This is my very first Ludum Dare! I’ll be joining in the Jam, and hopefully I’ll be able to complete something.

My tools:

• Unreal Engine 4.4 (Blueprint/C++)
• Visual Studio 2013
• Gimp/Paint
• Audacity
• Sfxr

So after a couple hours of trying to come up with an idea, I think I found one I wouldn’t normally do.

The idea is to have two worlds connected through a mysterious device. This device was then fleshed out to be a Myst-like book. The book is found by the player in the basement of a church-like building in the real world. They are then teleported into a cartoonish world where they become trapped. They must then find the book and figure out how to use it to get back to the real world.

Other then that, I really have no clue.

I learned the hard way. Unreal Engine 4 can be a pain if you don’t know it all that well. I spent around 2 hrs trying to come up with an idea, 1.5 hours just moving a box up and down trying to get it precisely where I wanted it (no joke), and countless restarts among the waiting for the multiple storms to pass.

I just seem so far away from what I wanted to do. It was supposed to be simple. Thinking simple should be you know, simple right? I’m starting to doubt I will have a “game” by the end.

Whether it’s a game or not, it will be something! I won’t let mother nature and the engine defeat me! >:D

(The progress since the last restart is I have a character, it moves, and then i have a partial floor with 3 walls! :P)

As mentioned previously, this is my sad slow progress thus far.

The littlest things tend to annoy me since I’m typically a perfectionist. However this trait gets me into trouble here. The light map has issues and its driving me crazy, but I can’t worry about that in here.

The start of the empty building all textured:

Lighting will have to come later. I think it’s time for me to get some sleep though. 😛

I made a brazier from just a cube and a sphere! I wouldn’t have thought of doing that if not for this! 😛

Also I made the front door and windows not so square.

I’ve managed to make a cool looking room.

It’s normally dark unless you look at the windows as that’s when exposure kicks in.

The room without exposure:

The room with exposure:

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That cool looking room from earlier….it’s finished. 😛

Sadly though, it’s not a game yet.

Demo Here:  http://youtu.be/ncl6gJqviAo

I predict what I make will be a short demo rather than a game. I though of the idea, but not of what type of game it would be. However, something is better than nothing right?

The art style of the “cartoon” side is not going to be overly cartoonish as I’m no go at graphics.

Normal Bricks:

Cartoonified Bricks:

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This was gathered in unlit mode.

This is the demo for the carton level and the basement of the realistic level.

Also the difference between the real and cartoon characters.

The last time I entered a Ludum Dare was back in 30 where I didn’t do so well. I had severely underestimated things and my perfectionist side got the better of me.

I’m ready to see if I can redeem myself this time around and hopefully at least do better than last time. A finished game would be great, but if I at least get something that’s fairly decently playable then I’ll be happy with my progress. I did the first jam with unreal engine 4 which I never used at that point and some things never change. 😛 I won’t be using ue4 this time but I will be using another engine that I don’t know much about. I just love the excitement of learning something new while a rapidly approaching deadline looms on the horizon. What will be different this time however, is I’m not going to let my perfectionist side get to me this time. Things won’t look the best but they’ll certainly work for the task they’d be created for.

Tools:
Engine: Stencyl 3.3.2 (Flash and Windows)
Graphics: Paint.Net
SFX: Bfxr
Music: abundant-music

When I heard one of the themes was 2 button controls, I thought of how mobile games tend to work. I know I’m not the only one thinking this. 😛

Upon further thought, I realised you could actually still do a lot with only 2 buttons.  While I was thinking about how you typically move in a mobile game, my thoughts drifted off to my time playing Super Mario on the SNES and it’s side scroller nature. It was then that I wanted to do a side scroller along those lines. The 2 buttons default behaviour would be to move the player left and right. Through button combos the player can jump and other things might be possible.

I want to incorporate the growing theme in as well, but I have yet to figure out how I might do so.

After spending some time making some simple programmer art and toying around with the engine, I’ve made some progress. The player is animated as well. I’ll show this sometime later.

I’ve been making progress somewhat slowly trying to figure things out. It’s fun and all, especially the small victories I accomplish, but then I look on here and see things much more impressive. 😛

It just goes to show that I have quite a lot to learn.

So I forgot to post this earlier, but I changed engines 😛 Stencyl was interesting but turned out to complicate the simple things I wanted to do. In the end it didn’t turn out well as I had spent most of the jam trying to work around it to do simple things. So last night I switched to using Unity 5.1.

Last night and this morning was spent getting most of the platformer collision/logic done. After a few hours sleep, I’m still sleep deprived and have around 6 hours left. I’ll only be able to add in a couple pretty simple levels showing things off a bit before the deadline. However, I might add more to it post-jam sometime this week.

I’ll leave you with a demo of the scene I used to test the collisions with at this time.

(It’s animated, just click on it to see the animation)

So I got a very crude, simple, and short version of what I wanted to done. It’s at least playable and I would consider it a game (although probably not a good one in its current state).

Therefore I would call it “finished”. 😛 I might work on it through out the week, but either way I would call this a win for me. 😀

It’s over here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=40211