Apostate Games is in for our first jam as a team. Nathan Hicks has competed on past teams but will be joined by Jason Varnell this year represented as our new company.
We will be using Clickteam Fusion 2.5 for this jam. Already got a menu system in place with custom keymapping which we will be making available as a tutorial file once the jam is over.
Good luck to every one and can't wait to see some of the submissions! :smile:
Hello fellow devs and jammers! :smile:
My name is Nathan Hicks (Programmer) with Apostate Games - Jason Varnell (Artist) and I did the game Plutus as our #ldjam38 submission. Please check out the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus
Seeing as this was our first jam as a team (I've been in 1 previous ldjam and 2 other jams) we wanted to focus on getting the game done in time with all planned features so we stayed away from doing a devlog throughout the weekend (as well worrying about screenshots/video) so over the next few days we will be posting day by day recaps from start to finish of all the progress, decisions made, and even problems we ran into or things we had to cut from the final entry. We simply want to document the process for future reference and help us figure out what we did right and wrong through the whole thing and seek other peoples feedback on their methods as well - with that said we will probably also do a post-jam-mortem blog post once voting is over. So hopefully these dev blogs will help other jammers from making our mistakes or allow them to utilize our successful tactics and allow us to improve in the process too. If you have any questions please post them in the comments! :smile:
Before I get started let's also recap the week prior the jam. We (Jason and I) made sure to get involved heavily in the voting process. Once we got down to the final 2 rounds of voting we started coming up with quick base game ideas for EACH category and tried to come up with some that would fit multiple themes. Unfortunately, the final theme that got picked was the one we prepped for the least as we didn't think it would win so First Lesson Learned: Never underestimate a theme in the voting process. First thing we decided we wanted to implement was custom control key-mapping which I started getting to work on ahead of time as a template to provide as a tutorial but it ended up breaking every time we tried it the first night so had to can that idea and is an idea we will still revisit later. But we were at least able to include X-box controller support still. Also would like to note before we went into this we decided on using the Clickteam Fusion 2.5 engine as it is one I know very well already and could easily pump out what we needed - we decided this long before the jam started)
Theme announced: A Small World - As I said this was what we were least prepared for so we spent the majority of the first night brainstorming. Came up with our idea for "Plutus" 2 hours into the jam which had planned to be kind of like a space Katamari. Then spent the rest of the night creating 2 asset and features lists. One we knew we could achieve in time - the other if we had extra time. We also wanted to make sure to include a short fun story so we started typing a few paragraphs we edited a few times over the course of the weekend.
Starting Asset List - Player Planet (w/ thruster animations) - 8 Planets - The Sun - 8-10 space debris objects of varying size - Shield power up - Power up Icons - Explosion - Hud/UI (size bar, power up icons and pause screen - originally we did not plan on the planet tracker and arrow guide) - Stars Background - Stars Middle Ground (for parallax movement) - Title Screen - Icon - Original Various SFX and Music
Starting Features List - ~~Customize-able Controls~~ (quickly canned this idea) - Player grows larger while all else in the solar system gets smaller respectively to create illusion of growth - Collecting debris smaller than you until bigger than other planets - Death by Sun - Death by hitting too many larger objects (explode and break apart) - Power ups (Shield and Warp Drive - Also originally planned alien threats and missile power-ups) - Notifications of when bigger than certain planets and when items acquired - Rotation of planets around the sun - Gravitational pull of the planets
...With all that done and prepped for we had some other ideas if we had time to make them like black holes, various easter egg nerd references (like star trek, doctor who, etc). If we go on to make this a nactual product we will be including most of those as well.
After the night of brainstorming got some sleep fairly early and got down to work the next day!
Day 2 Recap will be posted tomorrow :smile:
In the meantime while waiting for voting please check out our other game we currently have on steam greenlight and tell us what you think!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=872678368
Also follow us on social media and our website for future games and updates: - http://www.apostategames.com/ - https://www.facebook.com/apostategames/ - https://twitter.com/apostate_games
My name is Nathan Hicks (Programmer) with Apostate Games - Jason Varnell (Artist) and I did the game Plutus as our #ldjam38 submission. Please check out the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus
Since we wanted to focus on getting the game done in time with all planned features we stayed away from doing a devlog throughout the weekend so over the next few days we will be posting day by day recaps from start to finish of all the progress, decisions made, and even problems we ran into or things we had to cut from the final entry. If you have any questions please post them in the comments! :smile:
Day 1: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus/plutus-dev-blog-ldjam-recap-day-1
Woke up, had some coffee and breakfast then got straight down to work on the game mechanics and art. Jason began hand drawing most of the assets with pencil and paper and by the end of the night scanned them and started editing them in Photoshop (I believe all but the planets were started that day). I quickly got our logo intro in as well the Main Menu and pause menu systems in with options for Fullscreen V-Sync and volume controls for both music and SFX so I could hammer out the boring stuff first then get to the fun part - the game itself. I threw in some placeholder circles for the planets and set up the entire scene and determined a good size for the entirety of the map as well as the game objects (also based on some limitations from the engine). Set up the planets rotational movements around the sun - implemented the player controls and began playing with physics controls and settings which I continued to tweak throughout the entirety of the weekend.
