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

Goto “My Little Dungeon”

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

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

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

The tools I used:

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

What went right:

• It was a last minute decision for us to enter the Jam. Stefan asked me back in February the first time, if I wanted to join the Jam with him together. But up until the day before the start of LD 23 I was unsure if I have the energy to go through a 3 day crunch time, even if it is self-inflicted. This was because I just had some rough times behind me in my professional life and just started to recover. But in the end I joined and it was by far the best decision I made in a long time, and it was a really funny, creative and productive time. Even though I had to take a break a little bit more often and sleep a little bit longer then Stefan. Additionally, Gavin joined us and helped out with all music and sound-fx tasks, which was a really big help. This was great especially as we asked him on really short notice. Thanks alot :). Anyway we finished and we are proud that we did finish. This was a big positive.
• The tool choice was the right one. Even though I had not used all the tools before under production stress it worked out well and they helped me more then they kept me from finishing anything. It was a really smooth transition between the three tools and was a great combination. Especially PyxelEdit and GraphicsGale in combination was great for getting stuff done early before I could see them ingame.
• Art style: I had a vision of what I wanted to achieve right from the beginning which really helped alot. My biggest fear in the beginning was that I would have a creative block, but hey guess what: nope didn’t happen. 😉
• The simple art style also helped me to get my second biggest fear out of the way: Pixel art animation. I had never done that before. Normally I do 3D work and pixel art is a new field for me. I only just started to explore pixel art with our last game “Pixel Towers” but that game had no animations at all. Also GraphicsGale really helps you to get your animation job done. Love it! In the end I was happy how the character looked and how they moved.

These are the 3 iterations of the main hero that I did

• The communication between the three of us worked really well even though we were sitting in 3 different countries and only had Skype for communication. But we are used to work that way anyway since we’ve always had the problem of different locations, from the day we started working on games together.

What went wrong:

• I was unhappy with some colour schemes I used in the graphics. I also lost tons of time fiddling with the palette and trying to get the colours right. Next time I will plan a little bit better ahead and create the palette before I start making the art itself.
• Even if the game itself worked as we thought it would, there were definitely some big holes in the balancing and the things the player can do.
• For example the game is way too slow. But as we only had one hour left at the end for balancing and tweaking we couldn’t solve that anymore. (or maybe our brains were just too slow after three days of working that we couldn’t imagine the game in a faster mode ;))
• There were not enough things for the player to do, making the lack of speed even worse.
• There were some bugs and problems we just couldn’t solve anymore in time, like that you can get stuck or that the AI sometimes just loses interest in doing anything and you die from starvation. And we thought it was not that bad, but as it seems it is happening far more often than we thought. Sorry!
• In the end, I had lost myself way too long in some art work. For example I took 4 hours and three tries to get the endboss room done. That was way too much time for a rather small asset. Also the logo kept me busy for another 2 hours which was also too much in my opinion.

These are some iterations it took until I had the final endboss room. Took me too long in the end…

• We failed to make it clear how we used the LD 23 theme. The dialogue and the endboss-room were just not enough and you really had to play through the game to really get it which takes way too long and can be an impossible task due to bugs. So next time we will spend a little bit more time in thinking about how we can integrate the theme in a nicer and more fitting way.
• The menu and the controls are one of the things we rather failed at. First, we started way too late (last day afternoon) with the user interface. So we could not integrate a real interface but more a statistics window. This was because we originally thought, that we wouldn’t have time to get to the interface done at all. In the end it would have helped the game if we would have invested in a more working UI. One thing we also failed to implement was a simple main menu with the possibility to restart the game. But it was just too late already when we thought about it.

Overall it was big success for us as a team and for me personally and we are proud that we made it to the end. The best bonus of the whole thing: We now have a prototype for one of our next games. Because we are going to extend this as well as move it to other platforms in the future.

Can’t wait to get going again with the next Ludum Dare, and thanks for reading this rather long post mortem.

This time I had the goal of making a game that I’d like to play within the context of Ludum Dare. Something that is still enjoyable although you just played a ton of other short games and your patience is running low. Here are some of my criteria:

– Needs to deliver in 1-5 minutes (show interesting stuff as early as possible)

– Don’t let the player wait

– Simple to grasp game concept (I get braindead after playing a lot of different games)

– Easy to play through

– Something isn’t interesting when most other games do the same thing

– Music and sound that don’t cause ear-cancer  (music that loops too obviously is super annoying, huge jumps in volume are annoying)

– A 5 minute experience with proper beginning and ending

How it went:

I used my regular selection of tools that have proven themselves in the previous LDs and I woke up super early for the theme announcement. For the brainstorming I forced myself  to focus on stuff that isn’t too vague. A vague idea doesn’t lend itself for something that needs to be finished in 48h, but the problem is I usually get super excited by vague ideas and hate most of my concrete ideas. Anyways after a while I settled for something that wasn’t too vague and started working. Strangely on Saturday I was lacking motivation that faded into a feeling of doubt in the evening. On Sunday I felt a lot more motivated and positive, starting the day with creating my own level editor and making some music. I think I uploaded my submission 30 minutes before the deadline, which is okay imo.

The Good:

Compared to my LD22 entry, this one turned out to be an actual game and people seem to be less frustrated with it than with my LD21 entry. Many actually played it through. I’m fairly happy with the game mechanic, visual style and music/sound. Also I didn’t get distracted by the real world or had to struggle with bugs/tools. Conditions were great in that regard. I even made my own little level editor which was fun.

The Bad:

As I mentioned, on Saturday  I was lacking motivation which resulted in less work done, less ideas explored, less problems fixed and less quality of the overall experience. It would have been nice if that day had been more productive.
Here are some of the issues I see with my game:

– The Intro doesn’t really sell that it’s related to the theme … in general there aren’t many theme related things going on

– It starts fairly boring (first screen)

– The flashing background gets a tad bit annoying

– Some levels focus on the weirdness of the controls rather than the spin mechanic and some are a bit too hard

– The spin is too fast

– The ending screen is bland (an animation or something would have been nice)

– The music is too fast compared to the gameplay and maybe a bit too repetitive

– Sound should be a bit louder

– I regret not having more interesting stuff going on (visual and gameplay wise)

Conclusion:

All in all good.  Gotta tackle those issues next time, and also finally make a 3D game.

My entry http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=4912

My October Challenge 2011 game is finally done! I guess I took longer than a month to finish it

Anyway, check it out

If you want to know the whole dev history (how it took 4 game jams to make this game You can check out my dev blog.

Anyway, have fun!
-Phil

So today I’ve finally reached 100 titles rated, and out of all of that I’ve picked my 10 favorite games.

(in no particular order)

the most humorous game so far is:

To What a Mountain?, not much gameplay but a very funny game.

the most innovative games:

Phobius, the melting mechanic is  very nice.

Tiny Tim and Big Bill, playing 2 characters that rely on each-other, great idea

Recluse, probably the most original idea with the window control, I’ve never seen this done before.

The games I spent the most time on:

Tiny World, Big War, there’s no end to this game but it’s pretty addicting.

Tiny Domination, RTS, time consuming, addicting fun.

Electron Cloud, funny gameplay, socially awkward atom.

Greed Wars, I think I played this game for 4 hours or so, very fun and polished.

The most relaxing polished games:

Another Kind of World, nice pace, fun, great graphics.

Zephyr, addicting, calm, very nice graphics.

all these games are great and if you haven’t played them yet please go and try them out.

Post-Mortem:

In Delusion 

So it didn’t come out nearly as good as I thought it would, not because the ideas were bad, but because I didn’t have enough time to put them all together.

This was my first ludum dare so I wanted to try something I’ve never done before and thought, “Why not make a game from scratch?” this way I would learn new things and test my quick thinking abilities. Unfortunately my ideas for the game were almost completely incompatible with the way I was making it. What I did when the theme got announced was sit down and think for a bit. I wrote down a list of ideas that immediately came to my head and then when the list was complete, I crossed them all off.

I wanted to make something original, so instead of using an idea that first popped into my head I did the opposite. Anything that first popped into my head I didn’t do, because those are probably the same ideas that are popping into everyone else’s head.

The funny thing is all of the ideas that I wrote down/thought of were used. Every time I played a game that was on my list I chuckled a bit because I was surprised  how many people came up with the same ideas.

Anyway that was the big reason I wasn’t able to finish in time, after writing a list of what  not to do and after coding some base game logic I started writing down new things and came up with a rough outline for in delusion then I wrote a more detailed outline. At this point I was designing a heavily story based game for my first “2 day game engine”. Those ideas definitely do not fit together.

What went right:

Almost nothing, the only things that somewhat came through were the mood and the graphics.

What went wrong:

I had to redo collisions 3 times because I kept getting sidetracked writing story.

1 slide was unintentionally  being skipped at the end(Bill’s slide).

the slide idea was a last minute idea to broadly fit together as much as possible because I didn’t get to finish pretty much the last 75% of the game.

the inventory system randomly decided not to work properly after I put the slides in at the end.

What I learned:

Don’t expect a huge story to fit in a tiny “game engine” in 2 days.

Being original is good, but don’t get too carried away.

What’s next:

Right now I’m making my own flash engine and a remake of In Delusion is going to be the first game I make with it. This time I’ll put everything I planned in it and then some.

if you haven’t played my game yet, you can play it here

Tags: game reviews, post-mortem, postmortem, review, reviews

Well, it’s been a while since Ludum Dare, and looking back I am extremely proud of what I accomplished.

I made a game called In a Lonely Sea of Stars: you send harvest ships from your (tiny) planet out into the great galaxy to harvest energy from stars. Of course you have to defend your ships from space pirates so you build defense turrets, etc. etc.

Pretty colors...

The game

I chose my dev tools well. I enjoyed using cfxr, Photoshop, and even Flash Builder (though I’d have loved to use a Mac-native IDE. Chocolat with working AS3 autocompletion/compiling/debug? /drool)

If you’re interested in playing it, it’s on GitHub:

 | source

So how did I do?

What went right

This was my first Ludum Dare and my second full game. I programmed a game a couple of years ago that was really, really awful so I won’t even mention it here. Oops.

I did begin work on a concept to learn FlashPunk a while back, but “In a Lonely Sea of Stars” was my first real creation. And I am so proud of it.

• Concept. I got the game concept really early on (like 15 minutes after they announced the theme— I was eating dinner so I got the theme a little late) and got into prototyping really quickly.
• Asset creation. It was a cinch. I love pixel art because it’s so beautiful but so simple to create.
• Development. Development was, dare I say, fun! I didn’t run into many fundamental programming errors (because I used a framework instead of starting from scratch) so development just worked.

What went wrong

I may be proud, but I’m also aware of what broke.

• Math.  My worst enemy in game design is not procrastination or overreaching or anything at all complex. Math (which I’m really good at ordinarily) does not work in my head for games. Atan2? AHH! Math.PI * 180? HIDE ME! What clicks every day breaks when I try to apply it in general terms, and math was by far my greatest time suck.
  • Trig. I really, really, really hate trig for games. Part of my code reads:

    point.x = (FP.width * _zoom * Math.cos(_angle)) / (2 * Main.game.zoom);

    which then gets fed into

    x = Main.game.earth.x - 39 + point.x

    I know what it’s doing in theory (finding the x position of an object using it’s intrinsic _zoom and _angle position and then putting it in terms of a different origin… but really? What’s going on!?), so for next Dare I swear I will have a better understanding / predesigned framework for putting things on screen. Jeez.

  • Coordinate Systems. I also hate FlashPunk’s coordinate system. I ended up with code that had so many arbitrary numbers that I just cannot understand what is happening. originX vs centerX vs x vs width. Yah, I totally understand all of that.
  • Formulas. The reason I’m a developer and not a programmer comes down to this. Formulas just throw me; I cannot write an accessible function that throws out a scroll position to save my life. I spent close to 3 hours developing a scrolling system which actually just split a number (36, say) into digits (3 and 6). Then at the end of the day I combined the numbers again. And it’s still buggy. What a waste.
• No end in sight. I wasted so much time on the math that I wasn’t able to complete the ending or write the story I planned. The end goal was to find another life-supporting planet akin to earth (hence “lonely sea of stars”). I was not able to implement that.
• Time sucks. I had a practice AP test to take that weekend (I’m in high school), so I was effectively paralyzed for 3hrs plus the prep time for that exam.

Thanks, y’all

The greatest thing about this compo has been the community. You have no idea (or do you) how happy it makes me to see even the most perfunctory comments on my game like “excellent work for a first timer” or “could be really fun.” I know my game is far from perfect, but this praise makes me so, so happy. Thank you so very much everyone.

So we look to the future

Now I want to see how this game is when it’s finished, so here’s my plan:

I will release three versions of this game, all accessible on GitHub.

1. Original. The Ludum Dare version with all it’s bugs and inconsistencies.
2. Bug fixed. No new features, just playable; tutorial won’t break the game, turrets go where they’re supposed to, etc.
3. Final. This version will be the actual vision I had for the game. It will have some features I didn’t get to put in like a story and endgame.

I will also spend this weekend reviewing games because, by gor, I want other people to be as happy as I am.

So once again, everyone on the net and everyone reviewing games, thank you so, so very much. Thank you for making me the happiest person in the world just by saying “good job.” I worked really hard but it was so worth it, guys.

Thanks.

Tags: postmortem

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2012 at 1:09 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sometimes you wander around Ludum Dare and stumble upon some AWESOME entry. It has an awesome idea, an awesome design, awesome graphics and audio. And you, minor Ludum Dare game maker, who haven’t been in top 50 even with a jam game, think: “How the hell can I make it?”

Indeed, making games combines many kinds of art. You use art (drawing) to make graphics, composing to make music, acting to make voice, writing to make a plot, martial arts to fix hardware problems. How can you even do that?

I discovered a way of making everything. If you are not an artist, you can still create a beautiful game, if you never composed music and don’t know what is “half note” and “quarter note”, you will make some music for your game. LD is made for studying, isn’t it?

WARNING: Not tested on anybody but myself. You might fail succeed. I have a good imagination, but I am not sure about you.

Here is the algorithm:

1. Think of something
2. Make a draft
3. Upgrade a draft
4. Goto 3

Draft is the key!

If you are not a game designer.

I suppose you played a computer game before. A lot. And not-computer as well. What’s your favourite one? What is the best thing in games in your opinion? Have you ever made a game in childhood? (I used to draw point-and-click games on paper) Or thought about making one?

Take the best from all the games and your own ideas. Imagine how the game will work. And do exactly the same.

If you are not an artist.

Evolution

Drawing people/animals, and other stuff as well:

Step one: imagine the result. Step two: make a rough skeleton. Step three: outline it. Step four: polish it. Step five: color it.

Of course, the most important step is step one. Imagine the result as good as possible and simply copy it. And watch the drawing become as good as possible as well.

If you are not a composer.

The hardest part is that you can’t make a draft of a melody. You can only play it in mind. Or hum it. The next part is tedious yet productive: open the audio editor (I prefer PXTone). Hum the first note. Play a random note with the editor. Compare them. Pick another one that will be closer. Do it until the sound will match. Place the note. (If you really don’t know what the “half note” and “quarter note” is, better make all the notes the same length) Do the same to the next note. Yes, it’ll be a bit tedious. But I prefer making short loops.

Random joke: How do you call somebody who participated in compo? A composer.

If you are not a writer.

If you want to make a good plot it’ll be hard. But here is 1 rule: ask the player a question. Preferably about life. Like: “Are fame and fortune worth achieving?”, “Can a weak one survive in a strong world?” and tell the player your opinion as you play. For example, tell about life of a businessman, who works hard to make money, lives a luxurious life and then gets abandoned because he had a bad character. It will be a good plot.

Then use the above-mentioned algorithm to make a plan of the most important events. Like: Event 1: a man sees the life of rich people and wants to be the same. Event 2: he works hard to become rich. Event 3: he starts a lazy thoughtless life. Event 4: he becomes a bankrupt, everybody abandon him. Event 5: he returns home very poor.

Then add some less important events. And so on.

If you are not a martial artist.

Call servicing.

So, go on and make something you haven’t made before for the upcoming miniLDs!

Hello, fellow jammers! Being a strong believer that later is better than never, here’s a link to the Tiny Shard postmortem. In truth, I started it during the jam and finished it at some point last week, but totally forgot to post here.

Before all that, though, I just wanted to thank the Ludum Dare veterans and the other newcomers for the warm reception and awesome feedback! This is my first time here and I’m amazed with the great community. You guys rule!

In the Pixel Cows blog (www.pixelcows.com – no idea why I can’t make it a link), there is a more detailed narrative of our rollercoaster method, for if you like narratives, rollercoasters or methods! Also, Tiny Shard is vaguely based on our main game, The Journey of Eko. It’s not the same game or setting, but the style and main character are certainly similar! You can find more info about this game in our blog as well.

The Kid from "Tiny Shard" and Eko from "The Journey of Eko" - look alikes!

All right, down to business.

What went right

-Using tools that we’re familiar with, specially Multimedia Fusion 2. We didn’t have to spend time reinventing the wheel.
-Dedicate enough time for polishing. Small details such as the weekday sign, the next day’s shard being shown at the background, the opening and closing animation for the gates, etc, ended up contributing a lot to the game’s setting and message.
-Low res. We’re still shocked with how quickly you can come up with reasonably well polished content when you work with a 200×150 pixels screen!
-Creating the type of game that we like to design and to play. This makes it easier to immediately notice if a feature is important or not, if the game is well balanced, etc. Besides, since The Journey of Eko is mostly a platformer, Ludum Dare wasn’t the first time we had to meddle with the science of balancing jump height, gravity, inertia, etc, which is a good thing from a time standpoint.
-Particles!

What went wrong

-Initially planning a scope that isn’t feasible in 48 hours. We fortunately had the idea of merging our projects and redirecting our efforts to the jam, also gaining an extra day to finish the game; but if it wasn’t so, each one of us would probably have submitted a poorly finished compo entry.
-Underestimate the time that level design and content importing take. This was pushed to the last hours, and we really had a very real risk of not being able to finish the game in time because of that.
-Think that iNudge is a magical tool for creating music with no time and effort. Don’t get me wrong here, the software is really good, but a random sound made in 5 minutes will most likely not convey the atmosphere you want for your game. To use it to its full potential, it certainly takes practice and time (that we still don’t have and that we didn’t have, respectively)
-Balancing the game difficulty based on our own skill level. Many people found the game to be too difficult, specially the already infamous last passage in Harday!

We have overwhelmed by all the encouragement and productive feedback we’re receiving from the community, and truly amazed on how many talented people are here! In fact, it’s being such a great experience that it motivated us to finish Tiny Shard. We’re working on the main things: making the final levels of the game a little easier and with checkpoints, rebalancing the Gentleman’s Rage, making the slime less anoying, and expanding the ending. We’ll publish it at www.pixelcows.com when it’s done, check it out if you like!

