Really tough day today, but I managed to get the 5th game done. It’s a text-based adventure, with a tiny bit of graphics that have C64’s VIC-II graphics palette and resolution (+ some placeholders).

Full writeup on it is here, as well as a link to the game itself, if you’d like to give it a try. I would write some more, but it’s nearly 7am, and I need sleep badly.

Night, LDers! See you on the weekend.

I got decent, 8 hours sleep, and started working on my 6th warmup game for Ludum Dare – Dungeon Crawler. WOO! Let’s make it awesome 😀

This was gonna be hard. I woke up at 3 am, and noticed that the theme chosen was one of the few I’ve downvoted. But I wasn’t going to let go that easy. Welcome to Reviving Necromancer Roaring Rampage of Revenge (title pending):

So, I started dissecting the ‘you are a villain’ theme. Just what IS a villain?

-Somebody out to cause harm to good people, your cliche ‘do it for the evulz’ villain’
-Somebody viewed from nonstandard angle (like humans in Bambi. they’re unseen, evil monsters that cause pain to forest life)
-Somebody could have been a villain in a past and now is righting wrongs, and trying to make good of his life
-Sometimes you have to choose between two lesser evils, and that can make you a villain in eyes of observers
-Maybe somebody is out for revenge for their beloved ones, and he crosses the moral event horizon, becomes what he was fighting (think Punisher)
-And lastly, maybe he’s just branded ‘villain’ by the governing forces, like Rebellion in Star Wars

I decided to go for the last one. It’s easy enough for king and his lords to brand somebody dabbling in the dark arts a villain, and superstitious villagers will easily believe that.

Well, that’s the story at least. What about the game itself? I didn’t get to finish my 7 games in 7 days warmup challenge (done only 6 games, and as those of you who followed it know, I had to do some work stuff, because suddenly a deadline at work reared its ugly head), so I decided that my Ludum Dare entry will be the unofficial 7th game. My temporary graphics look quite similar to my 6th Game, Dungeon Crawler, as there is a limitation I gave myself: use only VIC II (Commodore 64 graphics chipset) colours. There’s only 16 of them, and that’s quite limiting in how many different, say, bricks I can draw. Here’s the palette I’m working with:

As for the game, it will be a squad based tactics/strategy game, akin to XCOM and Laser Squad. Look out for future updates, and hope you’ll enjoy them!

Here’s the (unfinished) Game

Controls are left click to select unit, right click to move unit, middle click + move mouse to move camera.

I think I bit off bit too much. I had guests for the weekend, and started making really ambitious strategy game. It wouldn’t be impossible to do, but the distractions cost me good 8 hours of development time. Right now I’m in the middle of the putting the pieces of code together, and probably in couple hours I would manage, but it’s only one hour left.

So, I shall finish the game tomorrow.

Here are couple teaser screenshots, for where I’m at right now:

Keep in mind that this entry was finished AFTER the LD, and is here only because I wanted to share my thoughts. Also, I didn’t quit even after the deadline ended and worked on the game, because NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER!

I have finished it. And on my birthday, too . What a wonderful gift to myself

After not having that much free time on the weekend and during the week, I finally managed to closed the deal (more or less) on the strategy game. This concludes our challenge. Sure, the last game took longer than one day, but I have finished it, which is most important after all. Giving up is never an option.

It’s not fully equipped, there are bugs, there are features missing (intro/help menu, display of attack range), but the game is playable, from start to end.

So, how did I go around creating it? As this was the biggest game, I had to combine everything I learned to make it happen. I’ve started, as always, by drawing some characters and textures to get me in the mood, trying to figure out what style should I go for:

During that phase, I laid out the game design in my head. I decided that it would be a turn based tactics game, similar to XCOM. For that kind of game I needed couple new things:

-Pathing algorithm (I’m using A*), on which I spent majority of the first day, setting up the tile system, character-tiles interaction. It still doesn’t take into account many things, so opponent units can stack themselves, and the AI is wonky at best, but we’ll come later to that.

-Menu/notice system: the game was complicated enough that the feedback that can be given by simple icons was just not enough. I wrote a tiny script that displayed overlaying menus and notices, and shaded the screen using dithering (later on I decided that it was shame I didn’t use same thing for the floor hilighting system.

Second day I have spent mostly connecting the pieces I wrote earlier, and adding AI.

Holy shit, the AI.

