Super excited for my first LD

I’m late to the game but I’m going to use twine to make an unconventional dungeon crawler

I’ll be tweeting progress from 12 45 when school ends, @chromebookbob

Tags: Twine

How am I going to make him cry??

This is fun so far!

livetweeting @chromebookbob

I’ve started writing the twine, to show my hard work, here is the logo/title screen thingy:

As ever, my live-ish tweet continues on @chromebookbob

I have been beavering away, after a break for some House of Cards. I have worked out my mechanic for speech and have set up my itch.io page ready for tommorow.

I’ll be here at http://www.twitch.tv/chromebookbob streaming my dev work from now until it’s done.

My game is going quite well, just managed to work in an adventure time reference to justify one of the monsters.

 The Live Stream continues at: http://www.twitch.tv/chromebookbob

Soundtrack done, the twitch continues at: http://www.twitch.tv/chromebookbob

Just made a new monster with a big old chin, also you can now see my face as I live stream at: http://www.twitch.tv/chromebookbob

I have just had a large computer crash, after sweating about lost data and finally biting the bullet and forcing reboot all is OK. My twitch stream was down for about 5 minutes, but I’m back in business now! http://www.twitch.tv/chromebookbob

I think that the game will have 5 monsters, 4 are written in at the moment. I am about to start drawing then animating the final boss character and then I will get back to programming (or whatever you call it in twine). Get ready for a plot twist….

My story is nearly done! I’m working to get it done in the next couple of hours. If I have loads of time I will put a few more monsters into the middle of the game.

Checklist:

Monster drawings/animations: DONE

Music: DONE

Story: Nearly done

Still streaming! http://www.twitch.tv/chromebookbob

Tags: Twine

I’ve just finished my entry to my first Ludum Dare. It’s been great fun and I look forward to doing it again next time!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=49589

My game is called: Not Nice Knight, it is a text adventure with some fun monsters. You play a knight stuck in a dungeon who has to escape, but all he has is a book with dirt about each of the monsters in and his wit. You have to be as mean as possible and make each of the monsters cry, collecting their tears. If you defeat them all you will be able to escape!

I encountered a few challenges along the way, the first was that I missed about 8 hours of the jam because of school. I had to work with twine 2.0, which I have done before, but it is a fairly new piece of software so it isn’t amazingly documented. I would have liked to be able to change the background colour towards the end of the game but limitations in CSS meant I couldn’t. I also had some trouble animating my monsters in photoshop as I was live streaming and using a pen tablet which was rather taxing on my laptop.

Anyway, I’ve had loads of fun with this. I hope you all did too, My entry page is : http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=49589

I’d love for you to play it. My only other issue was embedding the game. I couldn’t do it while retaining formatting and the custom fonts so I have left it as a download.

Itch.io: http://chromebookbob.itch.io/not-nice-knight

I have had an immense amount of fun taking part in my first Ludum Dare. Having started with the disadvantage of school on a Saturday (which happened to be a blessing as it allowed me to think up my idea), I commenced work at around 3pm.

I set out with the clear idea that my unconventional weapon was to be “being mean”, and initially I wanted to do an old school dungeon crawler type thing with flat 2D sprites in a 3d dungeon but I realised (thankfully) that due to my time constraints I had to cater to my strengths. I have done a few Twine games in the past year and I feel I am well versed-ish in the 2.0 version (which itself is not that well documented). So I set out to make a text based “dungeon crawler” with basic conversation trees and stuff. I also noticed on my way home from school that one of my ring-binders had a plethora of weird monsters and such that I drew on it. I decided that I wanted to take inspiration from these and make animated scene gifs for each monster.

I ended up making and drawing 5 different monsters, each with it’s own crying animation (which in some cases proved difficult, where do the tears go if their whole body is an eye?!). I spiced up the “dungeon” by animating them to switch between different sketchy versions of themselves.

Twine itself was brilliant and easy to use, apart from one hiccough. I wanted the last two scenes to have white backgrounds. I had done this in the past with Twine 2.0 but for the life of me I could not find any solutions in the twine forums or my previous work so I had to leave that out.

I had great fun livestreaming the second day on twitch,  though I received a couple of messages asking if I needed therapy when I was drawing the final monster…

The only other issue I had was to do with embedding the game. I had wanted to let you play it on the web, given that twine exports to html, but as much as I tried, the itch.io embedding and the LD embedding did not allow me to use googlefonts and it destroyed a lot of the formatting (which is essential for bits of the game) so the game is download only, although I did manage to export it with node-webkit to a great fullscreen windows exe, so that’s nice.

Overall I had great fun, and if I had had lots more time, I would have gone back and revised some of the conversation trees to make them more complex and to stop a lot of them leading to death. Anyway, thanks for reading/playing/jamming. See you next time!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=49589

Tags: postmortem

Sorry for the alliteration!

My text adventure has had some great feedback but I would still love for more people to play it:

Click Here!

Post-Mortem

Also, a few of my text games (You can play them right now here!), including this one are going to be part of indiegamestand.com‘s new freeware section when that comes out, so that’s cool.

Anyway, thanks for everything, and PLAY MY GAME PLEASE!!

Tags: final, ld32, postmortem, Twine

I was going to use unity this time, I learned javascript and everything, but the humble game dev bundle had a license for Stencyl in it, which I have used before so I thought for the time being I might as well stick to what I know. I have a few ideas already that I hope I can fit into the theme, I’m going to focus on sound design this time. Graphics will be done in photoshop, and may be a mix of pixel art and real photos I take then edit over the dare.

I got my name from a twitter bot I made that makes random game synonyms . I have no idea what it used to be! It so far involves geese. #HONK

I’m calling day 1 over, I’ve streamed all day, had fun, made game. My game *just* (famous last words) needs the gameplay fixing and refining so I think I can sleep easy tonight. ESL ONE was SO distracting today, too many frags. GOOSE

HONK

I’m just tweaking and testing from now on, after overcoming a very very annoying bug I’m stoked for the rest of the jam. Oh yeah, I’ve still got to do music and sfx but well umm….

My title screen

I’m done. Game is up here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=49589

Yesterday’s timelapse, if you missed it: