The game ended up being a considerable amount shorter than initially intended. I also did not have time to make clipping maps for the scenes, so the rover will sometimes be seen riding over things he’s supposed to be going behind.

I’m fairly happy with what’s there though and would like to expand it and make it into a complete experience, perhaps even a bit beyond what the original scope was intended.

EDIT: Oh, and I added a Windows installer for ease – link below.

LD Entry Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10871

Windows Installer: http://screwylightbulb.com/NixInstaller.exe

Here is my game, please rate and comment! I’ll do a post-mortem later!

It’s quite difficult to beat the game..but keep trying!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10692

Here another pic:

I uploaded the time-lapse for Rock ‘n’ Slash earlier today. You can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHrijodtOmY.

Tags: timelapse time-lapse

So here is my finished entry for LD #23.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11531

I managed to do most of the stuff what I initially planned. I didn’t code all the gameplay elements that I wanted but in the end I figure out that 48 hours is not a lot of time for a game with big scope, especially if you make a voxel engine for the best part of the first day! 😉

Here is a video showing off my game playing:

I will be doing a post mortem post soon and trying to capture a lot of the stuff that is still fresh in my mind.

Overall I had a great time and will definitely be entering future Ludum Dare compos.

Tags: alwaysgeeky, asteroids, ld23, minecraft, tiny world, voxels, when worlds collide

I have uploaded the timelapse of the development of “Grow”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7kWdo3dUpc 

Play the game here

Winding down for the night, and I’m adding a finish line and some text images. Jade is doing some spiffy things with code to make the track phase colors and such!
Here’s a screenshot from my recent test:

(The finish line will go right where that seam is. Shh! It doesn’t exist. :P)

Jade: As you may have noted in kinoko’s previous post, my spline class is not perfect – it still has that annoying seam at the end.

Also, i don’t currently have a function to get the closest point on a spline to another point – which is pretty important for these cars.

Whooooops?

Yeah, so i’ll do that.  Also the track now pulses all rainbow.  I’d post a screenshot but i’m lazy.  Use your imagination.  It’s good for you.

Aiming to get this submitted into the jam later today. After a nights sleep I’ve had some new ideas on how to structure the gameplay – Hopefully I can get them done in time for the deadline tonight, but either way I’m sure I’m going to carry on working on this after the competition is over.

There’s now resources to collect and build with, and enemy blimps to fight off. So its starting to actually resemble a game!

The one thing I have no idea about right now is a title – Any suggestions?

I just got up, and decided to make this update post before school.

currently we have added turrets which kill you and stone blocks which are not subject to tilting, and are about to added missile launchers. Play the latest version here.

screenshot of new objects:

A screenshot showing a turret shooting and stone blocks.

anyways, I hope we can finish this by the end of the day.

Tags: progress, screenshot, update

I unfortunately didnt get as much time as I wanted on this, and cant do anymore today for the jam :c

But I achieved the main bit of what I wanted to do for this which was a little 2d raytracing Light/Shadow system for the little astronaut explorer, Im hoping to continue on this and add some better controls and collision and a bit of narrative as the story’s not exactly clear [non-existant].

In short it was loads of fun and I’m definitly gonna do a full jam next time, live with web stream 😀

Now on to the ratings 😀

Well, the game’s in the bag and after a good nights sleep thought I’d do a submission/postmortem post for myself and anyone who’s interested (and to hopefully drum up some interest )

Submission:
Congratulations Doc, it’s a Shrink Ray!

A platformer shooter where you play as a scientist forced to defend his latest greatest invention from the evil ninja army!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=8352

Post mortem:

What went right
– The basic platformer physics were completed quickly and I came up with a level format that allowed me to define the level completely (with the exception of the enemies) in terms of platforms (including the backgrounds). This kept things moving at a good pace.
– The shrinking and ray gun effects. I was lucky to have been tackling problems like this recently for another project so it was all fresh in my mind (probably a large part of the reason I had the inspiration in the first place I guess). Resizing the characters to arbritrary scales was the easy part, but I really wanted a comic book style shrinking effect (you know, the blurred/faded cascading outline thing) and while it’s not as detailed as I’d hoped I did manage in the last few hours to get an effect close enough that I’m pretty happy with.
– Time management. I didn’t really have a plan but I feel I did prioritize well in terms of functionality, producing a game that wa playable (and fun, in my opinion) as soon as possible and adding features righ up to the last few hours.

What went wrong
– Anything that required artistic skill 😉 …except the main character, I’m really happy with how he turned out. I wanted the game to appear to have a little depth rather than be a totally flat platformer and, while when it works I think it looks good, it really caused me problems trying to create art assets to fit with the style/perspective (Most notably – cars. I really wanted a vehicle or two in the outside section but was completely unable to produce one).
– Enemy AI is practically non existent, they just run straight at you jumping occasionally. I don’t think I was ever going to get a good pathfinding system in there in the time but I would have liked to spice it up a bit to stop them being defeated by the simplist of obstacles.
– Enemy variety. Don’t get me wrong, I like ninjas, but when you’re killing nothing but ninjas all day every day some of the magic is lost. The one other enemy type in game was a pretty poor and ill concieved attempt but I left him in there anyway. I would have really liked to add attack dogs but my artistic skills were no where near up to it.
– Level… design I guess would be one word for it. Beyond the starting lab I didn’t plan out any more locations/setting and just stitched together whatever I was able to think of and produce images for.
– Ending. Well, the lack of it anyway. Similar to level design I didn’t have much of a story in mind so I’d never really planned for an ending, it just stops dead.

All in all great fun and I feel a pretty successful challenge. It’s been years since I tried to make a platformer and wa a nice change of pace. Looking forward to judging everyone elses entries now (and seeing how mine is judged :S )

Dexter

So, here’s my second (first mostly original) game of all time:

WTF LEMME OUT!!!

It’s a simple text adventure in a tiny world I designed while learning Python this weekend. It’s got everything an aspiring adventurer could ask for: danger, excitement, glory, awesome!

Download the game here! (CC BY-NC-SA)

Enjoy!!! Runs in any OS with Python 2.* installed!

For completeness here is a post showing the finished game. In the end it became a mix of missile defence and an explorer platformer. I’m happy with the result!

Entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=2311

I hope you like it.

Unterholz was made in less than 24 hours so it lacks a bunch of features (i.e. gameplay). The basic idea is to manipulate the elements to transform the environment so new lifeforms can emerge.

The only life form emerging in this build are just two types of plants though. Little creatures spawning in the lakes, climbing on plants, or looking for shelter in dark crevices could be added too.

It was interesting to work with pixel water, or cellular automata as it is apparently called. However it is very poorly optimized and can run into performance issues quite quickly if you keep pouring rain. Further performance tweaks would require me to rewrite the whole system, which i might :p

Currently, the environment is only absorbing water. Upon absorbtion there is a chance for a plant to grow out of it. Continuous watering will help the plants spread.

More environmentally changing features could be added like wind, storms, snow – which can melt -, thunder – bursting plants inflames – and other hazards that influence how life developes.

Here’s the source to the framework i’ve been using, it’s the same i’ve used the last two times:
Flow Source

Go play and rate Unterholz here.

Here is a quick teaser for my post mortem to come when I have more time to write things up (probably middle/end of this week).

These two screenshot nicely illustrate the progress made from first prototype (about 4 hrs) to finished game (about 18 hrs).

You can give the game a try HERE.

Tags: pygame, python

So, I set out with a few goals. I wanted a randomly generated level, and I wanted to make all my art in code.

I succeeded with both those goals, so I call this a resounding success! I really didn’t want to do a platformer, as I think they’re quite over done (and a cop out), so I struggled quite a bit coming up with the gameplay.  I got something out though! It’s somewhat like Black and White meets Conway’s Game of life.

As far as hurdles are concerned, I had a few minor ones regarding Procedural Generation, mostly my own inexperience. I also tried porting to Android in the last few moments, but that didn’t work out well, mostly due to a fault in my Input/Camera class.

I’m actually really happy with what I accomplished!

I hope y’all had as much fun as I did! I’m going to edit my timelapse, and link it in a seperate post

See you all in ~4 months!

So, it’s been nine hours since submissions were due and sadly I wasn’t able to get my game to a certain level that I’d be happy to publish it.

Considering it’s only my second attempt at making a game, I think I might have been a bit too encouraged tojoin along in this competition and should’ve increased my knowledge of basic game development beforehand.

I must say I was pleasently surprised by how quickly some things came together. Other things were (and still are) giving me headaches, tho I bet that to the more experienced game developers around here would be like “Wow, that’s so easy…”. It’s clear I still need to practice more and look into basic concepts more and get my math skills up to par. I will however continue to work on what would’ve been my entry and publish it on my website in the near future. Thanks for the challenge tho. It was a hell of a ride!

This is my second “I’m in” post, the rest of the weekend was spent studying German and Egyptian Hieroglyphs, for exams. I did some initial thinking after the theme was announced and decided to make a board game, so I threw together some code with libgdx to draw some tiles for my board, but beyond that after the theme was announced, I have not started. So here goes.

My tools of choice:

Platform: Windows 7, ASUS A53E i7 2630QM, on-chip Intel HD 3000 GPU
Language/libraries: Java with libgdx.
Editor: Eclipse
Version Control: Git
Graphics: Gimp, Corel Painter, Inkscape
Music: Sibelius, Epiphone Dot Semi-Acoustic Guitar, Korg X50 Synthesizer
Sound Effects: Amateur folio with built-in laptop mic and Audacity.
Organizing: Emacs Org-mode or just a *scratch* buffer
Focusing: Panic.

Finished up our Jam game, Would have like to add more content to it but we just ran out of time as other stuff got in the way.

Really pleased with what we have here though.

