Still work in progress, most of game mechanics are done – and as I’m running for Jam, it will most likely get there. A little image show follows.

I’m running for tower defense/strategy in Unity with (literally) tons of programmer’s art, that will put some pressure on player and of course winning the game is not an option, only losing faster or slower.

So, here goes my first Ludum Dare entry post mortem. I went for jam since the start, and to be fair I’m proud on myself finishing something in the given time scale. How it all began? I’ve waited off for theme announcement (which was 3AM here in Europe), and as I was quite tired after the work I went straight to bed right after. So, Saturday morning (technically almost 12AM), I’ve started coding up very first version of the game, coding movement, selection of minions, building selection and UI. The whole game core was created during the Saturday.

Sunday was a bit slower for me, I worked mainly on art – creating up buildings and units, and as I’m not really an artist, it took me huge amount of time – I’ve just spent evening on the menu. Monday, the first work-day of the week. I spent most of it in work unrelated to any game development, but in the end I’ve put up the ‘High Score’ logic and attached music and sounds to whole game.

In the end, well you can check out some gameplay video at: YouTube. Although you might as well prefer to Try It yourself.

For me, it is definitely a success. I wanted to participate in Ludum Dare few times already, yet I’ve never had enough courage to do so. And here we are, I have finished something – there were quite awesome ideas during the streaming on Twitch and talk on TeamSpeak (where I have a point for next time – do that in open community, not closed one -> more people can watch it & talk during it!) which could improve the actual gameplay, most of them didn’t make it through due to time scale.

Anyways for me it is time to give some attention to my girlfriend, as I’ve put her aside for the weekend!

Thanks everyone for support, participation and playing games!

Tags: 3D, LD 35, post-mortem, RTS, unity

Well, I’ve finally read the results and forced myself to write something. For my first LD I don’t really think the results are that bad, especially when I had no idea how to split my time between development, testing and doing the graphics.

As for some of the percentages:
ENTRY - Vikoz (jam) - LINK
OVERALL - 33.6%
FUN - 55%
THEME - 43.4%
INNOVATION - 48.7%
HUMOR - 31.9%
GRAPHICS - 14.8%
MOOD - 43.8%

First of all, I’d like to say big thanks to everyone who played the game – whether you enjoyed it or not. Second, I honestly consider a winner anyone who posted something, as making a game in 48 or 72 hours is definitely not an easy task. I’d like to comment on my score, it does indeed represent also how much time I’ve spent in various areas (I ran for the prototype, and then over-focused on the graphics – which can be seen in the results), so I even find them almost perfect in relation to the time spent on each of these sections.

Nevertheless, if time allows I’d like to participate also next time, and hopefully, taking some other guys with me, so we could drag something more complete over the finish line (and of course “beat ya’ all!” :D).

Well, I was decided to participate from the start – and this was created actually in ~48 hours. And honestly, my second attempt on game development in very limited time (and hell, I’m enjoying it). So far I have participated only as solo person in jam, and this wasn’t any exception – I’m kind of enjoying doing some project on my own (while in work you almost always work in a team).

So… the game tries to do some kind of mix between Diablo and top-down shooters. The original idea hit me on Saturday morning here, which was something like: “Run around, shoot enemies, upgrade your gun … all from top-down view in nice 3D graphics coat”. The best development part was most likely working with AI – creating actually 3 behavior types (one that doesn’t care about anything, one that runs away and last one is aggressive one) was really fun, especially their testing (when after dozen of attempts you still wonder why AI does unexpected things), surprisingly the AI was also almost the first thing I have implemented, and the game logic came after.

My final things were graphics and AI, where I would be able to spend several weeks on this small project, polishing every single end of it (which is also why I always have to leave it as last, I wouldn’t have time for doing the actual gameplay left in case I would focus on audio-visual appearance first). While I have re-used some of my art from previous projects (which is perfectly okay for jam), the terrain textures were done in Substance Painter (thanks Allegorithmic for really great piece of software) and those took quite large part of my time. Nevertheless I’m quite proud on the programmers art in this one! So here is a shot from it:

Please, if you have a bit of time – give it a shoot!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=86334

Thanks for reading and playing! To all of who participated – keep up the good work. I’ve touched just few games so far, but just imagining the effort put into all of them is awesome! Keep it up!

Even though we didn’t make any post mortem so far (but there will be a post about it, once we get a bit of pause from our real life jobs – so most likely over the weekend). I’d like to proudly present first video we have recorded and published now.

Also, in case you participated in LD – feel free to share a link in the comments on the video, and I will give it a try over the weekend.

