I finished my game “The Cycle” in time for the Compo, but I think my game falls outside some rules, so it’s submitted as a jam.

Woo, first time officially participating and first time finishing!

Video: http://youtu.be/adv1wGqJfDg

Download: www.gamefront.com/files/22173163/UDKInstall-Cycle.exe

Let me know what you think! (sorry about the huge UDK file size)

This has been the most intense weekend of my life. I’ve never had an experience quite like Ludum Dare before. While I still wish the theme had been different, I had a lot of fun doing it. This shows me how easy making a game can be, but also how maddeningly difficult finishing it can be.

[Game]

This is the second game that I’ve ever made, and while it’s very basic and has a handful of problems, I’m still rather impressed with what I finished. I hope to compete in Ludum Dare many more times, and I hope to improve a lot every time.

I don’t really expect my game to do all that well, but I look forward to playing and rating everyone else’s games. Some of them look amazing.

I think I’ll write a postmortem in a few days so I can straighten out what I did wrong as well as prepare for future competitions. More than anything, I’m looking forward to the Ludum Dare 25. Hopefully, I’ll be jamming with friends next time!

I will count this as one of the best, yet most stressful weekends of my life. Thank you to all of the competitors and admins who make LD what it is!

I submitted my game.  The scope was too large to make in the time limit, so I had to leave out a lot. It still turned out pretty good, I guess.
Visit the game page here.

Tags: as3, flashpunk

Grab you copy while it’s fresh – and know why it’s not good when the robot’s light turns red!

Download

Four hours before the deadline I have started rushing and eliminating content-to-do to get this. But it was 20 minutes late

Maybe I’ll try to refine it a bit and enter the Jam. It may make the anglerfish (that didn’t enter the compo version of the game) happy.

P.S: This was my first try at a LD compo…

I’ve posted a postmortem of my LD48 #24 project, over on my ludumdare.com journal.

After poking around for my old journal entries on ludumdare.com, I think they may purge content, so in case that’s true I’m mirroring the post below, after the cut:

I’m not super happy with the way things went this time around, I’ll just say that up front.  I don’t want to be too negative, and any weekend I spend doing game development is better than just about any other weekend, but I was hoping for a lot more, and I’m just disappointed in myself.

What went well

Not a whole lot.

I did finish and submit my game 5 min before the compo deadline ended, thereby salvaging a weak type of “success” at the end.  I could congratulate myself, but the outcome just wasn’t what I had hoped, and I’d be bullshitting myself if I said I was satisfied with the outcome.  I could have just decided to make this a Jam entry instead, and used the additional 24 hours to make the game closer to what I think it could be, but realistically I won’t be able to do that since I have work tomorrow.

The last 5 hours of the compo were intense.  I finally got into the zone and was able to focus, but I’m afraid it wasn’t enough to do more than be able to say I managed to make a game that didn’t feel incomplete, even if it did feel like a weak and junky game that I didn’t like very much.  I would have had a much better compo if I could have felt this way from the very beginning.

I did get to put music into a game.  I spent a couple hours with iNudge.net creating a really simple loop in a really easy to use sequencer that doesn’t have near as many features as I wish it did, but was easy to use.  I had to record the music as it was playing, rather that do a cleaner, better quality export directly out of iNudge, because lol they don’t have that feature.  But it’s really easy to click a few random cells in the sequencer and generate a loop that sounds like weaksauce synth music that’s not too annoying on repeat play and takes zero talent to create.  This is encouraging, because I really do have zero talent when it comes to music, but unfortunately I still feel there’s a wide gulf between me and being able to create anything better than this kindof “random junk when looped sounds like it could be easily mistake for music” approach to making a BGM.

What went wrong

Lol, just about everything.

Theme

I was not thrilled about the theme this time around.  Last time I wasn’t very inspired by “Tiny World” either, but in comparison I was at least able to come up for an idea for my Tiny World game in the first three hours, and spend the rest of the time working on building it.  This time, I had a couple ideas, but they were too big to fit into a weekend.  Evolution is a big, complex thing, and not easy to fit into a 48-hour game.