By the end of the 2nd night I had fully explorable solar system with very scarce space debris to start but if smaller then you were collectible as well as the speed boost power up. Added some cheat buttons to allow me to continue to grow to make sure scaling the player up and the rest of the scene down would make sense visually - this also took a lot of tweaking for the entirity of the weekend and still could use some adjustments and in the future will require some pretty intense math to calculate properly so went with simple to start. Most of the art assets were completed the following day. Here is what we were at in terms of the features by end of day:
Features Implemented Day 2: - ~~Player grows larger while all else in the solar system gets smaller respectively to create illusion of growth~~ - ~~Collecting debris smaller than you~~ until bigger than other planets - ~~Death by Sun~~ - Death by hitting too many larger objects (explode and break apart) - ~~Power ups (Shield and Warp Drive - Also originally planned alien threats and missile power-ups)~~ - Notifications of when bigger than certain planets and when items acquired - ~~Rotation of planets around the sun~~ - Gravitational pull of the planets - ~~Intro Story and Cutscene~~
A lot of the day was spent trying to come up with good feeling physics controls and proper scaling. But all in all it was a pretty chill day and we didn't worry too much and figured it would be no problem to finish in time. Although I did want to work on original music and sfx so played around with that for a bit but by the time I came up with a good tune and picked out all the instruments (only thing left was a LOT of editing) I decided it was best to get some sleep and work on that last since the game itself was the more important focus. After all we did have some collections of public domain music and sfx stored on on our drives (not just for the jam but for any project). So decided sleep was very important in the remaining days to be able to focus 100% on the task at hand so we went to bed fairly early and got decent sleep and had planned to finish the rest of the major features as well as figuring out a good size ratio and mass values the following day.
Day 3 Recap will be posted tomorrow :smile:
In the meantime while waiting for voting please check out our other game we currently have on steam greenlight and tell us what you think!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=872678368
Also follow us on social media and our website for future games and updates: - http://www.apostategames.com/ - https://www.facebook.com/apostategames/ - https://twitter.com/apostate_games
My name is Nathan Hicks (Programmer) with Apostate Games - Jason Varnell (Artist)and I did the game Plutus as our #ldjam38 submission. Please check out the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus Since we wanted to focus on getting the game done in time with all planned features we stayed away from doing a devlog throughout the weekend so over the next few days we will be posting day by day recaps from start to finish of all the progress, decisions made, and even problems we ran into or things we had to cut from the final entry. If you have any questions please post them in the comments! :smile: Also, apologies that this one was a day late. Got busy.
Day 1: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus/plutus-dev-blog-ldjam-recap-day-1
Day 2: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus/plutus-dev-blog-ldjam-recap-day-2
Jason was quickly finishing all the space debris, player planet, and backgrounds and were implemented fairly early in the day. I spent most of the day doing math...lots and lots of math to make sure the scaling made sense and you actually collect things smaller then you when you reach X size. This still is a slight problem starting out with smaller objects but is something we may fix later if we take it to full production
I quickly got to work on the gravitational pulls of the planets and got those in fairly quick. Then went on to do the notifications of when you were bigger then the other planets. And after that the death by hitting larger objects and cracking apart as well as randomly spawned objects off screen to populate the map with debris. By early evening most of this was all implemented and a lot of testing began. There was still no GAME OVER or victory events just yet. The rest of the night was tweaking and adjusting values, sizes, speeds, gravity etc. Half way through the evening though we decided it was too hard to find the planets since they move (which we liked and wanted to keep) so we came up with the idea for a planet distance tracker and a quest arrow since I have never done a mini map and don't know where to start making one (something I will be doing very soon now).
With ALL of the features in place a majority of the art assets also being finished it was time for Jason to move onto the planets and sun.
I had already started working on a musical composition in LMMS, a free music software I was not used to, to use in the game but of course we ran into lots of bugs that took priority. The bugs included: Scaling not working consistently as well as debris shrinking down to being invisible. Hit boxes not working properly. Gravity causing too much lag while remaining inactive when not on screen and dragging LOADS of space debris. The rest were mostly graphical issues like positions of thruster and shield overlays. The Arrow was also not pointing to the nearest planet or one you could destroy. Also making the objects pause and resume was even an issue.
