I’ve fixed some bugs/gameplay flaws in my LD24 entry! Lightning now loads faster and reaches the bottom of the island, and some issues with mating were fixed. It should be more playable now – you can try the new version here (or play & rate the original entry!)

Since my game is a bit confusing, I also made a quick playthrough video that shows one way to complete the game. You can see that I focus on the Poggles with features I want (round ears, long nose, and then long legs) and get rid of the rest.

Dawn, my first ever Ludum Dare entry. An experimental game, something of a mix between point-and-clicks and platformers. I was very pleased with almost all aspects of the development, but I figured it would be interesting to list what went right and what didn’t anyway in a post mortem post.

What went right?

> Unity – The unity engine is a breeze to work with. It loads almost every single asset file type you can imagine, there’s web deployment, and the game object system facilitates the game logic development a whole bunch. What more could you ask for?

> Cardboard cutout art style – This approach to visual design allows very simple 16×16 and 32×32 textures to simly work together. The style creates a nice and clean world that’s easy to add detail to, and animating props (for example the palm trees ingame) is easy and helps bring the world to life with very little effort.

> Sound design and audio software – I’ve never looked much at either sound effect design nor composing music digitally before, but after having a look at the LD tools page I simply downloaded SFXR and PXTone and had a crack at it. Turned out it was pretty easy, and I was very happy with the result.

What went wrong?

> The ‘find out the controls yourself’ design choice – Ludum Dare users tend to stop playing a game if it isn’t immediately obvious what it’s all about – something I’ve learnt from reflecting on how I rate games myself – which isn’t exactly unexpected considering the principle of the jam: A huge number of short games. The find-out-the-controls-yourself design that I was going for simply didn’t work as intended, players were put off by it rather than being intrigued. I thought I had fixed it when I added a simple “Controls: Z+X+C” just under the game frame, but it turns out people didn’t have any interest in simply pushing those buttons to find out what they do, or simply missed the instruction completely.

> Unforgiving 48h compo rules – Ambient sounds was something I really wanted for the game, and I had trouble generating it with any SFX software I had access to. According to the compo rules “sampled instruments are allowed IF you have the legal right to use them” but ambient sounds would simply be too time consuming to create by hand. I bypassed this rule in Dawn by using generated brown noise for the outdoors ambience, and running the noise through a low-pass filter for the cave ambience. I also played around with a couple of effects to create the monolith ambience. While this works, some kind of ambience sound generator would make a great asset to the LD tools page.

In conclusion.

I consider Dawn to be a huge success being a 48h game for my first LD entry. I would like to thank Sosowski for some asset ideas, Glundyn for creating the official LP/Walkthrough, along with the rest of the Ludum Dare community. Especially the IRC folks, you guys are great!

 /SteelRaven7

One last note! There’s a hidden playable character somewhere in the game. Can you find it?

Just like last LD, here comes my last minute recommendation post !

I’ve rated a little more than 100 games. To be honest, I liked LD23’s theme a little better (Evolution was a bit too vague for my taste), but still there were many great entries !

Here are my favorites (no particular order) :

Darwinphony – philosophistry – 48 Hour Compo Entry

This is a very creative entry. It’s not very much of a game, more of a music experiment. You paint creatures on the map with the “reproduce” brush, then you put some turtles on the ground. As they swirl around, the creatures touch the turtles and make sounds. Sometimes you get different creatures, that make different sounds. You can remove some creatures with the bird brush to get the melody you like !

Finally, there are 4 different maps (click Darwin to see them) that can produce a different athmosphere for your music.

A nice little program to play around with, and the graphics are charming !

Parental Guidance – Maple – 48 Hour Compo Entry

I rated this one 5 on the mood category, because it is set perfectly. You play a little kid who’s left alone on his appartment. What happened to his parents ? This is what you’ll discover.  As you walk around the rooms of the appartment, switch the lights and read the comments of the boy, the situation evolves and everything gets scarier and scarier…

life, undeath – Zillix – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A very well executed little game. It only takes a few minutes, and it’s very fun ! Zombies have invaded the city. The rescue team will arrive in 3 days so you have to survive till then. Kill zombies, upgrade stuff with the money they drop and rush to your safeplace at sunset. But zombies evolve during the night, so don’t let the stronger ones live.

