Tri

"Tri" is another Unity game I made for a contest.

At the end of April 2011, the Ludum Dare 20 began - and I was ready to make a game from scratch in (less than) 48 hours. The theme that got the most votes from the community was "It's Dangerous to go Alone. Take this!", a famous quote from the original "Legend of Zelda".

To be honest, I had the idea for my game the night before the contest started (and the theme was revealed), which was 4 o'clock in the morning in my timezone. So I was kind of lucky my idea more or less fit the theme when I woke up, as I don't think I would have finished the game if I first had to come up with a core gameplay.

Now, "Tri" is a puzzle game inspired by "Portal", where you have to think your way through the environment (instead of just shooting bullets into enemies). "Tri" uses ego perspective and the normal shooter control layout, but gives you only one weapon - the "Tri Force Field Generator Gun" (the name is an oh so clever reference to the "Zelda" games). With this gun, you can shoot three force field generators which will stick to the grey surfaces. If you place the generators correctly, a force field with the shape of a triangle will appear. As you can walk on this force field, it is a device to create platforms to reach places too high or far away.

There also are laser rays which you can reflect with your force fields, so you can redirect them and therefore activate or destroy certain obstacles. There are no limitations of how much triangles you can create, therefore the game is a little bit easy - on the other side it's great fun to build as much force fields as you can, so why restricting the player here?

After the event I chose to put the game from the normal "Compo" into the "Jam" (which is the same contest, but with relaxed rules and no chance to get voted for), as I used some code from the Unify Wiki for the first person controller. (The inbuilt controller had a gameplay-breaking bug.) I wrote the majority of the gamelogic by myself, nonetheless. Complying with the rules, I did everything else, too - graphics, sound effects (with bfxr) and music. The music was made by clicking randomly in inudge an hour or so before deadline.

"Tri" was mentioned with a screenshot right in the official result announcement!

Here are some screenshots from the development progress. The first task was to make it possible that the player can shoot the generators, and they should connect themselves automatically through thick lines.

After that, the laser reflection functionality got implemented.

The generated triangles got some restrictions, so they can't be infinitely big.

After the core gameplay was coded, the second day mainly was spent on leveldesign. I had to roll my own shader for the texts on the wall, which unfortunately doesn't work on older machine apparently.

The main menu for choosing the level (your progress gets saved) and exiting the game was implemented last.

Pitman Krumb

In March 2011, the seventh Seven Day Roguelike Challenge took place. The 7DRLC is a contest without prices where the participants create a game within a week only; of course, the game has to be a roguelike.

If you don't know what a roguelike is, don't worry - I didn't know much about it before I entered the Challenge, either. You probably can read a definition on Wikipedia, but as I was told the main elements are:

• randomness, regarding world generation and gameplay
• permadeath, which means no savegames and quickload
• turnbased gameplay, so you have time to think

As usual, Jana Reinhardt and I teamed up and together we made "Pitman Krumb". The premise is simple: you play the dwarven protagonist Krumb on a not-so-epic quest for mighty artifacts, collecting a lot of items and fighting against vile monsters. Jana did the graphics (character models, environment textures, decorations, GUI elements) while I used Unity3D for the interactive part. Again, Kevin MacLeod provided us with the music we needed.

Most roguelikes have procedurally generated dungeons and rooms as levels. I was sure I wouldn't compete in this field and tried something different instead: Now in "Pitman Krumb" the player has a couple of so-called "cards", which is our name for several pre-designed world sections with x*x tiles to walk on (with x in the range of 4 to 8 ). The player can distribute these cards on his journey and create his own dungeon this way. Everytime a new card is placed, new monsters and items also are created. Thus, "Pitman Krumb" should remind the player of a board game, which is complemented by the lack of animations and the style of the items (flat tokens on the ground).

The game generally is a role playing game, so the player can use different weapons, armours, potions and other magic stuff. After slaying enough monsters he can train several skills which make Krumb faster, stronger or more intelligent. At the end of each level a ladder appears which leads the brave Pitman to the next challenge ...

All Seven Day Roguelike Challengers are winners as soon as they submit a finished game in the given timeframe. But as it is tradition, a Commitee consisting of several members of the roguelike development community evaluate all entries and give points on categories like "Completeness", "Fun" and "Roguelikeness". Out of 98 participants (46 of them completed their games) we made the seventh place (2.44 points average, with 1 being the worst and 3 the best). This is not too bad for our first roguelike!

While Jana posted daily updates of our progress on our blog on ratking.de, I used the more or less official website 7drl.org and wrote small articles every day. Here is a list of them, as there isn't anything like this on the site unfortunately:

• Our first roguelike!
• First day survived
• Pitman – second day over
• Pitman – third day, still alive
• Pitman – after the fourth day
• Pitman – only two days left
• Pitman – the last day approaches
• Pitman – last day, and finished!
• Pitman – After-Challenge Update

Pitman Krumb: Post-Mortem

The pictures here are some of the screenshots of Unity3D I made while working on "Pitman Krumb". While the official, good-looking screenshots mostly show Jana's superior talent for art, these ones are just a documentation of my personal progress; that's why I wrote day and time on every screen.

Day 1

Our work began on Sunday, 03/06/2011.

First feature to be implemented were the tileable level meshes which are generated on runtime.

Also: pathfinding.

Day 2

Added creatures (the player character is "just" a special kind of creature), and the possibility for the player to extent the level with some more meshes.

Day 3

Creatures can attack (on their own) and be attacked. They die sometimes, too.

