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 Finished my March game, MinRacer! It's a minimalist time trial game with 9 levels and an editor. Download's here. A little bit late, but I only had about half of the month to work on it. It's missing a few things that I didn't have time to work on. Mainly, there's no sound and there's not much variety in obstacles. Still, it was fun to work on and I'm happy with how it turned out. It's something I might try to expand upon eventually.
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| # ? Apr 3, 2013 03:11 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 11:29 |
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Wow, flaffol, that's really keen! Visually quite appealing, interesting in concept, and surprisingly well-polished for the small bundle that it is. Good sense of urgency, too. It took me a few tries to realize that the timer doesn't keep going after you're reset to a checkpoint, or that you don't automatically start moving again. Exactly how it ought to be.
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| # ? Apr 4, 2013 04:29 |
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Just posted my March game ROTA [based on Valve's DOTA - yes, the R stands for Roguelike], but really it's not very good at all so I advise against downloading it [gently caress knows why I'm posting this if I don't want people to download the game, but hey]. I really took on too many things to do in the time frame which resulted in code being pleasantly scaleable in parts and horribly hacky in others [the later the code the worse it is] and pretty much no game in-between since I ran out of time. It really showed me that my job as a programmer really affected me, since I've planned out the systems, and didn't spend any time on the gameplay before 28th March, which made me have a mini-panic attack I might add. I think I may end up working on it a bit more later to try and salvage it because I've worked too hard to let it be a terrible unfun clusterfuck it is now. Download here Windows only - tested on XP, 7, 8   Oh well, lesson learned - onwards to the April game
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| # ? Apr 4, 2013 09:03 |
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I'm off to a bad start for the new month. I had planned to attempt a somewhat arcadey isometric ship sailing shooty game. But something like Sid Meijers Pirates where it operates like a real ship, sail with the wind for speed etc. But UDK's vehicle code is just a mess. I ran into lots of trouble with it on Zamboni, but now I'm running into limitations in the code exposed to UnrealScript. The way it handles vehicles is it has various sim object classes for different types of vehicles. The Zamboni used the wheeled vehicle model obviously, but I'm trying to make the ships use a hover style model so it glides through the water. Here's where things get silly, the hover vehicles by default use mouse look to steer and there's absolutely no way to override that behavior in a workable fashion. The actual code handling the vehicle inputs is done in-engine and isn't exposed to UnrealScript  It's getting me fed up, because I really really don't want to hand-code ship movement, not to mention how big of a nightmare it would be to integrate AI with that solution. The AI "understands" the stock vehicle code, not so much some cack-handed hacky system. I'm not sure I'm going to keep working on this idea, going to Plan B. Le Carmageddon.
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| # ? Apr 6, 2013 06:55 |
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I too am having major problems this month. For whatever reason I'm either not feeling any of my ideas for this month or I start them and then get daunted by trying to fit what I want to do into Game Maker's rules (although really none of it is that hard) Serves me right for trying to make a Mega Man parody about Tax season I guess  EDIT: My backup ideas at this point (and I really need to decide) are to try and finish my February idea given that I have a lot of assets already made for it (and a good chunk of code), or to try and work on one of my older ideas from the Bi-weekly game jams that didn't quite go anywhere. Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at Apr 8, 2013 around 06:21 |
| # ? Apr 8, 2013 06:17 |
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So I started working on Le Carmageddon, aiming to be some kind of ultra-destructive mario kart or racing game. With old crappy french cars. I had been wanting to play with UnrealEngine's vehicle damage system. A shame half of it just doesn't goddamn work for some reason, so I've been rebuilding it myself. Then this happened, when I stuck some code in to break off debris inside the called-every-frame function. And forgot to make sure it only happens once. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7kUAHhXrIk
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| # ? Apr 11, 2013 08:32 |
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Enos Shenk posted:Then this happened, when I stuck some code in to break off debris inside the called-every-frame function. And forgot to make sure it only happens once.