Super Clew Land – Team Clew – Jam Entry

It really looks like a NES game ! This is an amazingly well-polished entry. This is a platformer game where you play a little green creature that is not very powerful at first. But you eat stuff, and it gives you proteins to evolve. As you play, you try to match the proteins of the creatures you’ve eaten to the patterns you need on the little puzzle-game you find on the right. And when it’s done, you gain a new ability.

Coin-Operated Afternoon – Pierrec – Jam Entry

I rated 5 in innovation, because you won’t find two entries like this one ! This is a dialog game, and what makes it special is that it’s animated in stop-motion. It’s a huge download but it’s worth every minute of it. There are a lot of possibilities in the dialogs (15 different endings !), so there are a lot of animations to see. Highly recommend it !

Dawn – SteelRaven7 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

I discovered this entry thanks to the post-mortem posted earlier, and I’m glad I did, it’s a solid entry with a great ending, perfectly in the theme. This game is a lot about crafting stuff and discovering things for yourself. As it is quite easy to get stuck, I’ll give you a few tips. In the game, you collect things. When you don’t know what to do you can :

– think, with [Z]. Sometimes the character will combine some of the objects you carry.

– find the elements in the landscape that stand out (there aren’t many), and when you do, try to interact with them using the different objects you carry with [X]. Use [C] to select another object.

Martha Z. – Sachka – 48 Hour Compo Entry

This game has a quite unique graphic style, very immersive. What’s brilliant is that you never see the main character, only her shadow. Worth the look.

Death Death Evolution – Adhesion – Jam Entry

An amazingly polished game with unique mechanics. The music is great and the graphics are excellent.

It’s a puzzle platformer game. You play a little blue fox. To beat the levels, you’ll have to evolve. But how ? Each time you die, you evolve, and the way you die determines your evolution. For instance, if you die from a fall, you’ll have double jump. So it’s all about finding the right way to die…

Sidescroller Evolution – Kassoon – Jam Entry

Another game with a fox, but this one isn’t blue ! This game is more classic, it’s a game where you run, but what’s great about it is its atmosphere, very peaceful… Sweet graphics and nice music.

Psychiatric Evaluation – ConflictiveLabs – Jam Entry

A surprising game, where you evolve in the same place (a psychiatric hospital) switching between different perspectives. The more mad you get, the more you see the world through an old videogame graphics (the worst situation being a text-based game), the more sane you get, the more colors and details you get.

This is such a BRILLIANT idea to link stages of sanity to the stages of the evolution of video games, because when you switch to the text-based perspective from the color detailled one you really feel confused about your environement and limited in your options, you feel trapped in your head.

In other words, this game really succeeds in making you feel like the character you’re playing is supposed to feel. This is very rare and it’s done in such an elegant way.

***

Finally, if you’d like to try our game, here it is !

Lucas’s Quest Backwards – Volute – Jam Entry

It’s a story about a guy from the future who tries to find self-fulfillment in going back in time to live with his ancestors. How hard can that be ? It has platformer sequences.

Thanks for reading

So ! It was a great ludum dare. Really… But I’m a little bit disappointed about the lack of votes and comments of my game, Disease. I received only 9 comments for 24 votes; but the game has been started 428 times, and only two players has finished it (in easy mode, me and a very patient player ^^)…

My game is really… hard. It’s true. I had no time to create some in-game help… Look : there was around 20’000 monsters for 428 players, that’s really … too much ! The map is too really big (138 rooms) and is very boring.

♪♫ To my mind, the best thing in my game is the music. You can listen it now ! Just click here ! ♪♫

And you can also play to my game Just click the image below 😀

And I will be very happy if you comment / vote on the submission page 😉 

Lesterpig.

Hello everybody!

First I would like to thank you for being able to participate in such a great event! This was my first Ludum Dare and I’m certain this will not be the last!

Now, I would like to explain the idea behind my game, it must have been extremely frustrating to play it without instructions but I think there is some satisfaction in learning to play a game that doesn’t hold you by the hand from start to finish. I remember when I played old MSX games and there were no manuals nor tutorials and you had that great feeling of discovery when you started to understand the game and how to progress farther and farther with each play. The only problem is that I think my game is way too complex for the player to understand it completely, sorry for that! For that reason, I’m posting these detailed instructions explaining the game mechanics.

Instructions

When you start the game you are born as a random creature. This creature is composed of a series of sensors and systems that are used to give the player some feedback about what is happening around and within him.

