Ah, forgot to post at the end of LD24, but I finished for the compo.
Presenting Walkabot. It’s kind of like Lemmings, but with robots and no lemmings. More info in the game’s description.
Give it a play, rate, what have you! Would love to hear what you think.
Hi again!
If you’ve already played my submission (I’d Change the World for You) and you had problems running it because of lag, even after the first fix, then I’d like to invite you back again because I have a SECOND lag-fix update.
(You might have to refresh the page to reset the cache)
Thank you so much for playing!
Try out the post-compo version – if you get all 5 stars, you’ll get a new game mode based off of the joke theme! 
Well I didn’t finish the game, but I did learn a lot, and I had really a good time.
Let’s look into what was happening with me and the game then!
The idea:
Platform shooter. On death the game uses what killed you to apply various character upgrades so you can deal better with hazards in future. For example, if you die from fall damage enough times, you gain the ability to fly. Get shot to death? You can reflect bullets. Blown up? Bombproofing!
The good stuff:
-I’ve got the hang of seriously fast, simple art, that looks half decent now. It’s all about big thick lines people!
-Even though I’m kind of sick of working in GameMaker it served me really well and fortunately I’m pretty good with it by now, so despite a whole day with no coding, I managed to develop most of the mechanics pretty quickly.
-Juiciness! After seeing this about ‘juice’ in games, I was inspired to try it out for myself. And it seriously helped. Even though my game still kind of looks like arse and the gameplay is far from balanced, it’s still reasonably fun because of all the extra little bits I put in. Obviously I could have coded more fundamental features instead of juicing it up, but I think this helped maintain motivation because it felt more like a game worth working on with that extra juicy boost.
-The mechanics work reasonably well, although they’re certainly not glitch free of current. But my concept (using death as a way to build immunity to hazards) was decent overall.
-Designing on paper is awesome! Here’s a link to a zip with all the notes I made if you fancy it!
The Bad:
-I have awful time management skills apparently, and spent most of day one seeing various people and dealing with personal tasks that I really should have organised better. Day 2 I lost 5 hours at a barbecue where I got drunk. Day 3 was actually really productive but by then it was too late. Need to organise the rest of my life to account for development time better next time.
-I didn’t like the theme, although now that it’s finally come up I hope there’ll be a better one next time. Still, the advice of ditching your first few ideas was helpful, as you can see above, they sucked! I kept going until I thought of something decent.
Overall:
I had a great time even though I didn’t finish. I wish I’d made a really tiny backup game though so I could rate some of these awesome looking entries, but I’ll have to try that next time instead.
I have organised my channel on youtube so you can find everything easier – I hope. Check it out!
Also I have started a review series where I try to review 5 games a day. Critics are based on my personal experience during gameplay and can be either bad or good! I review everyones game who rated mine and I also read the developement journal and rate. However I’ll not tell you how I rated and can be different from what you think by watching the video as rates can be changed and my opinion too.
Here is the first video, don’t forget to subscribe for more!
Firstly Timelapse!
yeah it’s 16 minutes long 1 minute = 1 hour there ahhhhh.
Anyways not much to say this time, I ran into some slight issues with implementing features on time (player upgrades) but it’s mostly playable so…
I’d probably want to leave some time to bug test and add sound as I had to do two quick bug fixes (1 to render the game playable second to make it xp compatable)
Anyways game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=1443
This is a timelapse for my LD24 entry : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ynB1iPgiHY
View my game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14354
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=53 — here is my compo game. My original idea was to have the player and enemy (or enemies) evolve with each level, however because of my limited time I was only able to get this done. True If I had participated in the Jam I would have gotten something more playable done. But I didn’t want to do the jam I wanted to participate in the actual compo.
For those of you that know me I would appreciate it if you would play and vote (and it’s okay to vote poorly, it doesn’t really bother me) The important thing is that I entered. For those of you that DON’T know me, don’t feel obligated to play it since it will probably disappoint you 😉
Now if we can only get the rules to allow every entrant both a compo and a jam entry it would be cool.
That was going to be my next plan, even though I didn’t have much for the compo, I wanted to actually take the same game add more stuff and then submit it to the jam AT THE SAME TIME AS THE COMPO VERSION — It would have been cool because I actually got in something on the compo, and then at the same time the people who played the games would have had more fun with the jam version.