Additionally, I kept banging up against the fact that if you try many of the obvious ways to gamify evolution, it stops being evolution. Evolution is not:

1. A series of power-ups
2. A roundabout way of designing something
3. Something that you control

Idea 1 was a concept for an RTS  I came up with last fall, but haven’t worked on at all yet, plus some features that make the game units more evolution-y.  This was way too much to attempt in 48 hours.  I’d first need to create a simulated ecosystem, then make it into an RTS game, and then add genetic algorithms into my unit spawning code… Yeah, that might be a multi-year project.

I still want to do this game, but I’m not sure that Game Maker is well suited to it, so it may need to wait until I feel comfortable enough in a different framework to try to pull it off.

Idea 2 was a series of encounters between your creature and a randomly generated creature.  You choose to fight or mate.  If you fight, whoever wins is the “fitter” and survives.  Regardless of whether “you” win or the other creature wins, you control the winner of the fight into the next round.  If you mate, your traits are combined with the traits of the other creature, and a new creature is created, which you then control in the next round.  This seemed like a pretty interesting idea, but again, I didn’t feel I could fit it into 48 hours.  Just coming up with a decent random creature generator would have been a lot to ask for.  If I’d done this, I would have made the fighting abstracted, not controlled, like a stat-based text + flashcard graphics game.

I might still try to implement this idea, who knows. The more I think about it, the more promise I think it has to be a fun game, if done properly. It’d be kindof useful to have a creature system and a random creature generator under my belt.  If I didn’t have to worry about controlling the creature and animating the graphics, it seems reasonable that I could complete it in a short time.  Maybe that’ll be my next mini project.

Idea 3 was the one I ended up going with.  But what I ended up completing isn’t quite the Idea 3 that I started out with.  My initial concept was to make a game where you’re a single-celled organism, and you go around eating food.  When you eat enough, you mutate into a new creature, based on the types of food you found/selected.  Once you’ve mutated, your old form becomes available as a AI-controlled enemy in the game.  This idea had cool potential in that it allowed the player to kindof design the game as they played, and also as they got better at the game, it would challenge them with their own built-up character.

I wanted to do something that would generate new graphics as you play, so that when you mutate, you never know what you’re going to see, and it would always be a fresh experience for the player.  Creating new sprites on the fly isn’t too difficult in Game Maker, but coming up with drawing methods that would result in controlled randomness was  a hard thing to wrap my head around.  I wanted to have the game draw a random shape and attach it to the existing sprite, and I couldn’t figure out how I’d determine where the edge of the existing sprite was, or how I’d know what the new sprite’s size would need to be in order to incorporate the new shape, and so on.  I also needed to come up with some way of creating an AI that would learn how to use a randomly-generated creature in a manner which was reasonably effective and challenging and fun, pretty much no matter what the random generator came up with.  That’s a lot to ask for for 48 hours, and I quickly saw that it would be well beyond my current abilities as a programmer to do something like that.  I believe I could figure it out in about a week, since that’s about how long on average it takes me to figure out how to do something I have never tried before to do in Game Maker.

My fallback position was to a character who mutated, not graphically, but in terms of abilities.  Unfortunately this is not too uncommon in videogames whatever their theme.  Most games have a progression that you go through, gaining power and abilities as you go on.  Thus, simply doing this would not feel sufficiently evolutionary.  To make the mutations feel less like standard videogame power-ups, I decided to make them random, such that you might get better OR you might get worse in a given trait.  Also, I made the mutations depend on the type of food you ate.  So if you eat a lot of the thing that gives you Speed, your speed attribute will change by a wider margin; if you eat a lot of the thing that gives you health, your health will mutate more wildly, etc.  I came up with this idea toward the end of the compo, a few hours before deadline, and it was the only thing that I implemented where I felt like I was “in the zone” getting things done at a fast pace and knowing what I was doing and what I wanted to do next.   Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a strong enough association between an enemy type and what it does for you.  I don’t really feel like I have a good “system” of attributes, either — all I got done was max health, speed, and turn speed.  I would have added more attributes if time had allowed, possibly Attack, Defense, some kind of shield or different attack modes beyond ramming.  I wanted to get a bare minimum done to have a viable proof of concept, and that’s all I ended up accomplishing.