You can get our Twinstick shooter here.

Ludum Dare Page

I’m seeing lots of fun entries to try!

As expected, a busy weekend didn’t allow enough time to make an actual LD23 entry, but I did get to try box2dweb and gamejs.  Both seem pretty useful.

I’m looking forward to trying what everyone else created.

Congratulations if you entered!

Yes, I submitted my game 😀

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=3751

you can also find my timelapse here: (click on teh picture)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLJ_-ZwU86w

First of all, if you haven’t already, go play Subatomica

Regrets, I’ve had a few…

First and foremost, I regret sleeping. The 8 hours I had would have been very handy, and I know I can push through if I have to – I’ve done it twice at the Global Game Jam.

So being short on time meant I wasn’t able to add any sound. I thought about throwing in a few as3sfxr sounds, but I ended up deciding that they didn’t fit the mood of the game at all. I would have had to spend at least a few hours making sfx and music that I’d be happy with.

The bright side of life

In the positive column, I managed to squeeze some fun out of the concept! I was worried that it was a hopeless cause, but a suggestion on twitter lead me to remove particle-particle collisions and suddenly it was fun!

I also found a graphical style I like, and could handle in the time. I usually rely on my brother Adam for art, so my skills in that area are a little rusty at best. A few items feel unfinished, like the goal, but otherwise it’s consistent and most importantly readable for gameplay.

What a tool

So a rundown of the tools I used!

• FlashDevelop – A joy to use as always, my IDE of choice
• Flash Pro CS5.5 – I like vectors better than rasters for this kind of game, plus swcs are a great format and integrate well with FlashDevelop

And the libraries!

• nape – Still my favourite AS3 physics engine, well thought out, perfect for games, super performant!
• Flint – A great particle engine, very easy to throw together amazing effects very quickly
• BetweenAS3 – The best tween engine IMO, just really flexible and quick
• Signals – A better way to dispatch events
• tomvianas3 – My own personal core library, I ended up using quite a lot of it as usual!

Parting words

I had great fun making Subatomica! This was my first LD48, but it most definitely won’t be my last. For next time:

• No sleep!
• Get sounds in early, even if only rough!
• Try to avoid the urge to refactor, even though my code will be made public!
• To do lists helped a lot!
• Change venue – I found sitting at the same desk for 2 days really hard, go work in a coffee shop/library for a few hours a day

At the end of LD22, I was quite proud of myself. I had made a game, for the first time, and exceeded all my expectations. I had to deal with a library that I learned about just a couple of days before, almost no preparation, and lots of weird problems packaging the software. So it came naturally to me that this time out I would take all the lessons of LD22, build on top of them, and make an awesome game. Oh, how wrong I was!

Damn this game.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I went into great lengths to prepare myself for this LD. I participated in the warm up, and build myself a neat little shooter for the 10 hours that I allowed myself to spend in the warm up. Then I bought all kinds of food that I could or could not need, since food was another thing that I felt was lacking in my first LD. Since the theme would be revealed 10AM my time, I slept early, and planned to go to a restaurant near my home to think about the theme away from the computer.

At least food was not a problem this time!

All was working well so far. “Tiny World” was not my favorite in the list of themes, but I did not dislike it. The inspiration came when, at the restaurant, the expresso machine broke. I immediately remembered all those children stories about small gnomes fixing househood items, hidden from the adults. Specially, I was thinking about the recent Ghibli movie, Arrietty, which I liked a lot. So the idea started to form on my head. A family of tiny creatures, trying to live unnoticed in a human’s house.

I spent about 20 minutes thinking about a princess-maker style management game, where you managed a family of “borrowers”, sent them on missions to explore, or expand, or other things, and tried to keep your profile low. But then I thought that a management game was not a good call for LD — management games are not everyone’s couple of tea, and they can be quite hard to balance. I decided to change the focus a bit, in order to make something more likeable, and I came with the idea of controlling a single of these creatures, in an action/stealth game.

Maybe that was my mistake, maybe I should have gone with the management game I wanted to make… anyways.

The idea for the game was this — a creature living underground, had to forage the above world for items, food, treasures. All while avoiding the humans and other hazards in the big world above, and using the spoils to improve their own tiny world. It was still a good idea on paper. But when I started laying out the plan for the game engine, I panicked. I realized that I needed creatures of widely different sizes, on a complex world, and I had no idea of how to handle collision. In my previous game, collision was a non-issue, and I was getting scared that I would spend a LOT of time trying to learn how to make a quad tree or something like that. It did not make any sense, I was just panicking, and in panicking I lost a lot of time.

Eventually I decided to re-implement a tile based engine just like in my previous game, with three different sizes of sprites: 1, 9 and 25 tiled units. I implemented a simple and dirty routine for square collision detection on those sizes. Then I started to work on some early lose conditions, on the idea that I needed to have a prototype with a win/lose condition as soon as possible. So I implemented foraging for food, dying of starvation, and the cat predator.

But by then, it had already been over 30 hours, and I had very little time to do much else.

In the end, my game idea about living among humans and exploring, fixing their stuff, and building your base while remaining undetected became a silly game about stealing food from cats to give to your fat queen :-(. The game didn’t even have any humans.

So much planning, so little to show for it...

Other than the end result, not all was lost, though. The preparation certainly paid off: I did not have any problems regarding my programming environment (no mysterious bugs) or the living environment. Submitting, publishing, time-lapsing all worked without a hitch. I got a lot of practice with the Gimp, and learned to use some tools in different ways. I also learned how to create and add music to the game without requiring a lot of composition knowledge. Autotracker is a wonderful little tool that I learned about too late into the compo, but will certainly be a center piece for future dares. In fact, I might go as far as create a bunch of random tunes to just listen to them while playing DF or something like that. Also, I managed to insert a lot of little neat widgets into the game that made me a bit proud of myself, such as a generic handler for mobs using inheritance, a text message listener that shapes the message to an arbitrary window, dealing with real time, a pause screen, etc. Too bad that these neat tricks can’t replace an actual game :-/

Well, there is always next time! I still feel pumped for programming, so maybe I can get some more game making experience before LD24.

TL;DR:

I finished my game, but it fell way short of my expectations, couldn’t implement critical features.

The Good
* My preparation was top notch: I wanted for nothing, biological or technical
* I managed to solve many technical problems I had in my LD22 game, such as music and message box formatting.
The Bad
* I panicked early in the dare because of lack of familiarity with game programming, lost a lot of time.
* I misjudged the time I needed, critical features and playtesting were missing from the game.
Lessons Learned
* If I like a niche theme or a game style, I should just go for it. With 1000 participants, LD is not a popularity contest.
* Working with multiple small levels uses the time better than working with one complex level.
* Autotracker rocks.

Also the obligatory links:
* Game Page
* Time Lapse

Tags: food, java, postmortem

Well, that weekend was a crazy 48 hours. A lot of it is a blur (Im going to enjoy watching my own timelapse since I cant remember 75% of everything I went though)

The best thing though – Success!!

This was my 3rd Ludum Dare to date, yet the first where Ive actually finished an entry. I was cutting it close too, last night I got to sleep around 4am, and at that stage it was T-8 hours, and I still didnt have a proper level or any puzzels to solve. So after sleeping 3 hours I had a very compressed burst of productive work to get the final level design and features down (I was still finishing off a pretty important feature at T-10mins) O_o

Either way, it was an enjoyable experience and I was very glad to get something finished which I could call a ‘game’. I might venture away from a 3D game for the next LD however… So-much-work…

Im keeping this post quick, cause Im actually struggling to stay awake at this point.

You can check out the entry with the link below (Windows 32 & 64bit versions only atm) Ill have a linux one up soon hopefully, and mac potentially soon as well. And a timelapse soon too!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=3467

Title screen

And now for voting! Good luck to everyone, I look forward to playing a bunch of games

And w00t! – For LD getting 1000+ games on its 10th birthday 😀

Tags: AD-Edge, BGE, Creeping, darkness, finished, ld23, postmortem

That was fun! My game was a little tribute to Toe Jam and Earl.

It features an unlimited scrolling world and tenacious enemies.

It was build from scratch in HTML5, and is best viewed in Chrome. Libraries used were jQuery, Underscore and Paul Irish’s request animation polyfill.

Go see my entry page or the game itself.

I add a link to download a version of my game for Mac, I hope it’s work !

I hosted the game on my own site so you can play it without download anything !

Electron Cloud…

Sim Hamlet
My aim this time was to work on my drawing skills. So I decided to make a graphical game for LD#23, based loosely on an old favourite game of mine, “The Settlers”. I apologise for any eyeball bleeding you may suffer.
The aim of the game is to balance wood, stone, grain and food production, ultimately to build a castle (costing 40 wood and stone) and to store up 40 food to be able to survive a siege (note, siege not shown in-game). If you ever run out of food, you lose.

Buildings:
Mason’s: costs 3 stone, 1 wood. Produces stone from surrounding mountains, consumes food.
Woodcutter’s: 3 stone, 1 wood. Produces wood from surrounding forests, consumes food.
Farm: 3 stone, 2 wood. Plants fields in surrounding empty space, produces grain.
Windmill: 5 stone, 3 wood. Consumes grain, produces food. Each produces enough food to feed a single mason or woodcutter.
Castle: 40 wood, 40 stone. Building a castle and amassing 40 food wins you the game.

What went right?

I finished.
The game has both a win and lose condition, and both work.
I re-used a lot of code from my last entry, and that let me put in a main menu and menu->play->lose->menu cycle really quickly.
It has art.

What went wrong?

I didn’t figure out what the aim of the game was going to be until a few hours from the end, and nearly gave up because I didn’t have a “game” as such yet. In the end I drew the castle and its construction stages very hastily near the end and threw it all together. It stuck, so I submitted it.