Finally, let me just take the chance to thank the Ludum Dare veterans and the other newcomers for the great reception. You guys are just great!

Gabriel

So, this is our first Ludum Dare. Or was? Just 3 days left!

Anyway, we didn’t know what to expect. I mean, we are from Argentina. A place not precisely known for it’s videogame industry (which is actually growing fast!) And we are just two regular dudes!

Thanks to the comments and feedback that our 72 hs. game has been receiving, we have an extreme motivation to keep developing on it (AND keeping it FREE for browsers!). So we decided to give you guys a tiny present: An HD widescreen wallpaper!

If you haven’t, you can play and rate our entry, “ONLY US”, here!

Again, thank you very much. We still have about 1240 games to play and rate! See yah!

Tags: jam, ld23, tiny world

1. There are only two days left to vote. So how about we start voting like in the first 2 days, with endless enthusiasm. Everyone has to learn something from this LD, so while you’re voting you’d better comment as well – it really helps.

2. I hate the fact that this LD starts exactly when my examination period starts and the same happens with the winter LD

3. The miniLD #34 rule is AWSOME!!! Restrictions like these really trigger innovation. I can only hope to see themes/rules like these for main LD events.

4. I’m really happy to see that more and more people are using Java + LWJGL or other real programming languages or Unity instead of resorting to game makers. I know not everyone is a programmer and I know of the technical burden one has to face when using general purpose tools for creating something as specific as games, BUT no game making software will grant you the same freedom of expression you could get from something as C++ + OpenGl or equivalents. AND PROGRAMMING IS GOOD FOR YOU.

5. I’ve stumbled upon the tiniest game ever! Give it a go, and really try to find WHERE the game is. If you find it you’ll agree that it’s REALLY unexpected and original. It took me a 5 minutes to sweep the screen in search of the game but twas fun! PLAY –> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7465 It’s called “It’s a tab”

6. I’ve also prepared a list of not so shiny games that have huge potential. I would play an enhanced version of all of them with great pleasure.

+ POGO PLANET http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=935

Just look at it – it’s a simple arcade-ish game with style and it’s rather unique. There’s nothing much going on – you’re jumping around, avoiding stuff and drooling on the great geometric-abstract graphics – but all the good ideas are there. It just needs more drive, levels, waves of enemies, or anything to add some sort of structure to its continuous, monotonous gameplay. Oh, and by the way, the color-state-changing mechanics can also be found in another great indie game, MONO –> http://www.binaryzoo.com/games/mono/index.htm

+ QUANTUM ENTAGLEMENT http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11319

It’s a really nice puzzle game, and I would really enjoy playing some more. You don’t get to see too many puzzle games at LD events mainly because it’s hard to come up with a nice puzzle game and once you do that you realize it’s hard as hell to make nice levels for it. So I really applaud Quantum Entanglement and hope to see more of it in the future.

+ MUNIVERSE http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12236

This game has solar systems, planets, suns, stars, ships, nice star backgrounds, space stations, missions, cargo stuff… It’s a really nice start for a really complex space faring simulator. It’s true, some things are missing, but I have a feeling the creator will add everything to make this game worth paying for one day. Disclaimer: no screenshot does this game any justice…

7. By the way, I’ve found another gem 😀 (of course it’s my game) –> it’s called Space Bear! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=5035

I just want to remind everybody that while rating is nice and gives us our chart at the end with the “winners” what is really important is to help others grow as a designer, and the best way you can do that is leave a comment after you play a game. Explain what you liked about the game and what you didn’t like, and even add things that you would have thought would improve the game. I always try to include  a comment to the games I rate and I make sure to list at least one positive thing along with my criticisms.

Also, try to include something the author isn’t already aware of or has heard a dozen times already. I’m upset that I didn’t think of this earlier, but read the other comments so you aren’t posting the 19th comment about how the colors look weird.

And, when you post a comment, there is a link to your game right there that the developer can click to play. I know my last twenty comments have come from people playing my game after I’ve commented on theirs.

I definitely appreciate all the feedback that I have gotten and it has led me to some great ideas for improving my game post-compo. I know everyone else would really appreciate a constructive comment whenever you play their game, so please try and take the time to leave one.

There’s still time!  Rate Gulliver today!  It’s a metroidvania shmup hybrid with awesome 9bit chiptune music!

Posting these mostly for archival…

My first brainstorming document.  You can see some of the other ideas I had, as well as my primary design goals (music!).  I had also gotten the impression that tiled level design wouldn’t be quite too hard, so I didn’t have qualms about that.  I ended up being sort of right, but sort of wrong…tiled level design isn’t all that bad, but I was totally unfamiliar with the toolset and workflow.  I also tried using DAME which ended up just feeling kind of sluggish–Tiled might be a better choice (maybe?  can’t say for sure as I haven’t tried).

More ideas.  I likened the shrink idea to Blaster Master here, and decided I’d use a shrinking spaceship as that would be easier to do art for.

The initial design sketch.  I had originally planned for level transitions to involve a cool zoom in/zoom out transition, to emphasize the recursive shrinking, but unfortunately that wasn’t really possible with Flixel, at least not without bending over backwards to get it working.

Sketching out ideas for the game.

This was my design for the first Space/Station Zero level–it’s pretty much unchanged in the actual game.  After that I started just designing the levels on the fly as it was just faster that way.

This was my first Ludum Dare and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Not only because I learned a lot in a short time, but also because I made (what I believe is) a pretty good first iteration of a game in just 48 hours. I have plenty of ideas for what I could do with the game, but I’d much rather find out what the players want and build that into my backlog. That is one of the great charms of Ludum Dare – building a prototype and getting guaranteed feedback from real players.

As of writing, my game has 34 comments. I could go through them one at a time and tick off each feature request, bug report, etc, but that would be long and stupid. So, here’s what I did instead:

1. Gather all feedback
I copied and pasted each comment from my entry page into Excel and cut out any that very clearly didn’t provide any useful feedback (e.g. “Awesome game!!!1″ or “I didn’t like it”)

2. Split feedback into negative and positive key points
The point of this step is to understand what each piece of feedback is actually telling you. I found it helped to make a list of negative and positive bullet points for each comment. Take this example:

“I like this, it has a lot of potential. Here are some of my random thoughts…

It’s rather slow paced. It feels less like action than “Line up with an enemy, start shooting, wait, dodge it, wait, wait, dodge it, aim at next enemy”. Also, because there are so few enemies in each stage, it feels empty.

It’s hard to keep track of where you are. It would be awesome if there were a minimap during the shooting bits.

I got frustrated with placing pieces, but then I figured out, you can’t place a piece if it doesn’t match up? That does make sense, but with a little work it could be better. How about if the game checks if there’s a valid path, and it won’t let you place a piece that makes the path invalid? Also, what happens if you run out of room? Perhaps you could place pieces over previously placed pieces to delete them.

I’ll be looking forward to later versions! ;)”

If we extract the key positives and negatives we get:

Positives:

• Good concept

Negatives:

• Slow-paced ship section
• Too few enemies in a room
• No in-game map
• Difficult to figure out level building (tile placement)
• Unintuitive level building (e.g. just place junk pieces elsewhere until right piece appears, potential to run out of room)
• Build stage lets you proceed to ship stage even if a path doesn’t exist from start to goal

3. Group feedback points and sum totals to rank them
At this stage, you’re still left with a long ‘to do’ list of overlapping or contradicting items. You should group similar points together and rank them according to the totals

You can see below the tally of my groupings:

My interpretation is that people really enjoyed being able to create the levels before flying through them, but the level building could be better implemented, explained and introduced. The other major feedback points were around the ship sections being slow-paced but occasionally too difficult (green rooms are too easy and red rooms are too hard), and enemy ships starting too close to the door when entering a room.

4. Take the top negative items and determine how you can resolve/improve them
You should now have a list of items, ranked by the number of people who commented on that aspect of your game (I took anything that 2 or more people commented on). The idea is to remove the pain points by taking the most commented negatives and working out how you can turn them into positives. So, another example:

“I don’t fully understand the level building section”

Improvements:

• First level goes straight into ship section, second introduces level building with short tutorial
• Prevent level start until route exists between start and finish
• Remove restriction on tile placement (can place anywhere)
• Replace random tile selection with ability to choose which tile to place next

Note that you may occasionally need to refer back to some of the comments if your items are too general.

You should now have a pretty full to do list of changes that will make the biggest positive impact to players, which you could merge with your previous list of new features/fixes to cater for the few things that players may not have thought of.

Tags: tips

Do you REALLY like game jams?

Then you should go subscribe to www.reddit.com/r/gamejams !

I’m trying to build up some support for a little community at reddit where we can share and keep up to date on all the latest game jams and jam related news.  If you know of any upcoming game jams, you should definitely go post and help us out. If you don’t, we’d still love to have you!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2012 at 11:59 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12384

Go play this. NOW! I’m in love!

After 2 weeks of successful procrastination, I bring you: the timelapse.

I’m planning to review 20 more games this weekend, so I can get Bronze. I wish I could go all the way to 100 and Gold, but I need to finish things for school…

Tags: timelapse

Hey there jammers! It took a while but we finally found some time to sit down a bit and reflect on all that went down during the LD jam. It was our very first attempt. We had no idea what to expect from ourselves or the community and we couldn’t be happier with the experience. That being said let’s get down to the matter!

Check him out here!

IDEA

Since we basically had no experience making games, we tried to aim for a platformer which seemed, at the time, the simplest way to make something viable in 72 hours. Looking back, not so sure it was the brightest idea. Although we defined this early on, ideas went crazy and at some point we had to stop and settle for the one that fit our skills best. Luckily enough it was one of the favorites almost from the start of the brainstorm.

Regarding the theme we thought of the most obvious topics and discarded them right away to try and make something different. By thinking about various interpretations of world, we came to the inner world of a being or how he perceives it. And so, Phobius deMelt was born!  An overly phobic boy who sees his world close on him as he gradually panics from claustrophobia. It seemed to fit the theme just right and also provide room for a cool mechanic. It would also be very dependent on the audio to set the mood for the character which was a plus.

Pretty fast a story formed around phobius. He’d be going on some kind of a tour to a building with his family but fearing closed spaces he gets scared at the entrance and is left behind. The rest of the time he’ll spend trying to catch up to his family growing ever more phobic with the fact he’s now also alone.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

We managed to have a team where each member was focused on each main area of the development which went pretty smooth and also granted a really fun working atmosphere.

audio

– Using as3sfxr generator for some of the simpler sound effects

– The music ended up reflecting the character’s anxiety, his psychological fragile world and at the same time setting a steady pace for gameplay.

– A mixture of jazz and rock beats along with an 8-bit sampled atari melody was ideal because of the pixel art direction of the game.

– Recording our own voices for the sound effects.

art / game design

– The animations contributed a lot to set his personality.

– The resolution seems right for the puzzles we’d be designing.

– The panic meter/mechanic was a nice feature.

– The overall weirdness / humor of the character.

– The funny ending to a short game.

programming

– Picking up flashpunk which turned out to be great.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Not saving some time to polish what we had.

audio

– Spending some time trying royalty free sfx that in the end were eliminated because they wouldn’t fit the mood we wanted.

art / game design

– Too much animation, too little level design –  it was my first time doing animations and i got carried away because i was loving it. I think I’d get away with the character’s, but the pill, the key, the intro letters melting were just small details and the time spent on them could have gone to level design which came short of what we imagined.

– We couldn’t include the losing condition – The idea was that, once the panic bar reached max the screen would go nuts and start flashing or something to make it really hard to progress and express his burst of panic. You’d have to play with the melting / unmelting (pills) mechanic to be in the melted state just enough time to get through some platform and then transform back before you lost total control.

– Lack of experimenting with sprite sheets – This turned out to be one of the major issues that we encountered later with the hitboxes, since his normal and melted state vary in width and are not quite centered. I used an iPad app for the sprite work (Sprite Something) and it was kind of hard to center every frame out. Had i done it on the pc it probably wouldn’t have been an issue.

– Not experimenting with level editors since we had already decided to aim for a platformer.

– The character’s relaxed state color was too similar to the normal one making it harder to understand he could jump higher.

– We forgot to explicitly say that the ‘R’ key goes for restart which might have made some give up before the end

programming

– Not learning about flashpunk prior to the competition weekend

– Lack of polish – There are some nasty bugs in there and some sweet details got cut out.

– The collisions when the level changes can get him stuck more often than not – Again we kept pushing this problem to the later hours and it was left unsolved.

Bottom line, we loved the experience and learned an awful lot! And let me just say this community is really great, we got a lot of constructive feedback

We’ll be sure to come back for more next time!

And if you can spare a minute go meet phobius!

Tags: jam, ld23, post-mortem, tiny world

So, Construct 2 turned out to be a huge hassle to work with. The non-coding nature of the scripting made things difficult once I wanted it to do anything that wasn’t built-in.

I’ve played with SFML.Net (the .Net bindings to SFML) and have gotten some results quickly and easily. I’m very excited about it.

I’m working on my shmup first this time, but I’m varying from “128×128 all the things” by making it 512×128. It’s a Defender clone!

Isn’t it nice to finally find something that works?

– Henry

This is my second particpiation at the Ludumdare and I’m really happy with my entry.

This time I had decided to create a puzzle game before the beginning of the contest, I really wanted to find simple mechanisms because at my previous LD, I was aiming too far.

Once the theme has been revealed, I started to create all my needs for the story without really thinking at my game (the states, the context, …)

Once the console interface was done for the story, I started to thing about puzzle games in a 2D map that could be considered as a tiny world.

Then the idea came and I made this game where you need to connect all the block with the same color together.

Each time I work on a game (not only for the LD), I prefer to have something polished instead of something with a lot of bugs, that’s why sometimes I’m cuting some features.

When I say polish, I mean my game has a menu, a story, a way to exit, even a save file, … it’s all this little point that I really care about but that are not enough rewarded in the way to judge games for LD.

My biggest problem after the graphics is the music, I never know how to use softwares so I do nothing. I will try to find a way to add easily some musics to my gnext game 😉

Thanks for reading, if you wan to play, it’s here: Link

We found some time to build an Android version !
Move the ball by tilting your device !

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10263

This version is also a bit easier, as the tiny people weight less on the world.

Flash that QR Code to download the install straight to your Android device :

Thanks everyone!

Yup that’s right you guesed it. A last minute “port” to the chrome store for “I want to turn the heater on”. Couldn’t just leave it only on the play store could I? This version has the warping effects as originally intended, so if you haven’t given it a spin yet please do. Looking forward to any and all feedback.

Less than 20% pipes!

Chrome store! | Rate it! | Android!

The final day of rating is approaching very fast. After playing about 10 percent of the Ludum Dare 23 games and my LD23 folder growing to alomst 1 gig I would like to suggest a few games with only few ratings that should get more ratings (Click the headlines):

Cracked – BlackBird (33 ratings)

Interesting puzzle game. Gets more challenging in later levels. Game mechanics work pretty well.

Robots Are Red, Violets Are Blue – d_durham (39 ratings)

The control mechanics for the robot are pretty unique and make this game interesting to play and quite challenging.

c!ph3r – frosty (33 ratings)

A game about the right timing. The setting is great and the sound effects almost make a soundtrack.

World In A Bottle – Serilyn (38 ratings)

Pretty atmospheric concept about balancing a world in a tiny bottle. Also it has the smem basic idea as my game with a completely different execution.

Tiny Garden of Hope – steamgirl (40 ratings)

Very beautiful game which isn’t that difficult to beat if you are patient enough for letting the robot give you some advice.

Go and play those, they deserve more ratings than that. For my own game I’m actually working on the next post-compo version. You can find some information here.

Tags: game reviews, review, reviews

Attention last minute raters (like myself)!

Here are some games you might enjoy! With my impressions contained in really short and stupid sentences because I am really tired right now! No particular theme to these, I just looked through the list of games I’ve rated and picked some that stood out to me.

Serendipity with Cubes – angelk

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12262

A pretty cool puzzle thing

It’s a tab – brackcurly

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7465

The gimmick was mind blowing

Save the tiny world! – davidllanos22

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

Terrifying pigs D:

Extensionism – Eelfroth

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7288

Really great symbolism

Real War – nuprahtor

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=2280

Creepy & very cool

Le Petit – Pixelulsar

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10737

Super fun

Craemle Zone – PsySal

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=57

Insanity, with really great voice acting.

Civilized Pixel – Terrified Virus

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12876

Pretty cute and fun!

And while your at it, my own game could probably use a few more ratings, too 😉

Have fun in these last hours everyone 😀 I’m so excited to see the results!

Necro Gaia

Seriously, this game is completely awesome and has only been played 6 times. It’s a cross between a retro arcade shooter and a tower defense game and it is done really well. It definitely deserves more plays so someone go play this one now!

The title says it all!  Here are some more of the many amazing games I’ve had the privilege of playing thanks to Ludum Dare.  Go and show them some love, we’ve only got until tomorrow night at 9!

Necro Gaia – lazybraingames

A really fun take on tower defense with a great visual style and sound design.  This game only has 7 ratings at the time of writing, it needs some love!  You won’t regret it.

Space Cabin – trylle

The first thing that struck me about this game is its great visual style.  It’s such a pretty game.  As for the game play, it is a visual adventure game that relies heavily on classic text-based adventure game mechanics.  I love this combination, it makes for a very fun and fresh feeling game.

Shrunkit – MagnesiumNinja

A really fun puzzle-platformer with an interesting mechanic.  The puzzles are well thought out and the shrinking/growing mechanic is fun to play with.  With some more polish, work, and lengthening, this would be a game I’d want to buy.  You should definitely go give it a play.

ascii world – dwrensha

ascii world is definitely an interesting game.  I don’t want to spoil the discovery element of this game; I think that’s what makes it so interesting.  Give it a go, it’s pretty short and you can play it in your browser.

Curse of Grimwood – digital_sorceress

A neat little action-rpg that feels extremely polished for the given timeframe.  Definitely worth a go.

Quantum Entanglement – icefallgames

Quantum Entanglement is a really well designed puzzle game.  The puzzles feel well thought out and the mechanics at play are interesting and fun to mess around with.

That’s all for now!  Please continue to spread the love around the community and rate more games everyone!  And as others have said, it’s always nice to leave a comment saying what you liked/didn’t like about the game and offer some constructive criticism when you rate a game.  It’s how we all can help each other to grow as game developers, and I think it’s what makes the Ludum Dare community so special.

Tags: games, ld23, ratings, review, reviews

I’ve played several games with awesome soundtracks, and I’ve been downloading them when they’re available. I want to share the songs I’ve found as a sort of LD23 Soundtrack, but I need more songs to make a full album!