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| # ? Apr 11, 2013 14:29 |
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Enos Shenk posted:So I started working on Le Carmageddon, aiming to be some kind of ultra-destructive mario kart or racing game. With old crappy french cars. I had been wanting to play with UnrealEngine's vehicle damage system. A shame half of it just doesn't goddamn work for some reason, so I've been rebuilding it myself. Development bugs are the best bugs. Still trying to resolve my brainstorming as to what game I want to make this month, unfortunately. I'm thinking something along the lines of a word puzzle game, but I'm not 100% there yet.
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| # ? Apr 11, 2013 16:58 |
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So in a recurring theme I went back to my long list of ideas I had years ago that I never tried making, and this month I'm making Invaders of the Stratosphere, a horizontal shooter where you fly an F-86 Sabre against alien invaders; some of which will look like your bog-standard UFO and some of which will look like famous media aliens (such as the War of the Worlds 1953 manta-shaped ship). So far this is all I've got going in terms of implemented stuff, basically the player ship flying through a city background. Originally I was going to do this like an old game boy game in 4 colors to stick to the 1950s motif but I decided last-minute that putting a bunch more challenges on myself when I already spent the first third of the month dicking about wasn't the best of ideas. EDIT: Here's the city background using the Game Boy palette because why the hell not. 
Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at Apr 15, 2013 around 03:07 |
| # ? Apr 14, 2013 01:42 |
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My project this month is about a boy who falls in love with every girl he sees.  Your task is to run ordinary dumb errands like shopping, getting the mail, and returning library books, between exams. But there are girls everywhere! And if you get near any of them, they draw your attention, making you forget why the hell you were even in a grocery store in the first place! Lose your cool too many times, and you'll fail exams, drop out of school, work at a low wage dead end job, and cry yourself to sleep at night. How sad. Keep your mind in the right place by avoiding all female contact, and you just might make it through the semester... Then you can chase all the girls you want and live happily ever after! Hooray!  It's an HTML5 game, and though *INCOMPLETE* you can play it online now: http://blipjoy.github.io/sprung_fever/public/index.html (updated daily) It's currently playable, but not enough is implemented to really do anything. I am looking for feedback on the level of difficulty though, so... Requesting that much!  I am also blogging on my progress daily, which might be an interesting read: http://blog.kodewerx.org/ (Mostly for self-motivation.)
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| # ? Apr 16, 2013 08:28 |
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Haha that looks fantastic, Parasytic. Screenshot saturday! Le Carmegeddon has been a pain in the rear end, I never want to do a car game again. From wrestling with UDK's wonky vehicle systems to damage systems that don't work. The AI was kicking my rear end, but it pretty much works now. The AI cars choose a random enemy at the start of the match, and re-target whoever has caused the most damage to them. Basic but it seems to hold up.  The damage modelling looks great though. The car body and parts blend from undamaged to completely ruined, there's a bunch of shader blending going on as well. The main car body material has 6 damage zones that get blended together from code, setting that up was a bit of a nightmare but it works. I just wish I was better with effects. Smoke is easy, but I know the game could be more dynamic with some effects that aren't basic as poo poo. Oh well. Have a video too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMikW7Gozf8
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| # ? Apr 21, 2013 01:50 |
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Thanks Enos! Yours as well looks quite excellent. I think just a couple of spark particle effects (with dynamic lighting, of course) and maybe some liquid spillage and you have a complete destruction derby on your hands! Oh, and drivers too. With pencil mustaches and berets.  (Baguettes and wine optional.) But I have no knowledge of how much work that would be. The only experience I have with 3D game dev was a failed project using Blender many years ago...
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| # ? Apr 22, 2013 06:47 |
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It needs 2CVs! <-- still hasn't done a game, distracted by art.
