Ludum Dare 47 : Hamster-Wheel Hero

2021-06-13 2:46 PM

Last early Autumn I accepted a job as a technical artist at Blackbird interactive working on the game Hardspace Shipbreaker. One issue is I had almost 0% experience with Unity. The prior years in my career I worked with either studio specific custom game engines or the Unreal engine. The last time I had used Unity was in 2012.

I was taking some time off before starting the job so I wanted to spend some time learning Unity before starting the job. So I decided to enter Ludum Dare 47 and use Unity as my main development tool for the game.

Hamster-Wheel Hero was my entry for the Ludum Dare 47 jam. It was a mostly solo effort with my partner helping out with some very cute pixel art of the cats and hamster.

The way I tend to learn a new technology best is to dive in with a project, hit a bunch of walls and then learn the idiomatic ways to solve the problems I encountered at a later date. Overall the experience was quite pleasant and went quite smooth.

Art as always is done with my favorite pixel editor, Aseprite. For the music, the main song was made with a Deepmind12 hardware synthesizer along with an Arturia Drumbrute Impact for the precussion. The game over music was something I made quickly on the a Pocket Operator Arcade. Finally, for the sound effects I can't remember for sure but I'm almost 100% sure I used Bfxr as that's what I always use for lofi sound effects.

Web Download link : https://alexm.itch.io/hamsters-nightmare

Music link : https://soundcloud.com/futurecrush/sets/hamster-wheel-hero-ost

resources/images/2021/03/HamsterWheelHero01.png

Tags: gamejam

GB Jam 2016 : Meowshroom Medley

2021-03-07 9:46 PM

In 2016 autumn I entered the GameBoy Jam where if I recall correctly, you had to make a game with a 4 color palette and you had one week to do it.

I think this was the last game I made on the HaxeFlixel framework and Haxe language. Hopefully not forever though. I love the Haxe programming language and the HaxeFlixel framework. It's a joy to work with.

After this jam I didn't enter another game jam for quite a while. Work and other parts of life took over but recently I've started finding the time and motivation to work on small projects again. It would be fun to do another limited color palette pixel art game again. The contraints really help me with motivation in game jams.

resources/images/2021/03/meowshroom_medley_animgameplay.gif

Tags: gamejam

Catching up with old blog posts

2020-03-07 9:46 PM

Over the last few years I haven't been updating this blog. I'm going to try to dig through all the half done blog posts from the last few years and get them posted over the next couple months.

Tags: misc