So, were there any games that you thought included great songs? Did your game use an awesome soundtrack? If so, let me know and I’ll give the game a play and try to include the song (along with credits to the developer and song writer, of course) in a forthcoming post with a link to download the soundtrack.

Here are some of my favorite soundtracks:

Tiny Tim’s World by tacograveyard

Prince of Leaves by evilseanbot

Hamster Bowling by tfendall

ACTION SCIENCE DOG by bburbank

And of course the obligatory link to my game, A Pale Blue Dot, with phat beatz by MC Carl Sagan:

There are a lot of LD games to rate, these are my favorites:

Tiny Island Adventure

A little platformer with a nice difficulty.  Awesome gameplay and graphics.

Super Tiny Adventure

A Zelda like RPG with quests. Everything is so tiny, but awesome.

Tiny Wizard

A very cool shooter with a gandalf-like wizard.  You shall not pass!

Housefly

The story of a fly trying to get outside. Very cool concept and Fun!

Feel free to play my game too:

A Bathtub Story
A shooter game in a bathtub.

Hey Ludumers,

A few hours away from the end of the voting, we thought we’d post here some of the assets of our game to give us a little excuse to thank you all for your feedbacks and kind words and your help debugging our thing.

Our game Poiesis, is far from the most polished, but it was a great experience and we’ve been in contact with a lot of incredible people!

If you’d like to try our attempt at world domination, just know that it’s an unfinished little piece and way too complex in it’s current state, we’re working on it to make the learning curve more bareable

Do read the little tutorial in the description before jumping in, it might help you, and know that the aim is to try to please your clients without knowing their intents clearly. We hope you enjoy it, and if you hate it or if it doesn’t run, leave us a comment or tweetize us using our tweeterization tool.

That’s it for now and I guess we’ll see a lot of you next time!

Them Games: Oscar Claude and Charles.

The suggestion system for rating 20 random posts for me is now chock-full of Windows games, which I cannot play.  If I could, would I anyway?  All that downloading and installing and trusting and stuff… yuck!

So I’ve taken to going down the top-10s people are posting now; if the game was good for them, well worth a look for me?!

And when I go down everyone’s top-10 -type posts for LD 23, almost all of them are WEB playable games!

What does this mean?  Will we be able to work out how rateable things are by their platform choice after voting finishes?  Is there a trend here?

I’ve been stuck staring at Java applets that just show blank and being asked to download Unity players that don’t exist for my Linux OS, and I’ve even borrowed a Windows machine to play a few that looked particularly promising.  But the general Webness is goodness and the right direction!

Haven’t seen any NaCL entries yet though, which is a shame as I tried it myself for a mini once: Afraid of the Dark

My favourite so far is Tondie and Zupe:

Its just so playable!  A complete little platform game.

Something completely different is Tiny’s World

I really loved the music!  I forgave the gameplay, even.  Go listen to it

Tiny Civilization is super-nostalgic for me and I’m not even going to try the new colour version

My own game is a web game, and I’m rather hoping people will appreciate the pretty graphics and the CTRL-B mode-switching:

The Small World of Professor Strange

(nothing like trying to rustle up a few more ratings before the deadline 😉

Go Web Go!

I’ve played over 100 games from Ludum Dare 23 and have decided to give my top 3 games:

1. World in Cards: This game has HUGE potential. It’s a puzzle game divided into small screens (cards) and you must move these cards around the screen to guide your man to the goal without getting hit by enemies. Simple, but addicting gameplay. Summaky please continue evolving this idea and make some new levels!
2. Memento XII: I don’t understand how you can put so much polish on something, in such a short amount of time. The mood in this game is better than in many AAA games! I hope to see this game continue on.                                                                                               
3. Kumiho: This is a classic 2D shooter with a twist. You have the ability to teleport around the screen in 4 directions. This really helps with dodging all of the bullets on screen. Another game I would like to see taken a step further.                                                                                                                  

Firstly, this is our game. If you haven’t played it yet, give it a go! These are some thoughts from our team members about how the jam went.

Andrew Beasley (Design + Tileset Art):

Ludum Dare was a fantastic experience for me! I had participated once before but my part then was minimal. This time around I created the majority of the art assets and level design for our game, as well as helping in the conceptualization of the game and design of game mechanics. I’m very proud of what we have acomplished and I am now a lot more confident in my development skills. Before the Jam I didn’t think I had any of the skills required to make a game whatsoever, but now I am looking forwards to doing a lot more game development work in the future.

I think we did an excellent job on the game but we didn’t get everything done that we wanted to. My biggest regret about the game is the implementation of the teleporters. There’s a lot that could be done to make them feel right such as adding sounds and animations, and fixing the mechanics as there was a significant design flaw with them. There was also a fair bit we had to cut from the game such as a Volcano level, more puzzles, and opening and closing cutscenes. I am looking forward to working on this game a bit more and getting something out there that I can be happy to call truly complete.

My favourite part in the making of the game was definitely the level design. I do not really consider myself an artist so it was really good to be able to take the art assets that I struggled on for hours and put them together in such a way that turned out working quite well. Game design has always been a passion of mine and it was a great relief to be able to put down working on the art for a while and get to work on what I consider the fun part.

My favourite part of the game is probably simply how it all came together. The different mechanics of the game ended up fitting together quite well and I’m especially happy with how the pushable boulders worked. Not only do they feel right to move around but it was a great idea from our programmer to make them able to squash the slimes.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to play our game and especially those that gave feedback. I had an amazing time this Jam and will absolutely be participating next time!

Brendon Byrnes (Audio):

What went right:

Choosing a musical ‘style’ – As soon as we had a game idea locked in, the overall musical style began to take form in my head. With our game being, in my mind, a flashback to Zelda, Commander Keen and other early games, I knew immediately I wanted to use music that felt authentic and sounded like it belonged in an older game.

Building ‘repetitive’ music – This was one of the things that went both right, and not to plan. With the game style, I wanted music that could loop easily and wasn’t too complicated, yet with time constraints it wasn’t long enough to keep from being ‘too’ repetitive. In the finished project I would like to see it go double the length, perhaps even triple before it loops back around, but I’m reasonably happy with the end result. It suits the game, and while repetitive and looping, still fills the gap for audio and helps convey the style of the game.

What didn’t go to plan:

Limiting Chord usage – I’m a musican, not a composer. My composition work before this jam had comprised mainly of arranging background to other pieces, or re-arranging a piece to fit the makeup of the group I was working with. This does tend to leave my composition work itself quite undeveloped, and give me a tendency to use ‘safe’ base block chords. Listening to the music now, I wish I’d used a larger pool of chord types.

‘Writer’s Block’ – I find writing, both music and language, on a schedule difficult. I rely on inspiration to write, which meant the jam environment didn’t suit my processes at all. The melody, speed and sublety of a piece actually started to take form with the tilesets, as I saw pixels and started to build themes I felt suited them. I also managed to get distracted several times for extended periods of time after I’d stopped working to ‘clear my mind and gain another perspective’.

What I learned:

I need to practice composing more, especially composing through ‘writer’s block’. Next time I’d like to create things that are longer and more varied, using multiple chord types (I’d really like to start using sus4 chords in something, just because I like the sound of it). Also need to practice with my tools to find how to build varying tempos more easily. This is so I can change rhythms, and generally get out of building simplistic music.

Patrick Beasley (Programmer, Map Screen Art):

What went right:

The team worked together really well. The pieces of the game fell into place nicely and without too much stressing. We ended up with a really polished product given the timeframe we worked in, and our relative inexperience with game development (two of our members had never jammed before, but performed really well).

There were no major bugs in the submission (though there were a few minor ones that have since been fixed ready for a post-jam version). I coded the game in such a way that I could test it the entire way through, constantly checking everything that I was adding. This took quite some time (because I could have been adding new features instead of testing) but I think was worth it, because I was able to adjust everything to make it more fun.

The game was fun. It’s a great feeling to have played through the game maybe a few dozen times (testing) and still enjoy playing it.

The game was complete (though short). I’m really pleased that we managed to get a proper title screen, map screen, credits, full sound, music, and all art done to a good standard.

What went wrong:

The game required way too many art assets. This is just in the nature of a tile-based adventure game (especially with multiple zones like we did). I think that in future jams we should probably consider this a lot more in the initial concept. We should probably pick a game that doesn’t require any where near as much art to be created (because none of us are dedicated artists).

There were a couple of things which I knew weren’t quite perfect before the submission, and that drove me mad. Things like the fog of war not being a perfect circle (the circle algorithm that I implemented was always off by one horizontally), the hitboxes not being fine-tuned, aliens being able to walk through pots, etc. They turned out to be trivial fixes, but I ran out of time (and I was in the mindset of “this isn’t important to getting the game ready to submit” at the time).

The game was too short. This ties into “too many art assets required”. There were so many things that we had planned that would have been absolutely fantastic to add, but we didn’t get to. We had plans for a volcano zone, some more gameplay that utilised the fog of war that we had, interesting weapons (a fus ro dah gun?), more enemies (mobs in the volcano that left a trail of fire behind them), traps, etc.

What I learned:

I learned that we were capable of working as a team and finishing (somewhat) a game for release. We had never worked together on a project like this before.

A lot of the code was new to me, this is the first real game that I’ve done in Java (last LD I used Actionscript + Flashpunk, I like to mix things up). There were some things that I hadn’t done before the jam, such as XML loading (for the map file format), audio in Java, etc.

Thanks to all that played our submission. It was also great playing through a lot of the submissions for the jam. It’s a real shame that we couldn’t rate more, there were some really awesome games this time around!

College happened. My original plan was just to pretend it doesn’t exist until I’m done with my game, but my game was taking way too long and it was pretty much critical that I got these assignments done. So er, I just kind of stopped working on my game, and vanished from here entirely.

I’m probably going to jump into one of the minijams happening over the summer to make up for it. I’m not certain yet what I’ll be doing with my failed project. Maybe I’ll take the tileset and use it somewhere else sometime. I’m not sure yet. It’ll get improved by that time, though, as I’m not entirely happy with it in reflection.

As the title suggests, I will be writing a postmortem soon. Just wanted to say that you still have a day to play my amazing game; now with an OSX version! This is my first fully complete game, and first Ludum Dare entry, so I would really appreciate it if a few more people rated my game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10594

Thank you all for your helpful comments and support 😀

And EDIT:

I have rated 106 entries, and that’s all I can do 😛

Here are some of my favorites:

So far, my favourite games are:

Burger Defender- Cool idea for a game

Bipolar- Really cool how you can have the drugs and change what everything looks like 

The Tiny World of Fiorella- Really good graphics and probably my favourite overall so far

SubAtomic- Absolutely hilarious! 

I’ve been putting off writing a post-mortem for a while now, so I thought I should really write it before voting closes tomorrow and interest in LD #23 dwindles. So without further ado, I present:

trapped.: A Post-mortem

What went right:

• First and foremost, I actually finished a completely playable game. This was one of my main goals, and I’m delighted to have achieved it. The game was not at all deep or involving, but it was simple and it was fairly well polished. As I’ve mentioned before, I was pressed for time over the weekend, and only had at most 24 hours (including sleeping, eating, etc.) to work on the game, so my aim wasn’t set unreasonably high.
• I stuck to what I knew – no testing out new frameworks, languages or programs in a high-pressure situation! – and so I was able to devote the entire time to creating the code and assets.
• Luck! Somehow my collision detection code, something I have normally struggled with throughout my limited game development history, worked almost perfectly first time. Not only that, but my music sounded pretty good, pretty quickly, and even my art assets, as simple as they were, looked half-decent after spending only a few minutes work on them.

What went wrong:

• Building an engine from scratch – the epitome of reinventing the wheel. Learning to use a framework like LWJGL before LD #24 will be a focus for me, as it will greatly reduce the amount of time necessary to get a game going, allowing me to focus more on the gameplay than just being able to play the game.
• Having no ideas prior to the start of the competition. I had my first idea 9 hours into LD #23 (although the first 9 hours I was spending on another competition anyway), and it ended up being the idea I stuck with just so I could get it a game done in time. The lack of ideas also demotivated me somewhat, so a bit of preparation in this respect before the weekend will allow me to make better use of the limited time next time. One of the best ideas I read was to come up with an idea or two for every one of the potential themes in the final round of voting, so that when the theme is finally announced, you have a bit of a head start.
• Not working around my weaknesses. I mentioned before about how my art assets looked pretty good after spending only a few minutes on them; however, that was true only for the third iteration of the art. My first attempt at the art had me redrawing moderately complex figures and scenery numerous times, before I eventually decided that I would have to go with abstract shapes to overcome my lack of artistic ability. In the end, it ended up looking good, and had I had more time, I would have loved to have tied the story and gameplay into the abstract aesthetics more – for example, the reason the player is red and the enemies white is because I had toyed with the idea of the story tackling the themes of racism and prejudice.

All in all, I felt it was a successful first attempt at a Ludum Dare compo entry, and I can’t wait for LD #24 – I’ll be looking to make a much deeper game next time, with the story, graphics, music and gameplay creating a cohesive experience. That’s the aim, anyway!

(N.B. I’m aiming to rate 40 games for this compo, and I’ll be making a post of my favourites later tonight – look out for it if you want some ideas on what to play!)

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

So, I can’t say I’ve exactly rated a lot of windows games. I am one of the folks who mostly hunt for web releases (sorry!). However, a few neat looking games or recommendations have gotten me to download a zip or an exe and I’ve noticed that Norton quarantines about half of them. A lot of these seem to be WS.Reputation.1 type quarantines, which as far as I can tell means ‘Norton is not sure about this file because it has never seen it before’. I had to deal with this for ogmo editor a few weeks back and actually submitted the app to Norton’s white list. They wrote me back basically saying ‘oops, sorry, this app is safe’. Yep. Well, at any rate, I wonder if anyone has figured out a way to publish an exe without tripping this stuff on Norton. Some of the exes I’ve downloaded have been just fine.

Play Seeds of Destruction
If you haven’t played, I recommened you do. It’ll only takes a few moments to get the gist. It is a flash game, so you won’t waste anytime downloading/installing.

What Went Right?
1. Practice – I spent a good month practicing. I knew I wanted to use Flash and FlashPunk which I’ve never used before. So, I spent about a month before the event doing tutorials and then I worked on porting my Ludum Dare 17 – Islands entry to flash. Althought I didn’t finish the port, it was good to get my hands dirty with FlashPunk.
2. Chevy Ray’s Code – When the keynote was released and I discovered that Chevy Ray had given everyone a beautiful gift of awesome code, I immediately downloaded it and studied it. Then, during LD23, when brainstorming I threw out ones that could not be used with his starter code. It definitely shows that I did this, but I think it was worth the trade off.

What Went Wrong?
1. Bad Screen Switching Bug – in the last hours of the LD I ran into an impossible bug when switching between the different screens. I couldn’t unravel it because I didn’t understand Flash, FlashPunk and the Chevy Ray’s keynote code well enough. I spent too much time trying to “fancy fix” it. I should have switched to hack mode earlier. I ended up with a hack, that included restarting the game within the game. If you play it long enough I think it’ll run out of memory and crash. Doh!
2. Big Plans – I spent a lot of time on my animated cut scenes. It was planned to be more involved, but I noticed in time that I had to triage. I, luckily, was able to tell the bare bones story with what I had already created, but I stress how lucky I was here. I could have easily ended up with a lot of work being abandoned. I need to better judge how much I can get done in the time allotted.
3. Curse the Cursor – Several people complained about the green cursor being hard to see against the light blue sky. I hadn’t noticed this at all. I need to build in some “looking” time into my future plans. I was so busy with game play I didn’t consider the easy of use.
4. Distractions – I spent too much time surfing. If you watch the time lapse below I think you’ll agree. While surfing is a normal part of my routine, I feel it got out of hand. Typically I surf to give me and my subconsciousness time to organize and think about problems. Maybe I need to come up with a different way to take these thinking breaks. One that is less likely to degrade into just procrastination.

Time Lapse

Tools I used
Color Wheel:
FlashDevelop
MS Paint
Google Images
Fitbit
iPhone 4
My Camera
FlashPunk
TweenMax
Chrome
imgur.com

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse, tools

This’ll have to be quick as I am writing this on an iPhone and the tiny keyboard and auto-misscorrection is killing me. I’m away from home and should be relaxing sipping beer, but instead I’m micro-analysing our ludum dare jam entry.

Our game, the small world of professor strange ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10313 ) was quite daring in the sense that very few text adventures are entered. We wanted to be different, plus we had our own ideas how text adventures could be made more up to date. Text adventures are vintage, but I remember spending hours playing them in the 80s. Everyone had a friend who’d already completed them all so you knew it was possible, you just couldn’t find the right key or tool or wherever.

Want went right:
The artwork (my part) went much better than expected. We chose to be different and hand draw everything in ms paint and rendered in GIMP. The real reason was because it’s the fastest way I could create masses of artwork. We drew a sketchmap first, then I rendered it (4-6 hrs) then we started characters, sketches and interiors.

I also think the coding and text content went great considering the time limits. The whole project was smoothly coordinated, except calling James in at short notice to help with some text.

What we could do better:
For sure we underestimated the problem of not having good text parsing for commands. We knew we couldn’t write a decent natural language parser in 72hrs so we didn’t even try. You have to enter valid commands as laid out in the JavaScript data file. This is an obvious barrier to entry, many players get frustrated very quickly. The most consistent criticism we’ve had is that text parsing is missing and help not obvious enough (we improved that in a post entry update).

Another pain point was text saturation. We placed text descriptions in the relevant location on the map, but these soon get overcrowded and overlapping. Again we improved this after entry but it’s definitely something that could do with more attention. The fundemental idea of putting the text in the location is a good one I think.

Amusingly we also got someone pointing out spelling mistakes and grammar (mostly bad cut and pasts actually). Oh well you cannot please everyone.

Overall I’m quite pleased. Looking forward to LD#24, I think well keep the team and do something quite different.

Full postmortem on my blog

Play my entry here

In particular:

What went wrong
– from first comments, game could be frustrating after first teleporter, because you have to do a double jump in mid-air to reach a platform
– graphics is not so coold: I’ve planned to add a light effect, because all game is a kind of nightmare for a boy, but have no time for this
– flashdevelop: I didn’t setup it correctly so debug wasn’t working. So waste of time.. argh!

Tags: postmortem

Yep. After such positive reviews and the fact that it was simply gosh darn fun to work with we have decided to continue work with Boxed In. The  additions planned to be made to the game include

• Bug fixes (kinda obvious)
• Gates with corresponding switches
• Higher resolution graphics
• More sound effects
• More levels (MKEdit: You may see a few, VERY hard levels from me :3)
• PARTICLES!

And more!

