Hey everyone, this will be my first Ludum Dare participation. The competition begins for me at 2AM Saturday, so I’ll post once again then. I’ll be posting every couple of hours until the competition ends, updating everyone(which is nobody) on the game’s progress, my progress and how shattered I am.

Tools I’ll be using:

• Unity3D for the engine and general development
• Photoshop for any textures
• FruityLoops for any music (though I’m not sure how to use the damn program)
• My microphone for sound effects
• MonoDevelop, Unity’s built in coding program.

I’ll have fun playing all the great games the community makes, and I hope at least somebody enjoys mine.

Thanks for reading(if anybody did)!

I’ll be streaming all weekend and answering questions, check in on it!

http://www.twitch.tv/riley1219

My plan is to sleep about 4 hours every 24 hours, so I’ll be awake most of the time. Hope to see you there!

If this continues, I might not be able to participate. I haven’t had errors like this in six years, and it happens on this night. Typical.

In any case, I will not be doing a livestream, as I think it is the program that is causing it. If not, then there is no point anyway if the stream cuts off every 15 minutes.

Here’s hoping that’s the last of them, I’ve been really excited for this :(.

1:46

Hey all, I have already chosen and fleshed out my idea based on the theme. I had a lot of help from my friend, Reece, who I’m very thankful to.

I have decided to go for an isometric, dungeon-crawler-ish game where the player begins with 10 seconds, and must collect little items to get more time. The objective is to find the exit without running out of time.

There are enemies that take time away from you when you are hit by them, and there are some weapons you can pick up, but the ammo is your time. Enemies sometimes drop time, but is it a good idea to shoot them when there could potentially be no drop? The idea is to make the player think about murdering everything in sight. So far I’ve sorted out the isometric viewpoint, and next I will begin on the time drops and the enemies. Then I will begin on environments. Art and models will come after everything programming and functional side is complete.

So, I’ve been working on getting my core mechanics in place. The timer and being able to get power ups that add time. Unfortunately, I’ve had quite a bit of trouble with the second one. No matter what I do, I can’t get my player script to add time to the timer. None of the send messages will work. I’m going to take a nap, help me get my head in place. When I come back, I’ll see if I can get Q adding time, to see if it’s even possible with the way I’m doing it.

On the brightside, I got my sound effects and background music up, with a working music mute button for those that get sick of my simple loop.

Still don’t have much of a level beside a red plane and a powerup, but one step at a time. This is my first real game, after all,  and I’d say I’m doing decent!

Hell yeah! I feel like this is an actual accomplishment haha. Now I can check one more thing off of my list! Speaking of which, I have an actual list I wrote down of some things I want to accomplish in descending priority:

Mechanics/Things need implementing
timeUP —- (Check!)
Enemy with AI that hurts you when touches —-
At least 6 levels —-
^^^^CORE THINGS NEEDED
Secondary:::
Basic player and enemy models
Sound effects for pickup/timer nearing bottom
Weapon that uses time for ammo

TERTIARY:::
Decent textures
Random generation(Infinite mode?)
Small tutorial level, otherwise text that disappears after a while like
now.

I’ve got music and sound effects ready, I’m adding them while we speak!

I’m making decent progress, if I say so myself! I have all the mechanics implemented, sound implemented and everything is working fine!(Except for a glitch wherein a player gets stuck inside an enemy, but I’ll leave it until the end)

Now I’m in the process of building at least six levels before I begin working on nicer textures, but I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time!

Things are going great and I’m enjoying myself. I think I’ll build this first level and then take a break.

As I said, I’ve been working hard, I need a break. This movie is hilarious, will continue later.

So, as I’m sitting here procrastinating and thinking of designs for my first level, I remember reading an article on a dungeon generator algorithm earlier. I found a decent tutorial teaching me how to implement it, and I’m thinking about implementing it after I get back home. It could yield some interesting results, and save me time on designing levels that suck anyway.

This is an example of the kind of generation this algorithm could produce. Looks very nice! I’ll postpone the art side of things until the last couple of hours. Not even 24 hour mark yet and I’m making good progress. I will make a videolog at 2AM on my development youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh-Qdwj3gZmTqy9AXfKOMrA/about

As I said in the title, I slept about 4 hours over my mark, and I didn’t get any work done from six to 2 AM when I went to sleep. So much wasted time, and I need to get this finished. I’m implementing a random generation now. That’s my main goal to get done by tonight.

Either http://xdavidleon.tumblr.com/post/51104205836/roguelike-development-in-unity-part-i or http://xdavidleon.tumblr.com/post/58097415717/zelda-dungeon-generation-in-unity3d

Wish me luck.

