LD58 - GAME JAM! - Ludam Dare # 58 - The Return of Tom Lander
I decided to participate in the Ludam Dare 72 hour game jam this season with the local Game Dev community in minneapolis. I posted in their discord that i could offer artwork for games as sprites or 3d models in crocotile. A guy responded and we formed a two man team.
The guy who responded was this guy: https://ruben-tipparach.itch.io/
So after looking as his games, i was excited to work with him. his taste in graphics were similar to mine. He said he responded to my message on discord because he also uses crocotile to make models, but has since found the same workflow in blender.
For this jam, we decided to use Picotron, a virtual machine.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php
A mini operating system used to make super-nintendo games. There are limits to what it can do which further encourages creativity. restraints are what make you be creative. I was stoked to hear him agree with me on this.
He built a whole 3-d engine in picotron.
Then we decided to make a sequel to his first Tom Lander game called Lander's Revenge that he also made in picotron.
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He got a 4 thruster ship working in a 3d engine he built in Picotron.
I was stoked. i love how it looks.
This was probably the first 3d game in Picotron ever made?
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The controls were super hard, WASD to control each thruster.
After much effort i was able to land the ship on top of a building.
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I made some textures that could go into the game.
the next day
I drove to minneapolis and met reuben at the game dev HQ. it was cool to meet my teammate in real life. I watched him write the story to the game in five minutes off the top of his head. My job was to create cutscene sprites for the story in the intro.
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Tom Lander king of the moon. Little did he know the Barons placed sleeper cell on the Alien planet Gradix, they became mindless terrorists who blew up cities and government officials in the name of the Tom Lander, framing him for countless murders.
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The Gradixians got pissed, and invaded the moon, they showed up with a giant spaceship and blew up everything, the Moon kingdom evacuated and spread out across the galaxy. Tom was stripped of his title, escaped and lived in the outer worlds as an anonymous blue collar worker. He’s amazing lander skills landed him as the Ace Lander Pilot of the Shimigu Mining industry.
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One day, they received a message from the Gradixians. They are still pissed at Tom Lander, and demand they hand him over. The Shimigu board said “Fuck that!”, and decided that it was worth defending Tom and his Lander.
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They have 10 days to prepare before the Gradixians arrive. Tom must build up his fortress, by doing what he does best. Pick up valuable resources and land them in Texius city. The brilliant builders will build up the fort and fight back the invaders.
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We also joked about how cool it would be to have a super nintendo box art for the games thumbnail, this made sense because picotron is about equal to the power of what the super nintendo was capable of back in the day. To make these drawings i used a technique mentioned to me by a girl at the game dev meeting the last time, called PhotoBashing. which is a technique some people frown upon but as a painter im totally alright with. its where you just draw on top of an image, instead of using is as reference. for a game jam this is like perfect its also lo fi and cool.
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By the time i got him these assets, the ship was looking like this:
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I have to make sure i dont make this post too long to publish.
At this point we really needed music. and the only way you can add music to a picotron game is through picotrons music editor. ruben had no experience working with it so i offered to buy picotron for the jam and learn how to make music in the last 18 hours of the jam. thank got i found this awesome tutorial.
I was able to make some songs
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ive always loved video game music and used to play with fruity loops. i was stoked for music to be my task.
then:
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Someone in the Picotron discord made an insane remix of my song, by ear.
i loved this game jam. 72 hours is the perfect amount of time for one too.
go play the game!
https://ruben-tipparach.itch.io/the-return-of-tom-lander
and here is the source code