JelloEdit: also, since we set it up with the new ogmo, levels are not compatible and will have to be redone.

Also, you forgot the preloader with built in pong.

Here's a screenshot to drool over.

~AlucardX60

Tags: screenshot

If you are, I have some recommendations for you

I’ve rated about 200 games, and it’s high time I shared some favorites !

ONLY US by Datamosh – Jam Entry

This game has the greatest mood ! You play a cosmonaut, and you must explore a planet. But you must be careful not to run out of food or be too lonely. In order to do that, you can build buildings and interact with things. It feels like a sandbox because you can interact with what you want and build wherever you want. Besides, there are multiple endings. I really enjoyed this one, playing in this strange, creepy atmosphere.

Tiny Journey – Evil Sandwich Studios – Jam Entry

You play a little guy who dreams about building a rocket to escape his sad tiny planet and the not-so-great existence he had on it. It’s kind of a point and click where all the controls are with the keyboard. Don’t miss the checklist on the first room because it’s the guide of the story. You have to place the character up to get it because otherwise he wants to interact with the door.

This one too has a great mood. I really felt compelled to finish the story and I didn’t get stuck. I’m always stuck at some point in this kind of games… Everything is pretty straightforward in this one. It’s a very enjoyable game.

The World in a Bottle – Robotic – Jam Entry

This one is a very well thought take on the theme. You play an evil scientist that likes to torture tiny things. As he’d like to torture humans, he has to make them tiny. So in the first phase of the game, you have to miniaturize people with your laser to put them in a jar. But humans won’t let you do it that easily ! In the second phase, when you have enough humans, you can play with them in the jar.

A very fun entry !

There is a Picture – MortisGhost – Jam Entry

Some people have already talked about this game but it still doesn’t have a lot of ratings (40). You really should play it, that’s a very unique game with a very simple gameplay. You play a guy in a spaceship that wants to create a new world by uniting planets. To convince planets to join his project, he has to give them something. They all want objects, and the guy has a lot of objets in his spaceship. So you just have to walk between the rooms to find the objects they want to get them on board. Sometimes you have to merge objects together.

The screen doesn’t show it much, but this game is very immersive. The storytelling sequences are great and you want to follow the story. This game is very unique and has a great mood.

Disregard All Humans – Fireblend – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Another very fun game that fits well the theme. You play a dinosaur on a tiny planet. You destroy cities and eat humans, but they attack you too of course. As you eat more humans, the moon turns red and you grow so big that the earth seems tinier and tinier to you.

A very simple and dynamic gameplay and engaging graphics make this game a pleasure to play.

Corky – Gib – 48 Hour Compo Entry

I love the idea behind this game, and it fits very well the theme. You have a tiny world that looks like the one on the screen, but in grey and you can name and customize it. In your world, there are 3 NPC that you can name too and you can change their dialogs and then talk to them to see it. The corridors on the sides of the screen lead you to the customized worlds of the other players.

Unfortunately, not a lot of people seem to have played the game as I didn’t encountered any other customized world, but I would have loved to and I really enjoyed customizing mine.

It really was a great idea for this theme.

World Panic! – raarlac – 48 Hour Compo Entry

That’s one of the games I played the most. The execution is just perfect. That’s an avoider game where you play the earth. You battle against several planets of the solar system and ultimately the sun (not that I managed to get that far as the game is quite difficult ;)). Planet throw bullets at you and you just have to avoid them, you can’t fight back.

The gameplay is as simple as it can get, the graphics are engaging, the particle effects are beautiful, and the music fits so perfectly : it really follows the rythm of the particles (or the other way around) and it gets more intense as the battle becomes more intense.

Niña Nueve – Jonathan Whiting – 48 Hour Compo Entry

That’s a great game. A first I thought I wouldn’t play it long because I wouldn’t manage to solve the puzzles. But it’s not really a puzzle game even if it looks like one. It’s part puzzle, part Zelda-like, part something else. It’s quite unique actually. Anyways, in this game you have to move through the different rooms by getting to the arrows. To get to the arrows, you’ll do various things : activate switches, play with a balloon, lure monsters into activating switches, kill monsters, avoid monsters, kill bosses.

What I really enjoy about this game is that there are fights, but you don’t have an attack control. You fight monsters by throwing at them a balloon that you find in some rooms. And it is so much fun ! I finished the game and I’d love to play more of it. That’s a very clever game.

The Traveler – Thotor – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Such a beautiful and poetic game… It’s a puzzle game where you play a little guy in a snow globe, and in each level the objective is to get to the blue checkpoint. But you can’t do it at first. You have to shake the snow globe : it makes the snow fall (pretty), but more importantly it makes some blocks falls. Some blocks will take several shakings of the globe to fall, according to their pattern. So it’s all about getting at the right place when you shake the snow ball.

I find that the snow globe idea is such a perfect take on the theme. This game has a wonderful mood, the snow-globe-levels are beautiful, and on top of that the concept of the game is very interesting. This is definetly my favorite entry on the compo.

****

What I enjoyed a lot when playing and rating games is seeing all the various interpretations that were made of the theme. I tried to list a few categories for fun. And put some entries in them, in case you have time to rate more games. A game can belong to serveral categories.

“Tiny World” as a tiny world in a bottle

World in a Bottle – very nice to play and watch evolve

The Traveler

The World in a Bottle

“Tiny World” as a small ecosystem you influence

Miniature Words – fun little game to play with

This Precious Land – very polished triple-town like game

Evolve – not much to do but awesome graphics

Atom Planet – Beautiful Minecraft-like game with a great mood

World in a Bottle – very nice to play and watch evolve

Sun Bringers – little puzzle game with nice mechanics

“Tiny World” as a small ecosystem with humans

Tinyvilization – a great well thought strategy game, you should check out this one

Tinyville Confidential – fun idea, great execution !

“Tiny World” as the world from tiny things’ point of view : insects

Ant Surf Hero : the surfening

ANtopia

Prince of leaves

Flea Circus – fun little game

“Tiny World” as the world from tiny things’ point of view : atoms and molecules

Atom grid – You really should try this one, it’s a very clever puzzle game. But don’t overlook the how-to-play or you’ll be lost !

Polarity – Very polished and interesting puzzle game

Microscopia – Amazing game with unique mechanics and super simple gameplay. Check it out, you won’t regret it !

“Tiny World” as a tiled world with a few tiles

Five by Five – a nice looking little puzzle game

This Precious Land – very polished triple-town like game

Scape – beautiful, clever and very polished puzzle game

Cracked – nice puzzle game with interesting mechanics

“Tiny World” as restricted space with boundaries that can be extended

Extensionism – Puzzle game with great visuals, mood, gameplay and concept

Recluse – a platform game with such a great twist

“Tiny World” as “I am on a little planet”

Scape – beautiful, clever and very polished puzzle game

Tiny Journey – talked about it earlier

Tiny Island Adventure – a platform game with great graphics

Quest^3 – an RPG on a rubik’s cube like world, very interesting mechanics

“Tiny World” as a restricted perspective on the world, psychological (or not) imprisonment

Memento XII – a highly polished game

Tiny Flat

Predicament

Asylum – Great mood, great graphics

“Tiny World” as tiny planet to protect

Tondie and Zupe

Aether – unique game with great graphics and mood

Astro Break – great graphics

Necro Gaia – incredibly polished defense game

Space Bear – very bizarre surrealistic game that deserves a look, collect cosmic stars to repair the earth !

“Tiny World” as in “I enter a world that gets tinier and tinier”

Fracuum – incredibly polished game with great mechanics

Soul Searchin’ - a great take on the theme, very innovative game !

And you, what categories did you find ?

***

As for my game if you want to check it out, its here : Tinysasters !

Since it’s now the last day to judge the entries I think it’s time to write my post mortem which I was supposed to write a long time ago already.

The LD#23 was the first one I participated. I was successful in submitting an entry but it’s not a winner. So some things succeeded, some didn’t. In every case I had fun times during the compo weekend and will definitely participate in future LDs too.

My entry is off course still available so you can try it if you haven’t yet – even if the judging time has already expired when you read this.

What went right:

1. Before the compo: I prepared well. I made sure I had all the tools installed and working. I made a simple stub for the game that just showed a white screen (it could have been black as well). I packaged it and asked people on the IRC channel to try it out – and people were helpful there and offered to try it: thanks for the help for everybody who participated. This way I made sure that my “distribution pipeline” was in good order. This was to ensure that people could run my entry after the compo.
2. I used familiar technologies. I build my game with the Proton SDK which I have been using for the past several months now so I’m quite familiar with it. I didn’t have to study the technology too much during the competition which gave me time to focus on the actual game.
3. At some point during the compo I realised that I was doing a 2D racing game. For that I needed some car physics. First I thought to implement the needed physics by myself. I was thinking that doing a simple bouncy car with some collision detection and springs would probably be a quick job (ain’t it always). But luckily in the end I decided to check Box2D first. I didn’t really have much experience with the specifics of Box2D before. I did know that it is a solid body 2D physics library. But I didn’t know the API or the specifics of it at all. But Box2D turned out to be really easy to use. In the examples that came with it there was also a car physics simulation which I was able to use as a starting point for my need. The end result is definitely better than what I would have been able to achieve with a home grown solution in the limited time.
   I really liked Box2D and will probably use it in some future projects as well. It seems a really good library and no wonder it has become the de facto 2D physics library nowadays.

What went wrong:

1. I didn’t really manage to do a game in the end. My entry is more like a technology demo. After brainstorming some ideas what kind of game I would do I had a rough idea to what direction I would head. So I started implementing. But I never really cared to think what the game would be about. I thought that it will just materialize somehow in the process. Well, that didn’t happen. In the end I ran out of time and didn’t manage to do much of a game at all.
   Lesson learned: spend enough time in the beginning before rushing to implementation to figure out what the core idea of the game is. Then implement that core mechanic first so you’ll have the game in place in the end.
2. The only headers coding convention I decided to try out didn’t really work out. As I suspected in the pre-compo post the compiling times with this approach grow quite a lot while the codebase grows. But I thought that one wouldn’t be able to produce that much code in 48 hours that it would be a hindrance. Well, boy, was I wrong about that. After the first day’s coding the compile times were still manageable. But during the second day the compile times were starting to be quite long. During compilation the HDD light on the computer was constantly on so I suspect that the time was spent on reading files in from the hard drive. I have a SSD on the computer which is at least supposed to be fast but still it seems that the compilation process got I/O bound.
   So as Mythbusters would put it: this coding convention idea is busted!
   Lesson learned: if doing C++ put your .h and .cpp files separately as they teach you in the school. The wise men know what they are talking about
3. Music. I did manage to get some music to the entry and people have even given positive comments about it so I guess it wasn’t a complete failure. I’m not that much familiar with audio software so I didn’t really know what would come out as music. So in the end I’m happy with what I achieved with the music track.
   But where I failed with the music was the schedule. The compo ended here at 4am local time. So the last 4 to 5 hours everybody else in the neighbourhood were sleeping while I was doing the music track with headphones on. Earlier on the day I had recorded an acoustic guitar track. But I didn’t do anything with it until during the night. At around 1am I was adding drums and a bass track to the music in Garage Band. As it turned out the guitar track wasn’t quite in tempo all the time. It would have been an easy task to pick up the guitar and record the track again – this time with a metronome or the drum track on the background to get the tempo fixed. But in the process I would have woken up my fiancée and the neighbours so I couldn’t do it. So in the end I was only able to use less than half of the guitar track that I had recorded.
   Lesson learned: if using real instruments for music (or any foley artist kind of stuff to make sound effects) do those during day time while you won’t disturb other people’s sleep.

Those are the main points that I had in my mind. Overall I really like what I achieved and learned during the hectic weekend of Ludum Dare. See you next time 😀

• The whole code workflow : the past ludumdares contained some nice surprises, bugs, physics related issues… But from start to finish i didn’t encounter many problems on that project (if you don’t count network settings).
• The server didn’t fall down \o/ (much).
• Lidfrid which is another LudumDarer helped me gather attention on the game & debug stuff ! (check his game !)
• Once people understood the rules it was fun to play (for me at least), some strategies were actually involved. Me & Lidfrid were more the middle guys while Amodo & Norgg were the kind to work on their own around the map

• I started late on the LD48, i wish i could have made it for the LD48 but i haven’t. It’s in the jam right now :3
• I am not used to work with flash stuff and for whatever the reason i decided to host the web server myself instead of just shipping a *.swf file on a dropbox. Too much fight with my firewall.
• Policy server file : when doing networking through a browser the server has to give the client a policy file. I spent quite some time trying to understand why the server wouldn’t recognize the client policy file request. I didn’t see one space at the end of the request…
• A few server downtimes since the ip was actually hard-coded and my ISP is updating it every day i had to make a few changes but it was actually quickly fixed by changing / adding servers.
• The font ! There’s a chat in the game so i had to find a cool font, i did find it but there were no punctuations, no numbers : just letters. It was a bit frustrating.

I wish i would have allowed me a bit more time for the instructions, most players are complaining about that. Even with a screen at the start of the game, it didn’t work well, grey on grey  and just a few lines of text are not good enough.

After not understanding the rules you are not helped much within the game as well, there’s not enough visual feedback about where you can build a tower or when you can build them. The list of the players on the right were actually a ranked list, but i’m not sure many players understood that since there was no indication whatsoever. I should show the percentage of the map conquered and the % of the map you have to conquer to win the game. Basically more feedback for everything.

I’ve already made a *lagfree* version of the game but since it didn’t take much time to code, it would have been better added in the submitted version.

I’m going to put the project on github, i’m not sure i will work on it right away since i have other projects but after adding more feedback features as explained earlier, one cool thing would be to make it totally cross-platform between C++, Flash & HTML builds. I’ve actually used the flash networking library for that project but i’d like to use haxe networking and see how it goes.

Languages used :

• Client-Side : Haxe + Nme  (mostly Flash lib)
• Server-Side : Python + Twisted

Tools used :

• Photoshop
• Chronolapse
• Sublime Text 2

Link to the game

5 hours left ’til judging ends, super excited!

Almost all of the games I’ve played were wonderful and I’ve rated with an average of four stars. I bet there are going to be plenty of ties!

Heck, maybe even our game might make it into the Top 50 with a tie like last time :O

Anyway, good luck to y’all and I hope you had fun!

This is my first time I joined Ludumdare with my little game called “Magic House“. I have to say LDD is pretty good, challenging, hard, educational, and at the same time, fun as well.

Over 1400 people worked so hard in 2 days (or 3)to create a game base on a theme (“Tiny World”). This is what it’s all about. Have a little amount of time, and create something that entertains people. And, of course, no developer wants players to comment that his/her game is an absolute waste of time. That’s what make it Challenging!!!

Besides from challenging with yourself and participants to see who create the coolest game, it’s surely so educational that we can add up more ideas to our mind. It’s hard to think everything on something in such little time. So we might miss a spot here and there. However, by playing and judging other entries, we really can learn more cool things that we might not think of. Moreover, we absolutely can learn from our struggling that we had while we were creating game. Not only that, but also we all had players who play our game and give us some helpful comments to let us see what we are missing and what makes them happy. As a result from these, I’m sure some of you have learned some awesome things from this.

Overall, it is fun to join Ludumdare. We challenge the time, ourselves, and entries. We gain more knowledge, have great fun, and make us a better game developer. I had a blast with Ludumdare 23. And I’m looking forward to join this every single time.

So, I have a bit of spare time today. I might try and play/judge a few games that I haven’t had a chance to… any suggestions?

Feel free to post a link to your game below and, if I haven’t already, I will try to give it a go.

Also if you haven’t already played/rated my game, please give it a try (I will return the favour for you)…

When Worlds Collide (My entry)

Thanks and fingers crossed for good things happening in 10 hours

We have played well over a hundred games and we think it’s time to list the ones we liked the most!

Predicament by orangepascal, Compo

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

Planet Life by Sos, Compo

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=1405

Tiny Vessels by xel, Compo

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12874

Copulous by keely, Compo

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11502

Alien Comets by kTwitch, Compo

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12394

Tiny Shards by Gabriel, Jam

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11099

Deity by Blake, Compo

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=11039

These are obviously just our choices, based on our personal opinions, so our advice is for you to check these games out and see for yourself.

Finally, if you haven’t rated out game yet, you can still do it here in the next 3 hours:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=12700

Hi everyone! This is my Post-Mortem for my LD game, ‘shiprage’!

How did I came up with the idea of these ships battling (for the world’s ownership)?

At first, I wanted to make a bacteria battling game, instead of a ship one. However, while testing effects on the bacteria cell, I realized how ‘cool’ it looked with the dropshadow effect on. Like if it was floating. Bacterias mutated into ships. Oh, bacterias mutating into ships? This is giving me more ideas… hehe

What went good! (or decent!)

I LOVE AI:  Is it incredible, isn’t it? You write some classes here, some classes over there, and, shazam! You’ve got some pretty slick badass ships. I really loved the AI in this game, in the ships, in the bullets, … It’s something I’ve enjoyed creating.

The environment: Flash is my first development tool ever. It’s the one with which I feel more confortable, and that’s very important. I hope that, by the next LD, I’m more confortable with other engines/SDKs, like haXe or Cocoa Touch, so that I’m able to change and have a different development experience.

The Pixel Art Editor: Thanks God! Somewhere over this website I found ‘PyxelEdit’! I usually used a crappy editor which always gives me headaches. Kudos for the creator!

Garageband: Another tool I’m quite confortable with. I’m looking forward to a MIDI-USB cable for connecting my synth to it.

Blitting: Wow, I hadn’t done ANYTHING with the blitting technique before. I’m impressed with the results. With the shadows over the platforms, for example.

What wen’t bad

The time: Oh man, I was SO busy that weekend.. With some more little time the game would have been much better!..

The lack of relation with the theme: The idea was that you had to conquer different planets (tiny worlds) with your ship friends/faction, conquering the enemies bases… however, in the final version, nothing of that was finished… :/

Souvenirs!: I didn’t make a timelapse. I believe I did record some part of the process with a screenshot-taker, but I haven’t had much free time to make a ‘montage’.

Lack of communication with the community: Because of the fact that I had little time to spend on this LD, I wasn’t able to check others process, neither post mine’s. Maybe for the next one.

What to do with the game?

Well, I have planned power-ups, base conquering, planets, … there’s a lot to do!
I’d like to make a multiplayer version (with Gamooga, maybe?), and perhaps a mobile port. I’m also open too suggestions! ¿Any?

Ah, and maybe finding a sponsor through FlashGameLicense in order to make some money! :3

Post-Compo version. I made some changes to the compo version. I added another camera mode (press ‘c’ to change among them), colored the bullets, changed the ammo system and added some huds, enjoy!

CPU-only version.