Day 4

There are items that the player can pick up, which means he has an inventory. Decorations stand in the way and often can be used (e.g. health fountains).

Day 5

The Pitman can use magic and weapons and enter another dungeon through a ladder.

Day 6

Krumb can learn new skills after he earned enough experience points. NPCs will talk to him.

Day 7

There are no screenshots from the IDE for the last day as I was busy balancing the game (I didn't really succeed) and writing the "story" and doing the leveldesign. The game was pretty complete at this point.

The plot was the following: Krumb has to find some artifacts, but every person he meets doesn't have them. In the end, NPCs and books with texts were totally unimportant because the player can choose not to talk to them / read them and just advance to the next dungeon. Thus, the story is in the game for atmospheric reasons only.

1930

"1930" was made with Unity for the Mini Ludum Dare #23 on Sunday, January 23rd 2011. The theme was "The name of the game must be a year", with subtheme "Spring physics". I mostly ignored the subtheme, but I think I was pretty good at that year-thing.

I created the concept, wrote the code (in C#) and modelled the level. Jana Reinhardt created the 3D model for the gorilla. The music was downloaded from Kevin MacLeod. The piece is called "Spazzmatica Polka" and perfectly fits the colors I've chosen.

It's a singleplayer game, where you have to memorize a path from one blue building to another. The path is presented at the start of each level, and can contain gaps which you have overcome with a long jump.

"1930" has only 8 levels, as development time was pretty short (ca. 12 hours) and I really lost motivation at the end of the day. You can play the game here. If you rather want to watch than play, Vimeo has a video walkthrough.

Karoshi!

= death from overwork

The German board for (hobby) programmers and game developers ZFX hosted the ZFX Action III. The ZFX Actions are gamedev contests with loose terms; for the third instance, the goal was create a (mini) puzzle and/or strategy game within 2 months (September and October 2010).

Jana Reinhardt and I decided in the midst of September to do an entry. We went for the two themes "chocolate" and "bureaucracy" (there were four for choosing - the other two were "storm" and "oil"), and immediately began the work on "Karoshi!", a multiplayer-only strategy game in the style of "Dungeon Keeper" (great game BTW).

The core gameplay is simple: Build an office, recruit employees, and destroy the desk of the adversary company boss. To do so, train your employees (which are interns at the beginning) to be mobbers and vandals. Mobbers hurt other people while vandals attack furniture.

In order to generate money you have to place desks and chairs (thus creating office space) and give your employees tasks. To reduce the time an employee needs to complete these tasks you can train him to be a geek.

Training is done at copiers. Another type of furniture you can buy is the plant. You use it to delegate your minions and let them patrol from location to location.

Employees which were attacked by interns or mobbers have to heal themselves on vending machines with chocolate bars. Initially we wanted to implement coffee machines, but this way we could serve the theme "chocolate".

We wrote the concept by creating one single text document which was edited by each of us several times while the contest lasted. We chose Unity as the game engine, as Jana created her diploma project "Ketonauts" with it. It soon became apparent that is a reliable tool for prototyping and easy to use. And it has a free version!

I programmed the game logic in C#, while Jana made the 3D models and textures of nearly everything you see in the game. Only the floor of the level is my contribution to the look, as it is generated on run-time and uses a simple texture atlas.

A big portion of the time was spent on the GUI. It was very extensive this time although Unity's GUI system isn't the best; but now it automatically rescales to look good with every resolution. The second biggest hassle was the multiplayer functionality. Although I had experiences with RakNet from former projects (e.g. "Omertà") this is something I never mastered. As this was a hobby project I decided to give every client the control of its own logic (movement of minions and such), which is very prone to hacks/cheats and should never be done at home, kids!

All in all "Karoshi!" is the most complete game Jana and I ever did together, and it was part of the motivation to actually found Rat King Entertainment, our own gamedev studio. By the way, the music of Karoshi! was made by Kevin MacLeod.

You can find more pictures of the development progress in this Dropbox gallery. And watch a gameplay video on YouTube or Vimeo, if you don't have somebody to play with.

Moon Laser Duo

Since some years I visit the Devmania (formerly known as Dusmania), an annual meeting of enthusiastic hobby game developers. One of the highlights of this event is the overnight contest, where people create small games over the night (as the meeting takes place over two days). 2010 was the first year I also participated in this contest.

The theme this time was "Mondschein" (moonshine).

The whole night, from October 2nd to October 3rd, I worked on "Moon Laser Duo", together with Björn Grunewald, a former co-student.

After I thought of a concept I started Unity - and was unable to do anything for some hours. It was pretty late when the idea which was formulated at the beginning (it consisted of a human and vampire walking on a planet, trying to catch each other) got better and stimulated me to actually write the game logic. While I hacked some code into Visual C# Express Edition, Björn created the graphics in 3dsmax.

All in all it was worth it - we made first place!

"Moon Laser Duo" now is a simple coop multiplayer game for two people at the same computer with splitscreen.

You and your partner control two little astronauts on a moon who have a laser between them. The laser destroys the aliens which constantly spawn and try to kill you. If you and your friend are too far from each other the laser will diminish and eventually vanish. So you have to stick together to eliminate as many aliens as possible and therefore get a high score.

The music was downloaded at RKO. It's "Moon Patrol (v3 Edit)" from Doron Deutsch.

You can watch a video of the game on YouTube. Or even better, download it from Dropbox (RAR format, 7.03 MiB). Be aware that this is the contest version, so bugs may exist, and the gameplay is unbalanced.