Sadly, not communicating the mutation graphically to the user is really disappointing and makes for a counter-intuitive game.  You mutate, there’s a sound, and your abilities change but you look the same as you ever did.  You end up just scratching your head.  I wanted to convey things more through color, but I didn’t quite this implemented.  That’s why most of the game is in black and white.  What I did manage was that you turn more transparent when you’re closer to mutating, and you turn more red the more damaged you are.  I had wanted to color code the enemies somehow, so you.

Development

I did a lot of new things.  I struggled with them, and didn’t end up accomplishing as much, and what I did end up accomplishing wasn’t as good as I wanted it.  But I did do a few new things.

Getting movement to work right was most of Friday night, once I started on my Idea 3 concept, which wasn’t until about 11pm or so.  I wanted the game to feel like you were in an open, unrestricted space, and I didn’t want it to have boundaries.  Creating a really big room wouldn’t have worked very well, and would have hurt performance.  I elected to take an approach that is pretty counter-intuitive in Game Maker, which was to create a room that is only as big as the current view, put the player object in the center of the room, and when you control the player to move, it stays still, but everything else in the game moves in a relative way, giving the illusion that you’re moving.  This was simple with static object that didn’t also need to move on their own, but it took a little bit of trial and error to figure out moving objects.  I wanted to have things that moved in a straight line, and from there a progression from ellipses to spirals, which I got, then to undulating motion, which stumped me.  I did also implement an AI (“Homey”) who homes in on the nearest object, and if I’d had more time I would have created something that went off in one direction, randomly turned around to a new direction and then went off in that direction.  I spent a lot of time working on these behaviors, and I thought a simple progression that built up might be fun as well as simple to implement and give a sense of a path of evolution.  Probably this would have been better if I’d designed my game to throw each type at the player one at a time, to create that feeling of progression, instead of all at once.

I tried to do some crazy things with inheritance, not all of which was successful.  I had created some motion classes which worked pretty well, and my intention was to create collision classes, which would randomly inherit one of the motion classes.  That way, there would be different styles of interaction between the player and the different objects in the game.  Some would be immobile, some would be pushable, some would be eatable, some would hurt you, and so on.  And they were going to be color coded to help the player know which ones were safe/desirable to collide with and which ones to avoid.  GML has a function object_set_parent() which I thought might have been useful, but I’d never used it before, and it turned out not to do what I had hoped.  I was trying to get it to randomly re-assign a motion class as a parent to a collision class, and that would have given me a large combination of dynamically derived classes to throw in to the game, which could have been done in such a way as to convey a sense of evolution taking place as well.  My objects in the game are really, really simple, as they currently stand, but I was hoping to introduce complexity through successive mutations, each round of mutation resulting in a blending of attributes from different classes into new classes, randomly creating  new types of enemies.  I think there is probably still a way to do this in Game Maker, as it is possible to generate a new object type at runtime, but the approach I was attempting was the wrong one, and due to my lack of understanding of a language feature I’d never tried to use before, I squandered too much time. Rather than trying to re-assign parents of existing classes, I should just have created new objects entirely.

I had wanted to create a Windows, OS X, and HTML5 build for the game.  In the end, I only manged to make an HTML5 game.  For some reason, Game Maker Studio lost the ability to build this project to Windows along the way, and I couldn’t spare time to try to troubleshoot the issue.  Since HTML5 is accessible to both Windows and Mac OS X users with no performance penalty, this isn’t too big of a deal.