I didn’t get round to showing in-game what the build-costs of the various buildings are, how many resources they still needed to build, or any progress bar on their building.

The buildings are un-named in-game, so you have to guess which is which. Shouldn’t be too hard.

Known bugs
The windmill is missing its blades in the radial menu.
The radial menu is impossible to close without building something.

Tags: postmortem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6umjwtMx1kw

Screen capture taken every 60 seconds while developing my entry for LD23.

play the game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11027

my journal from the event:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/ld-23/?author_name=berkano

The smoke is starting to clear…and yes, I managed to finish my LD game “Gulliver” in time, and yes, I am very happy with it!

Go ahead, play and vote! (it’s a free-roaming space shooter game, with a neat miniaturization mechanic)  It’s a flash entry this time so it’s super-easy!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7285

Anyhow, lots of detailed post-mortem stuff will be incoming soon.  I’ve already scanned in my brainstorming documents so I’ll be posting those up, and describing a detailed overview of my thoughts on what went well and what didn’t, as well as the design process (also going in-depth into the music creation ideas).  Unfortunately, I didn’t really have time to post anything during the compo itself, because…well, it was just really down to the wire and I had absolutely no time to spare.  I just kept working working working and there wasn’t really much time to take a break, so that’s why the lack of dev screenshots and progress posts.  But I will definitely make up for it with my post-mortem stuff!

Now, onto the more important point of this post: the Gulliver OST!

http://ddrkirbyisq.bandcamp.com/album/gulliver-original-soundtrack

That’s right, click the link above and download the whole album, for whatever price you’d like (yes, free if you so desire!).  Featuring chiptune and electronic tracks centering around the main “Gulliver” theme, which I think is quite catchy if I do say so myself.

Last but not least, good luck to everyone who’s still in the middle of the jam!  You can do it!~

Here it is! Try it.

Try it.

My game is here: Robots Are Red, Violets Are Blue

This was my Ludum Dare, my first game jam in fact so I was excited to take part even though I didn’t have a clear weekend ahead of me.

Tools Used

• FlashDevelop for ActionScript coding
• Flash Professional to create and package up my graphical assets
• Paint.NET to tweak exported bitmaps
• sfxr to knock out some quick sound effects

The Good

Though I wasn’t able to start development on the game until Saturday evening,  I had been contemplating the theme throughout the day. When I sat down to begin coding I had a pretty solid idea of what the game was, which was great.

I actually like how the control player movement system worked out, easy enough to move but clumsy enough cause some damage to the town.

The Bad

The town below needed more work both graphically and for gameplay. The gaps between buildings are generally too small and buildings are too big to step over – the whole thing needed balancing.

I bunged in some quick sound effects made with sfxr in the closing stages, but they aren’t great.

The Ugly

None of the graphical assets were finished to a high enough standard (even for me). The robot remained the same as it was in my initial prototype so barely looked like
a robot at all. Also, it would have been good to get some more visual effects in.

What I Would Change

I realised quite late that changing to a single button control mechanic would be better. There’s really no point in using 2 keys as they can’t be used at the same time.

I’d originally planned to have cars moving around the roads, but this had to be dropped.

I had wanted a ‘week’ system, where the player starts on Monday and completes the day’s work, then the next day is slightly harder. Again, I ran out of time.

Lessons learned

Although I do think a few more hours would have come in handy, I also think having some time over the weekend to go and do something else (e.g. walking the dog, shopping, DIY etc) was useful in order to reflect on ideas and let them evolve away from the computer.

Keeping two task lists was good. One for ‘must haves’ and one for ‘nice to haves’. I could concentrate on the ‘must haves’, but occasionally reward myself with a ‘nice to have’ (generally polish stuff) when I needed a boost.

Summary

Overall I’m pretty happy something half-way playable came out of the weekend and it was a great thing to experience. I’ll definitely try to participate in the future.

Thanks to all, guys! Ludum dare 23 is an absolutely incredible competition.

This is my first time ever competing in such an event.

Let me introduce my game: The Tiny Life. It’s a story about a card’s life, where you are trying to grow up from a two to an ace and save your Queen of Hearts from a prison tower, destroing tons of enemy cards on your way.

Game is totally physics driven, so it’s rather hard to control, however you can do amazing tricks with physics and destroy other cards in a million different ways.

Enjoy

And some gameplay video:

After losing power and temporarily relocating to a coffee house Sunday afternoon, I managed to get my game working about three hours before the deadline, and 30 minutes before our dinner guests were supposed to come. But then (dun, dun, dun…) the internet went out :(. On the bright side, this gives me one more day to polish things up before jam submission. Here’s what the game looks like so far (pre-jam graphical enhancements and title/instruction screens):

The resulting game can be found here:
– Spaceship Planet Merge

Although the compo is already finished, this is our first blog post. We wanted to do one earlier, but time flashed by and suddenly already 48h passed!

Anyway, we’ve created a dungeon crawler-style game in which you play a white blood cell saving Timmy’s body of all his infections and nasty conditions.

The gameplay is simple. You need to create vaccines for the different bacteria. You get a vaccine by killing 10 bacteria of that kind… But! When you kill a bacteria you also get some damage and if you aren’t careful you may even die, leaving Timmy a very unpleasant life of pain and sure death.
Luckily you can heal yourself by killing bacteria for which you already have a vaccine. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, right? 😉

Here some screenshots for you all:

Now I still have some work to do after which we’ll surely make another blog post with our thoughts. Until then, just keep jammin’!

-Dave

Hey guys, here’s the time-lapse of my LD48 weekend. Fun times! Hope you enjoy it

You can find my entry here:

Free Donutia – My LD48 Entry

I’m blown away.

So many people working hard. So many people finishing or with a clear idea of exactly what to avoid next time. 1100 finishers for LD48?! Some awesome artistic talent. Some really surreal code wizardry.

For a first time, I’m actually really pleased to have finished at all. And I’ve learned something important about making sure people can play through your whole game — hard is fine, but for the compo, people should be able to continue from where they lose, so that can see the whole game.

Thanks everybody for your help and your enthusiasm.

And you Jam people, hurry hard! Only 12 hours left. Good luck!

This is a post-mortem for my Ludum Dare game, Shipwrecked! This time LD went more successful than the previous time. I made a better game and it took less time.

What went right:

• I did it! It was my first random-generated game and I did it!
• Graphics: I’m not an artist but with such a minimalistic game graphics weren’t a problem
• Music: I got used to music. I think I can compose rather good!

What went wrong:

• Bugs: I had lots of them because of complicated coding. But I managed to fix them!
• Testing: Random fact: I never passed this game. I just had not enough time.

What I learned:

• Random generating, of course! It isn’t that hard.

It was a nice weekend. I accepted the challenge and I did it!

Timelapse and walkthrough shall be done after.

Tags: postmortem

You guys! I had so much fun, you guys!

Sorry about the low res. Being able to read the code would only make you cry anyway.

obligatory game link

So I’ve been working hard this weekend, and I’m finally in the polish / level design stage. Looking forward to getting off work and into the game! I had a really hard time with the game idea, and wasn’t sure which way to go until late last night.

Posting a puny screenie of the title screen:

Title screen

I’m rather new to all this, but having a great time!

Click to go to the game's preview page !

Hi everyone!
Now that the submission-madness is over, it’s time for a postmortem!

What went wrong:

• Failed at making a roguelike with two teammates
• Failed at making a platformer as a replacement
• Watching Youtube videos while coding

What went right:

• Making a game without sprites/music
• Focusing on level-design instead of visual polish
• Talking on IRC to prevent despair

So thanks to everyone for being so nice, and congrats to all of you who made games this week-end!
See you soon!

Fififox 😀

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

I must admit I could have planned better, worked more persistently and take less breaks, get some feedback, and make a playable game in time for Ludum Dare compo. I actually had the game nearly ready as far as game mechanics in time for compo but I did not feel it was any fun yet so I decided against submitting it.

Should I work some more, trying to make it more fun and submit it for the jam or just turn it in as it is?

The issue is that it’s not really great awesome fun.
Maybe I should add some polish and just turn it in the way it is?

What. The. Hell.

I can’t rate my own game (which is normal), but I get my own game in “play and rate” section 😀 Kinda funny…

I figured my game looks best in motion. THUS, VIDEO!

Play and rate

I’m proud to announce that Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein will be appearing in super-awesome completely-unofficial guest starring roles!

Now that’s some real science-cred.

The Deserted : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11242

Heyo!

This was my first Ludum Dare and it was.. awesome! I haven’t been programming a lot of games lately so I was positively suprised how this game turned out.

What went right:

– Graphics. I have never been good at making art but in my opinion the end-result was pretty good. I had also cool lighting effect and some noise which improved the overall mood of the game

– Gameplay. The gameplay I managed to get in was pretty polished and works. I haven’t found any bugs at all yet !

What went wrong:

– Planning. I started making this game with only “big-picture” of what the game was going to be. Because of this, I for example made level editor that I didn’t use and I started writing the actual gameplay code only 10 hours before the deadline.

– Sleeping ( not that I shouldn’t have slept 😛 ). I pretty much slept at day and coded at night. As a result, I was pretty tired all the time.

What I learned: 

– Random generation. I made pretty cool terrain generator, though it turned out to be pretty easy.

– Component-Entity System. This was the first time I used Component-Entity System as my “main”-architecture. I’m not completely sure yet do I like it or not.

– Pixel art. I have never made pixel-art before ( not that I have made any other art either! ) but I managed to get pretty good looking textures

I’m already looking forward to the Ludum Dare 24!

Uploaded a time-lapse!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11991

And more pretty pictures

Tags: timelapse

After an exhausting 2 days, my game is as complete as it was ever going to be. A timelapse and post mortem will be coming once I’ve recovered, and fixed the glitch which means the game fails to run on some computers but not others.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=8539

Thanks to everyone who watched the stream and tested the game. I’m going to try and fix the bug.