One example are the different view sensors the game presents to the player. You may be born with ability to sense the distance of the nearest object (represented as a circle around the creature) or you may be born with the ability to sense the direction and distance of multiple objects (multiple lines coming from the creature center) or you may be blessed by  nature and be born with the ability to “see” all the objects and their shapes and colors.

In some cases you may be born with a not so good viewing sensor but you may be able to “hear” other creatures. This is represented in the game by being able to hear different sounds for different creatures and in some cases you may be able to hear from where the sounds are coming  for more advanced hearing sensors (positional audio). So if you sense an object but it is not making any sounds it is probably a wall or some kind of plant, if it is making sounds it may be a predator or a potential creature for mating.

Now, your creature needs food to gain energy to survive and for reproduction. The types of plants your creature can eat is determined by its digestive system. You may able to eat only red plants, or you may have a more advanced digestive system and be able to eat green or blue plants. If you eat a plant that is not suitable for your digestive system, you have to wait until it is “expelled” until you can eat a new type of plant.

In order to know if the plant you eat is doing you any good, all creatures have a nervous system. It indicates if your creature is losing energy, if it is ready for reproduction or if something you ate is doing you any good. All of these are represented by visual cues like green borders indicating a gain of energy, or yellow borders indicating you are ready to reproduce. More advanced nervous systems may even show you how many energy you have left.

This is all nice and good but it is all random and you may not have the luck to be a creature adapted to the cruel world of Awareness. But fear not, you have a minimal chance of evolving in order to survive this harsh world. The first thing you should do is try to eat something in order to be able to reproduce. Search for static objects (food doesn’t move) and try to eat it. Repeat this until you get a yellow border or yellow bar indicating you have energy to reproduce then search for mobile objects. When you collide with another creature you both die and you become their offspring. This creature inherits parts of the DNA of the parents with an additional mutation. This means you can inherit the viewing sensor from the other creature, or their hearing sensors, etc. If you have a good viewing sensor you may even choose your partners! Look at top of your creature and try to identify some kind of antenna. This is your viewing sensor. All creatures with the same view as you have this kind of antenna so if you want to get new features but you want to keep your view, you should find partners that have the same kind of antenna as you. The same is true for the hearing sensors (look at the ears), the digestive systems (lower body shape) and nervous systems (upper body shape).

If you feel you are evolved enough you may try to complete a challenge. In each corner of the world there is a trophy and a challenge waiting for you that you require that you are evolved enough to survive. In the top left corner, there are the Flyers, mask like creature that charge at you. It is a good idea to have good eyes and ears to avoid them. In the top right corner, there are Exploding Walls. It is essential to have eyes that can identify this kind of enemy because they will explode if you get too close. In the bottom right corner, there are no special enemies but there are only red plants there, you have to be able to eat them or you will not have energy enough to go there and come back alive. Finally, in the bottom left corner there are the three Ghosts. They cannot be seen but they are slow and you can hear them coming if you have good ears. Collect all the four trophies and you win the game!

Micro Post Mortem

For my game I tried to create a different gaming experience for the player and in some ways I think I succeeded but then I think this game was not suitable for this kind of event. My game requires too much investment from the player that must play it many times until he starts to understand the world and its mechanics. It is a complex game and I chose not to give any instructions because I wanted the player to learn from multiple plays. I wanted him to experience the life of many creatures and how easy or how hard was to be them in the game world. Sometimes you are able to see and hear the world and you feel like you are in familiar grounds but sometimes all you see are circles and you hear strange sounds coming from multiple directions. Even in these situations there is a small chance for you to prevail, to evolve and survive a little longer.

What went right: I managed to finish the game I envisioned in 48 hours! I used Allegro for the first time and it was extremely easy to reach the results I wanted.

What went wrong: The game is too obscure for the player to learn without instructions; I was not used to some tools and lost some precious time because I couldn’t debug my code

Timelapse

If you already did play Living Tales, skip this post.

So you are still here? Than you did miss playing a unique and fascinating game.

In Living Tales your words get alive. You type in a word and if it is supported the equivalent object will appear at the left side of a book. On the right side is simultaneous a story written. The objects interact with other objects and form the story, too.

