3 for me, and I’m up very early 07:24 now where was I…. (48 hours can span 3 actual days honest, I think it’s early! ;o)

That’s it targeting definitely needed, then hubs!

09:35 Arrgh targeting/control mechanic is a pain, given the marine a jetpack, more chance to hit the targets! (Need to figure out an auto-targeting system or mouse look control!)

Right next up going to add the Hubs and Decoding system for island control!

Tags: unity

Did I make it? Of course not. Do I intend to finish my entry, just for the fun of it? Absolutely. Will I finish it…?

Probably not. But I like my idea enough that I don’t want to abandon it yet.

Postmortem: Why didn’t I finish?

1. Real life got in the way. I am not too upset about this, I had a pretty great weekend.

So, roll on LD #21!

You can check out my entry HERE first if you want to.

So, I’m going to do here a brief debrief (I should get shot for such a horrible pun).

What went well :
Well, I finished it. I think that counts ! Otherwise, I’m really happy with having some standard animations, sound. I’m really happy with the explosions, I think they look cool and not TOO much off compared to the rest, it could have been worse.
I also find the game quite fun to play, it’s not “just an engine” like last time !

What I could have done better :
Definitely, I should have spent less time on the bullets. I’m relatively new to FlashPunk and didn’t know there was a moveTowards function, so i was trying to code it. It took me quite a while before spotting that function, and then I had correct bullet paths.
Also, on the side “not knowing my library”, I stuck for an hour on animations, that I thought didn’t work, but it turned out it was because I overrode a function, and didn’t use super().
So, basically, I should have known my library better.

What went wrong :
Not much actually. Maybe some loose ends with ennemy strategy AI, which is very basic, and little stuff like that… It’s also quite difficult to apprehend, and the hud needs some more work.

So, that’s it ! Over all, I’m very happy with what I entered. I hope you all enjoy my entry, and have a nice day !

12:02 Energy Hubs Added and can be Captured!

Game displays Won  Message when all Captured!

But the game is almost unplayable, low frame rate, no woking hud, poor control mechanism!

And Missiles don’t work, a key feature of the original was the sub being able to launch missiles at targets and the marine being able to ‘laser designate’ a target and launch a missle from the sub!

Still 3.5 hours left to my 48, going for coffee then need to see if I can get it working better!

Tags: unity

The sun is up here and I submitted a little while ago just before the extended deadline ended.  I also updated the submission to add a source link and fix typos a few minutes after the deadline.  I had to take breaks to do other things, but still was able to spend plenty of time on this.

It went ok, but some things took longer than I thought.  I thought I limited the scope enough, but still had difficulty finishing enough features to  make the game feel entirely complete in such a short time.  Also, bug fixing is much slower when tired — note to self : always stand up and take a break for a a minute when stuck on a stubborn problem.  I wasted too much time on a couple bugs that were clear once I wasn’t looking at the code.

I intended to add a few more dynamic things to show multiple sides of a conflict and allow more gameplay options, but ran out of time.  For example, I was thinking of doing more things with the positive and negative scores.  Also, war games generally seem to need lots of details, so I  had to take a simpler approach and create whatever simple objects I could make fastest.

I did learn an inkscape trick or two — I hadn’t really used tiled clones before, and they were helpful for repeating shapes in a circle.
The backgrounds are created with the gimp lava filter.  I only changed the color.

If I can think of a few more gameplay features, I may end up adding them — it probably depends on what I think of this game once I look back at it after having slept.