Goodbye!

Finally, after 48 hours of work I actually produced something (named Perspectives) and uploaded it on the LD’s web site.This was my first LD and my first time as a one man game developer! You can directly play the game from here.

I can’t say I’m happy with the game I’ve made but I’ve sure spent hell of a good time making it. While the theme did not appealed to me at first I insisted and created a consistent experience I think. I actually wanted the player to explore a world and discover how small it can feel when she has limited movement capabilities. I’m sure the intentions are not met by players since the execution is really shameful but as much unbelievable as it can seem I’m not too disappointed with the end result!

Here are the tools I have used:

• Language: Javascript
• IDE: Komodo Edit
• Engine/library: {FM.js(engine);}
• Graphics: Inkscape and GraphicsGale
• Sound FX/music: bfxr and Otomata

I’m pretty satisfied with these tools but I’m still undecided whether to keep using Komodo Edit or to come back to Netbeans or Eclipse. Inkscape and GraphicsGale are really awesome, especially GraphicsGale, even for a beginner it’s very easy to create any animated (or not) sprites. I was really afraid by the idea of creating graphics since this is my first time but I actually liked it and think that this might be the best part of the game! (though I must admit it was not a hard thing to do since the rest of the game is poorly done). Still it’s ironic, I’m supposed to be a programmer and game designer for Christ sake ! I guess I like to learn new stuff, for instance I’m more into music recently, god knows why. Regarding the sound and music it was also pretty easy with bfxr and Otamata but I really could have spent at least one hour on it instead of rushing it in 15 minutes.

Overall, I am completely in love with my new set of tools and feel almost capable of doing anything right now (I name this feeling the post jam disorder).

In the end I believe that working alone in my living room have prevented me from getting motivated enough to achieve everything I wanted. Next time I would really love to work on my game with other Ludum Darers.

In regard of the game I believe that it lacks many things, especially a bigger world and a better level design. Once again I was too lazy to achieve the few modifications that could have improved the game significantly. Another thing is that I was more involved in the programming than in the design of the game. More specifically, the collision and integration of Ogmo Editor took me some time and in fact, I absolutely wanted to use and enhance my JavaScript engine whereas I could have used a typical Flash based game development library (Flixel, Flashpunk). My last game, created for the global game jam 2012, is similar in that regard. Next time I promise I will make a longer and more polished game by using a full featured engine (Construct2 or Unity) or a reliable game development library (Flixel or my thoroughly tested one !)

Anyway it was really great and I’ll make sure to do as many LD as I can.

Thanks for reading,

Simon

Had some requests for a post-mortem, so ..uhm.. okay I guess.

Game is Predicament:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12805

This was my first LD entry, I usually don’t have the time for it and even for this one I only decided to enter 8 hours later. It’s obviously not my first game, and also not the first time doing a game in a weekend, so luckily I knew what to expect from a 48 hour maximum (and ended up with 11 hours left on the clock)

What went right:

I had my idea in about 10 minutes: a small environment (tiny world) and a little metaphor for living your life in a tiny world build into the short story (complete it, and you will understand)

Had a lot of fun getting the graphics done and the interaction of the various items. Was a first for me trying to write a game like this (adventure-y?), and I learned a couple of things that I might use in a larger version of this game in the future.

I normally create games for Android and iPhone, so writing it in HTML5 was refreshing and interesting. HTML5 has come a long way, and using a browser like Chrome you get all these debug tools without compilers.. pretty awesome for prototyping and competitions and just having fun.

What went wrong:

I had music build in there done with WolframTone generator, but people pointed me towards the terms-of-use on the Wolfram site.. still not sure if it’s not allowed to use for such free stuff.. but I figured I better remove it and go without music.

Some small bugs near the end of the game, I had time enough to fix it, but I was basically done with it and wanted to enjoy rest of my weekend. So you CAN get stuck gameplay wise, and would have to restart, but most people luckily don’t get stuck 😉  It’s a bit sloppy and could have probably handled it better if I just put the time into it.

Sound effects had various issues, I didn’t write my sound code cross-browser, so the sound really only runs in Chrome. However I do blame HTML5 and browser-builders for this. I stuck to the standards, and only Chrome really works. With audio-file formats also being a pain in the behind I chose to go for OGG to stick to the open-spirit.

What I learned

HTML5 is cool. It’s not ready for commercial stuff if you ask me, but for prototyping, or just having fun, it’s really good. You don’t need fancy libraries to get going. Just find out how to render parts of an image onto the screen, and go with it! All very simple, very open, and quick results.

Ludum dare compo’s are fun! If I have time again for the next one, I’ll sure give it another go, and I’ll even try to make time from now on.

Music.. I really should start learning to make music..

and finally there is an AWESOME community of  “game developers for the love of game developing” out there, and I enjoyed the interaction with many people I didn’t know yet.

No go give my game another try 😉

Hey everyone!

I was going to write this yesterday, but the server got really slow cause everyone was submitting their entries. Anyway, I finished my game an hour before the deadline! ^^

Check it out over here:

<Soul Searchin’ 1.0>

So yeah, I had a blast. LD was amazing and I’m totally joining the next one! :3

Cheers,

Maxim

I ended up making a Missile Command clone. I wasn’t expecting that, but the Ludum Dare can take you in some odd directions.  I was really dragging my feet Friday night and Saturday morning. I had a concept almost immediately, just getting around to it felt like a chore. However, once I started, I began coding like a madman. I started at 11 am Saturday and finished by 2pm Sunday, enough time to work on refining the art, playtesting, and adding a boss spacecraft.

This game is set on a small spinning planet with 12 turrets. It’s slow-paced at first, then ramps up after a few rounds. Like Missile Command, you try to create explosions in the path of oncoming missiles.

It was originally going to be a 2-player Missile Command set between two pinwheel-shaped worlds (I called it Pinworlds, the inhabitants would have been called pinheads). I didn’t have time to implement a second player, however, so I just wrote this simple AI that drops missiles at a steadily increasing rate.

I was pretty deleious by the end, making stupid spelling mistakes and embarrassing errors in the code. E.g, not killing the boss spheres would prevent the game from continuing at all. Also, the boss’ rockets would become stuck inside its collider, causing a thousand explosions to generate inside of it in an instance, but without killing it off.

The game is divided into “rounds”, each round has one additional rocket from the previous round. A boss spawns every 5 rounds. The goal is to survive for as long as possible before your planet is inevitably destroyed. Similar to Missile Command, there is no real endgame despite defeat.

So, here is Spinworld! Let me know what you think. You can also follow me on twitter @MichaelPConsoli, and check out my other game Against the Wall (which was my LD 20 project).

The idea of the game is to escape Motherboard City. You play as Chip, just a little dude jumping his way out of  a dangerous city. You travel around the four corners of the motherboard to reach the open PCI backplate, Chip is dying to reach the outside world.

Tags: chip, city, computer, Motherboard, WM

Wanted to post the timelapse I made of Maru coming together.

Maru Timelapse

Tags: timelapse

If I learned something about my first Ludum dare, it’s that the time is very finite, and it ends way before you wanted it to. My first ludum dare compo entry “Berries” is what I consider my 3rd game ever made. I’m not much of a visual artist, so the graphics kind of.. ..suck. Also, there’s not much graphical content, since I didn’t have time to finish half of what I wanted.

So what did I learn?

Plan your time better. Okay. So I didn’t have much experience in making games and it was not that easy to plan how much time I would be spending on each task. Also, the tasks were a bit unclear. Plan.

Keep it very, very small and simple. I guess everyone knows this. Now I know it too.

Eat well, sleep well. I actually did this and I’m sure it helped me a lot.

What am I going to do before next Ludum Dare?

Learn to make better graphics. Yes. I shall do that.

Learn your libraries better. I shall do that too. For this entry I used LWJGL and Slick 2d . I should have used more time to study them before the compo.

Learn. Yes.

Have fun. Yes.

See my game here: Berries

*insert lots of ranting like I did the LDs before :D*

*insert link to my own game*

*insert congrats to 10 years LD like “CONGRATULATIONS TO 10 YEARS OF LUDUM DARE!!!”*

TL;DR

Used: Flixel, FlashBuilder, Paint.NET, GraphicsGale, Google App Engine, Eclipse, sfxr

Good:

– made a game which connects to a backend server, something I wanted to do in a long time

– played with Google App Engine, something I also wanted to do in a long time

– I made a generic jumping game, also something I wanted to do as a case study. also, I don’t move the cars and I don’t move any camera, I just move the world 😀 (like the spaceship in Futurama does)

Bad:

– I was hoping for survival, but meh

– I’m not scared to look into library code, and for this LD, I dived a bit into flixel to get a continuous background animation and some other stuff. Still, I should have done it as warmup, as it took a bit time

– it took way to long to create a servlet with about 100 lines of code. too many bugs and it ate up 4hours

– had to release a bugfix because I was programming in Flash Builder, which deactivates the security sandbox, making the game get stuck. Didn’t realize that until this morning

– I forgot to give the game a name! When I opened the upload form, I had to reopen my mainscreen.png and add a name to it

– I don’t feel that the game I made represents my thinking. It’s not funny, and I like funny games :/

Timelapse time!

Timelapse of making in delusion

game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11098

So the game didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted, had to cut out most of the ending so a lot of things are unexplained. For my first Ludum Dare entry I just wanted to see if I could do it from scratch, and I did mostly, so I’m happy 😀 I also wanted to do it as a forced as3 learning experience and I gotta say, I learned more in the last two weeks than I did in six months of trying to learn as3

Tags: timelapse

I love the Ludum Dare Community.

