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Ludum Dare 46 - The Wrecker

April 28th, 2020 (edited November 3rd, 2022)

It's been a few Ludum Dares since I participated, but last weekend I jumped in for the Ludum Dare 46 with audio designer Christian Camargo. This Dare saw a big spike in participation this time around, probably due to the stay-at-home orders in many places. The theme was "Keep it Alive". We worked in Unity with Wwise.

After starting, as always, by spamming a heap of ideas out on (virtual) paper, I started trying to mash two or more of the ideas together into a hybrid idea. "The Wrecker" was born from the union of a game about a factory poisoning a town, and my recent playthrough of Red Faction: Guerrilla and love for its granular destruction systems. We also grabbed two other elements from the doc we wanted to include: a time limit to push the player forward, and the idea that the player is also dying and needs to prioritize their own health against that of the town. That more than was enough to get started!

'The Wrecker' logo

What We Learned

Wwise

The decision to use Wwise for our audio had some pros and cons. Despite being relatively unfamiliar with it as the programmer of the team, I was able to hook in pretty easily by making a single call to posting a string-named event when audio cues should be played or stopped. Christian was able to do a lot of customization in Wwise, such as randomizing the sounds played and their parameters, that I didn't need to implement.

On the down side, however, Wwise did not play nicely with Unity's Collab source control, which only synchronizes the Unity project data and did not understand that there was also a Wwise project to synchronize. This effectively siloed off the audio work until we manually transfered the project, and I didn't hear most of the audio until a few hours before the deadline. Theoretically, Wwise is capable of building audio banks into the project that could be synced, but in the jam crunch we never got that working.

I also discovered late on Saturday (making an early test build to catch any build problems - I definitely recommend it) that WWise is not compatible with Unity WebGL builds, which are the optimal way to get Ludum Dare raters into the game quickly. Fortunately this does not appear to be affecting our ability to get ratings.

Physics Gameplay

Screenshot of the player smashing down some walls.

I chose to implement the game's progression through three different weapons, each capable of breaking more objects than the last, and only the final weapon was able to break through the doors into the factory. It's a pretty time-honored design. However, I opted to implement the destruction with Unity's breakable physics joint system, in which each joint has a specified Break Force.

This was a quick way to get everything up and running, but the result was a huge number of breakable joints scattered throughout the game's prefabs, many of which needed to be carefully balanced so they were only breakable by the appropriate weapon. Any change to physics parameters, such as the player's movement speed or weapon swing speed, could throw off everything. If I did this over, I would probably try to implement explicit, hard limitations on which objects can be broken by which weapons rather than relying on the implicit interactions of the physics engine to gate crit-path gameplay.

Vector Graphics

Adobe Illustrator artboard containing game graphics.

I used Adobe Illustrator to produce all the art for the game. This was very efficient, and I was able to turn out assets incredibly quickly and get back to coding. I made all the assets on two artboards (Game and UI), which made it quick and easy to ensure everything was at a consistent scale and stroke width. I used a simple visual language that I think contributes significantly to the game's clean look - collidable objects have a black stroke and background objects have none. Additionally, control prompts are always a key in a rounded white rectangle.


If you haven't check out the game yet, you can download it for free from this link, or watch a video right over here! If you are a Ludum Dare participant, you can rate the game at its Ludum Dare page.


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Periodic Deliveries - Steam Release!

December 7th, 2019 (edited March 4th, 2023)

Way back in Ludum Dare 30 Justin Britch and I made a game called Space Transport Tycoon (which you can still play in your browser for free. Four years later, we still remember it fondly as the the game we spent the most time actually playing after making it. This year, we finally resurrected it as Periodic Deliveries and we're publishing it on December 17th on Steam!

Check out this before-and-after:

Space Transport Tycoon screenshot

We've obviously upgraded the visual quality, thanks to our real artist, John Lewis. The game still features the same core mechanic - configuring trade routes between planets to move certain goods from where they're produced to where they're needed - but we changed several peripheral mechanics. In the game jam, I wanted to create a game with multiple views shown simultaneously. That's how we got the planetary view at the bottom-right, where you could relocate factories to tiles that had more optimal conditions, based on the type of factory. This ended up being one of those features that had a lot of cool stuff in the implementation but didn't work in practice - it was just a quick chore to do once on each new planet. We removed it to focus on the main view.

One small change had a big impact: we prohibited trade routes from crossing each other. In Space Transport Tycoon, you'd often build a crisscrossing web of routes that wasn't terribly satisfying. The new restriction requires the player to use certain planets as hubs and create arterial intermediate routes, which we think is an important and cool part of the shipping fantasy.

Periodic Deliveries screenshot

The UI also got a big rework. The old UI was "planet-centric" - that is, you selected a trade route and were presented with a list of every planet on that route, with controls to configure the behavior at each planet. This allows the player to picture everything that happens at a particular planet little more easily, but it requires extra mental steps to think about what happens to a particular good across the entire route - the later being much more useful to the player than the former. The list can also get arbitrarily long, which is kind of a UI nightmare. Periodic Deliveries now uses a goods-centric UI, where the player sees a list of goods that are involved with the route, and configures which planets import or export that good.

That's just a few of the larger changes we made for Periodic Deliveries. If it sounds like something you'd like, try out Space Transport Tycoon right now and wishlist Periodic Deliveries below!

This post has been updated: the explanation of planet-centric vs. goods-centric UI was backwards.


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Outpost: New World (Ludum Dare 31)

December 29th, 2014 (edited November 3rd, 2022)

Just a few weeks ago, Justin and I participated in the 31st Ludum Dare. The theme: Entire Game On One Screen.

We decided ahead of time that we wanted to make a game that was more action-packed and also more polished than our usual fare. I'm not sure we totally succeeded in overcoming our propensity for making fairly complicated simulation games, but we did manage to make our most polished jam game yet. Play it here!

Outpost: New World Screenshot

Outpost: New World

Our past experience with game jams lead us to decide that we wanted to be done with the core game by early afternoon of the second day (sooner than halfway through the jam). We would then use the second half of the jam entirely for polish. While we fell behind on that goal, finished the core game around 6 in the evening of the second day, that still left us the entirety of Sunday for polish. It worked out very well - I was able to put together a very dramatic opening cinematic, a generate a full range of sfxr-generated sound effects, and record some moody cello music (three elements that we usually don't have time for in jams).

While I'm not a huge fan of how the final gameplay turned out, others seem to be enjoying it much more than any of our previous attempts. We'll see what the results show in about 21 hours.


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Ludum Dare #30 Results

September 17th, 2014

Results for the past weeks' Ludum Dare judging are in! While we knew we had made a game that was ill-suited to the judging style of the Ludum Dare, in which people have to play and judge a lot of games in a short time period, there were definitely some who really enjoyed the complexity and took time to learn the game.

Coolness84%
#99Theme(Jam)3.76
#345Innovation(Jam)3.11
#487Humor(Jam)2.13
#487Overall(Jam)3.06
#532Graphics(Jam)2.98
#597Fun(Jam)2.64
#618Mood(Jam)2.61
#629Audio(Jam)1.83

I played some other really cool games while I was judging. Here are a few that I stumbled across:


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