If only making games was as easy as making custom PCBs

This Ludum Dare was a really interesting experience for both of us. We wanted to do LD36 already together, but one of us couldn’t, so we had to wait for a LD37.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=8633

Theme

When planning a evening before, we really hoped for a “Small World” theme and were able to come up with an interesting game in matter of minutes. The other themes seemed lackluster, because they were often too limiting – and One Room was one of them.

When we woke up at Saturday morning and started discussing it, we didn’t know for like 3 hours what kind of game to make. There were several options (some of which actually appeared in LD as games – solving murder in one room, time traveling in one room, cleaning a room, …), but we couldn’t think of anything that doesn’t need a good storyline. We just knew two things for sure – we DEFINITELY didn’t want to do a room escape game, and we wanted fancy 3D graphics.

After joking about stupid ideas, we somehow came to conclusion that conveyor belt game located in one factory hall could be quite nice and went to discuss details more and decided on our PCB factory game.

The development

The entire game was developed by two people — one was focusing entirely on programming the game mechanics and logic and other one was doing mostly graphics, lightning and other visual things (he implemented Inverse Kinematics for a robotic hand from ground up!).

I guess it’s angry and searching for something inside those crates?! #ldjam #ld37 pic.twitter.com/V2eFXcyFaQ

— Pavel Kouřil (@Pajka) December 10, 2016

In the first day, we managed to implemented conveyor belts, robotic hands and basic movable objects for the transporters. This was a good prototype, and the game already felt like a fun! So we knew we were on the right track.

The second day was dedicated to modeling rest of game objects and programming the rest of the game. At the end of these two days (around 4 am) we had a almost finished game. It still needed some polishing and changes, but it was playable from the beginning to the end.

This is what we managed to do over the weekend. Shame we have to work today, so there will be only small changes, (if any). #ldjam #ld37 pic.twitter.com/SzPCnOgaYt

— Pavel Kouřil (@Pajka) December 12, 2016

To make the game totally complete, we really needed that third day – but we were all busy with our real lifes, meaning we couldn’t make much progress, apart from just a few bugfixes and polishing fixes. But we think we still managed to do quite a nice game over the course of these 3 days!

The Good

We really had fun when developing our One Room Factory and shared many laughs over TeamSpeak when developing the game – one can only wonder if the game would be even better if we didn’t have to work remotely, but could develop in one room together as some other teams did.

Also, since this was a first LD for one of our members (and first released game too!), we definitely learned quite a lot. Not only from the actual LD, but also from the feedback we’ve gotten. It was definitely an enjoyable and fun weekend!

The Bad

The HW requirements are quite demanding. Also, based on the comments so far, the game is quite difficult to understand; we did a basic tutorial, but because of time constraints (having to work on Monday AND being based in Central Europe cuts a lot of needed time due to timezone), we just didn’t have time for a proper tutorial.

Combine this with the complexity of the game (and players not being familiar to conveyor games), this game seems to hard to understand for some people. So, to fix this, we are releasing a video tutorial for people who would still want to play the game!

https://youtu.be/f-zrgA1B4Pw (Don’t forget to turn on annotations)

The Future

Depending on how we do in the LD, we are considering to finish the game and release it – we are reading the feedback people give us in comments and it makes us really happy when people like the game! The most rewarding comments are from people who want to see the finished version (with a proper tutorial) – and it’s definitely possible it will happen! 😉

If you decide to check our game out, we will be happy for any feedback you will give us! If not, we are at least thankful you decided to read our post.

To try our game, you can do so here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=86334

Vilem Otte
Pavel Kouřil

Tags: LD37, One Room Factory, post-mortem, tutorial

While we’re porting for other platforms (we’ve got just Linux and Windows binaries there so far, but there will be WebGL version before Wednesday) feel free to jump to LDJAM and play our game, it has been finished.

It is here, on LDJAM website.

I hope you will enjoy it and you’ll definitely hear more from us more!

Thanks!

Few weeks ago, I again participated in Ludum Dare and yet again in a team. There were actually three of us and we created the game in 72 hours for 'Compo' category. Some time passed and it is finally time to write a post-mortem.

Before going further, I'd like to point everyone out to the game and a walk-through video for it. The game is still available at:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/run-u-fool

And you can view the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrDnc1dAq_c

Let me start with short overview of how it went, for me this was actually already 4th Ludum Dare if I'm not mistaken, and 2nd Ludum Dare in a team. The routine is fairly similar each time, we spend afternoon of the Friday discussing what could be made for each possible theme (as in Europe the time theme is shown is during our night hours), then going for sleep as we start working on the game early in the morning.

Originally we have planned a game with small planet or planets, but as we saw multiple people going for the same topic on Twitter, we decided to go different way. The concept originally was based on world getting smaller, while the player's goal was to run away to reach the next level, ultimately reaching another world and saving himself.