This was my first LD and it was just as awesome I had expected. I blocked off the entire weekend and dedicated every passing moment to LD.
I told myself not to come up with any ideas for the game before the true theme was announced. However, after strongly rooting for 1,000 Kittens, when Evolution came up I was very disappointed. But wait, cats can evolve, right? My friend Andrew pointed me to the Wikipedia article about evolution and I read it to get some ideas. I spent about 30 mins to an hour sketching out the concept and came up with Kitten Farts. Kittens mate and their offspring comes out mutated genetically and better fit for survival. The progeny then continues until (if left alone) only the strongest kittens exist amongst the population.
Things I think I did right:
-Initially built the game as a prototype with no story and all game play elements included early.
-Stayed fast with not allowing any feature creep.
-Kept the story small.
-Made a to-do list with priority items listed at the top, knocking them off first.
-Slept for at least 10 hours during the 48.
-Lots of caffine
-Somehow stayed away from booze. 😀
Things I wish I did differently
-Leveraged a framework for collisions and/or animations. Collision took me a few hours of precious time, and it is basically just recoding the wheel.
-Went web based instead of Windows. People don’t like installers and I knew this. However next time I will try to get familiar with a web gaming framework before the LD starts.
I’m super happy with how the game came out, and I have been having fun watching the kittens evolve and then destroying their population. I may make a port for Windows Phone soon and release it on the app store. Let me know your thoughts on the game!
It is called Kitten Farts, please give it a try.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14011
-Scott
Twitter: @scottrehlander
(Written by Hagay, the graphics guy)
This was our second LD jam (our first was number 22). Last time we tried to create an adventure game, we made all of the assets but ran out of time before we managed to combine everything into a working game.
This time around we had a much bigger team – seven core members and several more who assisted along the way with food, bug testing, etc.
We started working six hours after the countdown started (Since we’re from Israel, the competition started in the middle of the night and we wanted to get some sleep beforehand). Our first ideas were pretty generic – Evolving player, mega-man style levels, and so on. Eventually we found a good idea – a platformer with many weapons and enemies who react intelligently and evolve defenses against the weapons.
Brainstorming the game. Gal (The composer of the game’s music) helped us via Skype on the TV
After we had the general mechanics worked out, we thought of a plot which started as a joke – A Bollywood movie police officer – IN SPACE!
I went out and started sketching while the others started work on level design and writing.
Working on my trusty Cintiq 24HD
Yoni, the programmer, started coding the engine using temporary graphics from our previous game. By evening I already had the basic character graphics ready, along with the basic evolution of the enemies. The others worked on level design, animation, music and pizza.
Enemy with different evolved parts
Thanks to the amazing teamwork, we managed to have a semi-playable game by the end of the second day. By the middle of the third day we already had most of the animations, music and levels ready, leaving only some annoying bugs (mostly related to hitboxes) and polishing. However, due to the lack of time we had to remove the entire planned boss fight – Still, we had 8 complete levels, each with a different feel and gameplay twist.
Left to right: Gal (music and animation), Lihi (animation), Aviad (Writing and design)
So, what have we learned?
– We had two major bottlenecks – Animation (Walking and 10 weapons for each character in the game) and programming. the animation problem was solved thanks to the fact that both Uri (The designer) and Gal had enough knowledge to help with the animation work. Programming was harder – Yoni is an excellent programmer but he’s also only one man, and he had to work with six other people at once. This caused the game to end up with some annoying bugs due to lack of time.
– We were lucky to have a team with excellent communication skills – Bad communication can lead to lots of wasted time and effort.
– ALWAYS SAVE THE STUPID FILE oh god why do I have to redraw this entire level from scratch where’s my coffee aughh
– The best feeling in the world is playing the finished game for the first time.
6AM: Best feeling in the world (except for sleep after 72 hours of non stop work)
In conclusion, we’re awesome and we should win.
Play our game here.
Until next time!
The night before the theme was announced I was looking at the themes that were up for vote. What I should have done was come up with an idea for each theme. Or at least tried. Instead, I ended up focusing on one theme that I had a good idea for but then expanded upon it further until I had my mind set on Chain Reaction.
