My first venture into 3D. It's gonna be hard to get something playable out, but I'm motivated!
Blender is still so difficult to use and I need a tutorial for everything but I'm going to make every model myself anyway.

Here's a gif of what I've got after a couple of nights.

https://gfycat.com/ShyKaleidoscopicFlyingfish

I'm going to follow the theme and make the story the main focus.
See you on the other side!

Hello you, I’m HuvaaKoodia; we might have exchanged words in the past! Didn’t have time for Kajam last time (and probably not this time either unfortunately) due to putting together my plan for this year. In short, I’m going independent (Exciting times!) making multiple 2 month solo project from scratch. Mostly for fun, maybe for profit?

Here's the devlog at TigSource for the first project.

Just so that this doesn’t become all about self promotion, I’d be interested in hearing your opinions on interactive digital media. I’ve tried to explain it here the best I can, yet the only way to see if it sticks is to throw it at people. Written from a developer angle, keep that in mind.

Cheers.

So the 2nd Kajam is over, and I'm very happy with the result (and we won, sort of)!

This was a very busy month for me, but fortunately I was working with some very talented individuals. They deserve most of the credit as I only managed to push a small amount of code and a couple of level designs.

I think the game is pretty fun, despite the simple gameplay. The music & SFX are great (albeit lodged in my head forever), and everything fits together nicely. There are also some brilliant touches which I would never have thought of myself, like the cat, which give the game character.

Given more time, I think we could have benefited from adding some hazardous items (e.g. spikes) for more varied gameplay, and perhaps some animations for the player in particular. But then, the lack of animation works quite well with the retro theme, and the game doesn't really feel like it's lacking. More probably we just chose a very realistic set of features for a game jam, and executed them quite well.

I learned a few things from working with wan, too: how useful a design document can be; how to pick a simple idea and do a good job (I quite often fail to complete something because it's too complicated); and how to drive something through to completion.

Overall I'm chuffed with the result and proud to have been involved :D

I made a simple room based level generator for Infested Zone. It is heavily inspired by the generator in Spelunky.
Here's how it ticks.

The generator

1. Create a room database

In the handy dandy CSV format. The first line designates the type of the room, which sides it contain doors (openings) on and if it can be rotated or not.

Room Base 1 1 0 0 r
w,w,w,w,.,.,w,w,w,w
w,l,w,w,.,.,w,w,l,w
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,w,w
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,w,w
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,w,w
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,w,w
w,l,w,w,w,w,w,w,l,w
w,w,w,w,w,w,w,w,w,w

Extremely easy to setup in LibreOffice Calc with conditional formatting,

Likewise easy to implement in Unity. Just read the file and split lines with comma as the separator.

(I'm not going to bore you with code)

2. Create a 5x5 grid

A multidimentional int array, nothing else is needed.

3. Set one of the corners as the goal

Just pick a random corner. No safeguards here.

4. Find a valid path from the center to the goal using random walk

Random walk: pick a random direction, keep track of positions already visited, back up if surrounded by walls or visited positions, stop if goal reached otherwise repeat. A recursive function works well here.

This results in all sorts of paths. At worst the whole grid is filled, but usually gives a pretty straight forward path. The random walk can be skewed towards the goal position by weighting the direction choosing part (I'm not doing this as you can see in the gif below)

5. Add a valid sequence of rooms to the path

Making sure the doors match. Other than that the rooms are completely random. This is where earmarking each room with its doors comes to great use.

6. Add random rooms to other positions.

The randomization can be weighted or otherwise limited here if the results looks silly. Rooms with less doors seem to work pretty well as they don't mess too much with the path.

Done deal!

Conclusion

The room database is the saving grace here. No need to worry about invalid connections or silly shapes as the rooms are authored by a human designer. Rotating them adds a surprising about of variation too and the FOV system hides the grid like shape of the level pretty well.

My game Endless Assault submitted.
Not as juicy as i was hoping, but had fun making it and I learned a bit more about unity's lighting and particle effets so overall ok.

I had grand plans for 1st Kajam: https://alakajam.com/post/235/a-la-kajam.
How did it turn out? Well, I managed to get a game out, and there is some polish to it, but nowhere near to what I had in mind.
It seems working on a game for a month or so is much harder than working on a game for just a weekend.

It was a pleasant experience anyhow, so no regrets.

Teleballtation

I've been distracted by some other games. My attention span for making games isn't very long, so I lost interest in the project for the Kajam pretty fast. ._.

Distraction #1(making a pokemon game from the ground up):

Distraction #2(messing around with perlin noise):
https://twitter.com/DaFluffyPotato/status/928466402633232386

Distraction #3(making an online co-op shooter roguelike):
https://twitter.com/DaFluffyPotato/status/929481927756861440

I don't think these long game jams are a good idea for me, I switch projects constantly, so it's hard for me to actually care about a single project for that long. There have only been 3 games I've made that I never lost interest in developing for more than a month, and I've been making games for 4 years. 48 hour game jams are perfect for me though! ^-^

I'm looking forward to the next Alakajam! and I'll probably see some of you during Ludum Dare #40.

This is where I stopped on the project(also in my last post):

Finished early. Sure enough could spend more time on polish, but other projects are awaiting so better cut it here.

Try it out (no WebGL due to unity issues, unfortunately)

Here's the repo for the metaball effect.

Audio is more or less in at the moment; I've only started on graphics. Should be able to hack something passable together this week.

EDIT:
Just finished the first and second levels. There will be an actual enemy in the third level though.

(older post)
Now that I've finished my level editor, I've started working on the actual game! ^-^