Well, I need more reasons to finish projects and have wanted to do LD before so here is my first one.
I’m going to be making videos showing development each day over the 72 hour jam
Tools I will be using
that is all conglaturation
Here is my declaration of pre-existing code.
I am using Pro-Builder for level design.
I may or may not use some shaders I bought previously due to my inexperience with them.
That is all really.
For my first game jam I know I have to keep it incredibly small, I don’t have the skill or experience to smash something out within this time thats heavy on gameplay.
SO
My game is going to be heavily inspired from the newgrounds flash game “One Chance”
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/555181
Basically, the premise is that its a story game with quite a few endings all determined on your simple choices with people and what you do each day, at the end of the game you get your ending and the game locks you out.
You can only play it once.
Big problem is that obviously the player could find and delete the file that the game reads for saves/if it has been completed before, so I’m going to have to hide that somewhere so even if the player deletes and unpackages the game again it won’t let them replay.
You only get one chance, You get one playthrough.
Make it worth it.
tRigGeR wARninG: I ramble a lot
wow thanks game
Power outage for roughly 6 hours, thats 12 hours of this ludum dare gone due to sleep then waking up without power.
and before that 6 hours of code was scrapped
this is not going well
So I just got word that there will be another power outage tomorrow due to them working on the lines.
My first Ludum Dare was an utter failure, I’l continue working on the game though as It’s a neat little project.
So I was planning on starting earlier for the 72 hour jam, but I was out and my train decided to just stop working and I had to walk for about an hour to catch another one.
When I finally got home, my artist had passed out (he lives in a completely different timezone and it was like 1am for him)
So now I’m sitting here trying to plan out what I’m going to code without any assets.
Time to make some shitty models myself I guess.
Due to some systems just not working the way we intended (read: at all) we are now removing one of the main features we planned, essentially halving mechanics.
Hey there babe, yeah you at the computer, you lookin’ fine tonight.
My names Harrison and with the help of two close friends we made Galilei, an ~arte~ game
Here is a full playthrough in action.
Anyway, I felt like I should talk about the somewhat downwards spiral that was Galilei and why it happened.
Initial Idea was too vague
Initially we wanted to make a space game as the artist really loves modelling sci-fi ships and etc, the theme fitted it perfectly but left little to the imagination.
We didn’t really think past that for a little while and went through a few ideas over the course of 24 hours before we settled on the final idea.
Most ideas were dumb
I really wanted to play around with lighting for this, I love minimalist art-styles and wanted to toy with shadows and all that junk, this lead to us starting off with an exploration game that would take place within an asteroid belt around an unknown planet, you would find audio logs and discover that previous ships had been trapped here after being sent through a wormhole.
that is fairly dumb and we spent too long on it, though some of the basic ideas stayed in but were changed artistically to fit, such as audio logs changing to gems and the reset function being based on a wormhole opening up and dragging you back (kind of i just went nuts making that to be honest)
I had no idea how to explain the art-style
I’m a programmer and designer, I was recently funded to start my own company.
I have a lot of knowledge about game design.
I suck at the art.
I’m bloody terrible at making art, I just can’t wrap my head around physically modelling/spriting/painting, I just don’t jive with that.
In my head I wanted a low poly art-style, that alone is very vague and explaining it to Nicholas was an immense task, eventually he figured out what a tired and slightly drunk me was trying to say and made magic.
Thanks Nick.
I ended up hating the art-style on the last day
Well, I do love it but I spent almost 18 hours coding new things and fixing old things once they handed me the final art assets, So I sat there looking at it for all that time and it got stale to me.
This didn’t really cause any problems I’m just not entirely happy with how it turned out due to how I had to cut quite a lot of things to make it look any good in time.
Now I need to talk about the good things
I’m surprised with what we made
I’m a very fast coder, I work fast and expect art assets to be done just as fast which is sometimes impossible
My initial code in prototypes is pretty bloody low, they work well but looking at them is ugly
I am incredibly impressed at what we made in the time period.
I know loads of people who study game design and all that junk who have made final projects for their classes that look and play worse than this, and they have passed, and while that might say something about the places they are studying at I prefer to say that we just did something good here, even if I’m disappointed that it’s not what we set out to make.
People adore the art
While I’m not the artist on this (Nick and Cameron made the art) it makes me incredibly warm and fuzzy inside to hear people compliment the art-style, I spent so long trying to explain it and it was made almost perfectly and people love it.
Some fairly important people have seen it now
I have had this problem where I like to prototype things, people love them and then I get bored of them.
I work on a project to learn a specific thing and then I drop it once I have learned what I set out to learn.
That means that a lot of what I make never sees the light of day and I’m never comfortable showing it to people who might want me on their project.
Seeing that Michael O’Connor (_PipeDreamer_) favourited a tweet I made about finishing Galilei made me happy, even if he’s just looking at whats happening in Ludum and saw that I finished.
If you see this Michael, you pressing a button made someone feel better about themselves.
Cameron also has some ties to Interceptor Entertainment, and according to him Frederik Schreiber enjoyed it, even if it’s not a “game” as much as it is a dumb ~arte~ piece.
Ending statement about LD30
I absolutely adore all of you, I attempted to do LD28 and had some serious problems with my house at the time and had to drop out.
This has been an amazing experience.
We are most likely going to continue working on Galilei as we all enjoyed the weekend even with the incredible lack of sleep.
We will be changing quite a bit up, most likely removing the spaceship aspect as it had its problems, and without a dedicated QA team we had no chance of ironing that out in 3 days.
Keep a lookout for it, It’l show up in your feeds again soon!
By the way, if you are still reading I love you.
Marry me.
Tags: Galilei, LD30, LD72, post-mortem
jokes on you no i dont
in other news, i kinda want comments on the PS1 shader