When I woke up the next day I saw that the theme was Evolution. I’m sure the first thing that jumped to everyone’s mind was Pokémon, because that’s exactly what I thought of. I also started thinking about the theory of evolution and Charles Darwin. And then I even took a look at genetics. Maybe I could put something about mutation in my game. Nothing really sparked a game idea, though. I was stuck with no idea and I was freezing up and fixating on it.
Luckily, I had to go on a marathon training run that morning, so I had a good hour and a half to come up with something. I figured with all that time, something would materialize. Instead, I ended up finishing the audiobook I had been listening to, which was Fight Club. That Olympics commercial got me hooked on the audiobooks.
At this point, I was thinking of bowing out of the competition. I’m pretty sure every good idea I’ve ever had has been either in the shower or while I’m asleep. I thought back to the old StarCraft custom map I used to play called Evolves. In it, each player would control all of their troops with one unit who was separated from the battlefield. You would tell him which player to attack using this one unit. The more troops a player kills, the faster their troops will evolve. In order to win, you must destroy the other players’ bases. So usually, the fastest person to evolve their troops would win. It required a bit of strategy and luck, but it was fun.
Obviously I wasn’t about to go building the underlying RTS of StarCraft so I could make something similar. I dumbed down the gameplay significantly so I would have a feasible timeline. I was also using a new library that I haven’t worked with before: FlashPunk. It is similar to Flixel, which I had used for the 0 hour game jam in November. So I especially wanted to pick something simple. I started with just setting up the game loop and getting something drawing to the screen.
I then proceeded to get the controls for moving and shooting working. And hooked up a bullet system for actually firing something. The bullet’s velocity wasn’t hooked up in this screenshot.
Or this one.
You can tell I was testing how the controls felt from an early stage. Tight controls really make a game that much better. I would adjust the movement speeds of the player and the enemies a lot throughout the project. Next up was having something to shoot at.
In comes the basic AI that I came up with. Originally, I wanted to do a sort of Pac-Man style AI, where each of the opponents does something different. Purple was going to shoot at the opponent furthest from them, Red the closest, and Blue the weakest. Later on I would find this to be highly advantageous to Red.
I know what you’re thinking. What happened to the little nub on the ship? Sharp eye, reader. I was going to have the ships pointing in the direction they were traveling, but since I made the movement so fast, I found that it wasn’t necessary.
I fiddled around with the AI until Red wasn’t too dumb. At this point, it would just chase me around the screen and continuously fire at me, which was fine for now. I duplicated Red’s AI and tweaked the variables until Purple and Blue were created. It was nice having these other opponents because red wouldn’t chase me down the entire time. At some point while playtesting with the AI, I thought it would be nice to have someplace to hide from the barrage of bullets. And I would eventually need a HUD for all the ships’ health and experience. So I built bases in each corner and built the information that needed to be displayed for each ship into the base.
I think they’re actually all going for me in that screenshot. Anyways, don’t worry. The AI would change before the end. There’s also a bug in that screenshot. Giant air high five to whoever can spot it. So I’ve got a player controlled character, 3 AI opponents, and the ships can actually destroy each other. Is it a game? Not yet. Still needs, at the very least, a win/lose state. And since Ludum Dare requires the theme to be in place, I need to hook up some sort of Evolution feature.
The easiest thing I could think of was boosting the stats of a ship once they gain enough experience. And with time being a factor, I made a quick decision to do 5 levels. Here’s what I initially came up with for the levels.
It changed as I tried it out and I think it turned out pretty well. The last round of evolution is now the craziest as ships are blowing up left and right as they race to the end. I added very basic game over screens for both winning and losing the game. And I of course put the option of restarting from those screens.
So the game was “technically” complete. The next important thing to get in was sound effects. I’m no expert in making sounds or music with a computer, so I opened up cfxr and created a few beeps and boops for various happenings in the game. I thought making each ship have a different firing sound would be cool and the player would be able to tell who was firing, but since the ships are firing constantly I feel that the effect was lost. If you try hard enough, I’m sure you’ll be able to tell the difference.