I created a small video showing off the game so far. It’s a little buggy but I’m working on that. It’s quite crappy, but this is the first real game I have ever created.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1ev7WEMLNA&feature=youtu.be

Edited like crazy because I’m terrible at speaking.

Basically, I added another capsule collider to the player  in order to fix this bug where the enemy gets so close it gets stuck inside the player and whips them around. The thing is, I added the tag “Player” to it, and the actual player itself had this tag. So it was trying to get both tags in the same location at the same time, so it caused to flop around. It’s fixed now, I can get to the game.

And I still haven’t done decent art. Oh well, I still have some bugs to work out (such as entire areas getting closed off for some reason!) Pretty art isn’t really my forte anyway.

A picture of the bug

I’m really, really proud of myself. I’m never proud of anything I ever make. Ladies and gents, I present to you…

What a terrible thumbnail

You play as a little capsule in a RANDOMLY GENERATED DUNGEON(!), trying to reach the exit cube before the time runs out(and you die!)

You can collect little TimeUp orbs that increase your time meter by 10, prolonging your health. But beware, there are little red TimeSuckers trying to stop you!

Good luck, and please comment on the first game I have ever created!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25263

So it’s currrently 6:20 am here in England, and I’m just about ready to start on my game. I woke up about 20 minutes ago, and I’m currently just brainstorming through different ideas with a trusty notepad and pen. You only get one is certainly an interesting theme, and I think a lot of people are going to have a lot of fun with it. I’m thinking of a game where you control a spaceship that’s gotten lost during it’s voyage, and it only has about one year of resources left. You have to control the citizens on board and hope to hell you can reach civilization.

Last time I didn’t manage to get anything in – I had a real block in creativity and ended up feeling sorry for myself for the rest of the competition.

However, this time I vow to get SOMETHING submitted, and I’m going to try my damn best to make it decent. Here’s hoping.

• LANGUAGE: Javascript
  
• FRAMEWORK: Quintus
  
• SOUND: BFXR, Audacity, Incompetech music, http://soundation.com/studio
  
• ART: PyxelEdit
  

This year I’ll be doing 2D, using the Quintus framework. I was thinking about using Phaser, but I don’t think I’ll be able to effectively get used to using it and optimize how I do things with it well enough before Ludum Dare roles around. Quintus also allows me to actually get the game up and running quickly, which is a huge plus especially for prototyping and quick game jams like this.

This’ll be my first time making a game in 2D, though I’m hoping I can get something done for the warmup jam this weekend. I’ve also literally learned how to draw very basic pixel art in about the past two days, so we’ll see how that goes. Hopefully 2D is easier to develop in than a 3D game in Unity…We’ll see.

Happy jamming everyone!

Hey there everyone. Going to give a quick development update on what’s going on. So I have the idea for my game down, the basic work done and pre-production completed. I have all the design work done and I’ve set up the basics on the programming side of things. No real problems so far, but I’m extremely tired, and so I’m going to go take a short nap.

The game’s called The Great Chamber, and you play an unnamed hero exploring a dungeon collecting Artifacts of Old to ultimately unlock the final chamber that holds a secret.

Each Artifact is guarded by a unique boss that you must defeat.

Wow, I’m so damned tired, can barely type now. I’ll update again later. Continue with the hard work everyone!

So I’m awake after my small nap, and I’ve decided that I’m going to try and actually get the game finished with my basic cube art before I attempt to draw decent art. I’ve got a couple reasons for it, including the fact that I cannot draw for shit, and that I would like to actually have it finished and have a game playable before me by the time the competition ends. Art doesn’t matter as much to me as mechanics, so I’m opting for actually finishing the damn thing.

Now I’m going to make myself a bowl of soup. So damn hungry.

Or rather, the lack of it. It took me many, many hours to do what should have taken me one/two hours at most. Now I have doubts about getting anywhere near to finishing the game before the competition ends, but I’m going to try my best. And I really like the idea, so I may continue working on it after this is all over. I’ve only got basic movement and a key and door system going…This should have taken me fucking minutes not hours…I really hate computers.

A gif of key and door system

Though this whole thing has been pretty much disaster after disaster, I’ve enjoyed this years Ludum Dare. But the fact is that my game is not in a playable state, so I will not be making a submission this year. I will be playing and critiquing others’ games, however, so don’t give up anyone!

I think I’ll continue developing and polishing this until it becomes the game I envisioned I’d make at the beginning of this weekend. Good luck to everyone, and I hope you’ve had a good time as well!