Monster Machine – The Horror Is Upon You!
Monster Machine is finished. And I gotta say I feel great about the work I did. I planned it very well, got plenty of sleep, was able to improve my artwork, and finish the game with plenty of time to spare. I had a fantastic time doing all this too – even as 2 am hit last night I had plenty of energy. The last few iterations of Ludum Dare just didn’t seem to do it for me – this one was totally different. I’m really glad I had the time to put in this. Now lets go over some game.
Reactor Incremental – a unique incremental game.
My game is Monster Machine!, an incremental int eh style of Reactor Incremental If you’ve ever played Reactor Incremental you’ll know what I’m taking about. Its a fairly unique incremental in that you can place your production buildings, and there are a variety of effects by placing certain units adjacent to others. I wanted to replicate this in a game of my own for some time, and this presented a great opportunity to do so. Truth be told I was going to go this route and let the theme fall where it will. I like my adaptation; my original game design was nothing like this one.
So at 9pm Friday I started. It was easy to create the initial grid and mouse mappings. Making this setup and initial configuration very easy was ImpactJS, a JavaScript game engine that I will stand by forever. I bought a license for this engine almost 5 years ago for $99, and I have got that value back many times over. Its easy to set up a game quickly, and the built in Entity framework makes handling entities easy. Using that framework I was able to get structures placed on the game grid quickly, getting two of the three structures working by the first night’s end.
Drawing Tablet – a life-saver!
Further speeding up my work was a drawing tablet, a first for me. In all LDs before I used a mouse to draw graphics and my game appearance inevitably suffered. Some people have that gift – I certainly do not. Even with a tablet my art is sub-par – but this time its my brand of sub-par. The mouse is also quite slow by comparison, and filling in small details like shading and extra scary teeth are tough. With the tablet I was able to get my art done – and then some. I was able to create multiple variations of each building so your map wasn’t so uniform, and each structure is animated to create a nice living (or undead) map. I was also able to add some nice particle-like effects, made easy with the tablet. I would recommend one to anyone.
Music Generator – This place is the bee’s knees.
Another pitfall for my games is music and sound. These can turn a good game into a great one – the atmosphere music provides is immense. In the past I’ve tried making my own, but no way no how. I’m no good on the keyboard and I have no experience with electronic music, so I stuck with some simple Python music generation. It didn’t ever really mesh. For this LD, I tried the Fake Music Generator. And you should too. The music that place comes up with blows me away – and I was even able to find a set of tracks that matched my atmosphere perfectly. Sounds were simple this time around – only a building placement and build removal sound were needed.
The final result is one I am very proud of – the first one since my December 2012 entry, Unleashed – coincidentally from the ‘You are the Villain’ LD. Let’s not get into the theme selection anyway. I’m always glad to participate in LD, but when I complete a project start to finish, I feel so much better about the weekend.
An early game screen with some buildings placed.