After the sound effects were in and tested, I opened up GarageBand to see what I could do with it. Turns out, not a whole lot. I gave up pretty quickly as there were so many things I wanted to polish in the game that would easily be better than any music I would make in the same amount of time. There were also a lot of samples missing in GarageBand, so I did a 1.2 GB software update to get them. I figured next time I tried I would at least have the entire sample library at my disposal.
Instead of an amazing soundtrack, I upped the visuals.
Trails for the ships and explosions for getting hit by a bullet and for being destroyed. I also managed to get a pulsating background in so it wasn’t just all black. It’s made up of 144 grey squares that scale up and down randomly. I had an idea about using the background to reflect the action as it happened. Let’s say Red had just been destroyed. The grey square underneath that could pulse red and send out reverberations of red to the squares near it. Something like that. It sounds cool and if I ever get back to this game, I will definitely try it out.
So it’s just before the end, and I’m noticing that the AI is way too smart. At least for Red and Purple. Going after the closest and weakest opponent kind of gives them an edge over me and Blue. I did away with the opponents’ sense of individualism and made them all behave the same way using a state machine. Every time between 30 and 60 frames an opponent will decide to either go to their base, move to a random spot in the arena, or go to an enemy’s current position. It will also choose a new enemy to fire at. This made the game far more balanced, with Blue and me actually winning some games.
Overall, I’m really happy with the way this Ludum Dare turned out. Even though I didn’t enjoy the theme too much, I managed to come up with an idea, a realistic timeline, and a complete game.
Now that you’re done reading about it, go ahead and play the darn thing!
Game: EVOLVES!
Tools: Flash Builder, Photoshop, FlashPunk, cfxr
Time: ~8 hours
So, for our first Ludum Dare ever me and Regus made The Joining, a centrally hosted 2D shooter MMO. Against all expectations, including my own, we made a relatively complete game by jam’s end. Unfortunately a 3-day-mmo is kind of like 5-minute-cake, a cool idea, worth doing to be able to say it’s doable, but the end result is infinitely less satisfying than what you’d get if you put the proper amount of time in. While running around pewpewing evil robots is fun, a lack of players and general aim and finetuning makes it only playable for 5-10 minutes before boredom sets in.
What went right
What went wrong
Overall a lot of things went right, far more than went wrong. Our first LD experience was enjoyable, and taught me some valuable lessons, or rather reminded me of them. And it was a chance to do a few things I don’t normally get to do, like make an MMO and work on pixel art. I consider it a win, even if I doubt our game will be getting top ratings.
We probably won’t work on the game for a post-compo version, I think. Nobody’s asked us to, which is a pretty good sign that it’s not actually wanted. Comment if you think we should, though. I’m tagging this SuccessStory even though the end result is lackluster, because… well, 3 day frickin’ MMO man.
Eniko, signing out.
Tags: mmo, multiplayer, online, post-mortem, postmortem, SuccessStory
First off, I think that you should all be congratulated for generally being awesome. Reasons for you being awesome include the fact that you just made a better game in 48 hours on your own, or in a team, than the entire Duke Nukem Forever team did in slightly over 14 years.
You’ve also once again managed to be really positive in most of the comments I’ve read on games, even when pointing out flaws. I’m still rather impressed that a community of people who suffer from severe sleep deprivation could do such a thing, but you all seem to pull it off again and again.
High fives for all! Let us share an e-beer! Or something like that!
Party on!
I WHIP MAH HAIR BACK N FORTH!
Anyway, all this aside, I would like to throw in a quick postmortem of what I think. This is mostly for m own good, so that when I write a proper one (after player feedback), I can see what difference feedback makes. Gain a little insight into… something or other.
Anyway:
I’m not a pervert, I swear… That sign is, though. Watch out for him…
Anyway, it’s been a great experience, looking forwards to playing your games!
Shameless advertising! Play my game! Now! Or else!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=4104
Tags: postmortem
Hi all, this is the post mortem for my Ludum Dare 24 entry called “Silent Game of Death”.
Silent Game of Death, entry link
First of I want to thank the community for all the comments I’ve already received , this was my first Ludum Dare and I’m quite happy with the outcome.
