Shapeshift. That was my favorite theme of the lot, so I was pretty stoked but unfortunately I hadn’t found anyone in the area to team up with me and as hours passed I realized I really wasn’t feeling like coding. I quickly gave up the idea on doing it in Unity cause I’m still very noob in C# so I went back to Multimedia Fusion 2 which I hadn’t used in like a year or two…

Since I was just feeling like doing pixels, I started with what became the infiltration phase which is basically just a big medieval castle illustration. Now I realize that this was probably the best choice I’ve made for a jam: not having to deal with scrolling, camera work and de-spawning issues in MMF2 is a life saver! I motivated myself to start coding by saturday evening and then things went very fast very well.

(The day / infiltration phase)

I surprised myself having time for RPG style upgrades, and fully doing the night / platformer action phase. If I had kicked myself in the ass on friday to start coding and take this seriously I would actually would have had time to submit for the compo. On Sunday game had a full loop, 2 endings, 8 type of ennemies and the possibility to keep playing as an endless survival mode to beat your highscore. It left me with monday to fully focus on making sounds, picking the right musics and making a full boss battle and 2 extra endings.

( The night / action phase)

Here’s what went well and wrong in short:

Good
– MMF 2 is great for prototyping, could progress really fast and no big coding issue came up
– having no scrolling allowed to evaluate art needed very easily and gave me time to focus on the fun stuff: making a bunch of creatures.
– Kept the animation minimal but readable. Villagers are 2 frames and the second one is the same as the first one with a few pixels moved lower. That’s enough for a walk cycle at that distance.
– removing the possibility to jump in infiltration phase got rid of all kind of collision issues coming up with MMF2. instead I took inspiration from the Looney Tunes game on game boy, with a rigid stair system that worked really well for an infiltration game.

Bad
– The instanced sprite system in MMF2 is a nightmare so having a lot of creatures at the same time created some bugs where villagers or guards teleport around.
– I play a lot of platformers and despite knowing that I make them too hard for average players… Well, I still made the night phase too hard. I still haven’t learned to properly balance a more welcoming and gradual difficulty.
– MMF2 by default only lets export to windows and all my attemps at getting Mac builds were rather unsuccessful so only a limited pool of players can access my game.

If you wanna take a look at my entry: 

Ludum Dare 35

And since I had so much fun doing it, I’ve been continuing working on it and fixed pretty much all the bugs, added controller support, improved the boss battle, etc…
Ludum dare version and post versions are there: https://brobbeh.itch.io/dopple-trouble

Cheers!
– blob

Well well, how did that one go?

It’s not always easy to be a Panda-shark-man.

Considering we spend closer to 30 hours working rather than 72h and that I hadn’t touched multimedia fusion in over a year, not too bad.
Also, first time in ages not doing a platformer and leaving Art to someone else!

We kept the project simple enough though to limit risks. Pandarmageddon is a fairly classic top view survival brawler where you fight endless waves of increasingly tougher robots . What was cool was how you used both buttons of the mouse to use Pandarm and Sharkarm, one being a good damage dealer the other better as a crowd manager.

What went well:

* The game isnt too buggy. I’m an artist and not a coder, so that’s good.
* It took a while for the game to feel any fun at all and I almost abandonned it cause it didn’t seem to go anywhere by the end of saturday. At some point I said f*** it and decided to try to completely mess with the parameters and made the robots 200% faster. That helped a lot – just trying something that seemed silly and totally messed with the gameplay. It gave me a new perspective on how the game could go. The game felt a lot more intense and the shark suddenly became life saving.
* I think the sillyness of the game was fairly successful. I’m glad I had time to make the ennemy robots talk politely while trying to kill you as your character casually walk flailing shark and panda around.
* Jill’s music rocks and makes crushing robots way more epic. 😀
* The game has potentially interesting mechanics between the struggle to find food for your arms while keeping robots off but also while being really carefull not to step over UFO tractor beams! I was usually able to maintain two of those goals in mind and then mess up the 3rd one, I realized after playing a bunch I had to really focus to actually get a good score which is a good sign for a brainless brawler.