So now it is your turn to be a explorer and find out what they do: [Start Exploring]

I am working on extending Super Charles Darwin a bit. Features will included updated graphics, more levels, powerups, weapons.
Basically more everything 😀

Pictured above the new Overworld view (in progress), that will be used to navigate between the levels.

Well, I’ve played a few of the games and I’ve looked at the feedback on my own, now, so I think I know basically what I’ve learned from this experience.  My game was called “Sweepers!” So here goes.

1. Take time off work to participate!  I spent a total of six hours on this entry, and was forced to create something so unbelievably hacky that it’s impossible to expand upon or deeply modify.  I also did not get much time to rate games, sadly
2. I suck at working under pressure, but not as much as I used to. I need time to think as much as possible to get the job done right.  I am not really the best quick thinker when I know that a failure to think quickly will result in failure at the task.
3. I am going to participate every single time from now on.  Why does that even need a “because” clause?
4. I’m 3 times as inspired!

What went wrong:

• Bugs!  Because I was forced to complete it with really no time at all it was full of bugs!
• Evolution mechanic implementation:  I wanted an evolution MECHANIC.  Not a THEME, but a MECHANIC.  So much of games as of now (yes, even indie games!) is conveyed in themes, I feel, which doesn’t really convey a certain way of thinking and experiencing stuff nearly as well as a calculated action.  The problem was that I couldn’t think of any way to make that mechanic work in the given time that didn’t involve my most natural starting point, a vector space sim.  So I ended up with each marker evolving seperately and creating a kind of fake “ecosystem”.  I see now that much more intuitive and satisfying evolution mechanics could be developed using a global approach modifying a map.
• I forgot to actually mention I was participating before I started *facepalm*.  Just got too excited.  So I’m probably disqualified.  Yeah…

What went right:

• Concept:  A clear illustration of how immediate and fast paced evolution mechanics can be really engaging.  Everyone I showed it to said it was fun.    The broadside like strategy ended up being pretty cool even though it was unintended.
• Sound:  While most people will probably dismiss the sound with a ‘meh’, I was quite proud, because I almost NEVER used to get around to adding sound.  I used BFXR to produce the sound effects, and I think I came up with a pretty good set.

But a game idea has come out of all this, one I think is pretty solid.  I’m doing a mockup of that now.  If you want to watch for news about it, here’s my blog: FungusGames  News is coming soon after the mockup is done.

But back to sweepers, I don’t believe I’m wasting any more time on it. The code is so horrible that I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking about it because of how much pressure I had on me to get it done (6 hours out of the 48).  If you want to see for yourself, click here and enter the realm of LUA noobery.  If you want to play it, click here if you’re on Windows or here for any platform that supports LOVE 2D (MacOSX, *nix).  I hope it was well enjoyed by all who played it, and I hope that if you’re just now playing it that you enjoy it now!  Just a note: if you lose, RESTART THE GAME BEFORE YOU PLAY AGAIN.

It is unplayable the second time through, and I think it has something to do with LUA garbage collection.  I generally hate garbage collectors and avoid them like the plague when the language doesn’t make me use them, because my brain can’t handle fuzziness when it comes to “does x object still exist?”

I’m sorry about not being so active with the community this time around, but my decision was spur of the moment and I didn’t really have the time I needed to participate correctly.

I’ve uploaded “final” post compo version of my game for LD#24. Please check it:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8471

From new things:

– Title screen

– scores, lives, instructions on screen

– bananas

– third level with new mechanics!

– more balanced gameplay (but there’s still this dreadful rotating platform

– end screen

– high score system

I’m planning to write more in postmortem sometime tomorrow. So see you tomorrow

Tags: poland, renegades

Hey Ludum Dare folks, just wanted to say LD24 was GREAT! A LOT of great games were made, and I learned a lot from the game I made. Also I think I’ve improved my timelapsing skills :3 In case you missed it:

And finally, this came in the mail:

Tags: final, shirt

There are tons of really great submissions (still playing them). There are way too many to manage between work and stuff.

I wanted to post something about my LD24 submission Evolve Larry.  I approached my third LD attempt with a personal task:

“To make a playable iPhone/Mobile game that I could do in 48 hours and submit to the Apple App Store shortly after.”