Ok lets start from the beginning shall we? During the summer I made a small 2D framework, using C++, SFML for window management and OpenGL for rendering. I stopped working on it when I got back to work though, I still had some “minor” things left to add before I could start making games in it. One of the things missing in my framework was audio handling, I had no way of loading or playing sound. Skip forward two months and I see Notch post about this thing called Ludum Dare, I almost imminently decide that I want to join in and sign up. I still have a half completed framework so I’ll need to work that out before the Dare begins. This was the Wednesday before the start by the way. So I sat down on Friday and added the audio handling and went to bed at about midnight, I live in Sweden so it started at 3 in the morning here. Here’s a time lapse of my progress all the way from the beginning to the bitter end!
I wake up and see the theme. I get really excited and scared at the same time. “Evolution” is such a HUGE theme, I start by making an idea cloud and just writing up everything that comes to mind. I start working on a game, a HUGE game, a game about evolving creatures for customers but first you have to grow the food for the creatures to affect their DNA. It was going to be great! Well no, I soon realized this was simply to big, scrapped the idea but kept the grid I had created for the farm game (this is the reason the enemy block texture is in the folder “ground” and is called “grass.bmp”). I came up with a new idea of using Conway’s Game of Life in some way and decided that it should be the main enemy of my game, so that the player was something like a virus or a disease. This evolved into a top-down shoot’em up with a ship that fires plasma bullets on blocks, really original!
Anyways I was about 4 hours from the end of the Dare when I noticed the silence in my game and realized that I’ve completely forgotten about all the sound! At this point I had some game breaking bugs and also some major features I still wanted to implement (gamestates and stuff like that) so I took the decision to skip putting in some half-assed sound-effects and went on to make the game stable and not feeling buggy or broken.
Things that went well
So I guess that’s it, I’ve learnt a massive amount of what I’m capable of and not. This have most definitely lit my game-making “spark” again and I will join the next Ludum Dare! Please play my game and add some to the comments, I really love reading what users think of it and I will most likely use these comments when I complete this game.
This just really shows how much is put into every hour of Ludum Dare!
Tags: timelapse
here are some snapshots of my game, pretty boss, eh?
you can play it here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14064
Intrigued? Think you have what it takes? Are you CLEVER (and probably patient) enough to stop evolution on Earth?
Play AvRvE and see how well you do!
And here, check out Cake’s timelapse of all the art.
It’s my first time LD48, I learned a lot and here is my post mortem.
It’s the second video game project I managed to finish. The first one, made during my studies, was a simple beat em all involving rabbits, birds and fish… In a group of two people, we ended up with a game visually nice but not fun at all. I had this only experience, but learned lots of things.
This time, I’m alone and I didn’t want to make the same mistakes (ie. focus on graphics and content, and not on gameplay) and make something more dynamic… Verdict ?
What went right (ie. the preparation…)
– Tools
I used Unity3D to make this game because I was the most familiar with, even though I wanted to make a 2D game. It was the simpliest way for me to make a game in time without learning a whole new language. Hours before the beginning, I had to familiarize with Orthello 2D, a free Unity framework to handle 2D, which helped me to gain some time.
– Drawing
Whatever the theme was, I knew I wanted to do a 2D game with nice hand drawn art (actually, I hate drawing pixel art, it’s so small..). Drawing takes a lot of time, I was aware of this fact, so I had to manage time carefully and create a limited number of resources with a simple art style. I looked for something to create sprite sheets, sprite fonts…
What went wrong (ie. development phase…)
– Balance
I didn’t have to check the balance of the game : enemies attack rate, enemies respawn time, player movements… Even though the game is playable, some variables are so random that winning or loosing can be a question of chance.
– Time
Since it’s my first time participating, I planned something too big for only 48h. Sunday night, I knew i couldn’t finish in time, so I gave up the compo and turned to the jam. It gave me an extra 24h, but it was still not enough, and I finished with an untested, unbalanced and unpolished game.
– Drawing
I actually spent too much time on drawing useless features like night/day, parallaxing background (these 2 are not even in sync, you can have a sun during the night)… Evolution related, I had to draw different different looks for my character and an animation for each one. Once again, I focused too much on graphics and not on gameplay.
