Friday Evening:

Other game developers have already been developing their projects for a few hours while I was still work-working away. I did have the chance to mull over theme ideas, but having played a lot of Fall Guys recently I figured an obstacle course “running” game would be a great test for the physics engine. The theme was not a single but choose one or more of three themes; Maps, Chaos and/or Ships. So my idea was simple; an obstacle course on the docks where the player boards a ship.

The theme of LudumDare was announced at 9:00pm Friday evening. Keep It Alive. I like sketching ideas on a scratchpad, but the bamboo tablet was fighting me with Windows Ink or other Photoshop settings. It took ten minutes to setup a relay stream from my macbook which has a much better tablet setup, but it made it more comfortable for sketching.

After running through some ideas, with my twitch viewers throwing in great comments, I steered very quickly into the egg in a bowl on a car. Actually I have wanted to make this very game for years, as it can be a good training tool for driving smoothly at the limit. I continued brainstorming for a bit longer, but this was the idea that pulled the hardest.

45 minutes after the theme announcement I had committed to the idea and created a list of tasks required for the game. Being near bedtime I chose to work on modeling assets for the game. This is one of the first jams I have ever started with art before programming. Doing so can be somewhat risky, especially  if ideas or concepts are subject to change. I knew the basic objects; car, bowl, egg and some track segments would not be a waste of time.

It took one hour to get all the assets created, using Imphenzia’s method to make the cars was very quick and easy; though I can’t do them in 10 minutes. Yet! Perhaps my blender practicing is starting to pay off as this process went super smoothly. With some art created I jumped into Unity. At that point I had used Unity for less than 15 hours, and this would be my first jam in it. Upon importing the assets I noticed issues with the lighting and coloring. I went back and forth between Blender and Unity trying to find the issue, tried exporting to fbx manually, nothing fixed it. Though I didn’t figure it out until the middle of the next day, it turned out that my 4×16 color palette was being compressed and lost color information.

• Total income: $130.38 without personal investments
• Total income: $3355.74 with personal investments
• Total expenses: $0.00
• Total hours: 191.75 At the start of November I decided that supporting the community a bit more would be a great addition with a Discord bot and other improvements to my streaming setup and the overlay visuals for the stream. This turned out to be

• Total income: $335.12 without personal investments
• Total income: $3466.44 with personal investments
• Total expenses: $0.00
• Total hours: 106

• Total income: $290.60 without personal investments
• Total income: $3677.63 with personal investments
• Total expenses: $636.97 + unspecified amount
• Total hours: 133.50

• Total income: $397.53 without personal investments
• Total income: $3791.75 with personal investments
• Total expenses: $52.99 + unspecified amount
• Total hours: 182.00

• Total income: $262.79 without personal investments
• Total income: $4640.54 with personal investments
• Total expenses: $29.99 + unspecified amount
• Total hours: 178.25

• Total income: $107.83 without personal investments
• Total income: $3578.20 with personal investments
• Total expenses: $105.17
• Total hours: 176.75

• Total income: $262.20 without personal investments
• Total income: $4364.69 with personal investments
• Total expenses: $526.95
• Total hours: 155.75