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| # ? Apr 26, 2013 21:01 |
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This thread seems to have died out a bit but for those of you that didn't know, this weekend it's http://www.ludumdare.com/ Ludum Dare. The whole points is to make a game in 48 hours or 72 or something, depending on if you're working solo or in a team. I woke up 3 hours ago pretty much as it started so I decided to make one, and this is what I did in an hour. The theme was Minimalist. http://www.5ifty2wo.co.uk/games/bir...ress/index.html I haven't had much time to actually do 1GAM stuff these last 2 months as I decided to just start a games company with a couple of friends, so we've been working on an iPhone release instead. But this was nice just to do something dumb that I thought up on the spot.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2013 04:10 |
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Thievery posted:I haven't had much time to actually do 1GAM stuff these last 2 months as I decided to just start a games company with a couple of friends, so we've been working on an iPhone release instead. But this was nice just to do something dumb that I thought up on the spot. That said, I've had no luck convincing myself to spend more than a day or two on the actual "game" each month, so they end up being limited. This month, I'm thinking I'll just make a cool bit of platforming and some simple puzzle solving, since that's the systems I have in place. Still, overall a good influence, and LD48 games only have a day or two of design too, so whatevs. (I'm not doing LD48, because potato theme didn't win and I'm staging a mini potato protest  )
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| # ? Apr 27, 2013 16:34 |
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Shalinor posted:I've been using #1GAM to force me to put together something playable every month. Thus far, it's had a pretty positive effect on my direction. It's keeping me from diving into systems for months, and instead nudging me into making usable systems that work well together. Same for me really. I have made a game every month for 4 months - the first one I did over 10 hours, the second was more like a weekend, the third was maybe 8 hours and this last one was ~45 minutes. I did try and spend a long time on a game in February but it ended up just getting frustrating and not working out as I wanted, so I switched to something different and just had way more fun with it. As long as I end up producing something I'm happy at least. I have got a Unity3D tutorial that i'm interested in doing but just can't afford the time for at the minute, maybe later in the year.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2013 17:34 |
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I've found a lot of success focusing on gameplay by doing my daily blog. It becomes a self-motivator because not having blog content for the day really sucks! Even just 30 minutes of level design or something looks a lot better on a blog than "wrote an awesome quest management system that you'll never see because it's taking too much time away from actually building the game...  "Anyway, I'm going to spend a few hours today on an LD game, and skip the 1GAM project for the day. Just to do something a little different.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2013 18:31 |
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I've always wanted to make a Wolfenstein 3D style FPS, but always got hung up feature creep, so for Ludum Dare (which I never tried before), I started fresh and got to work on 'RUST' using Game Maker Studio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzLEbMwJvRg Mostly worked on the engine today (as basic as the gameplay is), so tomorrow is going be about creating content (most of it is super-quick placeholder at the moment)
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| # ? Apr 27, 2013 19:41 |
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Shalinor posted:I've been using #1GAM to force me to put together something playable every month. Thus far, it's had a pretty positive effect on my direction. It's keeping me from diving into systems for months, and instead nudging me into making usable systems that work well together. This feels a lot like my outcome this month. I brainstormed a few ideas and in the end went back to one that I had toyed with as a concept before. It's going to wind up being a super-simple text-game proof of concept. On the upside I've been trying a new engine or game tool each month; First game was in MonoGame, second game was in Construct 2, this little game iks in Unity. Additionally I've taken on a few side projects to expand my knowledge a bit more broadly (messing with some JSON API stuff for the first time and playing with a minimal C# application to pull desktop images from a website daily). I think what I might do next month is take what I'm making this month and expand upon it to give it more depth. The very core concept is a word puzzle game: You take turns entering words to try and stump the opponent based on a set of simple rules: the word you enter must Start with the letter the opponent's word Ends with, and your word must be one letter longer than theirs. So an example game would go like this: code:We'll see how it goes, hopefully I can ensure the core mechanic is working properly by month's end now that I've actually gotten started on it.
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| # ? Apr 27, 2013 21:09 |
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It's still saturday, right? Ok so Invaders of the Stratosphere was coming along well (though still woefully incomplete)  but then today I remembered LD26 was going on and took a look at the theme, saw it was minimalism and thought "hey I can bang something out in a couple days, make that my game for April, why not?"  So I present MBD, a "minimalist" tower defense game. Not really done at all, just have the basic pathing and behaviors down, but working on it. The large green empty space is reserved for where the Interface is going.  Invaders is probably going to be shelved unfortunately, mostly cause about a week ago I realized it could've worked really well as a Defender homage but I didn't have the time nor the knowledge to make a Defender-style wrap-and-scroll system in the time I had. Either way this month has been really productive since so far I've learned how to better utilize paths and timelines in Game Maker Studio Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at Apr 28, 2013 around 04:03 |
| # ? Apr 28, 2013 03:15 |
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So I've finished this month's game. Maybe I'm getting better at having the motivation to do things after work I dunno. I don't feel like this will get easier any time soon though Anyway here's what I've done @Horse_ebooks typing tutor The hardest thing on this was the text. When you start playing and start typing and whatever half the text is green and the rest is grey. Trying to get that to work with my minimal knowledge of canvas was hard; and I don't mean that in the sarcastic "oh this was sooooo hard" like I literally spent hours trying to get half the text green and half of it grey, and I'm not even sure I got it right in the end because there are bits where a word flips to one line and not the other. Holy crap game development how does it work?