– Theme
I really expected 1000 kittens 
I plan to polish and complete it so feedback are appreciated
I’ve played over 80 games so far and have seen some really good stuff. If you haven’t played these 7 games yet, go play them now!
1. Parental Guidance – Maple – 48 Hour Compo Entry- This game is gonna win the award for mood, I don’t want to spoil anything.
2. Evoland – ncannasse – 48 Hour Compo Entry-This one is highly polished. Again I don’t want to spoil anything here.
3. Octogeddon – flyingbear – 48 Hour Compo Entry- In octogeddon you use your tentacles to attack incoming subs. When you die, you can choose to upgrade your tentacles to shoot fire balls, add another leg and more. I’m going to be playing this one again, a lot of fun.
4. Super Clew Land – Team Clew – Jam Entry-If you told me this was a long lost NES game, I would believe it. I felt like I was a kid again playing my NES. It actually looks and plays a lot like a Kirby game in my opinion.
5. Strike of Rage ! – deepnight – 48 Hour Compo Entry- Deepnight made this, that’s enough of a reason to play it. If you like beat’em ups, you’ll love this.
6. The Legend of Elzad – arkeus – 48 Hour Compo Entry- I JUST realized that elzad is Zelda mixed up, which is exactly what this game is, Zelda. It’s going to be interesting to see how far Arkeus takes this idea, either way it’s really good.
7. LD24 X0ut – X-0ut – Jam Entry-This game is just pure fun.
P.S And if you haven’t tried our game out, please give it a try!
Ancient Ruins – CappaGames – Jam Entry
People often wonder, “what the hell is going on in Jiggawatt’s head?”. Well, now’s your chance to find out with this timelapse of my LD24 compo entry, Manual Population Control.
One point of interest is that the visual style only gets designed at about 3/4th of the way, when I quickly slap proper images on top of the squares. I can’t even imagine having “excess sprites” like some of you have mentioned. You people are weird and I’m the only sane person here.
(Perhaps I should’ve checked if there’s anything overly private shown in that video before uploading. Oh well.)
I also made that gameplay video I wanted. People are pretty clueless about what’s going on in my game (and for a reason), so I hope this is at least proof that there is a point to this game.
See, I tend to make my games for myself, without the need to rely on buzzwords like “ease of use” or “tutorial mode”.
But I like to think my game is fair once you get the hang of it: you can always easily blame yourself for doing something wrong or having left something undone. It has that same addictive charm as roguelikes, in a sense, so I feel like it’s successful at what I set out to do. The mechanics are quite simple in the end (as a result of cutting down features), but there are some interesting strategies emerging from them.
‘Evolution’ as a theme was what I was hoping for but not expecting. I think my problem at the start was an excess of ideas rather than a lack of them. My first impression was that I’d make something like a strategy game where you indirectly guide the evolution of entities, and I had a couple of potential executions branching out from this vague “feeling” I wanted to capture.
I quickly decided I wanted to make something abstract, because fixing physics/collisions/pathfinding bugs has previously taken too much time from the actual design and content creation. It was a good decision because I had some spare time to fine-tune mechanics and just try things out, as well as add polish. Oh, and to keep proper breaks and have a good night’s sleep. Incidentally, MPC has probably the best graphics & audio I’ve made for an LD game.
It’s still not perfect, I guess, at least I want to believe that I haven’t hit my skill ceiling just yet. There are no proper animations, subtle things that would indicate gameplay events like who is attacking whom. That’s probably my biggest gripe because I realize how a developer can guide players with visual cues, and now I just resorted to writing a lengthy manual (plus the gameplay video) while leaving the rest for the imagination. I guess I should consider the user experience at some point, but it’s easy to get lost in the mechanics when there’s nobody else playtesting.
But overall, I’m once again satisfied at what I’ve done. It was my 4th LD and I’ve never failed to make a game, so I feel like I’m a lucky person when watching everyone around me give up. That feeling of clicking ‘Submit’ after two stressing days is just euphoric. You can’t plan everything in advance, so the end result is always a surprise from you to yourself. But that’s the point, to get over that perfectionism and just improvise and make a damn game.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5551
Tags: post-mortem, timelapse
this is my 8th vlog(wich seems kind of a alot) watch it here
or watch all of them here
thanks all