Now, I had basic pathfinding, but it was written in the wee morning hours, after loooong day, so it was far from perfect. My code started getting more spaghetti like, and I had to write ginormous state machine to govern the AI. The turn based system support was also something that I haven’t had prepared place in code for the start, so it needed to be hacked in by tons of bools and timer variables. The pathfinding worked only on tiles, checking if they were passable or not, didn’t check if there were other units already there. Picking nearest unit to attack also didn’t work that well. The AI would be cruising in same, A*-predicted lines as soon as it saw you, so they’d form nice conga line for your skeletons to shoot.

On the other hand, it worked well enough. It could kill the player, and that was fine enough for me.

Last hours (over the week, like I said – had to stop developing game over the weekend) were mostly making sure that the game is actually playable and some early polish.

HERE’S THE GAME!

Little bit about it:
CONTROLS:

Select unit with left mouse button, move them within their move radius with right mouse button, you can attack units you're next to with your melee warriors, ranged warriors can kill units within their range.

Middle mouse button hold + mouse move or arrow keys move the screen.

Back/Next icons jump between your units.
Done icon ends your turn.
Cast icon lets you summon units and cast Heal.
Floppy disk icon lets you enter options (restart only in this version)

Story fast version:

World is heading downhill in the Fantasyland. Feudal lords are oppressing the common folk, and abusing their power to do 'good' deeds, that are only good for them. One necromancer has had enough, and decided to wage war on the Lords. With his awesome powers he tries to overcome the obstacles and win against the evil knights.

Gameplay:

This is a turn based tactics game. You control a squad of units, each of which has following stats:

-attack, governing damage it can deal
-defence, governing how likely is it to defend the strike and take minimal damage
-health, when this runs out, the unit dies
-speed, governing how far can can it move every turn

You, as the necromancer, have spiritual energy. You start with 20, and can use it to summon more army, and empower the one you have. You replenish the resource by killing enemies.

-knight gives you 1 units of spiritual energy
-goat gives you 2 units
-Lord gives you 10 units

Killing the Lord also ends this version, so that doesn't matter, but in full version, where you would have to defeat many lords, that would be important.

You can summon 3 kinds of units:

1) Ghost, your basic scout unit. Moves quite fast, is cheap, and has average health, but poor attack power.
2) Skeleton Archer, your ranged unit. Can shoot units at a distance of 4 squares. Hits decent, but has poor defences, needs to be kept out of front lines
3) Zombie, your toughest warriors. Slower than other units, but pack quite the punch, and are very tough.

And that’s it for the game.

And here is a list of the entries in the series:

Last Day summary and Challenge Post Mortem
Ludum Dare preparation
Day 6 summary
Day 5 summary
Day 4 summary
Day 3 summary
Day 2 summary
Day 1 summary
Series kick off

So, how about a little summary of the long week?

7 Games in 7 Days Post Mortem

The week was tough. Like, really tough. But I got through it, I managed to refresh my skills, and I am looking happily into my future as a past time game developer. Let’s see what I learned.

General lesson was, as expected, don’t overwork yourself. I could’ve finished the Strategy game if I’ve crunched hard, but I’m happy that I didn’t. 2-4 hours every day of afterwork development is good enough to make a game in short amount of time, and way better for your health and personal life.

The bad:

– When I was really in the zone, I lost track of time. I spent 24 hours straight in front of computer developing the Dungeon Crawler. That didn’t make my girlfriend happy, and when she’s unhappy, that means something’s really wrong. She knew that I was preparing for the LD, but whole week of coming to bed later and later every night did put a strain on the relationship (nothing serious, but really REALLY unnecessary and whatever the earnings, not worth it).
– The tempo. I had really tough week at work, and the challenge meant I didn’t get even one day of rest, but rather not sleep till 3am+ every night. My sleep schedule started slipping, and last day I pulled an all-nighter, going to sleep at 1pm. I was recovering from that most of this week.
– Art before coding. Sure, it might’ve helped me stayed focused and interested, but I was supposed to write games, and while first games were fast enough, starting from Adventure Game, the art took WAY too big part of the game development time. Because of that, I had only one drawn screen in Adventure Game – I noticed how late it was, and I was still playing around with art, not having any gameplay to speak of.

