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

What a weekend project this one proved to be, I spent most of my Friday looking through the themes to get basic ideas, something I usually avoid. Prior to theme announcement I was assuming the theme would be unfavorable, since I had great ideas for others and so-so ideas for the rest. Ancient Technology was a so-so idea that

Burden follows a woman’s journey through her past, as she is chased by her traumatic and guilt-ridden memories of the plane crash that killed her family. She was the only survivor.

The game was made for LudumDare #33 as a Jam entry.  A team of three with less than 72 hours, Jeremy “mmango” Bell doing audio, Daniel “MechanicalLife” Akesson doing visuals and myself doing the programming.

Here is a game I made in a single hour for OneHourGameJam the theme, and thus title is: Flight

Flight (for Mac OS X)

Flight (for Windows)

Working on a game in an hour is a great way to learn the weaknesses about your development pipeline, be it in coding, art or audio.  The result is almost always a project that will get thrown away, seriously it took 60 minutes to make, but the experience is certain to teach you something and sharpen game development skills.

A quick entry for the 4th OneHourGameJam entry: Survive.

Survive (for Windows)

Working on a game in an hour is a great way to learn the weaknesses about your development pipeline, be it in coding, art or audio.  The result is almost always a project that will get thrown away, seriously it took 60 minutes to make, but the experience is certain to teach you something and sharpen game development skills.