If ever I was doubting my abilities or in need of a pick-me-up, I just need to look back at the comments on my submission for LD#23. Not only is there some great positive feedback, there is some really well thought out constructive criticism, and even an offer to help if I want to expand on the game (which I totally will).

For some of the criticism, if not all, I found myself nodding while reading. I’m able to understand where people are coming from and I can definitely see room for improvement. Here’s some notes on my submission in response to the feedback I have already received:

1. Walking is slow / sticky

Yuck. Yes, I knew this one. Its the reason I put a note in the instructions to indicate that jumping was important. Jumping gives you the momentum to move forward at a decent rate, and you can even get into orbit by running and jumping! However, the mechanism that I use to halt a player when they land on a planet causes them to be “sticky” when attempting to walk on the surface without jumping. I know why this occurs, with induced drag to prevent grounded players from falling through the planet, but I don’t know the best way to fix it (yet). Below is an example of running (constantly) and jumping (constantly) to achieve an orbit:

2. Score resets to 0 on death

I knew this one shortly after submission, and it was 3am in my timezone. The score does accumulate, and its a single line fix to restore. Its a real shame this didn’t work for the final release though

3. A mini-map could be useful

Agreed. I didn’t even think of this, and its probably due to the fact that I knew how the mothership was moving (it spawns the mini UFOs). I also planned to play a sound each time a mini UFO was spawned, but it was low on the priority list. A minimap would be one of the first things I attack in a future version!

4. Whats the floating log in the sky?!

Haha! It was left there as it was an attempt at a non-spherical planetoid. In early gravity tests, I was walking around it instead of around the sphere. This was done at the request of a mate of mine. It was left in as I felt it gave the player a bit of additional spatial awareness when moving about the planet. But.. yeah. This should be removed, and replaced with other planetoids (perhaps that you can JETPACK to, if you want!)

5. Explosions!

Woo! Yeah, the explosions were very important, I think. They achieved a couple of good things for the gameplay:

• Players (and other UFOs) get blown back on explosions. This gives some space between attackers, and it is forceful enough to blow other UFOs off the planet for a bit, giving the player some time to recover and get moving again.
• It gave a real sense of attack / achievement to the destruction of the UFO. Simply removing the object from the game would have been really lame I think.
• The use of particles in the explosion was a “cheap” way of simulating bits flying off the UFO on fire.
• Who doesn’t like a good explosion? (If you love needless explosions, see this LD#23 submission)

6. Gameplay a bit “stiff”

Agreed. I think with some tweaks addressing the points above could resolve this, in addition to extending to provide other planets, rather than just the one.

Conclusion? I’m super happy that I even finished LudumDare. I have attempted it in the past, and once previously, I submitted for the Jam. This time around, I was able to finish on time, and I’m supre happy with the feedback, and great constructive criticism. My game submission is by no means brilliant, but I’m encouraged by the feedback, and will definitely continue with it!

Thanks everyone!

Don’t forget to give me 5 star ratings! (I know you want to vote me 6 stars, but 5 is as high as it goes.. 😛 )

ahhhhh…my mind is playing tricks on me again…

instead of fixing bugs and implementing neccesary game logic i spent way to much time implementing new features

at least i got my lightning engine to work:

After some extended sleep and being tired for the rest of the day I think I’m able to come up with a post-mortem.

I submitted some kind of game after getting things together withing last 5-6 hours. I’m not actually sure how much time I spent with developing the game but effective coding time was around four hours and few more went into researching how to do stuff in Löve. I spent another 6 hours doing stuff not actually getting the game done like setting up Lua debugger or creating too ambitious OO system in Lua. First day went by overslepting and not figuring out what to do with the theme while I’d move furniture. The next night went by doing non-relevant stuff and the next day went by traveling. Fortunately I got into the zone in the last moments and was able to finish basic gameplay in time. The result was not pretty and not what I asked for but at least I delivered.

What went right:

• I managed to submit a game
• Basic gameplay was quite as I thought, yet unpolished.
• Last hours’ crunch time was super-effective!
• I got an game idea: Something I could develop further or use as an example to learn a new framework.
• I learned to use Löve and I liked it!

What went wrong:

• I spent too much time trying to figure out what to do with the theme.
• I didn’t prepare at all.
• I had little time reserved for LD and couldn’t use that time effectively
• I didn’t tell anyone else, except the whole world by publishing in this blog.
• I spent time doing stuff, which didn’t help the cause at all.

What to do better next time:

• Prepare tools beforehand
• Plan ahead
• Come up with on idea earlier. ( Brainstorming or mind maps to help )
• Tell family beforehand.
• Arrange time. Do a time schedule for LD.

Here’s my previous post with initial thoughts afterwards and submission links:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/22/finally-submitted-almost-failure/

Oh, a really neat SAFE-FOR-WORK mode too

Its mostly finishing the puzzles and adding text descriptions to everything.

You can play on-line already (images load slowly): http://williame.github.com/ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/

Well then. It´s done and finished!

Check it out here

and if you want you can vote.

(Flash & Windows)

Destroy the bomb boxes and save your folks (or watch how they all end

Btw: I´m already working on new levels – just for the hack of it!

Few, that one hell of a weekend. Just an hour before the start of LD #23 I decided to participate, no regrets! This was my second time and my first “success”.

For a time I had an idea of a space game with destructible terrain/planets. Then came the theme “Tiny World”, which was a good excuse to finally create a prototype. The result is good, but I didn’t have enough time left to implement real gameplay. I also spend less time on the project then I hoped, mainly because I didn’t prepare.

What went right:

• I got the right tools.
• My framework actually worked!
• I had a lot of fun.
• Background art looked pretty neat.
• The technical part, physics and terrain destruction, went very well.

What went wrong:

• I spend WAY to much time on a single thing: technical stuff.
• I should have thought about gameplay and experimented with it much earlier.
• I didn’t really prepare, only had the code of my previous attempt: LD #22.

Next time I’m going to think more about gameplay. Just planets and destructible terrain is not enough. I had no idea what to do to make it fun. I have an idea now though, and I’m sure to split my LD #23 entry into a real project/game.

Next time, I should prepare more. Practice with creating art/sounds/music. Especially playing sound effects caught me of guard, I didn’t have any experience with that. I’d also love the work with more people, or atleast not being alone the whole weekend. Maybe a Dutch gathering next time? Let me know if you’re interested (even if it’s a bit early now).

Thank you Ludum Dare, for all your efforts to make this experience a very good one. Until next time!

You can find my entry HERE.

Well, this Ludum Dare 48h Compo – being my first one – is officially over (go jammers, go)!

My contribution is a small game called Exciting Electrons, in which you shoot photons at  electrons in order to excite them.
Exciting them is not really the aim of the game though, rather the electrons falling back down the energy levels – emitting photons as they do – is the effect you’re after. Specifically having them emit photons with wavelengths between certain values is the goal.

Each level has at least one wavelength goal – broad or narrow, in the visible spectrum or outside it – and they’re modelled after real life values.

My experiences from this venture are several. Firstly, plan more before hand or chances are you’ll do more refactoring that you want to. Had I integrated the GUI lib I used from the start then I would probably have gained an hour or more for more fun things.

Also, concentrate on game play before effects and other things or you risk not having time to get your game play as complete as you want it (though I doubt many first-time-LD:ers do get them as complete as they want).

Lastly, go wild, don’t be afraid to set some time off to try new things – you’ll learn something from it and that’s the most important part of this competition as I see it (and of course to have fun!). I decided to try and make a custom GLSL shader (used for the “spectrum” part in the gui) and I learned much from it.

Exciting Electrons ended up only having two levels, as I ran out of time and there are several things I want to improve and I will.
The game will probably be a mini-game in a larger game I’m working on (in a team) and so it will get developed further. It might also get released as a separate mini-game, perhaps interesting for schools to learn about physics by playing a game.

All in all, it was a most rewarding experience and I look forward to future Ludum Dare’s.
Thanks to all you other competitors and the great games you made (and will make)!

Exciting Electrons

http://www.mediafire.com/?eucs2vxdcujd79u – heres what was done yesterday.(art and animations not final)

still a lot to do,and becuse of some bad planning, i’m worried it will not finished in time.So i will probably have to skip some bug fixing,for now the important thing is to make it more like a game.

At least the art my friend is doing is looking great.

Yesterday, I released my first Ludum Dare game.

I just need to say, that was an AWESOME experience for me!!! Lots of self-brainstormings, programming and soundwork in a small amount of time! After doing all this you feel like you are the MAN!

In the first day, as all of you, I was thinking about idea. The first was 2D-Zombie-Shooter-with-lots-of-guns-poweups-everywhere-particle-system-and-lots-of-beautiful-stuff. After 10 minutes of coding idea was banned. This situation repeats with other 3 ideas until I decided to make simple, intuitive platformer.

That’s it! The 1st day was over and code is ready for construct levels and modificate parametres of enemies.

The 2nd day dipped me into creative parts of the game: graphics, sounds and music. Great tools such as Grafx2, sfxr and FL Studio help me with this artistic mess.

At the 2nd part of the last day game was ready for test and release. When I submit my work and look throgh the other games on the Ludum Dare site I felt a great sence that I become a part of something bigger than just my one little awful game “Rob this tiny world!”.

Primarily, this is a challenge for yourself and others. The growth of yourself and others. Score your own abilities. And I think everyone who like game development and who is a part of it must pass this competition.

Thanks for reading this stupid post.

Good luck to everyone!)

So yeah, there’s one.
Note that it also containa a playthrough of the game, so do play the actual game before watching!

WATCH IT HERE!
GAME’S HERE!

