Node Knitters

Playable here

Alright, LD36 is finished and so is our game!

It was a really close call with the placeholder graphics staying in right up until half an hour before the deadline. There was a even a really annoying bug causing the running animation not to play, but a good night’s sleep (well, six hours of it, anyway) and speculating on Phaser’s animation code fixed that as well.

Speaking of Phaser, while I used to like it as a great framework for game jams, I’m thinking of retiring it for good. There were far too many instances where I was pulling on my hair trying to understand why a seemingly harmless feature/function was broken until I came across another one of Phaser’s little “quirks”. For my taste there are simply too many of those. Unity is the new name of the game!

Ugh, what’s this? Looks like crap!

Well, yeah. Prototypes usually look like crap, especially when everything is placeholder graphics. Once we have the final graphics I hope this game will be decent.

IFF - Playable here 

This was my entry to the Ludum Dare 32 game jam, under the theme “An unconventional weapon”. You play as, well, an abstract thing, being attacked by swarms of other abstract things. Your only weapon? The confusion gun. Hitting an enemy with it turns them to your side (or back to theirs). Survival becomes a questions of carefully converting enemies so they perish by friendly fire.

Development was honestly a bit half-assed. I tried a new framework, which is always a terrible idea for a game jam, and promptly ran into some issues I couldn’t fix. Why do bullets fly through walls? That’s not a design choice, that was just an ugly fix to improve performance.

Gameplay-wise I think it’s not too shabby, for my standards anyway. If extended to a fully-featured game, I could see this game actually being fun. However commenters pointed out that I did a horrible job of making the limit of conversions clear. I just blame it to the fact that GUIs are hard... *cough*

I realise it's been a while since the last update. Well, the reasons for that is that after hitting a speed bump on motivation lane, the semester has started. Between classes, voluntary work, paid work and writing my Bachelor thesis, I don't have quality time to work on the project.

But there is good news as well: For one, I don't intend to give up on this. I know that right now the game is not much to begin with, but I have no concern for time restraints, so I am going to make a game, even if it takes years to finish.

Is it just me or is Unity's GUI system weird? Having only one call for drawing a GUI element and getting input from it is unusual. I'd much prefer to work with events. But oh well, you can't have everything.

Also I have decided to cut the scope of this project down. Way down. Basically I split the game into two modules, with some wiggle room for more modules later on. One module is pictured above, while the other ones deals with managing a facility to optimize its production, by placing various machines and assigning robots to certain tasks. It is already questionable if I ever get around to make the second module, so I concentrate on the first one to make it a nice minigame in of itself. 

I recently switched from GameMaker to Unity and scrapped the previous game idea. Why? Because it was crap. It had no actual design or even an idea behind it. I figured if I just started making a game, something fun would come out of the project. But as the saying goes: Make good art.

Apart from that, Unity is a much nicer to use framework/engine than GameMaker. The GM is nice because it is graphical, but places serious limitations, not in features, but in code style on the dev. The fact that 3D is just as easy as 2D in unity is a nice bonus.

This time around I can make use of that to make the game pictured above* actually enjoyable.