Here’s how that went…

– Came up with the idea quickly and went for it right away. I started sketching and building the game mechanics in the second or third hour and was done with the overall gameplay by Friday night. I took some LD advice I had read (can’t remember who posted it) about having the gameplay basically finished by the first night.
– I had all of the sketches and  placeholders in place and by Saturday I relaxed a little and spent extra time drawing all of Larry’s Evolve steps in Illustrator and Photoshop. Then the food items, the backgrounds, the maps, the icons, the GUI. The whole day was gone but I was almost there.
– On Sunday, I crammed to fix bugs, make the sounds/music, polish the gameplay and get all the screen shots and testing finished.
– The music was hammered out in about 45 minutes using Reaper. The music is just randomly selected pieces played in small sections. Some of the sounds I made using an iPhone app with my own voice in the last hour.
– I managed to submit on time and had some hosting issues. I have to remember to do some testing on this earlier.

Overall I think the game was playable and semi polished, although the game mechanic was super simple. There is nothing much to the game besides catching stuff to feed Larry and keeping Larry from eating the wrong things. Still, it was working in Unity and on the iPhone as well just fine. So my goal was complete!

Aftermath: Ok, so now I had to cram to get this thing ready for the App Store. I took advice from comments and friends and quickly revamped the graphics and gameplay to make it more challenging. Here’s what I was able to do:

– Add combinations you had to feed Larry for him to Evolve.
– Added more foods items.
– Added more sounds and tighter graphics, GUI, etc.
– Added Facebook and Twitter share features using Prime31 plugins
– Added AdWhirl ads , well, just to see if I could do it.

I’ll be submitting it this week. Will post more later and a link to the App Store page!
You can check out the original Evolve Larry here.

Thanks for the support and the awesome games! 

Time to wrap it up with a little summary!

This time the theme was Evolution. Of course, like many others i had ideas popping all over, but i decided to break it down, and keep it simple. Unlike my last LD, where i started off with the animations before anything else, i brainstormed the idea, tested some mechanics, and mapped out a level draft.

The Art – Shortly after i made an interesting choice. I decided to, in order to cut down dev time, to not make specific art sprites. That might sound bold, and no, i didnt buy them instead! About 90% of the art in the game is purely made out of colored boxes – and personally, i think it worked out pretty nice!

The concept – So on to the concept itself. At the beginning, i was like, this should be fine, and i definitely should be able to make it in time! Of course, i didnt. The main concept is that the player starts out as a pixel. You are inside a sort of pixel breeding facility/factory, and you just happen to have some.. unique powers! How original eh. Well, the player must progress throughout the facility, and quickly shows that the strongest sure do survive.

At a certain point in the game, the pixel evolves. This was however not as intended. The process of evolving was supposed to be a much greater task, but due to limited time, i had to severely cut it down – which is reflected in the game.

Results – But in the end, i’m happy with it! And thats what’s important. I got to explore a new kind of way to create art assets, and set the mood, as well as scratching the surface regarding some pretty cool gameplay mechanics. If anything, i would love to go back and improve the controls, as they are.. far from optimal – but it is doable.

Looking forward to the next LD!

– The Highbred Pixel entry page –

 – Website –

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2012 at 11:26 am and is filed under LD #24. 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.

Wow it was my first LD. And it was… AWESOME!

I made a game in 48 hours! I never had so much motivation. I’ll surely take part in future LD.

Sad but I’m not rate a lot of games and hardly my game take a good place.

But main award for is that my game somehow was at main page of NG ~week!

Intersting but it was not post-compo version :).

It was not fair but I think this is some sort of Tom’s promotion.

Thanks NG anywhere!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/602387

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/602590

Well, I’m done with playing and voting. Off to bed because I gotta work tomorrow.

I want to thank all the people who tried my game. A special thanks for all the people that have left a comment (and for the encouragement after day 1).

This has really inspired me: I posted earlier that I made another game and I am attempting to make a game with some cell like evolution thing as well.

I have voted for about 160  games but that’s still just a fraction of all games. I hope people will post their favorites so I can try those (you can still try them after the competition I hope?).

I will compile a list as well.

I’m very impressed with the creativity in this competition. Unfortunately it means I think less of my game then when I finished, but I will improve!

Well it looks like our 24 event is over. Here are the results:

How did I do?

You can view your results here:

My Results: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=me

The individual category results are just above your comments.