I just updated the game, first one to have actual playable levels =] 9hr 40m left. I’ll be sad when its over, but it’s going to feel nice =]

Web

Tags: cit, Motherboard, WM

There is still much to do but we see the end! We hope that everything will be ready in time.
Here are some screenshots of the current state of the game:
#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Real War is done.

Sweeet!

Here is entry

Gah – I guess nobody wanted an noise map . So I took the time of the jam today and – voila – you can now play …

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11776

with proper maze maps . I guess it took me the special points , but I’ve learned , as everybody else learns , too 😉

Tiny World War is finished – what a mission that was! A highly intense 20+ hours, but I’m thrilled to have finished a game for my first ever LD. I’ll write a postmortem soon, but in the meantime if anyone is interested here is the quasi-mandatory timelapse http://youtu.be/0xE2kIK8nqo

Well done to all and good luck for the finish jammers!

And, er, my entry is here ;D http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=rate&uid=6965 

This was gonna be my first time entering the LD but I think I made that critical mistake a lot of ppl make when theyre new to the event… I overshot my timeframe and designed (and started) a game that was too big to make in 2 days. I still love the idea I had and the concept Ive started and will prolly continue to work on it even tho I couldnt get it in the compo.

You can see most of what I have finished here: TLY Preview

Controls: Arrows to move and select combat option. Space to interact and progress dialogs. Shift to run.

Combat locks you in place and the arrow keys select what to do. The combat is like the newer SNES Final Fantasys. Its real time but you have a combat timer based on a speed skill. Right now combat itself is kinda like paper/rock/scissors. You can attack or defend. Defending lasts until your next “turn” so depending on timing it may not actually defend anything.

You can kill the Enemy npcs and gain xp. Your hp regens outside of combat. Thats about it. You cant lvl up or die yet and they dont respawn.

The txt with the npcs might seem to act a lil funny sometimes not sure what happens but sometimes (usually the first time) the text wont wrap itself right when the web font is loaded.

Now that thats out of the way. The concept of the game.

My take on the tiny world theme was small floating islands in an endless sky. The idea is that each island is so far from the others each is like a small world of its own. The game is an rpg/shooter hybrid and most of the game takes place in rpg mode and travel between islands is a vertical shooter.

It may not look like much is done by whats playable but the core systems are inplace and designed to be reusable and extendable. All the npcs (even the enemies) are 1 object and everything they do I can configure edit time or change at run time. Same for combat and all the stats (you cant see yet). Basically most of the time spent durin the 48 was workin on a kinda OOP system for makin the rest of the game lol

All in all I think I got a pretty good amount of work in for what was really more like 30 hours of the 48. And like I said I love the premise and what I have done already so Ill probably continue it and now I have a bit more on what to expect from the constraints of the compo. Maybe next time Ill actually get an entry lol

Well, this may be a bit early to do reflecting on the actual game, given that I haven’t gotten much player feedback. Although there were no major snags in my process this time, there is still quite a lot to take away from the experience.

Stuff to Remember for Next Time

• Processing is a good tool. While I can think of plenty things I’d like improved in it, and while I couldn’t successfully export an applet from it, it saved me from having to set up a project file as I would in C++. I didn’t have any trouble with adding graphics or audio.
• Fake the physics. Last April, my greatest challenge was the physics engine. This time, I wrote another physics engine. It only worked with circles and the hardest math it used was computing a component of a vector. Also, most the math was created through the process of, “this seems to work,” rather than through any deductive reasoning. Overall, it’s not very realistic, but it passes for a game.
• Get a prototype out early. In this Dare, I had a prototype ready 18 hours in. I found that it was really boring. At that point, planets crashed into each other and stopped when they did, creating a big clump. This was not at all challenging to avoid. I ended up writing a basic physics engine and changing the goal of the game entirely to make it better. These tasks were fairly significant in scope and took a good amount of time. I also made a lot of tweaks to the movement mechanic based on some comments of, “Your game nauseates me.”
• Add variety to the game. Late in the development of the game, I decided to add difficulty levels (which are based on the score). This led to the advent of huge planets and fast planets, which make the game more interesting. I also found this in the game I made last April, when I added falling platforms, moving the game away from a pure puzzle (since it wasn’t a very good puzzle).
• Google can help you make assets (indirectly). While it’s obviously cheating to use premade assets, it is useful to look for resources on how to make assets. For instance, for my astronaut, I wanted a really easy walk cycle, so I looked up, “pixel art walk cycle” and found some useful tips.
• Details matter. The game feels quite a bit more professional now that it has fades between all the screens. The Earth graphic looks just plain weird without clouds. The tiny jump sound makes the game feel different than if there were nothing.

Tags: postmortem, tips

Game is coming along even better than planned. Still a lot of work to do but things are looking good. We just finished making our own songs , 2 of them for now.

Lot of animation to implement, kind of a hard work since were doing the game without an engine to help. Lots of art is implemented and the game is playable, its core

functions are working. Its all a matter of making everything look good. The game has quite a few secret endings, it will be fun trying to find them.

Play our game here!

It’s time for bed. Don’t think that we’ll be doing any more until after Ludum Dare. This was an awesome experience. Will post more thoughts in the morning (or after work tomorrow). 😉

Oh well, at least I got a incredibly glitchy collision system in place and a large amount of features are coded, but not implemented in a level.

I will be continuing with this game until I see that damn collision system fixed and all my ideas in a level (probably ending with a turret.)

All my code is up on my GitHub page, and I will post here when I have completed the game with a timelapse, along with a applet version of the game.

As the first full LD I have participated in, I can honestly say I had a lot of fun, and I will be back for LD24, probably with an ally or two for the Jam!

Congratulations to all that submitted a game on time for the Compo, and good luck to those yet to do so for the Jam!

Just a little post to tell all the people around the world that i have the highscore in my game ^^

NOBODY can BEAT ME (evil laugh)

You can see my entry here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=4055

Or Try to beat my high score  http://www.jeux.mu/de-plate-forme/le-petit-chevalier-autour-de-la-planete.html

We both cranked through the night and got Pow! Pow! Pow! with enough time to spare! (Except now we’re running late from work from staying up all night. Hmm.)

Game Page + Play Link

We would love the comments, suggestions, and any ratings you all might have. It’s our first Ludum Dare, so we’re not really sure what we did right and what we did wrong. We’ve played the game so many times we can’t really tell anymore.

Enjoy!

Hi all!

I wanted and wanted to participate in a Ludum Dare since I knew about it a few years ago, but never did. This time I decided I could not let pass the 10th aniversary, so here I am. I’m pretty happy with the final result, although I left a few features out. Here’s my little post-mortem:

What went right

• Features selection: I think I did pretty well selecting what to do and what to leave behind. I wanted to include enemy waves between the different bosses, but the lack of graphics and sound made me discard this in favor of title screen, graphics, sound and winning/loosing screens.
• Tools: Although this is the first time I use Unity3D without following a tutorial, I felt really comfortable with it. At first I wanted to go with Cocos2D-iphone & Objective-C, but I also wanted more people to be able to play my game
• Planification: The Compo started at 3am local time, so I went to bed right after knowing the theme. I woke up, took my breakfast and started thinking about the theme. After writing down 2 or 3 ideas (both 2D and 3D) I came with the right one (for me :D). Then decided that the core idea was simple enought to be ready in one day so that left me with a full day for polishing, graphics, sounds and bug-fixes.
• Graphics: Used to use my own programmer art, it’s not difficult for me to improve any previous work. Although the graphics are not spectacular, they are much better that the ones I normally produce

• Schedule: Being a father of a 3 years old makes it difficult to get much working hours in a row. I got continously interrupted along the day, which got me out of “the zone” dozens of times.
• Lack of experience: This is my first real attempt to make a playable full game, not just a demo or prototype. I found difficult to concentrate on just one feature and work on it until done. I usually work on many things at once, which leads to poor performance. (Looks like this went right )
• Poor understanding of the tool: Being the first time I used Unity3D, I found that I lacked a lot of solid knowledge of basic things, like the GUI system and exception catching. One of this misunderstoods made me lose an hour trying to find out why the final boss started having a negative life value instead of exploding…

Since I submitted my entry, I’ve been tinkering with it a little. I’ve added a seagull and some fish.

The biggest problem is that the 48hr entry was running at 10fps instead of 30 on everything but a Core i5+… I shouldn’t have been dynamically scaling it (every frame…) to 2x. Resized all the images and now it runs full speed 😛

Update here: http://www.fernbirdsoftware.com/ludumdare/game.zip

(requires python+pygame / no .EXE included)

Original (exe for windows 64bit / also includes .py for those with python/pygame installed) + more screenshots here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11969

Well, I guess that’s time to do a little recap on my entry: The Little Glitch

What went right:

• I finished on time!
• Made the basic engine abstract enough to be able to be extended to any interaction possible.
• Focused on code first, then level design, then graphics.
• I chose tools I am used to.
• Kept ideas in the plane of doable.

What went wrong:

• Wasted 5 hours of great inspiration in a event.
• Internet was slow as hell
• Used outdated beta version of Unity, had to upload web version later.
• On-the-fly slow level designing
• Saw the theme 5 minutes in the compo

What to improve next time:

• Make a usable and efficient library for basic things
• Cancel all events.
• Check the theme right when it is chosen.
• Plan features before implementing
• Make concept art
• Take screenshots

I kind of planned the game as I went creating, with no design beforehand, no plans on what to do.
But overall, I think I made a good job. This is the first game I am officialy completing, everything else I made was just tech demos to test engine capabilities.
I also hope new Ludum Darians (or whatever) read these post-mortems and prepare themselves before joining.

Tips to fellow programmers:

• Plan yourself, let nothing in the way of your creation.
• Use a platform / engine you already know.
• Sleep enough, or sleep a lot before the event starts.

Note to self: buy a faster and more stable internet.

