…and I’m sitting here still unsure what exactly I’m getting into. This is my first LD and I’m kinda hoping that it will help me fix my life a little, and become a big milestone in my career.

I just deleted a few paragraphs worth of random babbling here

To make my first try as painless as possible I’ll go with the easy way: HTML5 with Phaser framework. 99% sure there will be “pixelart” involved, so Gimp and other pixel pushing software from my toolbox folder. Pixelart implies “retro” sound effects and music, thus sfxr and musagi/LMMS. I’m not the best musician, so I might use the help of cgmusic if that fits within the rules

Lessons learned (half whining half serious):

1. I suck even more than I thought.
2. Start with the code, end with the assets.
3. If you have several similarly complex ways of solving a problem, don’t take the one you think is the easiest to implement, it will backfire in the worst way possible and you will spend more time trying to fix it than you would if you chose another solution.
4. Have people to talk to, there is nothing worse than bashing your head against a wall alone.
5. Drop a post after every bigger achievement, it will vastly increase the chances of getting some feedback from community and will keep you motivated.

So now, with 13h left in the jam, and the only thing working being the terrain generation as seen below, I ask you:

Give me one reason I should stand up and ignore this little nervous breakdown and keep trying to finish the game…

Edit: oh right, forgot the “picture”

Gorgeous logo courtesy of Delta

Hello there! I’m Rays, and with my best friend Delta we decided to enter this Ludum Dare.

I did try to participate in the previous compo, but working alone, with less than half of the time (due to some busy time in the weekend), annoying bug to deal with (that later turned out to be my fault) and with a really low morale I didn’t manage to make anything that would even loosely resemble a game.

But hey, those times are over! Now we are approaching LD as two, with whole 3 days at our disposal, having stuff planned out and all hyped up.

People seem to like lists, so here is ours:

• Phaser framework – to get us rolling as fast as possible and deploy for web. Had some problems with it last time, but I think we are good friends now.
• Notepad++, Brackets – for code and other text
• Git – to switch code back and forth and to safely work on it at the same time
• Gimp, Inkscape, PyxelEdit – depending on the style of graphics we’ll end up with.
• MadTracker, SFXR, Audacity – for our audio needs.
• Tiled – should we need to build some levels
• And anything else that sits in our toolbox folders that I might have forgotten about

We really want to make everything ourselves, but in case the time starts to run out we might look for some cool music on Newgrounds. That’s where we want to deploy the game after it’s done, so we are really anxious for a theme that we will be able to fully develop.

We won’t be streaming, but this time around I’ll make sure to interact with the community a lot more. Expect gifs, lots of pictures and note-to-selves.

With 34 hours to go, I want to wish us all a merry theme and a happy coding. Good luck everyone!

~Rays

Woohoo! 3 hours left and we are finally all set up and ready to roll. Right now the plan is to brainstorm the theme for a while, maybe mock up some sketches and get a short nap to be refreshed enough in the morning to be able to get right to the code and hopefully have the basic mechanics ready by lunch. Next post – when the theme is announced.

Here’s hoping we can get the spaceships in the… well, space soon enough. You can’t really connect those worlds without spaceships can you?

Phaser turned out to be a wild horse once again, and with our current knowledge attempting to tame it in jam time was a… well, vain effort.

So yeah, if you guys have any leftover ideas that did not provide enough challenge for you to implement, please do share them, cause with our current morale we can’t really think anything up.

Also, looking for a new platform, that’s a little more forgiving to new developers…

Collisions are finicky little beasts. Especially when what you need is not a collision but an overlap.

But hey, we are back on track! If we finish this in time (and it looks like we may do just that) it will probably be one of the wildest saves of this ludum dare. Realizing halfway through the jam that we don’t know how to implement our idea in Phaser, changing the platform to something totally different, that we have even more vague idea about and completely changing the game concept. On top of that Delta has some errands to run back at his place, so for the last hours he will have to work remotely. Now using a git, even with some problems with merging stuff earlier, turns out to be one of our best ideas for this LD

Gotta stick those planets together man!

To all compo participants that just couldn’t make it in time, and to all fellow jammers biting their nails in fear right now: Don’t ever give up. LD is over when the timer ticks to 0, not when you think it’s over!

Oh boy, after a minor fixing we now have a full world filled with planets and stars and black holes! Since we have collisions solved already, getting the planets to collide with the rest and trigger either a planet destruction or a gameover will be a nice and easy thing to do. Since we can’t figure out how to keep our current background static, we may opt to use a tilemap of star specks on a blueish background that will be randomly generated to fill the whole world.

Ath’krtubhath will be proud.

With less than 2 hours left till the theme announcement, it might be a good moment to post the classic “I’m in”.
Due to logistic issues I won’t be able to enter the Jam with my buddy this time, so instead I’ll have another go at the Compo, and try to finish the game this time.
The goal for this edition is:

• Finish the game – this has to be a complete “product”.
• Aim for as simple execution of the theme as possible.
• Interact with the community more – more blog posts, more comments, more game testing, maybe I’ll even jump on the IRC

As for the “tools” part that everyone adds religiously to their posts… My plan A involves using Unity5, although it is entirely possible that I will come up with something simpler and use Phaser, Flixel or something totally new and different. All depends on the theme – and looking at the list, I’ll be happy with pretty much any of those. The rest of tools will likely consist of GIMP/Inkscape/Blender/LMMS/SFXR and anything else that resides in my Toolbox folder, should a need for that come up.