The good:
– I did make 7 games. That’s a massive boost to the self confidence. I haven’t really finished a personal project in ages, so when I look at these games, I feel like I can take on big challenges again. I even feel like picking the games (especially Dungeon Crawler) and expanding on them, possibly turn them into full products.
– I haven’t given up on the challenge two times: first, when I worked really late in the night and didn’t finish any real game (with the Racer), and second time, with the Strategy, which I had to put off in time, due to work and personal issues. I have continued the challenge after the first, which was really discouraging, and I didn’t give up on the second till I decided it was ‘good enough’, even though the 7th day (or, indeed, Ludum Dare) was long over. I was rewarded with huge feeling of satisfaction for both of them.
– I really got from 0 to hero, engine knowledge wise. First game was a really bad clone of Asteroids, and last game was quite complicated strategy game, combining every single lesson learned so far.
– Art before coding. Sure, it might’ve stopped me from doing awesome stuff, but when I was doing them, my brain was resting, I wasn’t thinking about solving some hard problems with code, but rather looking at happy little pixels.
– Choosing the VIC-II palette was great. Limitation has turned into inspiration. Less colours make my sprites look better and more interesting. Working on them and trying to figure out how to achieve certain effects was FUN, with capital F, U and N.
– 7 different game genres. Each day new, exciting set of challenges waited for me, and that at least a bit alleviated the challenge fatigue.
– Tools. As the days progressed, I got more and more skilled in using GraphicsGale and Blender. That helped me every next day, when I had to do more complicated stuff in same percentage of development time.
– Simplicity. Each game was designed to be as simple as possible, and for the most part it worked out really well. I rarely if ever had to cut features, and there was enough time to implement full games.
– SUPPORT OF THE PEOPLE: thanks to people that were interested and commenting, I found strength each day to sit in front of computer and continue coding, for the 16th+ hour that day. Without you guys, I would have never managed. Thanks! Really, that meant a lot to me.

And on this, I will end. But keep your eye out on the lookout for more projects that I’ll be working on. I hope you’ll enjoy them as well.

I really want to join in, but I started on my warmup game and I’m enjoying myself so much that I’ve no idea if I’ll be able to tear myself away from it for WHOLE WEEKEND!

(here’s my post about it)

If I do however, I’ll be using Unity3D, bfxr, blender and graphics gale, as usual.

Let’s have a great time!

Really liking my Mini-LD game, a mix of Roguelike and Pong. Thinking about polishing it into something bigger.

This time I’ll be trying to make a game with some music, so spending my last days before LD refreshing my DAW skills. Tools that I’ll be using:

Unity/C# for code
Pinta/GraphicsGale for graphics
FL Studio/CFXR for audio

I’m considering limiting palette to 4 colours to make things more challenging.

Let’s do this!

Tags: ld32

When you forgot your weapons before going out on an adventure… THE WORLD IS YOUR WEAPON!

Trying to convey as much information as possible without any dialogue.

Spent bit too much time working on the intro. Should’ve made a robust scripting parser instead of doing everything by hand. Still, I’m progressing.

Yes. In fact even you can die.

One last level left. Majority of time are now spent testing if the levels can actually be finished. It appears that they can, but it cost me some of my sanity. Attached picture: seconds before umpteenth death on that level.

The game is finally complete! It’s 4am here in Europe, but it’s totally been worth it. I didn’t manage to squeeze all the things I wanted to do, but full disclosure will have to wait for the Post Mortem. Till then, the game is available here:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=779

Currently I built it as a Unity Webplayer version. I’ll provide alternative builds later, now I need to catch some z’s.

The Idea

Ludum Dare 32 theme was ‘An Unconventional Weapon’. For the first time in ages I was reasonably prepared and had enough free time to tackle the project. After short deliberation, I have decided that my angle will be ‘the entire world is my weapon’. As you move through the level, you will encounter different enemies that you will lure to their deaths by jumping off the bridges, getting hit by bullets or dying under pistons.

At first the enemy attacked you instantly, but it just didn’t feel good. Then I added a delay, but it was hard to notice that the enemy is about to attack you. So, as I was recently playing with Unity 5’s UI, I decided to use it for a popup warning, Metal Gear Solid style.

Now, platformer is the universal language of gaming. Everybody played Super Mario Bros or Sonic. Kids love Rayman and people with too much sanity on their hands torture themselves with I Wanna Be The Guy. And for some weird reason I’ve never created a proper platformer in my life. So, this would be my chance.

The game that inspired me, which might seem surprising who has seen the final version, was Megaman X. The wallslides and walljumps are the idea I lifted from Megaman. I have never played Super Meat Boy before this Ludum Dare weekend, just seen it played on the youtubes. But as I was watching youtube videos on platforming games for inspiration, SMB got stuck in my mind. The physics seemed just perfect, the entire gameplay was fluid and natural. So much so that I’ve bought SMB and spent some part of the day playing the game and trying to figure out what I loved about it.

And that’s where the SMB vibe started overpowering any other influences. Instead of coding I spent couple hours trying to get A+ scores and get all the bandages. When I finally managed to tear myself away from the game, I knew what I wanted. But first, I needed to overcome a really weird Unity problem. You see, when one puts couple tiles made from Box Collider 2D next to each other and slide another box collider on the surface, it tends to get stuck on the edges. However, there is a solution for this: instead of using Box Collider, use four Edge Colliders. For some weird reason this works! So, let’s do the dissection now.