Tags: postmortem

A very short Postmortem about my Compo entry: Ant, Bee, Cow, Pig and Spider BOSS. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=2465.

I think I shouldn’t have participated this Ludum Dare, I was/am overwhelmed with work, and I should have kept working on the weekend. Also I hated the game I submitted.

What went wrong

• Came with around 10 ideas; worked a bit on each one of them and on the end the game was nothing related to the initial ideas.
• Worked only 10 hours.
• The graphics, ah the awful graphics.
• Too short: I’ll blame the fact I had dozens of ideas and didn’t work on a specific one, so I couldn’t focus on more levels/mechanics.
• Problems with the 2D library in Unity: I decided to go with Orthello 2D free version, but I have never used it before. I spent the first hour just playing around with it and on the end I gave up and had to go with my own solution from scratch (I normally work with 2D Toolkit, but since it is a commercial library I can’t use on the compo).
• I didn’t like my end result.
• I drank too much cold Cola, so I’m a bit ill now.

What went right

• Used tools I’m familiar with.
• Althought I’m a bad artist (99% of my time in “real life” I’m doing only programming), I’ve gone the only art route I know: pixel art.
• I had fun.

• Unity3D (C#, iTween)
• cfxr
• Audacity
• Photoshop
• Checkvist

Play and rate it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=2465.

Tags: igdacwb, postmortem, unity3d

Polishing stuff and creating levels!

Be prepared for the street!

Do you like space?

Because I decided to work on what I’m calling a space-roguelike. The easiest way to describe it is Star Control 2’s real-time combat/flight meets Desktop Dungeons’s simplicity/brevity.

Here are some early/non-final progress shots from recently to give you an idea:

Here are some older screenshots.

Well. I knew this was too ambitious for the 48 Hour compo, so I’m hoping to have something playable for the Jam. Wish me luck (I haven’t slept much the last few days…)!

Tags: jam, progress, roguelike, space

Here is the promised timelapse!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDWYMco7GQo&feature=youtu.be

Hello everyone !

So this is my post-mortem for Tinysasters, my LD# 23 48h entry made in Flash.

Play and rate Tinysasters

As I said before this was my very first participation. I hadn’t planned to enter the event until about one week ago, and I didn’t prepare. But I work on flash games every day, so this must count as some kind of preparation

I was a little anxious, because I had never developped a game in such a short amount of time, and I didn’t know if I could do it. But everything went very smoothly.

The game

Tinysasters is a puzzle/simulation/gestion game. You play on a 8*8 randomly generated tile map and have to build workplaces, shrines and cities in order to collect ressources. The goal is to build a level 4 shrine. Natural disasters happen every now and then. They reconfigure the ground and make your life harder !

Build the level 4 shrine to heal the ground and spare the world from disasters like earthquake !

The idea was to make something between the boardgames Settlers of Catan and Labyrinth ; basically a Settlers of Catan where the tiles move and change of nature.

At first, I was absolutely not happy with the theme. I rated it -1. I liked “Artificial Life” and “Castles in the Sky” a lot better, but I don’t know if I could have made something good out of them. The theme doesn’t matter a lot actually.

As for the nature of the game, to be honest, when it comes to play, my heart usually goes to platformers and adventure games with a good story. But programming is my strongest point, so I thought I should rely on it a lot for my entry.

What went right

– (almost) no time wasted on debugging ! That was a good surprise. I’m used to spending a lot of my time fixing problems that seem to come out from nowhere and make absolutely no sense although they usually end up being all my fault after all. That’s one tremendous benefit of working on a very small project : I just had to see a bug to know where it came from because the entire code of the game was so fresh in my mind.

– I was a little scared at first when I started programming the tile animating sequence that happens when there’s an earthquake or the player generates a land. But it went smoothly and the TweenLite library was very handy.

– I hate building / coding menus and interfaces with so many buttons, and so many textfields, and tabs, and they all have to update, show the right information, show a red color when there aren’t enough ressources, etc., and it’s so overwhelming… It was very tedious but it went ok. There are a lot of ugly duplicates in my code but I guess I can live with that.

One of the many possible states of this interface box…

– About 40 minutes before the deadline, there still were no sounds, and the tiles were still rough colored cubes. I rushed on as3sfxr to generate some sound effects (very useful tool), made a quick music arrangement, added an underground effect to the tiles, some texture and some decorations.

Despite the fatigue (it was about 2 AM and I had worked all day), I found myself inspired so everything went quickly and I finished on time.

– I’m very happy with the result. I enjoy just watching the game playing disasters and reconfigure the map into wild deserts, forests and lakes. The mountains always prevail, eventually.

Invasion of the mountains !

What went wrong

– The firsts hours of coding were the hard part. Sometimes I’d finish coding a new fonctionnality, like the map generation, and had some kind of a mental blockage : I just couldn’t figure out what to do next. What I had in front of me was so far from being a game… it was a little overwhelming.

a depressing early stage of the game

– Like I said, I only had 40 minutes to polish the sounds and graphics. I had great expectations for the animations, I wanted to use beautiful particles effects… I wanted the tiles to explode in a thousand of pixels when they reach the borders of the map instead of those mere alpha fade outs… I wanted the volcanic eruptions to set the map on fire… I wanted the flooded tiles covered with shiny swinging blue water drops… I wanted a little flying god inpersonating the player’s actions react to the disasters and constructions…

Nothing of that was done. I am so sad. Maybe in the enhanced version

Also, more types of disasters were initially planned. Disasters that only affect the constructions : plague, civil war, etc.

– 7 hours before the end I was like “Great, 7 hours left, I have PLENTY of time to do everything I want !”. But 7 hours in the end are not like 7 hours in the beginning, especially with the timezone I’m in. I was so tired I was like a zombie and sometimes found myself spending half my time just starring at the disasters do their thing. It’s a good thing the game was already well-advanced at this point.

What went terribly wrong

– But the biggest problem I encountered came from the nature of the game itself.

“Do the game mechanics even work ?”

I couldn’t answer this somewhat significant question before the game was ready to be tested. The disasters had to be coded, same goes for the ressources, the buildings, the upgrades and all the time-consuming interfaces that come with it.

The game was ready to be tested 2 hours before the end.

I had my fiancé test the game. He told me he was troubled by the game even though he knew what he had to do.

At first, I didn’t listen to what he said and continued to blindly code what I could. Coding more interfaces wouldn’t have bothered me that much at this point.

Then, I had to face the reality : the game mechanics didn’t work as they were.

I had to balance the costs and gains of ressources, add difficulty settings to avoid overwhelming the new player or boring the experienced one, write a “how to play”… For that, I had to test the game a lot which takes some time… And the game navigation (title screen, restart…) wasn’t done yet, nor the graphics and sounds, not to mention the fancy particle effects I still hadn’t given up on !

The last minute how to play screen

Damage control was done, but the game ended up being less challenging than I would have wanted. Hopefully a future enhanced version will correct that !

Final thoughts

I’m very glad I participated !

Thank you for reading and don’t forget to rate Tinysasters

Play and rate Tinysasters

Link to the to-be-enhanced version on Kongregate

I hope you’ll enjoy the game, I enjoyed making it a lot !

Tags: as3, flash, ld23, postmortem, procedural

As requested, i have uploaded sources to web : sources (Unity 3.5)

Also have done a timelapse video of entire development : timelapse (YouTube)

Tiny postmortem:

• Unity rules!
• Spent too much time on visuals (maybe it was worth it?)
• Gameplay too simple (had no time to add more depth)

And two brand-new screens!

Hi everyone,

After 72hours of fun work, the Uchuu Sentai Pastagaga team is proud to present Interstellar Moai Ranger.

In this rail shooter-like, you play as a Moai Ranger to defeat the evil forces !

Please give it a try and give us your feedbacks

Burn your cosmos!

I’ve never participated in LD before, and I wasn’t planning on it this time, either. Then suddenly, with only 10 hours until midnight, and with the knowledge that I wouldn’t have time to work on the game on Sunday, I decided, “What the heck? I’ll go for it!”

So I toiled away for about 11 hours (timelapse here) and made a game.

Then when I went to submit the game to LD48 I realized that my game didn’t qualify because I didn’t follow the rules. Oops! I didn’t realize I couldn’t use middleware and pre-made assets for the Dare. But it appeared that the Game Jam was more relaxed about things like that, so I decided I’d submit it as a Jam entry. Also, the extra 24 hours would give me some more time to work on it.

After about three and a half hours of sleep on Sunday night, I suddenly woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. It seemed like as good of a time as any to work on my entry some more. So I spent the next few hours (timelapse part 2 here) adding a main menu, some GUI screens, Playtomic statistic logging, and displaying some of those statistics to you when you lose the game.

I’m a noob to game jams and I feel like a noob to Unity. A lot of the things I did on Saturday are things I’d never attempted before in Unity. It was a great learning experience and I really enjoyed it.

I’m glad I could be a part of the historic 10 year anniversary Ludum Dare 23 in which over 1,000 new games were created. Congratulations to everyone who succeeded!

And with that, I present to you:

Be Tiny, World!

Tags: game, jam, ld23, shmup, timelapse, tiny world, unity, unity3d

Here’s a time lapse from last weekend’s coding/graphics/sfx/music binge, also known as Ludum Dare! The soundtrack in the video is the music I created for the game. You can check out the game here!

As an added bonus, here’s the original “design document” I carefully crafted before writing a single line of code.