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| # ? Apr 28, 2013 21:54 |
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Today for #1GAM I whipped up a little shooting range thing to test out the Razer Hydra, some camera tricks, and misc Unity stuff. I attempted a crude "virtual window" type of setup in one mode, which was thrown together rather than actually measured or had math applied to it. It's definitely something I want to experiment with more later. Anyway, this isn't really a full-featured game, or even particularly fun, and there's no sound... but hey, if you've got Windows and a Razer Hydra, and literally nothing else to do, this is what you've been waiting for! Unity Exe in a .rar file here  *edit* Image is now a Youtube link. Groovy background music not included in game. Locus fucked around with this message at May 1, 2013 around 20:40 |
| # ? May 1, 2013 01:47 |
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Alright, my April entry's done. It's called Not Pie, and is Unity playable in your browser. You can do most of it with keyboard, but you'll need a gamepad to get to the end. Mostly, this was a test of the warped plane platforming stuff I've been working on. Specifically, I wanted to test how fancy I could get with world design with the teleporters. Turns out: pretty dang fancy. I'm pretty sure I could do full on 4-way intersections that allowed you to walk on both sides of each street, crossing at each sidewalk, and it would still feel great. The font... worked a lot better in concepts. I'm thinking we'll need a different one. I love the chat bubbles overall, though, and next up is making a dialog system to hook those to. Overall, I'm pleased as punch with how the codebase is shaping up, and I'm pretty happy with the controls. I need to make any velocity against a rigid surface bleed instantly instead of sticking you there (ie. try blasting yourself into a wall or into the bottom of a platform), but that's about it.
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| # ? May 1, 2013 04:24 |
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Shalinor posted:Alright, my April entry's done. It's called Not Pie, and is Unity playable in your browser. You can do most of it with keyboard, but you'll need a gamepad to get to the end. It's interesting; the controls are a bit strange (my computer dislikes holding Alt and hitting A in the reload screen for instance). but I like the style and the music is really fitting. ------------ Now that May is here, we've got a new keynote and a new optional theme: Grow. MCFunkyPants has hinted at upcoming improvements to the website in the near future as well. Looking forward to seeing what folks come up with.
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| # ? May 1, 2013 17:54 |
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As done as it will get for April! Sprung Fever can be played in your browser now. Collect the items while avoiding the girls, couldn't be simpler, right? Right?! I'll add the finishing touches (mostly the item sprites, but maybe also an intro) in the next few days, I think. The game is also playable on mobile (tested on iPhone 4S) but CocoonJS is recommended. Anyway, pictures!    Controls: Arrows to move, hold Shift to sprint. Mobile: virtual D-pad to move, hold red buttons to sprint. Playing with good quality headphones or subwoofer highly recommended!
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| # ? May 1, 2013 21:23 |
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Parasytic posted:As done as it will get for April! Sprung Fever can be played in your browser now. Collect the items while avoiding the girls, couldn't be simpler, right? Right?! I like it, the gameplay is enjoyable and challenging (particularly when the controls switch) and the setup is enough to make me smile while I'm being frustrated by the hectic gameplay choices. The music and sfx are great and the way the game shakes as you lose all focus was great. I had a bit of difficulty reading the labels for the items on the floor background, but other than that thoroughly enjoyable little game.
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| # ? May 1, 2013 22:53 |
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Thanks Mo_Steel! Glad you enjoyed it. I just pushed a change that fixes the items, making them real sprites now (with simple animation). That should help quite a bit. 