What went right?

Separating tasks between each other, while giving others insight every now and then. It all ended up so well, that everyone of us knew what we're doing and what we're going to do. The idea behind the game was a lot more simple compared to our previous Ludum Dare, where the game we mapped on theme was quite complex.

Also having an in-game tutorial this time was definitely a plus. It gave a player perfect idea of how to progress through game, we haven't received any feedback in sense that: players had no idea what to do. Which is definitely a success.

Technical execution of the game. I'm quite proud to what we have created technically within those 72 hours, as all art assets - models, textures, shaders & effects were done in that time frame. I even decided to put few selected effects as appendix into this "post mortem" to explain how we did it to other fellow participants.

What went wrong?

As each competition, time planning. No matter how hard you try - it will always go wrong. While all of us were mostly free on Saturday and Sunday, I was the only one finishing the game on Monday (with help of one another guy, who helped me with some final testing). The rest of the team had to be at work, and I took few hours off, to wrap everything up.

Main menu. That part of the game is definitely the one that is the least complete, with just few text-buttons to start levels. Nothing really interesting goes on there, and sadly we had no time to think off and create some art for it. Yet, it serves its purpose and has all the functionality we needed.

Build for website (e.g. WebGL). I already knew that browser builds are slow, after all I've worked with browser rendering through WebGL in past as a job. That was about 3 or maybe 4 years back. That was on a custom-built engine (mainly for rendering) which was faster than Unity in comparison ... since then browsers didn't really move a lot. They are still way too slow to compete with desktop based applications (even the ones running on .NET beat them in order of magnitudes of speed). The solution? Reduced effects, reduced physics, shatters have about 1/10th of objects and it is still several times slower compared to desktop build on the same machine (and I'm talking about testing rigs with Ryzen 1700 + Radeon Rx 480 or Core i7 + GeForce 1070 ... on neither of those it was smooth in WebGL build).

Summary

Those were few of my basic points. All in all, I really enjoyed Ludum Dare and hopefully I'll participate also in the next one. It may be as a team, or solo. Which is still unknown, as the next one happens during the summer and I fear that some of us might be out for holiday at the time.

For those of you, who participated in Ludum Dare or are generally interested in what few effects we put out - with little details and/or description, please read the following sections. For the rest, I hope you enjoyed the game, and feel free to share any thoughts you have about the game (or anything you have in mind).

Appendix - Force Field Effect

Once we came up with and idea of the game, it was obvious we need some kind of blocking feature in the way. Such item was a force field. The first model I created was a gate to hold force field, as I was against just putting up a plane with some effect. The basic model looks like this:

Which followed by adding materials, by adding color, metallic and roughness I achieved the final effect for gate that holds the force field:

Now the final effect, done by simply rolling multiple textures one over another - changing intensity and using some random rolled texture as offset. The final animation is in there, although in my opinion it can't be noticed unless somebody really looks at the force field. The last part was lighting itself, which is done with multiple point lights to simulate the effect of area lighting from the actual force field. The final look:

And also a video of effect in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5fe1u-x7E0

Appendix - Chain Physics

As the development of the game progressed on, we realized, that the player can go through the levels without too much effort. So the idea was to block his progress through the game somehow. I spent some time adding some rigid body objects, but those were not enough to block the player.

You can literally go around, or just knock them. Which brought me to the idea, what about some chains that would slow you down. The chains had to react based on the physics of course, and as objects have mass - when you push them it will slow down your speed. But visually they have to behave as 'rope'.

At this point there was no time to write some advanced 'rope physics' from scratch with a lot of parameters. So I've settled with simple idea, use few rings in chain as a rigid body and add hinge joints in between the nodes. The result was this:

And here it is in action, I was surprised how good it looks in movement - so I didn't really touch it anymore. It did its purpose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9EmuW-ACsw

Appendix - Shatter

Once our idea for the game was settled, I noted that we do need to have some special effect for floor falling apart. The idea behind everything was to use a 'Voronoi shatter' technique to break down the floor. So I've prepared whole floor model and the one with dozens of objects in which floor shatters.

First idea was to just let it 'explode' downwards, but it didn't look really good. What we did in the end is, that once floor tile was determined to be destroyed, the whole object got disabled, while shatter one was enabled. Each single voronoi cell had rigid body assigned, but without gravity applied and kinematic flag set to true. Along with that we added a random timeout at which the cell gravity was re-enabled and stopped being kinematic only.

By cleverly playing with parameters we ended up with acceptable animation looking like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tme4Ayndul4

As each time, I've tried to think off and try out new concept for Ludum Dare (as I don't really see any other point in it anymore). This time I've went for building quite complex physics simulation and game around it, just for checking what feedback can I get for such game.