Tags: ld23, photo, timelapse, video

So this was LD 23. You can play my entry here: The Island of Dare

It’s the fourth time I participated so I can compare my performance to my previous ones. Overall I’m happy with my progress. Here are my experiences:

What went well:

• motivation: I really wanted to get something done this weekend to push my motivation for other projects. So I was really excited when the competition started.
• technology check: My game has only characters on colored background for visuals. At first I wanted to do this via DOM (so every character is one DOM node), but I did a performance check on this appoach and got only 3 FPS. So I decided to do it with canvas instead.
• time for bug fixing: Like last time, I sat down and took time to play my game over and over again. So I could find most of the bugs and fix them.
• story: I wrote a story this time 😀 It’s not overly complex or innovative but hey – STORY!
• sound: It’s my first game which has some kind of a soundtrack.
• learning new things: I never did procedural content generation before so it was a completly new field for me. I was a bit scared and my motivation dropped when I didn’t understand everything completely, but it was worth going through. PCG is awesome!
• timelapse: After two failed tries to produce a timelapse, it worked. It feels so productive when you see the work of 48 hours in four minutes. Find my timelapse here: Timelapse
• version control: 93 commits in my GIT repository. It’s good to know you can always go back when trying wierd things (like SVG rendering).
• follow the flow: Playing the game is the key. If I missed something, I added it. Planning everything is not a good idea to my mind.
• twitter: I always want to tweet more, but this time I really did it. Yay 😀

 
What I should do better:

• user testing: I did a user testing, but it was like four hours before the deadline. I felt tired and decided not to do add features which were clearly missing. I should do usertesting earlier.
• theme: I still have a hard time coming up with a good idea for a given theme. I don’t know why…
• underestimation: I think I could have managed a more complex game… But well, I guess I was too cowardly.

So – and now I’m going to play your games.

6 hours left and still at work. Well’ now I have a super-dynamic scriptable, flexible and extendable game engine, but no game. I hope I will make it better in 4 months. Let’s see if I can glue some test levels together to make at least a simple game. If that doesn’t work, I will have to put a nice “TO BE CONTINUED…”-message at the end of the 50 seconds-lasting game that is ready so far.

(for a french version, scroll down)
Hey guys, as Tinyvilization is a little tricky to get in, here is a short guide to learn how to build strategies by exemple. I don’t say things explicitely, but I give you exemples that you can compare to each other to understand how it works. Try to beat those exemple to begin, they are much easier than the built in levels.

Tips to learn how to build you strategy.
1. Expand properly

Try to use and fight against the following strategies. They can’t beat levels stategies but they still spread on the whole grid.
Compare each strategy with the next/previous one in the list to understand what each action is for.
To compare strategies, copy/paste the code in the import/export text box then click “use Strategy” to see it or use it, and click”Fight strategy” to have it against you.

— basic expand
TML-UMRT (easy but usefull)
— better basic expand
LTM-UMRT (beat previous, see the difference and guess why)
LTMM-UMRT (sligthely beat previous, see the difference and guess why)
LTMMM-UMRT (sligthely beat previous, now you should know why)

2. fight
— fight only
LTMMM-TMRCRCRC (beat previous, see the difference and guess why)
— defend and fight
LTMMMU-TMRCRCRC (beat previous, not obvious ! only cities at level 1 or more give points)

— to practise
MMMMMLMMMMM-TMRUC (work up to level 4)

3. explicit tips
!!! If you like the game and start to understand it mecanisms, please go deeper and read the following tips ONLY if you think you understood deeply points 1. and 2. Else, keep analizing and thinking to find out how a strategy works.

– Your “setup” strategy should focus on “expanding fast”
– Your “development” strategy should focus on “fighting”

Others way might work, so far, this way is the most efficient one I found. Any other thought appreciated !

4. Final boss
This is my best one. Didn’t spend a lot of time building this one so I believe a lot of better strategies exists. Still, good luck to beat me =)

— fast expand then aggressive
MMMMMMLMMMMMTLMTLMTLM-UCMCRC
— even better – made by a colleague of mine
MTMMMMTLMMTMMMM-MCRMMCURMCMCRMMCRMC

5. Balancing
By now strategies are pretty unbalanced and some actions are too strong, preventing some “alternative strategies” from being efficient.
I plan to balance the game/add new actions/include this guide levels in a future version. If you want to be updated, I’ll be twitting about it @Lythom.

Have Fun !

[stextbox id=”alert”][Version française/French Version][/stextbox]

Salutations =) Comprendre les mécaniques et les subtilités de Tinyvilization  n’est pas évident, voici donc un petit guide stratégique pour vous aider à construire une stratégie efficace. Je ne donnerai (presque) pas d’indication explicites mais des exemples à comparer entre eux pour comprendre leur fonctionnement. Pour commencer, affrontez les plutôt que les niveaux inclus qui sont bien plus difficiles.

Astuces pour construire votre stratégie
1. S’étendre proprement
Essayez d’utiliser et d’affronter les stratégies qui suivent. Elles ne battent pas les niveau inclus mais s’étendent sur toute la surface, ce qui est un début suffisant.
Comparez chaque stratégie avec la suivant/précédente et analysez les différences pour comprendre le role de chaque action.
Pour comparer, copier/coller le code en gras dans la text box. “use strategy” permet de voir ou utiliser la stratégie, “fight strategy” permet de l’affronter.

— déploiement de base
TML-UMRT (facile a battre mais montre la base)
— meilleur déploiement de base
LTM-UMRT (bat le précédent, regarder la différence pour comprendre)
LTMM-UMRT (bat de peu le pécédent, regarder la différence pour comprendre)
LTMMM-UMRT (bat de peu le pécédent, maintenant vous devriez avoir compris les bases du déploiement)

2. Combattre
— conversion uniquement
LTMMM-TMRCRCRC (bat le précédent, regardez la différence pour comprendre)
— défense et conversion
LTMMMU-TMRCRCRC (bat le précédent, la victoire n’est pas évidente : regarder jusqu’au bout pour voir que le bleu gagne. Seules les villes rapportent des points!)

3. Conseils explicites
!!! Si vous aimez le jeu et commencez à appréhender ces mécanismes, ne lisez ce point que pour confirmer ce que vous avez compris précédemment. Sinon continuez d’analyser et de réfléchir, ce sera bien plus valorisant au final!

– La phase”setup” de la stratégie doit être dédiée au déploiement et à la domination de la carte
– La phase “development” de la stratégie doit être dédiée au combat et à la domination de la zone alentour.

D’autres façon de faire sont peut être viable. Jusqu’à maintenant, c’est la stratégie expliquée jusque ici que je trouve le plus efficace. N’hésitez pas à me proposer des alternatives si vous en avez !

4. Final boss
Ma meilleur stratégie. Je l’ai construite assez rapidement et je l’ai peu triturée, il en existe probablement des meilleurs. Il vous faudra tout de même bien comprendre les mécaniques pour espérer ne serai-ce qu’y survivre, bon courage !

— extension rapide puis défense agressive
MMMMMMLMMMMMTLMTLMTLM-UCMCRC
— Encore mieux ! Strat d’un collègue
MTMMMMTLMMTMMMM-MCRMMCURMCMCRMMCRMC

5. Equilibrage
A l’heure actuelle, il me semble que certaines actions (et donc stratégies) sont trop avantagées ce qui le laisse pas assez de place à la diversité. Je pense continuer le développement pour équilibrer le jeu, inclure les stratégies de ce guide, et éventuellement implémenter des nouvelles actions pour varier les stratégies. Je gazouillerai sur le sujet donc si ça vous intéresse :  @Lythom.

Have Fun !

I started 6 hours ago, I have something broken and incomplete but I really have to sleep due to exams and classes tomorrow. I wish LD could have been a weekend later.

I will get to rating other peoples games as soon as I have some free time.

Disappointed, but still had fun trying to make my entry, a board game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=4842

All done!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=654

I managed to finish in time, adding menu music, a level, basic splash screens, multiple weapons, sound effects, and more animations.

I had to trim some features to make it, but everything turned out just fine.  The final product is definitely worth it.

It’s still not up to my standards of originality, but it’s fun regardless.  I would have liked to add secondary weapons, so we’ll see what happens to it in my spare time.  I was able to build a reasonable level.  It’s not that pretty and was annoying to make, so I only made one…  I was really hoping to make a couple more, like desert and river levels.  Also, “tiny world war” is a demonstration of my latest framework using the SDL_gpu library to drive 2D OpenGL accelerated graphics and using Box2D for collision physics.

Overall…  Success!  I’d like to put networking into a future version, which will be a good preliminary step toward doing the same to my current main project, Don’t Blow It!  When that does happen, there may be a new release on my website.

See ya guys next time!

Tags: opengl, SDL, SDL_gpu, tanks

I think I’m doing well, time wise… I think… Just adding the little details and background items. I still have a few more things to draw. Then I’m going to figure out how to make an animation for the ending and I hopefully should have at least one hour to figure out about music/other audio.

Tags: city, Motherboard

More progress!!

It’s not complete yet but it’s playable and need balance! 😀

Saturday was a write-off due to visitors, then I had a reasonable idea (similar to some others, I’ve learned). I started some basic code in Flash to render and subdivide hexagons, but then my mind drifted off to other things and I couldn’t bring myself to add gameplay components during Sunday. Was hoping for a jam entry, but after refining the concept on Monday I still didn’t really feel the spark needed to sit down and make it work. Too bad.

I think it might work out as a fun abstract game though, but probably needs a lot of reactionary tweaking after the initial playable builds start popping out, to adjust balance and add interesting challenges. Pacing might also be a problem, making it fast enough to be entertaining but not too fast for comfort. I imagined having mouse controls of a slightly unusual nature where you move to aim and are able to do limited backwards movement while still aiming and firing.

Feast on these conceptual mockups while I try to find the brain fuel for a post-compo implementation.

Congratulations to all the participants with far greater discipline than me! Getting a game completed and submitted isn’t a small thing at all. I look forward to browsing the results, as always. Next time I will have to do some warmups to iron out my gremlins before it gets serious.