Thanks everyone for reading! To end with, I’d like to try some last games before the time runs out. You can leave your game as a comment, and I’ll check it out!

You can follow me on twitter (@AirRider3), and I’ll surely follow you back, because we’re all damn interesting people here

Tags: airrider3, shiprage

While waiting for the results of LD, I am keeping myself occupied by coding more voxel engine functionality… 😀

From Argentina, the Datamosh team wants to thank everybody who took the time to rate, comment, critic, enjoy and specially PLAY our very first entry ever at the Ludum Dare: “ONLY US”. Words right now simply don’t have meaning.

EMOTES <3 T0 EV3RYB0DY.

Tags: final, ld23

Well, this was my second Ludum Dare. My birthday was just after I made this, so I’m 14 now. I’m rather proud of this game, mainly because I ended with a finished game.

Things that went well:

COMPLETED: Last time I scrapped what I had been working on for 1.5 days so I ended up with a smaller game, one which I only worked on for about 4 hours. I’m really glad I was able to finish this and have a playable game.

ART: The art is actually what made this game. At first I was going to do a platformer about a guy who accidentally drinks a growth-potion and become huge, but as I was spriting it turned into this weird minimalistic character. It inspired me to do a computery sci-fi game, which led to this.

NO GLITCHES: There are no glitches at all (that I know of). I’m super-duper-extra-proud of this.

Things that did not go well

CONTROLS: The controls did not go over well. I actually thought they were neat because they were different from most games, but most people disliked the controls. I’ll be sticking with the basic WASD/arrowkeys from now on.

LEVEL DESIGN: I’m pretty bad at this. The levels are somewhat tedious instead of hard, and people complained about the difficulty. From now on i’ll try to make simpler, easier levels in the beginning that ramp up in difficulty as the player becomes familiar with the game.

.EXE: People complained about it being a .exe and not an in-browser game. I’m a newb at programming and I can’t do this yet, and I found it rather rude that people were complaining about it even though I apologized for that in the description.

LENGTH: Because of my poor level design, it ended up being rather short. I would have preferred for it to be about twice as long.

The future!

Right now i’m learning java, so when i’m able to I hope to remake this game with a slightly different title; “For(g!=v)”,. I plan on making it much longer, extending the story, and adding in some more gameplay aspects.

Game can be played here; http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7563

================================================
PLAY BURNING PLATFORM on your ANDROID phone or tablet
================================================

My little green friend and I have been hard at work on a post-compo revision for Burning Platform!

Those of you who downloaded the app from Google Play will very soon see an update available for Burning Platform. I wanted to make sure that I waited until the end of the rating period before pushing the post-compo update, so as not to break any rules. Those of you who left feedback on the original version will notice *several* improvements.

Post-Compo update includes
1. Clearer instruction text.
2. Lines that persist for a second after you lift your finger
3. A new powerup, this one *further* increases the time the walls persist after you lift your finger.
4. A tiny gravity meter in the top corner as a hint that tilting does something
5. Your friends respond a little faster as you tilt the device around

Things that I noticed in the feedback and commentary:

1. Even though the compo-version game explicitly tells you to tilt the device to move your friends around, some players never tilted the device. They simply held it at an angle and let the little friends just fall down. I’ve tried to make it more obvious that the device orientation *is* the main control mechanism.

2. I agree that the lines disappeared too quickly in the compo version. This was priority #1 for me to fix and I did.

3. I want to add even more powerups but I don’t want them to be game-breakingly powerful. Now that the lines/walls persist that led to one other easy powerup. I’m still thinking of some others to add.

4. It won’t be in this update but I do plan to add high score tracking, possibly with an online component.

The people who played the game and got the mechanic seemed to respond very positively to the underlying idea, so I think it’s worthwhile to explore a bit. I hope those of you who played the compo version will also play the update when I push it and let me know if you feel like I addressed the major issues from the compo build.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already played it…

================================================
PLAY BURNING PLATFORM on your ANDROID phone or tablet
================================================

And then when the update appears later tonight let me know how you like the changes!

My favorite Jam Entry
Exposed

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=5105

I choose this entry, because it has a consistant graphic style and a very fun gameplay. It’s not very innovative but the timelapse video is great!

My favorite Compo Entry
Another Kind of World

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=3244

Very chillin music, nice gfx and intuitive gameplay. Easy to learn, hard to master!

It would be also really cool, if you rate our entry. Thanks for this gorgeous LudumDare!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=13106

thx alot.

After I rated 50 games, I choose 10 entries which I thought deserved more recognition and praise. Now I reached my goal of 101 entries, so I’m picking 10 more games from the total I’ve played so far (of course, without repeating games from my previous list, so if I’m not repeating games here it doesn’t mean I don’t like those entries anymore, lol). To celebrate I reached my goal, I’m also putting pictures this time around!. You have no idea how hard is to select only 10 more entries out of 100 (and believe me, scrolling such a long list to spot the entries you enjoyed the most is not any easier, so if I missed one I’m sorry ) but here is my attempt:

Let’s do this!!
Zephyr

This game is beautiful. Simple, fun, polished, play it.

Tinysasters

AWESOME game. Amazing graphics, cool background music and with innovative game mechanics. Loved it.

Game With a Fantastic Title

A beautiful musical experience accompanied by gorgeous art. Warning: Involuntary smiles may be a side effect of playing this game.

Little City

A gameboy-era-reminiscent game. A tiny adventure on a tiny city with a mind-blowing ending. Tears will come to your eyes when playing this game.

Apocalypse Inc.

Die Aliens! Die! Die!!! Mwahahahahaha!!!

The Tourist

Interesting adventure although the beginning is a bit slow. Be patient with this entry and play it until the counter reaches zero!

Cosmicro

A challenging game. You can clearly see how difficult is to defend a planet when you play this game.

Obsolescense

Interesting and well executed game mechanics. The mission is to survive as much as you can by finding new planets where your population can migrate before the end of that world comes.

Phobius

Intriguing take on the theme. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel anxious in small spaces in real life, this game will make you feel exactly that once your character feels trapped. Don’t believe me? play this game.

There is a Picture

Insteresting and insightful game where -in fact- there is this picture…

Special mention

The Green Planet

Yeah, I cheated again. I was unable to pick only 10. This game deserves to be on the list as well.

We all know that for the most of it, gravity is a b*tch. Well, in this game you have to use your planet’s gravity to redirect asteroids so they impact with Jupiter, collecting the resulting debris so your planet can grow. In other words, this is probably the only scenario where gravity will ever help you reach your goal instead of sabotaging your plans.

Well, if you haven’t played our game before, you still have 1 hour, 30 minutes to PLAY IT! We love to receive comments, suggestions and any form of feedback you may spew! (from both Conway’s Game of Life veterans and people who never heard of CGOL before).

EDIT: Now I’ve mastered the obscure art of proper paragraphs.

Tags: favorites, ld23, Top10

I know it’s kind of late to be doing this, but maybe someone will see a game they missed!

Greed Wars –  [has web version] A 2D RTS that takes place on a wrapped radial surface (around a tiny world!). Very fast, kinetic, frenetic strategy action. There are many ways to totally beat up the CPU opponent but highly engrossing and one to watch- if multiplayer is in this one’s future, it’s going to be a blast. Great presentation.

ANT SURF HERO: THE SURFENING – [has web version] A heart-wrenching love story.

My Little Dungeon – [has web version] Stunning presentation- beautiful graphics, some of my favorite music from LD23 and very heavy, mildly anxiety-inducing decisions to be made- do you want to spend more time and resources keeping your hero safe, or gamble and set him up against some strong monsters in order to make him tougher quicker?

Planet ZOOB – A really cute little arcade-style game where you are a creature defending a small planet.  The visual design is very cute and the way music ties into it is quite clever.

It’s a tiny world – An addictive tile-based mini-RPG with some intriguing puzzle aspects in its magic system. Like an even lite-er Desktop Dungeons! I’d love to see what it would be like a little more fleshed out, but I’m just always a sucker for feature creep.

The Underground Court – [has web version] Caranha worked really hard to review a lot of games this LD! I see his avatar on almost every single page I go to. I think the resource management in this is a bit interesting and the nonlinear gameplay in the brand of design he showcases here is nice to see. I’ll be following his future endeavors for sure.

Conquest of the Cyber-Ovine – A top down action RPG. The game-world is randomly generated islands on top of water (or, in other levels, ice or lava) and you must level up to proceed to further levels. Scattered throughout each world is a wealth of equipment that is all upgradeable, such as an item that lets you teleport into the distance to move quickly or escape, a bat that knocks enemies further away as it levels up, et cetera. I really enjoy the concept and execution of it!

(Thanks Lumi Mae for the picture!)

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it, but Recluse got 8th place in the competition alongside with Astro Break and also 1st place in the innovation category!

I already wrote everything I could want to say right now in my “thank you” post, so if you still haven’t, please read it. (copying and pasting everything here would be too cheap, even cheaper than pasting a link to the original post =P)

I also can’t stress enough how much I am grateful to my friends in Brazil who gave me support. I hope they are reading this!

I wasn’t expecting getting such high rankings, especially in overall… So once again,

• Thanks a lot for playing and rating Recluse.
• Congratulations for everyone.
• I hope you all had fun!

Tags: results, thanks

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2012 at 9:56 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=8522

287th overall… yah that’s pretty bad but I was up against some FIERCE competition.  I’m satisfied with my own work.  I’m particularly proud of of the fact that the platforming engine came right out of my head on the spot, first 2 hours.  And I did WAY  better then last time.  As for things that went wrong… I had a downright humiliating screen falling off bug in the first version.  Something that should not have happened with my level of experience.  I also admit that the physics were broken.  Everyone did great, so I’ll see you in winter.

#583 overall… Well, better than last LD!

You may remember my disappointed musings at the close of the last LD (my first) where I placed about halfway up the ladder.

So I was still miles away from winning this time around again, but this time, Anthill landed me roughly just shy of the top 3rd. That’s improvement as far as I’m concerned! I was much happier with the game overall compared to my effort last time which I think felt a little sparse and cobbled together to really be a competitor. The response was far more positive and I think the game was FAR more fun, as well as miles more quirky 😛

The competition was also especially tough this time around, with 1,400 contestants all submitting some seriously cool material!

Overall I’m pleased with the result and can pat myself on the back knowing that I did better than last time, so long as I’m improving and learning from the community, I’m happy

Next time I will: Learn that a game can’t be a one trick pony. Consider making gameplay more varied. One fun idea will only have limited playability. Have Nikolai compose the music again (his help gained us the #110 (might be 1 or 2 out) spot on the music rankings!) 😛

Had great fun making Anthill, and even more playing everyone’s creations! Until next time, Darers, until then

I shall rise again! 😛

James

First of all, the post-compo post… I now give a gigantic THANK YOU! to all of those who played and enjoyed my game! I loved seeing the feedback, both positive and negative! And yes, a very heavy update is in the works!

Anyway, onto the post-mortem post… It seems that I wasted quite a bit of time playing the game instead of working on it… This seems to be a common problem of mine… I didn’t work on graphics that much, other than the bullet which is shot by the enemies… Sound was simple, but complete… I should have had more layered sound effects (like my LD21 entry), but I didn’t… All of this links back to my initial problem. I just turn out too lazy at the wrong times… My choice to use GameMaker 8.1 was not a bad one, despite the LITE logo appearing in-game, I was able to use something that I knew the ins-and-outs of, so it was easy to translate ideas to code.

Now, the post-judging post… My overall score was 3.04 (#392 of 1402). This seems to be an average score, but it’s actually my best overall yet! As always, I have one score that is much higher than the others, and this time, it was fun, with a score of 3.46 (#113 of 1402). This is the highest score I’ve gotten for anything except Community in LD19 (which really doesn’t count too much). As far as the bad goes, the scores I got under 2.5 (average) in were Humor, Innovation, and Coolness. I wasn’t trying to be funny, and I got lazy with judging… The low Innovation score is something that I seriously need to work on for the next LD. I did a shoot-’em-up because they’re easy and quick to program and have some relevance… However, I wasn’t very innovative at all; the only slightly unique thing I did was allow the player to switch directions, which pretty much carried the entire game… Had it not been for that, I would not have scored as highly in Fun, judging by the comments. I should have done more as far as thinking outside of the box.

Anyway, thank you all for the playing, the competition, and the fun! I hope to see every single one of you in the next Ludum Dare!

If we could get the standard deviation value for each of the scores we received. Maybe even the skew.

That’s all

Tags: results, scores

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 1:57 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Through the Blue Sea is my entry for Ludum Dare 23, it is a abstract platformer art game about using drugs as an entry into your own tiny world.

Now that Ludum Dare 23 is over I wanted to write a second Postmortem that addresses the comments I received, as well as how I have dealt with them in the Post-Compo version of the game. If you haven’t already you can go read the first Postmortem, its an analysis of the game whereas this Postmortem is me explaining my decisions.

"Happy square grows!"

Addressing Comments:

First I want to thank everyone who played my game, and left a comment. It is always helpful to get comments because you get a real opinion that was articulated in words, rather than a number. If my response seems harsh to you, just remember that it is my opinion, that you also have a valid opinion. I am not attempting to force my opinion and say that I am right or wrong, just the way that I view the issue and deal with it.

“You need the August 2008 DirectX update in order to run this application….” error

Comments:

“I didn’t bother updating, so it’s possible this is my fault. But I purchased my computer after 2008. Window 7, 32 bit.”

“I won’t even try – my comp is older, circa 2006.”

“Same problem here.”

Response:

DirectX is a common requirement that most gaming computer have already. In the event that you don’t have it, well there is a free download on the Microsoft website, it can be any version that is newer than the August 2008 DirectX. SO for Vista of 7 that could mean 10 or 11, for XP the most recent DirectX9c would work.

I expect that most people entering a 48 hour game challenge would have DirectX already. I could bundle DirectX with my game, but that makes the download larger.

Platform play-ability

Comments:

“Couldn’t emulate on linux (wine)”

“Sorry, I can’t play since I’m on a Mac.”

“sorry mac only here!”

“Alas, I cannot play this game on my mac.”

“Can you make a Mac version?”

“I would try it if you had a Web or OSX version.”

Response:

I recognize that using Construct Classic limits what platform the game can be played on. But Web games have a tendency to be mediocre at the best when compared to a downloadable game. They have that reputation of shitty flash games, and just changing to html5 doesn’t change that fact. The majority of players do not realize what the underlying tech is (flash or html5) nor do they care. There are quite a few decent puzzle games on the web, but outside of a few genres web games are inferior. It would also be harder to allow customization of a web game. In addition to losing the usability of the right mouse click.

As for a Mac version, it would be nice. Ideally the games would run in WINE, but they don’t currently (and I believe it has to do with the Sound Engine used) I hope to set up a Linux desktop soon so I can get them to run in WINE. If I cna get them running in Linux WINE, then they should work on the Mac WINE. Not that I have a way to test them…I don’t own a Mac.

Sound Effects

Comments:

“lol, Pretty strange game. It really didn’t need the sound effect for when a asteroid was being generated, Music was good tho. Apart from that good work.”

“You know what?! that awful sound and eye bleeding graphics kept me playing :))
The winning sound is even more awful (but in a good way)”

“The SFX were painful to be honest. The controls were good. Great effort!”

“jesus christ what is that noise”

“Interesting menu. Sound effects were annoying. Except for the times when levels were unbeatable, this was pretty good.”

“Sweet little platformer. But oh gods, the sound hurts my ears.”

and more

Response:

The winning sound effect is actually bugged in the Compo version, it is playing over and over again. But only 18 games have been finished for the win sound to be played. More than likely the Asteroid incoming sound effect was annoying, I should have lowered the volume of it some. Overall I still feel that the sound effects fit in the game.

I will agree that the asteroid incoming sound effect was probably not needed, but it was later in the day when I decided to make the asteroid spawn at a random location off screen, aimed at the player. To compensate for the random location I though a sound effect would make it more playable by offering a warning.

Gameplay

Comments:

“No virus warnings or anything here. Technically solid. Gameplay was a little frustrating though – dots that couldn’t be retrieved, powerups that weren’t onscreen long enough to get. Controls felt a little oversensitive.”

“Not bad, but it seemed like some coins were just impossible to get, and the sound effect was kind of annoying. But I do like the online scoreboard.”

“Weird game

Works fine, however the random positioning mostly ends up in unsolvable stages (too many pips appearing on the lower border without platforms below)”

“Interesting concept! I kept trying to avoid the red splotchies until I realized they made it easier to win!”

“Really weird game. The sound played when the asteroid was being created made me cringe. I had to turn my sound off to even play the game. That sound was literally painful for me. :/ Interesting that you’re generating levels though. That is different than what most people do.”

“It was cool that you procedurally generated the levels. At least it’s new each time. That said, the gameplay was lacking and the sound effects were pretty abrasive. Good effort – keep it up!”

“Kinda strange, it’s too unpolished to give a fair rating, the physics really sucked. Would’ve need a double jump at least and less power in the jump, the title screen didn’t look that nice, the text with white background gave an ugly contrast to the rest of the screen. The game would probably have been a lot better if you had a day more to work out the problems, it does have potential, just needs more polish.”

Response:

I do agree that the dots not being retrievable can be annoying. The levels are randomly generated (not procedurally) so I knew there would be cases of not being able to collect all of the pips. I should have addressed this issue by forcing two of the platforms to always generate on the bottom, and to make all of the pips generate above the lowest platforms. That is how I have it set up in the version I’m working on.

I messed with the controls quite a bit to come up with something that was tricky to control, but still controllable. The asteroids and growing feature was added later, and once I added the larger character I needed to make the game challenging again. So I shrank the starting size, and made it harder to control. Adding something like double jump would have made it to easy to complete the levels. With double jump you would be able to drop under a platform to get a pip, then jump back onto the platform. I wanted you to be force to choose what pips you got in what order and to have a consequence for choosing to drop down and get a pip, at the risk of falling off.

The game could use a better introduction and How to play text, or a tutorial but I was low on time and wasn’t sure how to do it (so you got a wall of text).

Graphics

Comments:

“Won’t gonna lie to you. Graphics could be… better. But sound is good and gameplay is fun, but needs improvements! Keep up the good work!”

Response:

I disagree, not to say that I can’t draw better (I can) but that wasn’t the goal of this game. My entire interest in creating Video games is using it as a Fine Art Medium. For fare to long Fine Art has been paintings that costs thousands of dollars, or drawings, prints, ect that costs hundreds. Video games for me represents a way to put art in front of everyone for a little to no cost. Then maybe we can move past Thomas Kinkade and Bob Ross being the greatest American Painters, when in reality they are only a minor player in the Fine Art world. I like Abstract Expressionism art mixed with the Minimalist art, and that is what my games tend to represent.

