Hope everyone has a good new year. I’m looking forward to classes beginning and taking part in Global Game Jam again in the near future.
I got a new camera for Christmas and have a Flickr account so feel free to add me if that is a thing that you do.
Shortly before Christmas I finally attempted something I’ve been planning for ages: I took part in Ludum Dare. If you’re unaware, Ludum Dare is an international, 48 hour long, individual game development competition where all content and code is to be created within the limited time period.
I’m really glad I took part and regret not doing so sooner. I was worried about having to create my own artwork and music, and that taking part would leave me exhausted for days afterwards and interfere with University work. In reality, I found having a game which I had created every part of incredibly rewarding and am quite proud of my artistic and compositional efforts, even if they’re nowhere near the level of the group projects I’ve worked on in the part. Additionally, I found that staying up for 48 hours straight would have been completely unnecessary and probably detrimental, and maintained fairly sensible hours.
I achieved much more than I had originally expected during the weekend, but definitely saw the jam as a chance to develop something cool with no obligation to continue rather than a competitive endeavour. That said, the community feedback has been one of the most awesome parts so far. It’s a really awesome feeling to have something I made actually described as “fun”, of course, but it’s the constructive criticisms on problems I recognised but didn’t have time to resolve completely, such as collision, elements I never thought anyone would play long enough to require, like an ending, and additions I hadn’t even considered, like your achievements affecting the game, which I am most thankful for.
In response to the elected theme of “Discovery”, I made a simple research sim game called “Let’s Science”. You take control of a lab and its scientists, and direct them to make a series of ground-breaking discoveries in order to become a world-leading research facility.
I worked in Unity, along with Paint.NET (graphics), sfxr (audio effects) and LMMS (music). I had hoped to work in 3D (having practiced my incredibly basic modelling skills in Blender) but didn’t feel this idea would benefit from it – maybe next time.
You can check out the game along with the other fantastic entries on the Ludum Dare site.
Unfortunately a few months ago Abi, Jess, Kieran, Ian and I went our seperate ways into further education and employment and the development of Pollen iPhone ceased. It became clear that scheduling development time on top of full-time employment was not realistic, especially without access to Unity iPhone at home, and that progressing as a start-up as our sole means of employment would not be financially viable.
Additionally, Pollen was a fairly ambitious idea which would require significantly more development time that various other ideas we had since come up with. Maybe we’ll get to work on them some time in future…
Here’s a (very) early development video of the climbing ants I worked on, from before we even had 3d enemies in the game.
For more content and artwork from the development of the game, check out Jess’s project blog and portfolio, as well as Abi’s portfolio.
As ever, not posting to my blog frequently tends to mean I am either doing nothing of interest, or enough that I don’t have time to post about it. Thankfully, in this case I am doing the latter. Here’s a brief update to list what I’ve been up to, and assure my parents that I am alive and well.