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| # ? May 2, 2013 06:09 |
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I've got a silly little small game in mind for this month. It even follows the theme for once! And...I haven't even started working on it.  I've been tinkering around with code for a collaboration with another fellow. He put together this spectacular mock-up of an idea using a cylindrical world, and I've been working on the code for player/camera movement for it. Here's his video of the thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB0nD225X8Y And here's my very placeholder version running my movement code. It kind of breaks UDK's built-in movement systems over its knee, which makes it tricky to integrate other things like animations down the line. I've been trying to only hack apart the bits I need to. Basically the Z axis is untouched, it just uses built-in gravity to let the player jump and fall down. But the X axis is completely faked, it takes the player velocity (After calculating it manually because the acceleration -> velocity calculation is handled with PhysX in UnrealEngine  ), does some trig and uses that to make the entire world rotate.It actually matches up pretty drat good. And I'm actually looking forward to fiddling about with polar coordinates to add in pickup items. I must be losing my drat mind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv34CRcU-KE
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| # ? May 3, 2013 01:22 |
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It's my first time making a game with C# and Unity. It's a puzzle game, where you must grow to occupy as much area as possible, by connecting tetrominos orthogonally by only one liberty. Also, rather than being able to rotate the tetrominos, the world is four-way rotationally symmetric. There's a WIP net version here I'm racking my brains trying to think of a way to check for empty spaces being completely encircled, but the only method I can think of would be horrendously recursive. Taking each empty square, finding it's neighbours, if that neighbour is empty, finding its neighbours etc. until it finds one that connects to the edge of the world. Doing that for the best part of a thousand cells every time a piece is added would probably lead to significant slowdown.
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| # ? May 6, 2013 17:28 |
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ShredsYouSay posted:It's my first time making a game with C# and Unity. It's a puzzle game, where you must grow to occupy as much area as possible, by connecting tetrominos orthogonally by only one liberty. Also, rather than being able to rotate the tetrominos, the world is four-way rotationally symmetric. There's a WIP net version here Perhaps you could try this: If a piece is set in, check it's sides for empty spaces. If there is an empty space, do a simple projection straight across to see if it's closed on the other end. If it is, there's a fairly good chance that the space is closed. You could then call your recursion algorithm. I haven't gotten a chance to play it yet, but you could include the four way symmetry in your check. If it's closed in one quadrant, it'd be closed in the other ones. Another option would be to use the "Turn Left" mentality of maze solving. Just hug the wall, and if you reach where you started without hitting the edge of the screen, you've created a hole to fill. Just use a flood fill algorithm from there. E: This is just a total guess, I'd be interested in seeing other people's solutions as well! NorthByNorthwest fucked around with this message at May 6, 2013 around 19:58 |
| # ? May 6, 2013 17:40 |
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Decided to make a Schmup with RPG elements this month, using Construct 2 again as a proof of concept maker. Not much to show yet outside a basic generic layout with simple controls: Fly a triangle on a single screen here.
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| # ? May 12, 2013 18:40 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 11:29 |
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It's been a fairly busy month; how is everyone doing for their gamers this time around? I've made a bit of progress with mine beyond this, but the version I have on Drive currently has a clickable "Wormhole" sprite that takes you to a static Dungeon level with enemies that wander about until you get too close. The lines that generate out from them were for debugging purposes; the version I have locally has them firing projectiles, taking damage and being destroyed when they run out of health, etc. Try the slightly dated version. On my todo list is to implement a couple more varieties of basic enemies and some basic looting / inventory stuff. All in all having experimented with the concept for a bit in Construct 2 I'm pretty pleased with it. I might look into moving over to a platform with a bit more control though, like Futile 2D for Unity, especially because I really feel like multiplayer helps the sort of action-RPG style that games like Diablo and Torchlight are. I'm still a bit torn about the controls: right now it's an instantly responsive speed / direction changing, but I've tried having speed change by accelerating as well. It gives the gameplay more of a Space feeling: you glide when you let off thrusters, but that also makes it harder to be precise and stop or reverse when you need to.
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| # ? May 20, 2013 18:26 |
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