The purpose is to get across a message, and convey a point. Through The Blue Sea is a bit light on the message but it is a message targeting society. It has to do with the use of drugs, that they take you to your own tiny world, where you are the only person. Then when you come down from your high you have the munchies. But I want the message to be interpreted from the game, and not told to you.

Score Menu in the Post-Compo

Post Compo version of Through the Blue Sea

I have released a Post Compo version of Through the Blue Sea. It doesn’t add new content, but it does address a number of issues that the Compo version had. I think it is important to release a Post Compo version because it gives you a chance to apply the feedback that you received for your game, and helps you to create a better game next time.

Scoring:

The scoring in the Compo version was overly simple. For ever pip you collect you gained one point. As a result  there is no different between two people who both collected all of the pips. With only a little variation it makes the Online scoreboard a bit on the boring side.

In this version I reworked the scoring system, so now you start with 100 seconds on the clock, this is then multiplied by the number of platforms you have left, then you multiply that by the score pips you have collected, and the last thing that happens is you add the count of asteroids that you collected. This turns out much more varied and interesting scores, now just because you collected all eight of the pickups, you likely did so faster or slower than someone else.

Gameplay:

The biggest Gameplay problem was the pips that couldn’t be collected. Quite often the game would randomly place the pips below the lowest platform, and spread that out across the level. This resulted in you not being able to complete the level.

I fixed this issue by generating two platforms that are always the lower that the pips, now when you are big you can collect all of the pips.

I also revised the How to Play text to mention the asteroids that make you grow larger.

One of the comments I received suggested this:

“I’d suggest automatically redirecting to another world instead of going to the main menu every time the player goes off the screen.”

I thought this was a great idea, and was implemented into the post compo version. Now if you collect all of the pickups you move to the next hardest level, if you fall off you move to the next easier world. This really makes the game more cohesive. With the new end of level scoreboard you have the choose to keep playing, or go to the main menu.

Online Scoreboard:

The Compo version would only show the highest 20 scores for each planet, so even though 232 games have been played the compo version would only show 100 results total.

The Online scoreboard has been revised, and moved. It is now a page on the main All Around Games website. The scoreboard can be sorted by time, platforms, asteroids, pips,  score, and name. You can also find development information, videos, and screen-shots all on one page.

Tiny Green Planet

Ludum Dare 23 Postmortem

This was my fourth Ludum Dare, and the biggest overall Ludum Dare yet (1402 games) The competition has only grown since I started.

The rating system in Ludum Dare 23 is for the most part like it was for Ludum Dare 22. The Community rating was removed, since most people did not rate it correctly. What I like most about the rating system is that the twenty that you see on the rate page change depending on how many games their creator made, as well as how many rating the game has had. I rated 110 games this Ludum Dare, and have around fifty-five ratings.

The one thing that I would like to see is voting opened to the public, preferably in a way that  did not force registration. I think this should be kept separate from the current scoring methods. So you could have a developers ratings (from participants) as well as a public opinion rating.

As far as the games, I think the bar was raised this Ludum Dare. I played more games than I did demo-scenes, although a few did sneak in. Overall most of the games were fun and entertaining, with some idea in them that worked really well.

This Ludum Dare I had two goals in mind before the competition started. The first one was that I wanted to make a complete game. While my games doesn’t really have a beginning, and ending It is complete. I find that score is often one of the best goals you can use in a game, because you can strive to improve that score. My other goal was to make an art game of some sort. As mentioned early Through The Blue Sea qualifies for my definition of Art Game.

Rating Games

When rating started I decided that I would be consistent this time, rather than rating a bunch of games at the end. I rated five games each day, this got me up to 100 ratings with an extra day to rate whatever I wanted. I didn’t really have a method for selecting games, I just played whatever I saw. Some-days I picked them based on the name, or all web games. I don’t really participate in Ludum Dare to rate games, or be rated, but it comes with the competition so I do my part. I tried to be consistent in how I rated, but I think I am to generous when rating…

Overall – I just average the others to a degree, so if I give mostly four stars then Overall is four stars.

Innovation – I look at what is different in this entry than the other games I have played. I tend to score 3D games high, just because of the time it takes to do 3D rather than 2D. I also tend to rate a bit on artistic merit in this category…what statement if any does the game make.

Fun – This is one of my least favorite categories. What one person finds fun, another find boring. I rate depending on the time I spend playing the game, and how enjoyable it was to play.

Theme – I rate depending on how typical the interpretation of the theme. To me a theme really shines when you get non-typical games.

Graphics – I rate the hardest in this category…but compared to most interpretatiosn of graphics I’m backwards. I’m looking for anyone that tries a different graphical style. Something minimal, surreal, expressionistic, or just abstract is rated highly for me. Pixel Art, realism, cartooning rate the lowest.

Audio – I rate easy, if you have sound effects you get 2, if you have music you get three. If they fit the game you get more.

Humor – I tend to not rate this at all, unless I feel it was intended to be humorous.

Mood – I tend to not rate the mood either, many games don’t really set a mood for me. They are just generic locations with a goal.

That is how I rated the games I played, now I want to look at my own rating. I feel more or less at the average line. This is were I expect to be, I’m not looking to appeal to the masses with my game or art, I am looking for a small supportive audience.

#467 Humor 2.15 – I’m happy with this rating, I intended the game to be funny and lighthearted, with a serious underlying issue.

#597 Audio 2.02 – I don’t really understand this rating, according to the comments this should have been really low. Almost everyone complained about the sound effects. Yet this is my second highest rating?

#756 Fun 2.15 – Happy with it, there isn’t a deeply fun element to the game. Just an average platformer.

#762 Theme 2.30 – I think this is on the low side, but the Tiny world theme is one of my least favorite.

#799 Mood 1.97 – I’m alright with this rating, I don’t think I set much of a mood.

#804 Innovation 2.04 – I think this is a bit low, how many entries had an online scoreboard, or controls that you could remap to different keys or even a gamepad. I’ll give it that the gameplay isn’t really innovative.

#838 Overall 2.17 – ok

#849 Graphics 1.89 – I have already voiced my opinion on graphics. But this was expected.

The Dreaded Tiny Red Planet

In Closing

I enjoyed participating in Ludum Dare, and will be back in August for Ludum Dare 24. I have my own clearly defined reasons and expectations from Video games and I stick to them.

I have released the post compo version of the game, you can download it from:

http://allaroundgames.net/index.php?page=throughthebluesea

Thanks for reading.

Tags: final, post-mortem, postmortem

–A comparison–

A few days ago, I posted the simple question : “How did you do this time?”

Feelings about what we think of our own work aside, we now have the results of the voting to show us how others received our efforts. For my own part, I think the ratings I got for both of these are pretty fair, but with a few surprises. eg: I was sure Innovation would be even higher than it already is in BP, and I felt like I was very much on theme, though not to the level of a game like Fracuum.

The first thing to remember here is that LD23’s contestant base was massive compared to LD22. The rankings don’t map exactly between the two, and when you’re this far from the top 5 (or even top 25) it’s better to consider what percentile you fall into.

The reason I didn’t answer my own question directly in that previous post is because I really don’t know the answer. I generally had more fun making HUGMONSTER and I think it shows in the high Humor and Fun ratings it received, compared to the fun rating of Burning Platform. At the same time, I feel like Burning Platform was much more of an accomplishment regardless of the relative ratings. For example, no part of the actual construction of HUGMONSTER scored higher than 3.02. By contrast, Burning Platform blows it away in Innovation (and really I don’t know how HUGMONSTER got an innovation score above 2.5 in the first place), and the strong soundtrack in Burning Platform gave it a nice boost in general.

I guess the meat of the matter really is the “Overall” rating here. In both cases, it falls onto the happier side of the top 50 percentile of entries. It would seem that the community gave a higher score to BP than to HUGMONSTER and I suppose I can understand why even in light of its gameplay flaws, which had a serious impact on the Fun score. The interesting part of this to me is that HUGMONSTER had its own share of gameplay quirks, but they seemed to just add to the charm.

I suppose my ambivalence about seeing Burning Platform as having a higher Overall score than HUGMONSTER is because of that glaring “Fun” deficit. If I’d just tuned up some of the loose ends more tightly in Burning Platform I feel that both Fun and Overall could have been sitting right at the 3.0 line.

But enough about me

How do you feel about your two games, side by side? Do you agree or disagree with the ratings? Do you think the crowd got it right, or can you not believe that they liked that other game better than the one you like better?

The rules are clear.

Competition Rules and Eligibility

6. Source code must be included.

So why are some games in the compo top without providing the source? Rating is over and some authors don’t respect the rules.

Here are some examples from the Compo Top 50

>>Names removed because all mentioned entrys provided thier sources.

have a nice day.

cheers

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 5:58 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Rating myself:
Overall: 4 stars:
Innovation: 3.5 stars: Most of the gameplay elements ‘just work’, but it’s not the most original I’ve seen.
Fun: 4.5 stars: There’s something about the freedom the game gives I really like. Of course, I’m biased.
Theme: 4 stars: While not the most original take on the theme, they are definitely ‘tiny worlds’.
Graphics: 3.5 stars: The trees are nice, the sprites are OK. More life would’ve been nice
Audio: 2.5 stars: Not all bad, but nothing exceptional
Humor: N/A: I don’t think I have any humor
Mood: 3 stars: It’s not mood-less, but it’s nothing special either.

(I’ve made this post with 17 days to go for rating, and I’m going to compare it with the averages I’m actually going to get)

#121 Overall: 3.56: half a star lower than I anticipated, but beating the average.
#153 Innovation: 3.53: Right on the mark
#169 Theme: 3.53: Half a star lower than I anticipated. Come on guys, they WERE small planets 😛
#262 Fun: 3.12: Massively lower than I anticipated. I guess it became boring more quickly than I anticipated.
#305 Mood: 2.91: Right on the mark.
#450 Audio: 2.44: Right on the mark
#531 Humor: 2.05: Well, to be expected rly.
#677 Graphics: 2.41: a star lower. Perhaps I should’ve focussed more on the trees or the more unique features.

Well, that’s it! I’d like to thank all the voters, and I know I shouldn’t be disappointed: 121st of over 1000 entries is very good for a first entry. And of course congratulations to all the winners!

Before I start this post I just wanna say that I am not writing this out of any spite or bitterness towards the results or angry about anything. I am completely proud of my entry and what I achieved during this LD (my first entry ), so don’t just dismiss this post as a bitter rant about my personal rankings.

But I do want to bring up the question of how fair the results are and if the way results are currently calculated is working as intended…

From what I can see and assume, the results are just calculated as an average of what you given in each category. So for example if you were rated by 10 people, your score for each category is tallied up and divided by 10, to give you a score for each category. Now this seems a bit broken for a competition like this, where each entry will get wildly different number of votes/ratings.

So in theory if a game was only rated by 1 person, but that person gave the game 5/5 for each category, then it would get a score of 5.0 for each category… This seems wrong to me and allows for wild fluctuation in the results depending on how many people played/rated your game.

Let’s take a look at some examples and see if what I am saying seems to make sense:

Looking at the top 25 list it doesnt take long before you can go down the list and find a game that scored *very* well, but on closer inspection seems to have only been played by a very few number of people…

Lonely Hated Rock – Came 5th overall in the competition and had scores of #8 in theme, #21 in fun and #30 in innovation #94 in mood and #128 in graphics. Very good scores all round! I’m impressed! That is, until I Look at the spreadsheet and find that this game was only played and rated 16 times…

Pocket Planet – Came 10th overall and joint 1st in fun! Well done… 20 people rated this entry.

Pale Blue Dot – 16th overall and #23 in the fun category… but was only played/rated by 20 people.

Necro Gaia – #16 overall, #11 for graphics #16 for fun and #50 for mood. This game actually ranked in the top 100 for 6 categories! Wow.. thats amazing, how many times was that game played/rated? 18!! (Whats worse… the author of this game had a coolness rating of 0… yep, according to the data, they never played/rated any other game.

Using the latest play/rate data from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao74NZQqNUt5dDNvZUJ1UXVqZGkxUGVlVkxlZ3JnM2c#gid=0

I am not bashing any of the entries in my example, merely using them to point out how having fewer people play your game seems to benefit your final result.

It would seem that using an average score to give you a final result is flawed in a competition such as this. Average scores and using the mean is a great metric but should only be used when you can guarantee that each entry will get the same number of data points. If this is not the case you need to look to alternatives and start doing more statistics to get a fairer results.

It really depends on your viewpoint, but as I have pointed out above, if simply using the average to calculate the final score. The competition and results are open for wild abuse and un-fair results.

Maybe somebody could compile a data spreadsheet showing the number of ratings a game got, and ordered by the overall ranking of the game… would be interesting to see how high-up some games can get, by having a very few number of people rate their entry…

EDIT : I put an example in one of my reply comments below but just bringing it up to the original post for more exposure.

Here is an extreme example highlighting the problem in a simple way that shows how the system doesnt work for the current dataset:

With the current system a game that is played and rated by 10 people, all giving the game 5/5 would score a 5.0 in the final rankings… but a game that is played by 100 people and rated 5/5 by 50 and 4/5 by 50 would score 4.75 in the final rankings… now just consider this example and ponder if this seems correct to you? Personally I think this highlights how the final rankings for the games doesnt correctly reflect the ratings a game got.

So I thought I’d review the scores I got for Dave is in a Fish Tank and compare them to my expectations.

I would have liked more ratings (only got ~55), but I’ll assume these scores are sound.

Humor – I found it surprising that this is my highest score. I spend alot of time when blogging or doing creative things trying to be funny, but I can honestly say it wasn’t even a priority with this game. I am however glad that whatever sarcasm or cynicism that is in the game was understood. Or at least, I hope that’s what was understood. Perhaps everyone just thought it was completely random and ridiculous.

Innovation – I’m glad people appreciated my effort on this front, though top 25 was where I’d like to be. I was frankly shocked at just how boring and safe most of the entrants had been, but I suppose it was to be expected from the same people who voted for such a boring and safe theme. To me, innovation should always be a priority, for EVERYONE, or what really is the point in your game?

Fun – it starts to go downhill here. I should have focused more on gameplay and made sure my crazy ideas were actually enjoyable. I needed more time to balance and add more elements to the game. The game was bare-bones – there are alot of things I wanted to add, like tetris blocks and such, which would have made gameplay much more engaging. I am sincerely disappointed, but I do think my score was fair.

Overall – Fairly reflects the scores in the other categories, I guess. Roughly the same as “fun” and “theme”, and in between my high scores in “humor” and “innovation” and low scores in “graphics” and “audio”.

Mood – I don’t even know what mood is supposed to be. Not sure there is any mood in my game. Not sure there is any anti-mood either. So a perfect 3/5 sounds about right.

Theme – This was a disappointing score. I think my use of theme was just a good, if not better, than my innovation. Personally I think there are games in the top 25 with less original uses of the theme, or at least equivalent “just as good” uses of the theme. I’d say this is the most suspect score of all and the one I think I deserve better in.

Graphics – This was fair, I didn’t focus on graphics at all as I don’t think it’s a strength of mine. I suppose this also adversely effects the impact of my game and my scores in the other categories. Next time I’ll be ditching the cartoony, child-like style and making sure there’s at least some integrity there. Will work on my pixel art, if only for my solo efforts.

Audio – Again, fair. Everything was SFXR. I’ll work on my music skills too.

To conclude, my first LD was an absolute blast but disappointed with where I placed. Will definitely be entering next time and I’ll definitely be getting one of those shiny medals.

Just a shameless plug to finish off:

An RPG game making competition I’m hosting at 64digits.com. First prize is worth well over $400.

Post-post-mortem is a post-mortem with a double post.

I made a game for LD23, and it’s called “Shipwrecked“.

I examined the rating of my game.

Overall: Well, I did a better game. I’m surprised the rating didn’t change much.

Innovation: My game is more innovative. It was well-planned.

Fun: I made an over-complicated game.

Theme: I followed the theme. That’s all I can say.

Graphics: My previous game had crappy graphics. My new game has not-crappy graphics.

Audio: My previous game used the music the set the mood. The new one does it as well, but the game isn’t moody itself.

Humor: The fog of peace? What else is humorous?

Mood: It happened accidentally. I relied on mood when I was making the previous game, but not the new one.

Coolness: I rated 100 games. You can always earn a gold medal… just by playing games.

Average: Average is more likely to be close to overall. And it is.

I made a better game, and I calculated that if I’ll continue improving at the same speed, it’ll take me about 8 LDs to get a 5 average. Good luck!

Summary: my game is more polished, but more complicated. If somebody played my other games, he can say I (almost) always make difficult games.

So I saw the all the stats-posts and wanted to be cool too.

Here are the ratings of my games during the last 4 LDs, including some general stats.

What’s interesting to see is that the number of games has skyrocketed. 1 year ago there were only 352 games, now it’s 4 times that much.

As a result of this I believe a percentage-score becomes important. Ranking, say, 50th out of 300 is different to ranking 50th out of 1400.

Aside from that I can tell that I have significantly improved after my first LD. Audio has increased steadily and Theme hung around the top ~25 spots. The rest did improve generally, dut did fluctuate.

My worst grades were in Humor, yet even then they were in the top 40%. Cool.

I learn from this that POLISH MATTERS. I always made sure the game is as “complete” as possible, even getting my roommate to play it a few hours before the end to implement the input. The more “stable” and “complete” a game is, the less you may frustrate the player, which will result in a better mood towards your game and thus better ratings.

(Yes I know the coolness-rating has been calculated differently each time, I didn’t take that into account. But I did take extra care to look beyond the coolness-numbers and I did actually come out 1st every time. Does this make me eligible for a lifetime-coolness-award? )

-Matthew

Tags: postmortem

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 10:46 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I was so excited to see my LD results that I decided to make a chart!

Here it is :

On this chart, you can see the results of my 3 Ludum Dare entries. Left columns are the position, middle columns are the rates and left columns are (position/number of entries) x 100, something like the position the game would have if there were only 100 entries. A good way to see if you improved yourself or not, despite the increasing number of entries.

I think this chart is quite interesting and I suggest you to do the same. Here, I can see I improved A LOT between my first and second LD Game (first and second games ever) bu that my third LD entry wasn’t as good as the previous one. I already knew that but some details are very encouraging.

1 : I significantly improved my graphics, and I’m very proud of that

2 : Even if I lost some ranks in Mood and Humor, this chart shows that I’m still as good at it. By the way, it’s quite surprising that I got on LD23 a better rating and a worse ranking in Humor. Were the LD23 games funnier than LD22 games ?

3 : Innovation is interesting too! I lost A LOT of ranks in Innovation, even if my LD22 and LD23 entries have similar gameplays. But after all, it’s very logic. Never Alone Hotline was quite innovative, Ok, now this is akward wasn’t, because I already made Never Alone Hotline before.