The whiteboard is clear. Music is flowing. Emergency sweets just within the reach.
Moral Support Moose is on his post. Let’s have some fun

That took a long time…

Throwing food at enemy until he burst from overeating can be classified as unconventional warfare, right?

The first day is almost up. What do I have? The most basic mechanics are in there, along with a ton of //TODO notes all over the place – most involving potential areas to apply polish. The morale is high (even though it was brought to my attention that the Moral Support Moose might in fact be a reindeer). I really hope I’ll have enough time to make this game even a little bit more complete than than my LD30 entry I did with my buddy.

…I might still need to balance some variables.

DeltaRays is back for the next Ludum Dare, and this time we are here to…

R: …what are we trying to achieve anyway?
D: Try to make a better game than last time.
R: That’s what everyone says.
D: Have fun?
R: That’s what everyone says.
D: Find the meaning of life?
R: …

Anyway, us two dudes decided to team up again and battle in another LD, this time with hopes of not having to start everything from scratch halfway through the time limit.
As for the generic “stuff listing” that everyone seems to enjoy so much, I’d like to propose a new format, a little more elaborate than throwing software and food names on the screen:

• Engine – Unity seems to be the most likely candidate. It’s free, reliable, powerful, has a great support of the community, and working alone I managed to finish an LD32 jam entry with little knowledge of it.
• Graphics – Gimp for processing images and textures, Inkscape for vectors, Blender for mangling with 3D. No surprises here, we are not an actual studio so any paid software is rather out of the picture for now.
• Sound – The ace in my sleeve is this nice little sound recorder, which has already proven itself in previous LD. Even though I had time and idea for making only one sound effect, H-1 paired with Audacity got me just where I wanted to be, so this time I can see myself playing with SFX a little more.
• Music – The hard part. Last LD I managed to whip something up in LMMS, although it was far from what I’d like it to be. This LD I’ll be trying out something new, a DAW called Studio One 3. You can get a free version, albeit with no support for VSTi, so you have to make do with only one instrument with a lovely bunch of presets. Hopefully it will be just enough.
• Sustenance – Pizza. Fizzy drinks. Homemade meals. Coffee. You know the drill. Ludum is not around often, we can party a little.

What happens when you mix an idle game with dungeon keeping and being a mean boss monster?

We don’t know but we will find out soon enough!

After at least 4h of brainstorming and countless more or less silly ideas we finally made it to the point where we have something that could be called an idea. We’ll be taking our own spin on a classic, but with a little shapeshifting to it, hopefully making for an interesting enough gameplay to be worth the effort. A little sleep deprived, we are currently fighting with Unity physics casting to get our cute heroes to interact with the world as intended. Szasz is hard at work with the graphical design and I think at this point it’ll be safe to assume it will be a strong point of the game.

Did I mention explosions?

10 hours, 3 github repos, a bunch of cursewords and a couple bottles of cola later we… kinda still have nothing. But it appears that all the major malfunctions we did not anticipate were cleared out of the way. Animation is going smoothly. A page worth of level design waits to be implemented once Szasz finishes with the tilemap. All is looking reasonably good for the next hour or two. Time for a nap maybe?

But that is going to change right now.

Levels are being worked on as I’m writing this down. Only a few more pngs and we can start merging it all together into scenes. Still need to come up with a script to keep the score and we are good to go to the polishing sector.

More gifs inbound :3

Alone this time around, but I’m in!

No good reason to repeat the old tool list that does not change too much, so have this instead:

~~ RaysAndLazors Questing Log ~~
Main quest: Work on monday! Better fit in the 2 day compo limit this time!
Optional quest: You have just downloaded a trial of Cubase. Make sure your game has some funky music!
Optional quest: Use your nifty little sound recorder to prepare some SFX for the game.
Optional quest [0/10]: Publish 10 blogposts with meaningful information about your game.
Super optional but highly appreciated quest: Make your game about cats!

~~ Completed ~~
Main quest: Set up a git repo before the jam starts.
Optional quest: Have at least one idea written down for every possible theme.
Optional quest: Take a nap before the theme announcement

Zzz…

Couldn't participate until now, mostly because I spent the whole weekend on Slavic Game Jam (woohoo!), but now that I'm out of work I decided to do something silly and try to make a game in, what, 9 hours? Let's go!

PS. I have absolutely no time to check other games or the blog, so if you know about games with cute little robots walking on a grid and trying to power up machines, please let me know :smile:

After some hour of tweaking I have a control scheme down. The little bot will move across the grid, stopping on each tile for a split second even if you hold down the arrows. Now for some tiles for it to walk on!

Another hour of work and now the little robot (don't mind the placeholder cube) walks only on the tiles. What's with the green one? We'll see soon!