With all that in mind I decided to not sleep at all till the bugs were fixed and canned the idea of making my own original music and SFX (at least for the jam). So with that said Day 3 merged with Day 4 (for me at least - Jason made sure to get some sleep). Lack of sleep also later became a bit of an issue in terms of remembering important fixes and taking all other code into consideration so more bugs kept arising so it was a good thing I canned the original audio idea. The lack of sleep also made for a few last minute mistakes that weren't tested properly but we will review that on Day 4
Day 4 Recap will be posted tomorrow :smile:
In the meantime while waiting for voting please check out our other game we currently have on steam greenlight and tell us what you think!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=872678368
Also follow us on social media and our website for future games and updates: - http://www.apostategames.com/ - https://www.facebook.com/apostategames/ - https://twitter.com/apostate_games
My name is Nathan Hicks (Programmer) with Apostate Games - Jason Varnell (Artist)and I did the game Plutus as our #ldjam38 submission. Please check out the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus Since we wanted to focus on getting the game done in time with all planned features we stayed away from doing a devlog throughout the weekend so over the next few days we will be posting day by day recaps from start to finish of all the progress, decisions made, and even problems we ran into or things we had to cut from the final entry. If you have any questions please post them in the comments! :smile:
Day 1: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus/plutus-dev-blog-ldjam-recap-day-1
Day 2: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus/plutus-dev-blog-ldjam-recap-day-2
Day 3: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus/plutus-dev-blog-ldjam-recap-day-3
With no sleep I was able to hammer out ALL of the bugs that popped up and began realizing we wouldn't be able to do any of the extra stuff we wanted to. I quickly found some public domain Music and SFX from the Sonnis packs. We decided on a excerpt from a PD classical composition by Dvorak - A New World since the idea fits the theme and at the same time is a spoof of star wars. So quickly got the text to scroll similar to star wars. THEN another bug - we didn't realize the engine would not include the installation of our custom PD font we picked out for some of the pop ups. Luckily we had gone ahead and made all the buttons image files instead of text but began tweaking some of the text files to be images after that. Some of the text will still return to a default font on most computers, not the intended font unless you have it installed (its called "PC Senior" if you want to download it). But then also typed up a quick outro text for the success event of destroying ALL planets).
With most everything working well (as far as we knew at the time) I began implementing the rest of the graphics Jason had made for the planets. All of which were done JUST in time to allow us some building and testing. Towards a few hours to the deadline we were coming up on the home stretch and got EVERYTHING in we had wanted minus the extra stuff if we had time. However, some last minute decisions were made to make the world feel more populated and of course we later found this to be an issue and broke a few things after we entered our submission (amidst the site being up and down)...and unfortunately some of those bugs were GAME BREAKING.
I continued on into about midnight to 2am after the submission deadline to fix and remove some of these last minute implementations that made it game breaking. Basically what happened was the number of objects allowed in the world was TOO high and we added TOO many objects causing the game to slow down to non-playability as more things spawned. So this was immediately fixed. With fixing that it also broke the scaling down limitations to where objects would stop shrinking to a certain size and they would keep going to become not visible which also broke the game. With all that fixed we had reached our completed state by around 1 or 2 am Tuesday.
We did still end up with a few glitches we are aware of but since they weren't game breaking or affected gameplay much if at all we decided to leave them be out of fairness but will go back and fix them when voting is over. The few remaining bugs to our knowledge are: Thruster and shield graphics (when active) get knocked out of alignment when hitting large things or wrapping around the play area. The indicator arrow that is supposed to point you to the next planet you are able to destroy but does not always point to one you can destroy even sometimes. The sun collision box stays the same as it shrinks but entering to far into its glow can kill you so avoid the glow once you see it. Some planets hit boxes get wonky from time to time too and sometimes the power-ups become a one time use per playthrough. And the biggest thing we will be changing later will be the scaling and consumption values - some small objects when starting LOOK like you can consume them but you can't until you grow just a bit more and of course the biggest complaint and feedback we've gotten is the controls need some tweaking as well and we will definitely revisit that. Will definitely also be returning to Katamari for research lol.
So...what did we learn from this gamejam?
We will be doing a full postmortem sometime this week on "Plutus" - especially once we get feedback from some of the judging and comments. Again if you would like to go check it out and please vote that would be greatly appreciated:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus
And feel free to comment a link to your game submission and we will go rate and comment with some feedback on yours as well! :smile:
Hoped this helped any other jammers looking for other peoples approaches and day by day recaps. There is much we would like to fix, build on and add to make it a final product so if you have any suggestions please leave them below! :smile: Also if you get some free time and want to take a break from playing and voting on the 3000 games please check out our other game we currently have on steam greenlight and tell us what you think!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=872678368
Also follow us on social media and our website for future games and updates:
Hello fellow devs and jammers!
With voting now underway we're looking for as much feedback as we can get on our submission: Plutus! We may take it into a full product eventually so every little detail helps if you have the time but even a quick peak and vote is appreciated! :smile:
Check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus
Thanks! :smile:
http://www.apostategames.com/
HELLO EVERYONE :smile:
Been very busy with our day jobs (and life) past couple weeks and hadn't had a chance to play too many of the other submissions but we got around to a few. We currently are only at 7 votes on the majority of the categories and really all we want is to get a rating at the end of the voting to see what people thought so PLEASE check out our game and VOTE! :alien: Over the next few days we are really going to crack down on playing and rating more games so if you want us to check out yours please VOTE and link it in a comment on the ldjam game page: - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus
THANKS! :smile:
We are only a few votes away from being able to receive a rating and we would love to be able to see how we did! So please check out our game, vote, and comment with feedback and a link to your submission and we will check it out! :smile:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus
Results are in! If these are final! Top 100 in Humor! :smile:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/plutus