In the end, I’m very happy with this results. It’s more or less what I was expecting with some good surprises (I expected much worse in Fun and graphics)  and a single bad surprise (only 127th in Theme ? Originality doesn’t pay much)

From now, I’m gonna work hard to improve myself for the next LD in august! Can’t wait!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

I’ve said my thoughts on the current ranking system elsewhere so no real need to re-state here, but theres something to me that’s quite a bit worse that could be addressed, and this is more of a community thing really but perhaps there’s some way for LD24 some “encouragement” could be put in place to do it.

Much like LD22 I take the same issue with my comments/feedback…..my comments and feedback are 100% positive (well..99%..someone did bring up that more feedback in the HUD would have been nice 😀 ), nobody could really say a bad thing at all.. out of just over 100 ratings 40 of said people posted that they “loved” the audio and thought it was “really really fun!”….and that was about the extent of my feedback. (And not just my game of course, I’m just using it as a easy example as it effects me the most personally, many many others I’ve browsed through are the same, nothing but positive feedback and glowing praise towards the game….then a really low score)

I scored a 3.07 in fun and 2.75 in audio

Now…whatever, those scores arent “bad” by any means, but they don’t reflect the feedback in the least!  if 40 people of 100 “loved” those….then I’m looking at probably 20-30 ratings who did not like the gameplay/audio who did not leave feedback.

That sucks…mostly because it’s the feedback from those who didn’t like the game that I care about, I want to hear why they didn’t like it!  As much as I appreciate the “I love it!” posts as feedback goes negative feedback is far more helpful. I don’t know if people are just too “polite” to post things they didn’t like or if they are somehow afraid of being “retaliated” against and being given a bad score on their game or what, but, at least to me, I enjoy feedback good and bad…It lets me know which things I tried people liked and which things i tried people didn’t like so I can either explore further into an idea or avoid it in the future.  (Especially in something like this where I made a game type I’ve never done before AND tried a few twists from the “norm” in it’s genre)

So, in saying that, I’d like to re-iterate my suggestion I brought up prior to LD23 based on my experiences from LD22….we need some sort of way to allow people to attach an anonymous comment to their vote (well, the site would still know who posted it, just dont show the name) but still leave a way to leave comments in the thread like we can do now (showing our names).  Perhaps this would allow more people who don’t want to say anything bad to open up a bit and give honest feedback?

Feedback has to consist of both what worked and what did not work to be effective….just my $0.02

Tags: feedback

Don’t want to be emo but I did terribly in this compo. My worst ever out of 5, even with someone else helping on art? I’m very disappointed.

Thanks for All the Fish!

First off, thank you everyone for actually checking out my game. It’s interesting to note that the average number of ratings per entry was ~35. You guys graced me with 55 Ratings, which is awesome. So much love for a game I only spent 13.5 hours on.

Ratings

A little talk about the ratings I got:

First, I think the “coolness” system is a really great way to get people to hunker down and try games. By rating lots of games, I was able to get a lot of feedback in return, which was amazing.

Overall
I’m honestly not surprised my overall score was better than any element in the game. A lot of it was rushed and just “finished” but I’m really glad people understood the potential of the game, even if it was so hard it was practically unplayable.

Graphics
My “minecraft” approach to the isometric graphics (a billion of just about anything looks awesome) and extra forethought on the GUI system seems to have rewarded me greatly.

Innovation
I’m surprised this one was as high as it was. This was pretty much a click-fest sim-city RTS. THe mix-genre was enough apparently.

Fun
Again, I am surprised this was so high. In my opinion, this game was practically unplayable.

Mood
This was probably killed by the lack of story and music. No surprise here.

Theme
I was grasping for straws when it came to the theme, so no surprise here either.

Audio
No sound == Crap score. No brainer here, but it does make me wonder. If there is no sound does one rate it N/A or 1? Does N/A count against you as 0, or does it just drop from the overall average? What I find even more odd, is that I got 1.1 as an average. ಠ_ಠ Which one of you guys rated the sound >1 when there wasn’t any sound?

Humor
Considering the game was so hard to beat to unlock the kitten achievement, I’m not really surprised at how horrible this came out. Regardless, I’m not sure if the game would have really done better in this column with just the achievement.

Download Statistics

I hosted everything on mediafire, which gave me some nice statistics:

A quick pie chart of downloads:

The linux downloads isn’t surprising, as the downloads for them came a few days later after the compo was over, but what is surprising is the number of .love downloaded. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I shared it on the love2d.org forums, but considering everything was nicely packaged, I’m not entirely sure about that.

Anyway, thanks folks! Much love!

So I’ve just posted up a neat little article on my blog where I talk about our game, Tiny Timmy and Big Bill as well as giving some general tips and advice about game design and game development in general, as well as telling the story of how Timmy and Bill came to be

http://4urentertainment.org/blog/?p=83

I’ve even used big headlines so you can skim through to the interesting bits if you like!

Tags: postmortem success SuccessStory tips

The Ludum Dare is awesome. But rated jams come every 4 months. That’s a long time!

My favorite part about Ludum Dare is getting the ratings – so I know what I did well in, and what I can improve.

My friend and I are thinking about building a website to host more frequent, but lower-key, rated gamejams. It’d have a focus on learning how to improve (I’ve noticed people saying how the comments they got on their games didn’t help them understand out how to get better). Would you be interested in this?

Do you have any other suggestions for cool things you might be interested in?

If this is something that interests you, leave a comment so we can get back to you when we have a decent prototype

And so here we are. This was my first LD so I wasn’t sure how my game would turn out. My game entry page is here. Let’s take a look at the results!

Overall, not bad! My game wasn’t finished, so I was expecting an overall score between 1-2 (after all, there isn’t much you can do, and the pacing is way off). I’ll break down my thoughts by-category.

Innovation (#84, 3.77)

I’m really happy with this number. To be honest, I wasn’t necessarily aiming for anything particularly innovative. My design goal was to just have something interesting and that I could knock out in the time allotment. I did, however, intentionally avoid common genres.

Graphics (#265, 3.25)

I was expecting a decent graphics score as my game was in 3d yet didn’t rely on complex shapes (which I would utterly fail at designing). I stuck to simple shapes, colours, and lighting. I actually believe my lack of detail helped me here. However there were some things I never got to do: ship engine light, trails showing their path (think Homeworld/EVE) and simple planet textures. Worked out pretty well considering, I think.

More UI would have been very helpful.

Mood (#279, 2.96)

I’m actually surprised this was about a 3. I suppose the very, very cold darkness of the space and the death of Earth could be considered moody; In reality I just didn’t have time to add a background.

Theme (#336, 3.21)

Not bad. I was aiming for the ecological aspect of Tiny-World, in that the Earth is simply not large enough for all of us. I didn’t get any negative feedback on this point and I believe most people did agree with my take.

Fun (#390, 2.90)

Surprising, there’s no audio feedback on any of your actions, and very little visual. When I released the game I felt there was very little ‘game’ here, let alone fun. The comments I received after submitting my game really raised my spirits though, and definitely have motivated me.

Humour (#539, 2.00)

There is no humour in my game, unless someone considers the demise of the human species hilarious I suspect there is mostly a large number of N/A votes here.

Audio (#742, 1.30)

There is no audio! Nothing! I don’t deserve the 1 or 2 votes here. I suspect I got some votes as no audio is better than terrible audio.

Overall (#571, 2.75)

Not bad for a prototype I say. I was hoping to be in the top 50% and I beat that by a little margin.

Now let’s see if I can get something cranked out for MiniLD #34!

Tags: earthisdying, results

For Ludum Dare 23, I made Invasion Of The Trivials which you can play here.

It is a First Person Shooter where you have to save the miniature Trivials from the mega-spheres!

I feel like I did better on this game, but it sort of lost the originality Isolated Assault had.

How I rated Other People’s Games

The games where a lot better overall this time around and I mostly gave 4 stars for most categories.

 Results (Drum Roll)

Audio my highest rank, at #211, which made sense I guess. I put a lot of work into the music and sound effects, so thanks voters!

Innovation, however, was the lowest. I didn’t think an FPS was very original, but the idea of saving the smaller towns was new, so I don’t know what happened here…

Looking at my score compared to last LD, I did a lot better last time, my highest rank being #40. Then again there was a lot less people less time.

STAY TUNED FOR A SPECIAL GAME SURPRISE! (A sequel to a very popular game by Rob Productions :3 )

Nice job, everyone, great LD! <3

Tags: compo, ld23, post-mortem, postmortem, results, timelapse, tiny world, unity, unity3d, update

Very exciting to see many GREAT games being created at LD23! I’ve played about 120 games and many of them are very creative and good. It also gave me about 60 responses to my game which you can try it here. This was my first attempt at LD and i think my result are beyond my expectations.

My Results Are:

#155 Theme 3.56

#252 Mood 3.00

#357 Audio 2.65

#402 Humor 2.28

#411 Graphics 2.92

#481 Innovation 2.82

#502 Overall 2.85

#680 Fun 2.23

—————————————-

Theme ( #155 :: 3.56 )

Seeing this made me very happy. I was able to get #155 which was very exciting to see. I can see why because i took the meaning of “Tiny World” literally and created a Tiny World! This was one of the categories I was going towards through literal meaning.

Mood (#252 :: 3.00 )

This was confusing to me. I didn’t see my game as very moody or something, but many said they liked the music or ambience i set. I guess the nice sounding music put people i ease. This is still very exciting to see

Audio (#357 :: 265 )

This is same for the mood because of the audio the mood was set right i guess i wasn’t really expecting much for the audio. There was only 1 main music and atleast 5 small effects.

Humor (#402 :: 2.28 )

this was one of the category i was going towards, but then 5 hours into the competition i reviewed the game idea so far to find out it wasn’t so funny, but this was still my 4th best scoring category. I guess i did conclude some random event through some simple cutscene pictures.

Graphics (#411 :: 2.92 )

Still not understanding, but I created all my artwork in close to 1-2 hours. Nothing exciting because mostly everyone did some sort of pixel art and i did the most minimal of pixel art.

Innovation (#481 :: 2.82 )

This was the problem for me. I was trying to make my game different, but it didn’t work out as well because i have no imagination at all

Overall (#502 :: 2.85 )

This was exciting to see my overall score, rank 502 seemed decent to me because i was around the half way mark(502/1072) this didn’t worry me because i knew my game wouldn’t be the most amazing.

Fun (#680 :: 2.35 )

This i can agree with MY GAME WAS SO BORING! Many comments suggesting that the game should be more challenging and not so boring, this is because all you do in the game is either go Right or Left. This created absolutely no challenge or difficulty at all. I even found myself getting bored when i was testing. I decided to not try to scrap the idea because after testing i was already to far into the project.

What I’ve Learned For Next Time:

– Faster paced game (People disliked my slow pacing game, this contributed to how boring it was)

– More challenge and more difficulty ( My game was waaaay to boring and easy)

– Polish Polish Polish

– Spend more time on Aestics

Overall this Ludum Dare was very exciting and I hope to join the next one or the Mini-Dare!!

The game: Ineptia.

Results

Breakdown

Although I’ve taken part in a few game jams before, this was my first Ludum Dare. I would have liked to have done better overall, and to be honest at first I was rather disappointed with how I scored. Now that I’ve had a few days to look back I’m quite pleased, although I don’t know how I scored so well on graphics because I thought they were pretty bad.

Lessons for next time

My first Post Mortem concentrated on the more technical lessons I learnt, but now I know how I rated overall there’s a few more things that have become clear.

The original game plan was to have you start in a cryo-tube, and be woken up by an emergency light. You would then have to travel around the ship, collecting bits for your robot before placing him the various domes to fight the intruders and collect animal samples. It sounded good on paper, but then I came to my senses and realized that 48 hours would be far too short. The domes stayed, but only really on the title screen and help text.

Lesson: You’ve spent a whole weekend mentally reinforcing how your game fits with the theme, but every other player has no idea. They must learn it in the brief time they play, so make it stand out.

I went for a turn-based strategy, which is one of my favourite genres. However, it isn’t exactly easy to pick up and play, and it can be quite slow. It’s also quite difficult to balance in a short space of time, which led to most of the game being purely driven by chance.

Lesson: The player only has a few minutes to judge your game. Make sure it’s spent playing, not reading rules.

Finding out how you scored is exciting, and is a good was to gauge how well your game mechanics worked. However, rating below what you wanted isn’t the end of the world. I scored lower than I had hoped, but got some really great feedback (and if you took the time to leave a comment on my game – thanks! I truly appreciate it).

Likewise, take some time to give some feedback when you’re rating other games. Even if it’s only a sentence or two about a feature that would work well or something that could be tightened up.

Lesson: When you’ve poured 48 hour of your time into something, a few words of feedback make it all worthwhile.

Moving forward…

LD #23 gave me a lot of new ideas to work on, and I’m planning on releasing a post-compo version in the next month or so. I went in with expectations about how I’d rate, but instead I learnt far more about games and rapid development.

But next time I will score better

In this LD my game was bad, and my scores confirm it.
You can play it here:
Space Mission Part 2

Or watch my timelapse here:
YouTube

Most ratings were low, and i think some of them could have been lower. Now let’s see what scores i got and why i got them.
Fun: #354 (2.96)
Whoa! I didn’t expect this vote was this high. Pretty much everyone told me my game was freaking hard, with only one live during the entire game. The first part was too hard for many and dying in seconds during the second part should have annoyed everyone else.. This makes me think a lot on what people find fun.

Audio: #444 (2.45)
This time BFXR was on my side too, it created cheap and effective sounds for me. Probably the voting was nerfed by the complete absence of music.

Humor: #446 (2.19)
What did people find fun? Exploding before the first planet? Playing and insanely hard shooter to get squashed in less than 10 seconds during runner part?

Mood: #506 (2.58)
2.5+ score. I wasn’t expecting this, too. When i play a game so hard it is frustrating, it sets my mood level to 0.

Overall: #541 (2.79)
Overall, I am in the second half. This means people found my game mediocre and i think they are right. My game is rushed in some parts and it is not well polished.

Graphics: #701 (2.35)
The second part of my game killed this score. I personally think the ship and planet sprites are fine, everything else like bullets or all the sprites in the second part was rushed and not so good looking. Lastly, the particle effects weren’t really in line with other sprites.

Theme: #815 (2.10)
Nothing to complain here, pretty much every other game used the theme in better and more interesting ways.

Innovation: #830 (1.98)
Making a shooter, a runner and a sequel (of my previous ld entry) is not so original. I got what i deserved.

Now for a real postmostem

The good

A game – This is the only good point i can think of. I made a complete game: main menu, two intros, two levels and an ending screen. The game is not so good, but meh, i made one and i think it is enough.

The bad

Difficulty – I’ve increased the game’s difficulty in the last 5-6 hours, without testing it deeply. This increased the difficulty from “three years old child” to “OMFG SHOOT SHOOT OH GOD NO SHOOT!!!”, making it a lot more frustrating.
A mediocre game – Fair. I made a mediocre entry and i got mediocre ratings.
Tools – I still haven’t created (or found, for what it matters) a good, fast and easy to use open library for 2d sprites, which i use for most projects. The one i used was rushed in a couple days and it was far from perfection. I need to fill this gap before the next LD.
Pratice – Between the two LDs i didn’t make any project and I still have a lot to learn about Unity3D.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse, unity, unity3d

OK I just didn’t want my post to be yet another post labelled “results”.

Coolness    100%
#89    Humor    3.26
#90    Theme    3.74
#213    Innovation    3.39
#226    Fun    3.19
#302    Overall    3.19
#417    Mood    2.70
#571    Audio    2.12
#577    Graphics 2.61

I’m pretty happy about these…except for the fact that I used sfxr for sound effects and did them all in an hour; but I got higher for audio than for graphics! I did go for functionality over looks, but it’s a little embarrasing when you’re an artist.

I think this was the most fun I’ve ever had in any game jam! I will definitely be participating in the next one.

Tags: how i did, madgnomegamer, results, score, scores

You want to know my rating?

Here’s my rating.

Coolness #1120

that’s it. My first LD doubled that in almost every aspect.

the synopsis

Polish is overrated.  make your game functional first.

http://www.spiridios.com/ludumdare/ld23/postcompo/index.html

I decided to port TPod from Python over to something that runs in a browser, and Silverlight won out as the technology to do it in. It was largely a toss-up between a Java applet and C# Silverlight, and since I work in Java daily I figured I’d refresh my C# skills.

I would have posted this during the compo, but my productivity wasn’t exactly at competition levels and I literally ported the last feature the day voting ended. Which is probably good, since I don’t think this really should count under the “porting” provision. This wasn’t just a “tweak a build file and correct a backslash” kind of port. This was a “rip the guts out, since even the language itself is fundamentally different” kind of port. Those who played the Python version should recognize the game, but will see I implemented some of the suggestions from the comments. The source code largely mimics the Python code, though Silversprite/XNA do things a bit differently than PyGame, and I did refactor and implement some things better now that I had time for such luxuries as “encapsulation”.

I had a lot of fun participating in my first ever game jam and making Asteroid Defender. Now that judging is over, I don’t have to hold back my real thoughts about my game anymore. It’s postmortem time!

I also made a post-release gameplay video. I recorded this when I showed my friends the game for the first time.

Innovation (2.67, #549)

I made a shooter that adequately fits the theme, so I’m sure the gameplay didn’t surprise anyone. I didn’t play any other games where the tiny world in question is an asteroid, but otherwise, everything in the game has been done before. I saw a lot of other developers come up with more creative types of games to fit this tiny world theme. Oh, and the title, Asteroid Defender, was the biggest afterthought of them all. The game didn’t have a name until 1 hour before the deadline. The repairing mechanic was good, I guess, but I could have done a lot more with it.

Fun (3.17, #239)

When I make a game, I start with getting the core game mechanics and make them rock solid and fun. I feel like the shooting turned out really well and the movement was enough to do the job nicely. I put a lot of time into tweaking the equations for little things like your gun’s spread and the spawn times for enemy waves, and I think the game gets frantic at all the right times. However, I ran out of time to give the game the depth I wanted. 30 seconds into the game, you’ve already seen everything there is to see.

Theme (3.25, #314)

It’s tiny, but is it a world? My plans for this game involved defending several kinds of structures on the asteroid’s surface. You’d need the turrets to help shoot down enemies, but there was also living quarters to repair your tank, the mine which gives you the resources required to do repairs faster, and solar panels that boost the speed that the other structures do their jobs. The different structures working together would make the asteroid feel more like a self-sufficient world with its own infrastructure, so I’m sad that I had to cut it down to just turrets.