The Bad

1) Scope. Although I know how to limit myself to small games, and frequently make one day projects, I wanted to make something really great with this one. My game was supposed to have one act for each stage of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance), each of which was supposed to contain 20 levels, one bossfight and a cutscene. And this was supposed to be a Compo entry. Unfortunately, at the end of Day 2 I barely had the basic gameplay elements and one level.
2) Difficulty. This might seem weird, but difficulty was a major problem. I wanted a slow progression from really easy, tutorial levels to hard, final levels. Unfortunately, as the deadline was nearing, I wanted to ramp up the difficulty. The only problem was, each level being harder meant longer and longer time required to test it, which meant that I would have less time for the next level, which meant I had to ramp difficulty faster.
3) The THEME. Which is somewhat important thing with Ludum Dare entries. The fact that I wanted the game to be so big and polished costed me tons of time. Which meant that my dreamt up ideas about multiple ways of killing enemies and focusing on using world as your weapon had to take a distant second place.
4) Physics. While I may like the way the player controls, I read over and over again in the comments that it’s way too slippery. Creation of the content took too much time, I’ve literally upload the build couple minutes before the submission hour end, no time for end user tests. What I should do was have people playing it as I was developing. Next time maybe.
5) Cutscenes. The cutscenes I’ve written down earlier on a story board. And good thing, too, because everything was implemented in code by jumping
6) Audio. I really wanted to not make a dry, soundless game this time. I’ve spent entire week trying to recall music creation skills and making some chiptunes. And yet, when the time came, I didn’t have time enough to add the music. Shame. Maybe next time.

The Good

1) Intro. After creating the exclamation mark notice thing, I thought – why not use only that for entire conversation? And managed (or so I think) to tell a story without using even one word.
2) Gameplay. I actually love it! Maybe it’s hard, maybe it’s annoying, but holy shit – I enjoy playing it. Even today I spent like an hour during writing this text to try and finish the game in one go. Got to second-to-last obstacle on level 9 😉
3) Completion. The game while missing some content and maybe options, is a full, proper game. It’s got an intro, it’s got couple fully tested, in my opinion coherently designed, levels (I especially enjoy the 10th level – the Doctor’s mansion). Hell, there even is an outro (but as opposed to the intro, I’m not going to ever post it anywhere. Maybe one day somebody will get there, and he’ll be rewarded ;). Oh, and the game even times you, so there’s speed run possibility 😉
4) Styling. I used squares as temporary standins for some characters, but, well, they grew on me, so I’ve just tweened them , thrown couple particle effects in, and they really became ‘alive’
5) Tile graphics. At first I wanted to go for really complex, pretty tiles. That would however take me ages (I can do some tile art, but I’m not a fast artist). I decided to draw really shabby silly tiles, but keep true to the old rule of making three tiles of each type and make the variety pick up the slack. And they did so brilliantly. So much so that people actually said that it looks pretty. Which is not something I expected.

The End

All in all, I’m really happy with the outcome. Maybe not as a Ludum Dare entry, but as a game on its own. I’ve tackled a genre that I never could beat, and I think that I’ve managed to do so succesfully. Maybe next time I’ll be able to create something better. So, if you haven’t seen it, here’s my game:

GRIEF

Flying solo this time

Using: Unity, GraphicsGale, Bosca Ceoil and CFXR.

To get into the mood, I drew BLOOD PEPESH, COMMUNIST VAMPIRE! (now with 100% more retro shaders! buy one get one free! offer void where not applicable!)

So… the theme I REALLY hoped won’t win, won.

Not that I disliked it. But because I used it yesterday when I was learning 3D modelling as an inspiration. Now I’ll have to re-do everything from grounds up 😀

Well, who cares. YOU ARE THE MOTHERFUGGIN T-REX!

This took forever, but finally got the animation and special attacks working. Now on to audio and let’s hope I’ll have some chance to fix the 2D art 😀

I’m in!

I’ll be either using Unity3D, or allegro.js. No idea yet.

The only thing I know is that I want to finish a great game!

Time flies fast, and another LD is upon us. This time I’ve reserved the weekend up front, I’m prepared and full of energy.

I’ll be using Unity for my engine, and random assortment of CFXR, Bosca Ceoil, Aseprite, GraphicsGale, Blender, Wings3D, Tiled, Pinta, and whatever else I’ll put my hands upon in the madness that is compo.

Let’s go!

I’ll also be streaming at my twitch page (clickie).

Even though I had very small amount of time yesterday, I managed to squeeze out something. Let’s continue!