Top 50 Games

Check out winning competition and jam games here:

Compo Top 50: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=top
Jam Top 50: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=top&cat=Overall(Jam)

Winners are decided by the Overall category.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Categorical Top 25s

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

Categorical Top 25s: ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?more=1

(And for the press, a shorter Top 5′s is available here)

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 50 style lists per category.

October Challenge 2012

Yes, we are doing another October Challenge event. If you’ve done one before, you know the drill. We’ll be kicking things off around September 27th, so stay tuned! Companies looking to offer incentives should get in contact with me (Mike, AKA PoV, AKA @mikekasprzak).

Ludum Dare 25 – December 2012

You had a good time right? Great! We’re doing it again in December! We don’t have a specific date chosen yet, but stay tuned for that. Follow us on Twitter or join the mailing list to stay informed.

September Mini LD, hosted by Ratking

December not soon enough?

Tune in this weekend for a brand new Mini LD event hosted by Ratking. Unfamiliar with Mini LDs? It’s like a regular LD without the weeks of voting (and waiting).

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for us (website, observations, etc), we continue to collect them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/01/09/suggestion-post-2/

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 24 an INCREDIBLE success!

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

* * *

- Announcement
- Real World Gatherings
- Warmup Games

Ludum Dare 24 — August 24th-27th, 2012 — Theme: Evolution
[ Results: Top 50 Compo, Jam | Top 25 Categories | View My Entry ]
[ View All 1406 Games (Compo Only, Jam Only) | Warmup ]

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2012 at 7:15 pm and is filed under LD #24. 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.

Hi there !

I forgot to post that there was a bug-free version online of our little Point’n’Click !

In case you played it and couldn’t finish it because of an inventory bug, here’s a new version…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11779

There’s also a new inventory button, which comes in handy for android devices.

Enjoy !

I’ve been waiting to post this until after judging was over so that I could post some hopefully interesting charts derived from my server’s access logs.

This was my fifth LD48 entry. I’ve entered every LD48 since LD20. I probably slacked off more this time then on previous ones, but that was largely intentional, as I tried to come up with a design simple enough that I didn’t have to rush too much. I think it worked out well, as I actually managed to add in music this time.

What Went Well

Analytics

Since the game was implemented in HTML5, all resources were loaded on demand using separate HTTP requests. While this would slow it down for a big game, this one didn’t need too many assets. This also had the advantage that I see in my server access logs when a resource is loaded, like the win screen. See below.

PlayN

Against my better judgement, I decided to use PlayN again even though last time I got burned when I discovered compatibility problems late in development. Specifically, I’d been testing using native Java, and when I switched over to HTML5 compilation I discovered that transformation matrices weren’t compatible with hardware accelerated WebGL at all, and I had to largely abandon the HTML5 version due to time.

This time, I carefully tested the HTML5 version before the very end, and I avoided transformation matrices altogether. The HTML5 version works as well as you could expect, even in IE9, although of course it is extremely slow compared to the native Java version.

GUI

Compared to my previous efforts, I think this one’s UI turned out fairly well. It has better highlighting and visual/audio cues as to what will happen if the user performs some action. I also mostly managed to keep it simple, and avoided huge help pages with dozens of controls (unlike some of my previous entries).

Evolution

Ah, the most important thing, right? The way the bacterium’s genes work is this:

• Each creature has a set number of arms (which is actually a floating point, however a creature with 2.3 arms will just have 2 for gameplay purposes).
• Each creature has a genome, consisting of an arbitrary number of genes, each one representing one “segment” on its arms. Each gene has 5 attributes, each itself a floating point:
  • Length
  • Width
  • Type: A number, usually from 0 to 5. It is rounded to the nearest whole number, determining the piece type:
    • 0 (Or anything outside the range): Structure
    • 1: Engine
    • 2: Solar Cell
    • 3: Armor
    • 4: Weak Structure
    • 5: Weapon
  • Angle: The angle of this piece relative to its parent’s angle
  • Backtrack: Allows branching by causing this piece to move its base toward the center by this many segments before branching off. So for example backtrack 1 would create a Y shape.
• When a new creature is created, its stats like arm length and number of arms are just averaged from its parents. Gaussian (bell curve shaped) random numbers are added to these averages. Then for each segment it gets a random one from all its possible parents. The inherited segment’s genes are also altered by Gaussian randomness.
• The damage, health, solar collection, engine power etc. of each component is determined by its mass, which is close to width*length.