Graphics (2.58, #593)

Um, yeah…I’m no artist. The art in this game is only a little bit better than placeholder art. Maybe I meant to re-do some of the sprites before the end, but I don’t know how I could have learned to do much better in such a short time. In my opinion, the graphics didn’t bring the gameplay down, so that’s good enough for me. The radar was definitely worth the time I spent coding it. I had some difficulty getting Game Maker to draw sprites where I wanted them, so I couldn’t get health bars in the game in time. Now that I think about it, a basic player health bar would have been simple.

Audio (3.00, #216)

Here’s the deal. On Saturday morning, I had just decided what kind of game I was going to make. I made the mock-up image, and I decided I’d get my VGM Music Maker ready to make some music. I wrote the first 8 bars and decided I’d come back to it once all the gameplay mechanics I wanted were in the game. That time never came, so that 8 bars is all you get. I was, however, really pleased with my first time using sfxt. Whenever I got an idea for a sound effect, like a quiet “pop” for your gun or a deep “boom” for your turret getting destroyed, sfxt could generate a good one very quickly.

Mood (2.36, #626)

Shooters aren’t exactly the best place for emotional content. I wanted to create some tense moments for when you’re down to your last structure and things are finally falling apart, but the loss of the other planned structures took away the game’s ability to make this happen. I still like the panic that happens sometimes when you look up at the radar and see a red cloud of doom descending on your asteroid as you run for cover under a turret. I spent the last four hours of the compo tweaking the game to give it these frantic moments, and the game is much better for it.

Overall (2.92, #452)

For what it’s worth, I think Asteroid Defender turned out OK. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I could get a playable game out at all in 48 hours, and this competition pushed me to make the sacrifices necessary to get it done. This game clearly isn’t complete. There’s only 6 seconds of music, one type of structure, and one type of enemy, the minimum to make it work. Next time, I should start smaller so I don’t have to scale things back at the end to get it out on time. I want to use the shooting mechanic in another game in the future, but it won’t be this one.

Coolness (20%, #1007)

In the three weeks following the competition, I had a couple major things happen. I started a new job the morning after the compo, which required two sudden schedule changes that took a toll on my energy to do other things. I also had an email account cracked twice by spammers, so I spent quite a lot of time dealing with all the domains they spammed links to and coming up with new passwords for everything. I didn’t have a ton of time to play many of the games, but it’s fun to see how other entries tackled the theme. Next time, I want to play more games!

I’ve been cranking on updates to my entry and am feeling pretty good about the changes shown in the video. Thanks to the great feedback on my entry page I had a much clearer direction to go in. It makes me crazy happy to build a game for LD and hear people enjoyed playing it I had a ton of fun playing everyone’s entries (well.. as many as humanly possible), there were some seriously cool ideas floating around during this compo that could turn into great indie titles. Rock on everybody, can’t wait till the next one!

This was the best Ludum Dare I have participated in so far. I actually managed to get into the top 50 this time! (38th to be exact)

Thank you everyone who played and rated my game and gave feedback! And to those of you who couldn’t play my game or didn’t want to download anything, I have good news: I’ve finished an improved html5 version of my game!

Unfortunately that doesn’t mean everyone can play it now, since in order to keep a lot of things in, the game requires WebGL. But people with a recent version of google chrome or firefox should be able to play it. Let me know if it works for you, since I’m getting mixed reports.

Play it on Kongregate!

Some reasons why most MiniLDs are awesome:

1. Know the theme earlier: It’s nice that everyone is given an equal handicap for the full LD48 by only announcing the theme at the beginning of the compo, but I like to know in advance. It’s fun to be able to scheme and plan and throw away bad ideas before the pressure is really on.
2. Flexible timeframe: The MiniLD runs STRICTLY from the Saturday to the Sunday. NO EXCEPTIONS. Unless you are going to be busy that weekend. Or you have a great idea and just can’t wait to start. Or you decide to do it on Friday and Saturday instead, but your idea on Friday didn’t work out so you restart on Saturday and work until Sunday. Or…
3. Good themes: The LD48 theme voting process is good and fair, but choosing  a theme by committee means that the truly odd themes get weeded out, as do the more open-ended generic themes.
4. If you finish making a game, you are already a Guaranteed Winner ™! Tied for first place!

Some MiniLD hosts may be more or less strict about some of the above, so YMMV, but the MiniLDs are mostly known for focusing on the fun.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=5397

Post Mortem

Good evening. This account is the shared account of James (err, cool James) and sstrandberg. We worked together on Fancy Seeing You Here for Ludum Dare 23. We made the shared account as we are total bros and have decided that we will do more Ludum Dare’s together. I (James) decided to write this post-mortem on this account as to establish our identities on here.

This was James’ first LD (and first game jam ever), and sstrandberg’s 3rd (although he has done other game jams in the past).

Results

Overall, we’re both pretty happy with the results. From the beginning our intention was to focus on the atmosphere and mood, and coming in 8th place for the mood category proves that we were at least moderately succesful. The rest of the results are more or less what we expected although I am particularly happy with 77th overall as being in the top 30% or so proves that I’m better at making games than I thought I was. One thing that results did teach me is that the Ludum Dare community are awfully sadistic. They gave us a 2.6 for humor, but the only “joke” in the game is that you get to murder your best friend. You sick bunch.

The coolness rating really is a bit of a let down. You see, one of the reasons I have made this combined account is so that we can both rate games and get that rating up. We both played an absolute ton of games that were entered, but sstrandberg being a forgetful bugger kept forgetting to rate them and I couldn’t as the game was tied to his account, not mine. Still, people should know that we played loads of games and the vast majority were really quite excellent.

Some Things What We Did Do Learned

While we were both pretty satisfied with the results, there were a number of things we could have done better. One of our biggest failings, in my opinion, was that we had lots of clear ideas about different elements in the game (for example, we wanted a lighter in it as fire is a fun mechanic to play with) but we had literally no idea how we were going to implement this into one coherent game. So, we made the lighter, and then we were like “well now what?”

This is a pretty small example, but there were some bigger things that came into play. For a while, we didn’t even know how the game would be structured. We knew where it started, we knew where it ended and we knew how we were going to hook this into the theme. However, we had no idea what would go in between these two points. In the future, we’re going to have to think more about implementation than we did this time in order to get all of our ideas into the game.

Some Things What I Did A Learn On

On account of their being two of us, and on sstrandberg being the much better coder, I mainly spent my time being an asset slave over the weekend. I am not an artist, but it seemed like the role that I would be most useful filling. Now, having spent 72 hours being an artist, I have learned a number of things.

The main one is that, similarly to coding, you really need to have an idea on how you want to implement your creative vision. The initial plan for the game was to have you start in a lush, green area and have the word gradually degrade and tear apart as you got nearer to the end (that is what your mate (who we refer to as Fred) is on about when he says “shrinkening”). I started out by creating the lush green environment tileset that you can see throughout most of the game, and that worked totally fine, but when I then tried to tear it apart I had literally no clue how that would work.  We were using Ogmo to edit the levels, and with how the visuals ended up looking I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make it look as if it were degrading. I also underestimated the amount of assets I would need to create and also how much time I would need to create and prettify the levels, so that led to me pretty much completely abandoning the idea to have the world degrade.

Similarly, I was in charge of all the text stuff. Now, when we discussed how we were going to show the things that Fred says, the initial plan was to have a traditional RPG style dialogue box pop up with his freakish square face at the top of it. However, mid way through making that we noticed that it looked pretty cool just floating above his head as you can see in the game now. This was totally fine for most of the development time, but as we neared the end and I started trying to implement some of the things he said, I realised that it was super hard to tell a coherent story like this. I literally had to completely abandon the narrative that I had planned and instead just used Fred to drop hints as to what was happening in the world  . In the end, this worked quite well for establishing mood and positioning him as some kind of sinister figure, but it’s still a little bit disappointing.

Stuff What I Am Really Proud Of

Now, as I mentioned previously, I am not an artist. However, I have tried my hand at creating sprites and tilesets and what not in the past so I wasn’t a total virgin. This was the first time I had ever tried to animate any kind of sprite though. With that in mind, I think the four character animations that I did came out pretty darn great. sstrandberg was the one who did the walking animation for the player, but the hammering, the shooting, the Fred dying and the Fred checking his watch were all mine. The shooting could have been a little better as I really should have put in a bit of code that started Fred’s dying animation when the gun was fired rather than when the animation started, but the dying, the watch checking and the hammering are all as good as I could have  made them, and that makes me rather happy.

The dying in particular, as morbid as it sounds, is pretty much my best contribution to the game. I wanted to make you feel really guilty about it as there are basically only two situations in which you would see that animation. a. you are a psychopath who enjoys murdering people or b. you messed up the only failable puzzle in the game and didn’t have a spare key to get the artifact. In both of these situations, I wanted you to feel disgusted with yourself and to be filled with unimaginable shame. The way that the blood seeps down and the way in which he just becomes a gross slump of blood and flesh works really well to that end.

What Is The Next Thing What We Will Do

Basically, the plan is to enter this weekend’s mini-LD. So that should be pretty cool. We will take these lessons to heart, and hopefully that one will come out better. Cheers to everyone who played and rated our game, you are the best people that exist.

My game got into the top 20 for both Innovation and Humour (#19 and #17 respectfully)!

That’s just really weird.

My coolness was very poor as I had my finals immediately after the compo through to a couple of days before the end of the judging period.

Anyway, I’ve since learnt HTML5 canvas +  Javascripty type stuff so expect my next game to be much more accessible.

Surprise!

Since the post about my greatest weakness, I’ve started a new project I thought I would never finish. I just called it “Parkour Project” because the main thing I was trying to implement was climbing and free-running. However, all my story ideas would’ve taken 5 years to implement. (Some stuff about un-corrupting a futuristic city with hovercraft)

So half-way through, I thought I should do the folks down at Ludum Dare some justice, and decided to do Isolated Assault 2. However, that meant I had to make everything from scratch again, because my current “Parkour Project” was using a completely different character set up. It took a long time, but I finished the character controls and improved the enemy AI and sounds.

The demo is now complete (the first 2 levels… I’m working on the others right now)

I’ll explain the rest in the FAQ, but why don’t you read it while the demo is downloading? :3

Mac Demo

PC Demo

FAQ

Will there be music like what we heard in Isolated Assault?

Yes! The traditional looping music track over the entire level is back, but I’ll also be including a new music system that plays certain tracks based on character situation and position. The original Isolated Assault track has been remastered and put into the first level. I will be mixing in orchestra sounding tracks with dubstep tracks (what I’m used to). This has been a fun new experience writing music in a new style, and also it’s interesting mixing in dubstep and orchestra to make one awesome music-packed game!

What’s this whole battle arena about?

The battle arena has changed since the build of the demo (sorry) and is currently under heavy development. I’m adding music, new spawn codes, and enhanced weapons, so be ready for the next demo!

When will the full game be complete?

Well considering I’m only on level 3 right now, and considering there’s going to be more than one chapter and a cool new story to implement… NOT SOON… However, new demo versions will be constantly built and I will constantly keep you guys updated on Ludum Dare and Unity Forums. I’m not actually sure if I should let you see more than the first chapter before it’s done… give me a comment and I’ll see what I can do. Certainly an idea I have is that as I make the levels, I release the demo versions, so you can play it as its being made. (The continue button should work with multiple versions of the game)

Will the final game cost money?

Probably not. Most likely not. If this game gets on Steam (see below) they might recommend I make it cost money. But I don’t really want to do that because I owe you guys something, and making money is not important.

What’s your favorite changes from the original Isolated Assault?

EVERYTHING! Mostly the cinematic scenes though. It’s cool to match music up to voice and animations, so hopefully the taste of cinematics you get in the demo will be extended!

What are the controls and stuff?

Information like that can be found in the README file. (And also the credits)

Thank you all for supporting the original, and thanks for helping make a great LD that got this series started. Yep, I said “series”! I was sort of hoping to get the final version on Steam, but I have no clue what they’re looking for and the submission page looks very… professional. Any ideas? Do you think I should just submit and see what happens?

Anyways, any other questions can be asked in the comments, and be sure to stay tuned for updates!

Thanks Ludum Dare! <3

Tags: Assault, compo, demo, game, indie, Isolated, LD22, music, post-mortem, postmortem, progress, screenshot, SuccessStory, unity, unity3d, update, video, youtube

So I know that a lot of you guys played my game, “Tiny’s World” (the one with the mouse), and I know that many [all] of you, including me, experienced severe lag. Though I didn’t put this in the game info, that game was the first that I have ever written. I’m here to say that I realised why the lag was so unbelievably high and the framerate, so low. Basically, I have been placing (“blitting”, as PyGame calls it) images on the screen, when actually I should be blitting sprites as they are all constantly moving. To fix this, I changed the pixel format of all my images using Surface.convert_alpha() which converts the Surface (image) to a sprite form. When I changed all my regular game objects, I increased my framerate from 15 to 17 FPS. This was much to my disdain, as I expected more. But then, I proceeded to change my (moving) background images to sprites, and I managed to get the framerate to in excess of 100 FPS! 😀

What I’m here to say is, I love ALL you guys and the LD. Thanks to all you guys who run it and contribute it. And thank you for all those helpful (constructively criticising) comments you made about my game and for all the suggestions which I am currently working on adding into my game.

And by the way, I am working on a post compo version of my game and if anyone is interested in it. It wont lag [or will lag much, much less] and I will be adding features you have expressed your interesting in in your comments when you played it.

Thanks again for the LD, as I’m learning more and more about Python; both its strengths and weaknesses.

If you want to play the old version of my game (for the time being, before I upload a new version), it’s here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=10594

Hey guys!

So yeah, Soul Searchin’ placed 4th overall :O which is a score I’m pretty pleased about ^^ thanks everyone who rated my entry!

I’ve decided to continue working on this game and to try and publish it. The new version’s got:

• A new world: the world of Fears (*tam tam taam!*)
• 2 new pieces of music (one for the world of Desires and one for the world of Fears)
• Better controls.
• A more haunting ending.
• And general small fixes :3

The post-compo version is as good as done. Right now, I’m looking for play testers who want to help me make this game even better and iron out the last little quirks.

Interested? Shoot me an email at: [email protected] /* */!

Cheers,

Maxim

I wasn’t planning to participate, with finals and graduation next week…but I changed my mind. I like the Aspect concept, and think it offers a challenge. I have also been wanting to try out Construct 2, so this was a good way to try it out. I did decide to reuse assets from my Ludum Dare 23 entry, as a way to save time.

I title this sequel I Threw the Red.

Because I’m using Construct 2, meaning html5 exporter you can go try it now. More level to come tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2012 at 10:28 pm and is filed under MiniLD #34. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The Basic Engine is done! Tomorrow graphics and gameplay! Now I’m going to sleep! (4:50 am here T_T)

Web

Hello, this is my game for Mini Ludum Dare 34. This is my first “MiniLD”. I really like the idea of mini/strange resolutions.

Instructions

Move: Arrows

Change gravity: Z

Start: click on box.

Music: http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/54469

Hey, looks like spending five minutes browsing that ‘how to make tiles that aren’t completely terrible’ tutorial paid off!

Now to find an easy-to-use Python .tmx loader…

Progress!

The idea is that you go through little rooms filled with monsters. When all the monsters are dead, you go through the purple portal thing. Each room is chosen randomly. So far there are only 2 rooms, but more will be added soon. Each room has a random color, and a random type of enemy. There is still a long way to go, but i think this is a good start.

And now for the experiment!

Flashdevelop generates an html file which contains the game. This file is hosted in a public dropbox folder.  This means that you can play the game as it is being updated. Every time i compile the game, this link gets updated.

I would love to know what people think of this idea.

Bye!

I’ve switched the resolution to 128×128! Also added some graphics! The objective: Kill all the zombies using traps or whatever you find!

I’m still not really sure if I’m going to participate in MiniLD#34. The 18×64 64×18 resolution feels very tempting (and proves to be quite a challenge) – so far I couldn’t resist and had to try something, and this is what I came up with:

(it’s scaled x2, but the general idea is that it would have to run in said 64×18 resolution, no cheating here)

The mechanics is something I was thinking of for some time now because I’ve never done anything like that before. So, if I’m going to enter, this is going to be an experiment on my part and I’m quite sure this won’t be finished by tomorrow, as I’m pretty tired right now. If you didn’t guess yet, working title is “Micro Beat’em Up”. 😉

I’m probably going to work on this a little bit more after the weekend, but don’t know if this will take me anywhere. I wonder if the submissions will still be open after Sunday.

I’m doing a circle resolution. I have an idea for my game: you can change the gravity for yourself, but for other objects it remains the same. I even made up an intro:

*school, physics lesson*

– Username, how much is gravity force?

– I don’t know.

– Why don’t you know?

– I don’t want. Gravity is unimportant.

Play the demo! Drag the level, get the ball (either one :D) to the yellow circle. Red is no-drag zone.

The placeholder name is “Problem, Newton?” Maybe I’ll leave it as it is.

And I’m going to port it to Android! You will have to tilt the device to alter the gravity direction.

P.S. I just started, so I’ll end a bit later.

It’s on! I’ve decided to make a protoype of a game idea I had, so please be detailed in your feedback!

It’s a game about guns. There’ll be tons of attributes and combinations, and lots of monsters to shoot them at.  It’ll have fun sci-fi laser effects too; although I decided to leave out the Lightening attack type.Basically you have fun trying to find the optimal (or the weirdest!) gun. The monsters will have the same guns you can have, too!! Although i MAY give them limitless ammo.

It’s going to be called Guns Rule.

Will put up a screenshot when I have something to show; I’m just about to dive into coding.

Cheers!

UPDATE: It’s working! I still have to hook up being the HUD and improve the monsters and add bosses (and polish), but I’ve got the engine in place!

UPDATE 2:

It’s looking cooler now…

UPDATE: Finally figured out how to get it to let me put up screenshots!! Yay! (It’ll look better when it’s done.)

Tags: guns, guns rule, madgnomegamer, mini ld, Shoot

So, after doing a 3d game in Unity for the last Ludum Dare, and feeling a bit dirty about being all high level, I wanted to scale it down a bit, and do a simpler low level game, in either C++ or C# – And then this mini game along, with it’s tiny screen resolutions (And silly huge ones!) – Perfect!

So, I decided to make a 64×18 game, after just drawing out various boxes and seeing how much detail actually fits in them, then drawing out some rooms, then just kinda slapping gameplay onto the images basically Using SFML via C#

Here’s some incredibly unexciting screenshots!

It’s slowly coming together, other than it having no major objective or gameplay in place or planned so far!

And yet again, I am getting no sleep

I decided to go with 128×128 because it’s a square. Even on all sides. Handy.

PixelBlip is a little like Bit.Trip Core, except you can move around.

I only have a couple hours total to work on this. Hopefully I’ll finish! 😀