What sucked:

* Not finding the fun in the game earlier. I feel we could have had a lot more if we found it on the first day.
* Classic one but still true: not enough content. This kind of game is a lot more fun with many ennemy types and bonus. The game has 2 ennemies and a variation of one + 4 pick ups.
* general amateur feel of my coding.
* Multimedia fusion. Its OK for jams and prototypes but I’m not really learning anything useful using it. I gotta get to Unity!
* No combos :c
* Only one level

Overall it was a great LD, and I think we ll add a couple things to the game. There s a few funny ideas that can be explored with the conflict in between a vegetarian and a carnivorous arm!

Pandarmageddon:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=12252

-blob

Congratz to all !

This Ludum Dare was a ton of fun. I’ve always loved villains – my main project puts you in the role of the villain as well – so I was very happy with this theme.
Besides having a coder as a roommate makes for a very easy and instantaneous team setup at home which was awesome. We’re still working on Tyranoforce. It will take some time to get a new version because of our full time job but we will do it. We really want to push it further, no only because we got cool feedback, but also because its a game Idea I’ve been wanting to explore for a long time.

Xewlupus even got http://www.tyranoforce.com/ up haha! That shows we’re serious about it 😉

Check it out sometime for updates

See you soon for another Jam!
-blob

PS: Here’s a WIP at the boss look. Prepare yourself to punch some wannabe hero.

This was my first Game jam and well, it was tough. I was carefull to sleep at least 8h per night to keep maximum efficiency but still… Quite painful to have a 48 hours exam ! But hey I love making games.

About the collector: Started from scratch with Multimedia Fusion 2.
Took the first hour to find the concept. Came up with ” an evil wizard creates his own tiny world by turning creatures into tiny beings and putting them in his terrarium”. I pretty much kept it except that originally I wanted to make it possible to really add everything in your tiny world. That you’d have to shrink even trees, mountains and stuff to make your little zoo more comfortable. Didnt have time for that sadly.

Reused base code for the platform engine et got movements, spells and physics in a few hours. I quickly realized my game was quite ambitious ( the map allows for 4 times the size, but map design took way longer than I thought ).

I had no set design for the whole world, instead I improvised as I went along. Adding more monster types and maps as long as I had time.
The last 2 hours went in making all the sound effects ( with the great sfxr ) and some terrible musics.

In the end we have:
– 8 regular monsters to find and capture ( 1 is kind of a mini boss )
– 2 unique boss monster that are quite tough to subdue. ( they can respawn if you just kill them instead of capturing )
– 5 Experience level, gained through fighting or capturing monsters. Which allows to capture stronger monsters.
– a starvation system of your tiny creatures. They need to be fed with food you find on the way.
– 2 spells: fireball (to destroy or weaken ennemies) and shrink ( to capture weakened ennemies)
– a hi score based on your total number of monsters captured when you died ( or retired, if you captured the last boss) to add some replay value.

Go to hell !

Because there’s only so much content you can create I tried to improve the game’s life by having the player “maintain” his stuff. Therefore you need to check on monsters you caught to avoid them dying. You need to come back in parts of the dungeons at later time once you leveled up, because you can now capture creatures you could not before, ect…
I also made an intricate dungeon with a bunch of tunnels crossing each other and even though its small its messy enough to get people lost.
Lastly to add a bit of surprise I added, late in development, some random encounters to force the player to stay alert. I didnt have time to push that as much as I wanted but its there and sometimes you might get surprised if you’re careless.

I’m rather happy with the result though I wish I had been able to make the world more pretty. Not many animations for the monsters but it was the price to have 10 different types of creature. Havent had time to add that when you have more monsters they eat your stored food faster, would have been interesting and turned the game into a real race in the end.
I am afraid the game is a bit hard in some fights and that its maybe missing some RPG elements to make it more immersive and fun.

Phew, I’m glad its over. Looking forward for the critics and hear or hi-scores !
As a bonus spoiler, here’s a world map of the game: http://ftarabout.com/misc/worldmap_thecollector.jpg

unable to submit my game: keep being signed off and even after being able to post my game once there’s no download link available on its profile… Help appreciated