The end result gave a lot of variety in the creature types, and I’m pretty happy with it.

Music

Considering that it was randomly generated by Wolfram Tones, I’m pretty happy with how the music turned out. The only small thing is that the music can seem a bit dissonant with the tone of the rest of the game at times. Another oddity was that the 64-bit JRE refused to load the music file, saying it was too big. The 32-bit JRE had no trouble, though.

What Went… Less Well

PlayN

Again, PlayN was something of a mixed bag, especially because of its default build system, Maven. When Maven works, it works really well but its error messages can be a bit incomprehensible when it fails.

Additionally, PlayN’s severe performance problems in HTML5 mode forced me to repeatedly scale back the size of the game world. I suspect this has a lot to do with JavaScript being slow.

AI

The game’s AI isn’t very good, although creating good AI for a game where the structures of creatures is so random would be a bit difficult. Still, I would have liked to make better AI for both enemies and player controlled bacteriums.

The Name

This was the first LD48 entry I had trouble naming. Originally, it was going to be called “Petri Dish Empire”. You can still see this name in some of the source code, and in the URL on my site “/pde/”. Eventually, I decided this sounded uninspired and I switched to “Empire of the Petri Dish”, which while sounding a bit better is a mouthful. It was only after the compo was over that I realized I should have named it “Bacterium Imperium”.

Testing and Balance

I noticed partway through development that weapon pieces were overpowered, so I made them more expensive, but it wasn’t really enough.

Another problem was that if the player wasn’t aggressive enough, the enemy bacteria could grow out of control and make the game very slow. This is why I added the solar cell cap, but it was a kind of rough change that I added late in development.

Late in development, I discovered a nasty exploit where you could use the fact that you can create a bacterium anywhere to put a small, heavily armed but immobile bacterium right in the core of an enemy, killing them quickly and easily. To fix this, I made it so that if on creation a bacterium intersected another, it was pushed away from the other one. If it still intersected others, it was pushed away until it did not, moving farther each time. The problem was that I just normalized the difference vector between their positions and then multiplied it by an increasing multiplier. Thus, in the degenerate case where they were right on top of each-other, it would enter an infinite loop. The issue was only discovered after the compo was over, so I couldn’t fix it in the compo version. Judging from the comments, it doesn’t look like a lot of people hit this issue, luckily.

Analytics

I went back through my server access logs to see if I could make some interesting graphs of how people played the game. Here’s what I found:

Here’s how people downloaded the two versions (The native Java one, and the HTML5 one). It shows both which ones they downloaded and in what order they did:

In total, 90 people viewed the HTML5 version. However, 16 of them went on to download the Java version, so I suspect the HTML5 version didn’t work for them. Of the remaining 74:

Of the 9 people who won the HTML5 version, I measured the time from when they first requested the Javascript (the first thing that happens when you load the game in a browser) to when they won:

Finally, the game lets users select their screen size. While users can select any size, they’re encouraged to select a size just under the viewable area of their browser. Here are the sizes people used (The size of the bubble indicates the number at that size):

All in all, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and I hope you all enjoyed playing it!

For the curious, there is also a post-compo version with some alterations.

A lot of us are on twitter. I was just thinking that there should be a way to tweet your scores. I think it’d be neat. Just a thought.

With the voting for LD#24 done I was kind of surprised that my game didn’t show any ratings. I either did something wrong with my entry or somehow ended up being flagged as lame as my rating of other games tended to hover towards middle ranks as I am piss poor at rating things. If anybody knows I would love to find out what I did wrong. Still, the miniLD that was announced doesn’t have any of this rating nonsense and is much more flexible with the rules so I will be attempting to enter that. I, however, may not fully understand the theme.

When I hear no-game game I immediately thing of toy games. Construction sets and interactive toys. I have created an egg generator for easter, but some other type of generator where the “player” makes selections to generate something is what I am thinking. Right now I am not sure what type of thing I will be generating, but as the theme has been announced well before the competition starts I am sure I will be thinking of something. Hopefully I am on the right track this time and hope that this weekend proves as fun as LD#24. Granted, something will probably come up this weekend so I may not have the full 48 hours (though I may take advantage of the rule that lets you ignore this rule if my weekend is interrupted).

Put up a post mortem on my blog a while ago, forgot to link it here:

http://home.beanalby.net/blog/2012/ludum-dare-24-post-mortem/