I'm actually quite glad for the feedback, as it was mostly positive and often praising technical side and innovative idea. Yet some pointed out that the game is "too simple", the original idea was making it more complex to control, yet look at the ratings, compared to previous years:

So, what are my findings (and why ratings are lower compared to previous times), plus what I've learned:

Complex Physics/Simulation driven games are getting torn down on Ludum Dare

From experience, only simple games are rated high on Ludum Dare, the more simple you go, the higher you get. This can be seen from TOP games each Ludum Dare so far - when games are catchy and easy to understand - players beat them and therefore give high score. Whether I will go more simple, or more complex next time is up to a question - depending on the theme, how fast I can get game idea and how much time will I have to actually work on game.

I won't ever do any WebGL build anymore in future Ludum Dares

This has 2 reasons actually, I won't tell you the technical one (not until the end of post) - but just the motivational one. We've got most votes in previous runs based on desktop one (for LD38 we released WebGL late, and I believe that if we didn't, we'd reach top 3 places in graphics). This time I released WebGL almost immediately - even though you specify people to use Desktop version, due to heavy problems with textures, shadows, etc. when running WebGL version (they are toned down to extreme level - to keep performance in browser acceptable) ... majority played the WebGL version only.

Next time I'm going to do some more though integration & checks in game

This time I ran for high scores. I could match some people in comments, and that made me quite happy... I appreciate any feedback I get, as on Ludum Dare one has a chance to impress various target players, which isn't that easy in reality, as only target gamer group will buy your product.

So why tighter checks and implementation of let's say achievments, high scores and maybe secrets? Because of 2 things - first of all it helps me match feedback to actual progress of player (assuming he gives out his nick), and possibly finding points in game which frustrated him or where he quit. And apart from that, people here tend to love high scores - so why shouldn't I bring that to next level?

So, am I going to participate next time?

Sure, why not. Also I'll do some small shameless self-promotion - next time I'm going to participate with custom game engine and not Unity, based around Direct3D 12 (Windows 10 only).

If you would like to see some progress from it (mostly graphical) - you can check me on twitter (although my activity isn't nearly as high as Donald's) - https://twitter.com/VilemOtte

And here it is! I'm most likely in.

This time I'd like to drag out this beauty:

Which is a custom in-house D3D12 engine. This would somewhat hard limit people who would like to try it out, although on the other hand it would somehow allow me to test this in a game-like scenario (it was never tested in such case).

I have quite long roadmap, which I'm implementing and if Ludum Dare theme is good, we're doing this!

Tell me what you think!

So, the first day is behind me. I'm participating in jam (as always), and as I have the game finished in terms of logic and gameplay (yes, only one map). I can dedicate rest of the time to art, fx and polishing of the game.

I'm not going to say more about the game, you have to wait for it to play it!

As first out is already done, I have to attach it.

I didn't like the theme, even though I came up early with 2 genres I'd like to blend a bit - doing so in 3D was actually very hard (even though they don't seem that incompatible - doing so in 72 hours was almost impossible ... and with several cuts during implementation phase, finished!).

Phew! I have no idea how I blended this with work today, and managed to finish it.

The name is really first thing that was on my mind when I finished this.

Thank everyone for playing and participating in Ludum Dare (twice to those, who crossed my game), especially those who commented (twice to those, who comment and rate ... as just rating is pretty much pointless).

See you in August!

So another Ludum Dare is here. I'm still thinking about participation - but I'm not sure whether to go solo or try to search for a team here (most of my friends are unavailable due to holidays, etc.).

Tools I'd use in case of team - Unity, Blender, Substance Stack, etc. ... heavily preferring 3D only. I mostly do programming, physics and partially graphics.

So what do you think, anyone up to something?

Apparently I can't add or edit any posts (not even game post - where I couldn't even add link to download game). Anyone else had similar issues?

Had to add link into comments (which is pretty much the only way how one can edit it right now).

Admins?

It's been few years - to be fair I didn't have time to do Ludum Dare since I had a little kid. There would be time, yeah, but there was no energy to do anything than falling into bed. I may or may not finish on time, so I welcome an Extra category, which sounds most likely and realistic for me.

Anyways - if it gets finished and someone plays it, then you're going to deliver postal packages... with trebuchet. Collateral damage is expected (once something to do damage on is added). At this point mechanics, physics and counting attempts works. So strictly speaking - the core of the game is done.

Now it is already polishing time - and I had to share this marvel of medieval engineering:

My family grew with another member about a week back, although if there is an Extra category still this time around (which I think it is) - I might participate again!