Art Post Mortem for “My Little Dungeon”

Hey everyone,

Simon here, with my late post mortem for the LD23 Jam. I was responsible for the graphics for our Ludum Dare Jam game called “My Little Dungeon”. I recommend you play it if you haven’t already… and rate it. Thanks!

Goto “My Little Dungeon”

So this is an overview of the 3 days and what we did from my own perspective. This means it is my perspective and Stefan and Gavin may have different views on things.
There were two first time things for me with this game:

• It was my first Ludum Dare game for me.
• It was the first time I did pixel art animations at all.

The Tileset and the steps it took until I had all of them…

The tools I used:

• GraphicsGale (All animations and most of the pixel art)
• Photoshop (Some art/logo and some reworks and cutting/layer-work)
• PyxelEdit (I used it for previewing the tilesets)

So you want to know what went wrong and what went right? Well then, lets start after the break:

“My Little Dungeon” – Our Ludum Dare 23 game

Last weekend we took part once again in Ludum Dare (website). But this time we entered the jam competition as a team. Gavin Harrison (website) also decided to jump on board providing us with awesome tunes & sfx! Needless to say, we had a blast

The product of our 72 hours of work is called “My Little Dungeon”. It’s a reversed RPG of sorts where instead of controlling a hero you control the dungeon building process and hope that your hero makes it through alive. The ultimate goal is to beat the boss at the end. If you don’t challenge your hero enough you might end up with a weakling unable to beat the final boss.. Push him too much and he’ll certainly die.

We’re proud of it and we think it’s entertaining to play as well. Check it out for yourself over at the Ludum Dare page: My Little Dungeon

Let us know what you think!

Pixel Towers music available for purchase

Played Pixel Towers and loved the music?

Well here’s some good news for you: The soundtrack is now available for purchase from Gavin Harrison’s Bandcamp

In style with the rest of Pixel Towers it’s completely up to you how much and if you’d like to pay for the soundtrack. We might be biased but we think the soundtrack is easily worth some money. This is your chance to support good music in indie games!

Have a listen to soundtrack right here or click through to get to the Bandcamp page to purchase the track.

Want to play Pixel Towers on your desktop?

Well – Now you can!

We’ve made a desktop version of Pixel Towers available for download. Please note that the desktop version does not support online highscores. But besides that it’s the exact same game.

You will need Java Runtime (from here) to run this succesfully on your desktop of choice (PC, Mac, Linux). If you have Java installed, simply download the zip file below, extract it to a folder and double click it to start the game. It’ll keep track of your highscores locally.

Download it from here: Download

Enjoy playing Pixel Towers!

Pixel Towers – out now!

EXCITING NEWS: Pixel Towers is finally out on the Android Market!

We’ve been busy finishing this one up over the weekend. And we’re proud of it. Pixel Towers merges classic one-button gameplay with lovely pixelart accompanied by retro chiptune music. The game is powered by Scoreloop to keep track of highscores.

We provide Pixel Towers completely free of charge. The game available is an uncrippled, fully-featured, no-ad version and you will never have to pay for Pixel Towers.

If you love Pixel Towers and wish to support us, you have the option of purchasing the “Cookies & Beer” version of Pixel Towers. By purchasing the “Cookies & Beer” version you will allow us to enjoy a few “Cookies & Beers” during the development of our next game I mean, who doesn’t like Cookies & Beer?!

Click “Read more” to get to the links & QR codes.

PixelTowers – Our new arcade game

First up.. Awaken is not dead! We’ve just been busy with a little side project but are still working on Awaken. We’re excited to present you the product of our distraction:

PixelTowers is an addictive little arcade game in which you stack building storeys (incl. people in them) as high as possible. Sounds simple enough? Well it is, but it’s fun!

We’ve had the very talented Mr. Gavin Harrison work on the music for PixelTowers. If you ever need someone to produce top notch game music hit him up! (http://gavinharrisonsounds.com/)

We’re very very close to releasing the game to the Android market. In the meantime have a look at the video after the break to get an idea of the gameplay.

Merry Christmas!

To celebrate Christmas I made a quick Christmas version of “The Invention of Colour”. Check it out here: Christmas!

Stay safe people & MERRY CHRISTMAS!

The Invention of Colour

Last weekend I took part in Ludum Dare once again. I ended up creating a short little experimental storytelling game called “The Invention of Colour”. The entire thing (art, code, music) was created in under 48 hours.

You can find out more about the game here (incl. a video): The Invention of Colour

Walking into the competition I had one goal in mind: Create something that has a dense, expressive mood and portraits a distinct character to the player. I wanted the player to walk away from the game feeling like he actually got to know the main character’s emotional world by just listening to him for 2 minutes.

I personally find the transfer of emotional concepts to be one of the most challenging for a game designer. Quite often realism does not translate to something that’s emotionally impacting. The current trend seems to be toward hyper-realism. But to be honest I was a lot more emotionally involved in some of the classic games of the 8bit & 16bit era. There’s a huge potential when we leave gaps for the player to imagine things.

What is your experience with this? How can we as game designers engage players more on an emotional level? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Md2 exporter script for 3ds Max

For our animated models in Awaken we decided to go with md2. Even though it is a somewhat antiqued format (hello Quake) it seems to fit our purposes best since it doesn’t put much drain on the poor mobile CPU. Who knows we might still end up having to go down the vertex skinning route..

We spent way too much time trying to find a way to export the models from 3ds Studio Max to md2. Turns out it is a little bit more tricky than first expected. We searched the internet for exporters / plugins and there’s really not much around. There’s one commercial plugin (QTip) and a few really old scripts.

Finally we found a script posted by a kind user somewhere in a forum which seemed up to date. We ended up having to modify the original script slightly to work with the libgdx workflow better. So all the glory & praise goes to the original authors, we just made the tiniest changes!

Either way, we thought we’d save you the time and trouble to find a script if you’re in a similar position Read below to get all the details and instructions.

New Update and some Screenshots

Been a while since the last update. Lots and lots of stuff coming to Awaken soon. Our main focus is currently on the combat system. Hopefully we will be able to let you kill some monsters in the next few weeks and gather some much needed feedback on combat.

In the meantime we got a small update to play around with. We’ve fixed pretty much all bugs you guys reported. Additionally we’ve been playing around with the lighting and the new version is a lot more atmospheric because of it.