Caribou Simulator – My first Ludum Dare

This weekend I participated in Ludum Dare for the first time, and I wanted the hardcore experience of doing all assets by myself, in 48 hours. It was awesome.

First of all, if you want to play the game you can find it in GameJolt or in LudumDare.

Even before I started jamming I was already thinking on making a game about boreal caribou, simply because it is related to my Geography Master’s Thesis. The theme of Ludum Dare 40, however, is: “the more you have the worse it is”.

I quickly came up with a concept where you must lead caribou to a safe zone. However, the larger your group gets the harder it becomes to avoid wolves and other hazards.

Making of the block wave effect in Color Wave

Color wave was a lot of fun to program during Global Game Jam. The wave effect was the first thing I imagined and actually programmed into the game, even before we thought of the different color effects.

A lot of people got interested in the game as soon as they saw the effect in action. Many of them complimented us on it and some people asked me how it was made. So here you go, making of Color Wave.

The important stats for an indie game developer

As I’ve discussed in last week’s post, scope creep can be a real issue especially in an independent scenario where at the end of the day it’s really just you and a couple pals working on a game in your free time.

That made me reevaluate not only our game project but also my own performance as game developer and how I could improve it.

So I came up with a list of important IRL stats an indie game developer should have in their build. This is meant for devs in a big project context, not jam-like events.

Creativity

This is overrated. Dump this stat. Sure it helps a little to be creative when you’re brainstorming ideas for an innovative game, but that is less than 0.01% of game development. Plus a good amount of creative games are born with iteration and random chance, not necessarily during the brainstorming session. What really makes the difference is the determination and competence to take an idea (good or not) all the way to the end with a solid execution.

Staying positive when all of your hard work was for nothing

VeilWalker

When I used to work as a research assistant at university, sometimes I faced the situation where all my daily work was lost because of a power outage and I hadn’t saved my progress. A coworker of mine used to say that lost work is a good thing for a number of reasons: first you pay more attention in the future in order to not lose any work; second you do your work faster the second time because you’ve already done it before; and third you get to review what you’ve done and can come with better solutions than before, most of the time ending with a better product and a deeper understanding of whatever you’re dealing with.

VeilWalker game has been in the oven for a few months now, but the idea of making this game has been under discussion  since December 2015. We’ve had many ideas for game concepts…

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Making your game go Ka-Boom with destruction physics

VeilWalker

Recently I’ve posted this GIF on Reddit and it received surprisingly good feedback, so I decided to post about how to achieve this effect using Blender and Unity3D.

First of all, you need an object with good geometry, no disconnected vertices or edges, no internal faces or areas with zero thickness. Sometimes you can repair your model with the triangulate modifier. If your model does not have proper topology the Cell Fracture function will fail and you will not obtain the desired results.

The wall that I’ll destroy in this example.

Next, enable the Cell Fracture add-on function in Blender under File > User Preferences…

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The secrets to building a smooth 3rd person camera Rig

I’ve worked hard on this camera rig for the last few weeks. Here are the results!

VeilWalker

I’ve tried using free camera rigs available in the Unity asset store, however none of them were as robust as I wanted and most of the time the scripts were unoptimized and hard to read. So I decided to build my own from scratch.

The 3rd person camera rig can be very hard to program, it is arguably the hardest type of camera to make so how do we start?

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The Hero’s Journey, and how not to use it

The Hero’s Journey is a story structure derived from Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth from his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. It was built by analyzing similarities in many proven by time stories and tales. Many successful works have used this structure since then.

Movies that use it: Star Wars, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, Avatar, Fight Club, etc, etc, etc.

How to build meaningful experiences as an indie developer

Jesse Schell, in his book “The Art of Game Design”, establishes theme as the unifying core out of which each part of your game branches. Like the theme of “being batman” is the central idea around of which all the music, game mechanics, graphics, story and overall feeling of the Arkham series games are made.

A good theme can help you to better structure the experience you are trying to build, and to make sure that all the pieces have good synergy.

A resonant theme, however, in addition to all that will also be a meaningful experience to the players, and might stick with them for a lot longer.

“The best themes are ones that resonate with players – themes that touch players deeply”

-Jesse Schell

But how do we know that we have a resonant theme?

Is visual scripting any good for game development?

aFirst of all, I want to say that yes, visual scripting is a valid option for many people, and there are a few cases where people got to publish a game made (almost) entirely by using visual scripting. But there is no way it is ever going to replace code writing and here’s why.

This week I evaluated Unity’s Play Maker as a tool for producing our game. It’s a visual scripting tool for Unity. I watched several tutorials explaining how to use it step by step. The guy narrating them says he has “worked at several big studios” and that “play maker is fast”, then he shows how to do something with Play Maker and he says “if you had hand scripted all this stuff, even if you’re a good scripter, it would’ve taken, you know, a little more time”.

This is when I knew this wasn’t for me. This guy is lying. I don’t blame him, he is trying to sell his product, of course he is going to say good things about it, but come on you don’t need to lie about it! He could’ve said “look how this is clear to understand, code is not as visual as this”, or “this is a good option for people who are getting started to programming”.

I’ve made an image comparing a visual script the tutorial guy made in Play Maker and a piece of code I wrote that does exactly the same thing.