I noticed on Saturday that I really didn’t feel so great.  I think most of this is attributable to poor diet choices on my part, especially too much caffeinated soda.  I think it’s very typical for people to load up on snack foods, caffeine, and sugar, and not plan or prepare real meals, because it saves time.  This is just not a good idea.  You should fuel your mind/body as you would for any other rigorous competitive event, such as rock climbing or a marathon.

I did sleep pretty much normal.  I was up until about 3:30am on Friday, but went to bed at around 11 on Saturday.  My Saturday was almost a complete waste, though, I barely got anything done, felt like crap all day, and couldn’t focus.  Sunday was more of the same up until about 4-5 hours before deadline.

What I learned

Figuring out the motion trick thing was the one useful thing I learned this weekend.  I learned a lot of “what not to do” also.

What else you should know

It was really nice being able to spend the weekend with the Cleveland Game Developers meetup members who showed up at our site at Shaker LaunchHouse. Extra special thanks to Dar Caldwell, Matt Perrin, and Steve Felix for putting the site together and for everyone who showed up, participated, and helped out.

This is over, and I’ve got a playable game at least :p I couldn’t be more relieved.

Even though my game might not be so innovative, try it and try to reach level 10 !

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8502

I already cannot wait for the next Ludum Dare

Kind of lame in between all the “finished!” posts, but our jam project is still in full swing. Current features:

• Randomly generated theoretically infinite terrain with houses that have door openings, shelves and tables.
• Being able to log on to the server and seeing other players move around, fully animated.
• Mouse based A* pathfinding mouse movement.
• Auto dirt to grass tile transitions.

Note the depressing lack of gameplay features. I’m pretty sure at this point we overshot and we’re not going to make it in time. Oh well, lesson learned if it’s so, I guess! Still the fact that we managed to get this much done in a server/client architecture in two days is impressive.

Now for an art dump.

And last but not least, today’s dinner:

Tags: food, multiplayer, progress

Well, my team the jam failed… We fell victim to scope creep and couldn’t complete the game.

So.. I’m going to try to enter a game into the jam last minute. Thumbs up. Lets. Do. This.

Yeah, so I didn’t make the competition deadline. I guess I’ll still go for the jam. Maybe that means I could get someone else to make the music. 😛

Anyway, as you can see, there are actual space invaders to interact with now. No goals implemented yet, but messing with the invaders isn’t fun yet either, so I’m working on fixing that up first. Shooting needs to be a lot easier – right now you can only shoot when you are standing still, and you can’t fire very quickly, so it’s annoying. Really I should make this feel like Cave Story – that would be fun.

And you can punch and kick the invaders to replicate them (and send them flying). Death and reproduction, the two most important tools in evolution’s inventory.

Oh, also, I have an awesome, terrible name for this game, but I will wait until I finish it before I unveil it to you all.

End of day 2 status for our Jam entry:

The game is almost feature complete, and has had some tuning.

Still remains to be seen how playable it actually turns out to be, but at least it’s pretty fun to tinker with.

Works on Android as well, except there’s some investigating needed into getting smooth update speed (it’s faster and jumpier for some reason on the phone than on a desktop).

IT look like I did not submit my game in the right place instead of submitting it I posted. Ha well the rush got to me hopefully I will be able to post something for the LD jam

This is as far a human can go in 48hours. At least this human.

All organs and powers working, alien scenario done, no AI yet.

To Jam then

This is my first Ludum Dare that I participate and I’m very happy for the result of the game and experience.

The game is a simply platform game where you have to eat before you die of hungry (5 sec. aprox.) and according as you eat every “chicken” of the zone, you evolute to access other zones and eat more “chickens”.

You can play them hear: Kongregate.

About the good things that I do in this LD:

• Eat and sleep fine kept me fresh, fast and creative.
• Follow the KISS rule!!! I could create a simply, funny and semi-polish game.
• Prototype first and art after… This made the prototype was interesting, and the art improved the quality of the game!
• Remove obsolete or boring mechanics. This made the game more “essential”.
• Rest when the things was not working… When I was back to the computer the things were done alone!
• Define and prepare all applications and frameworks that I used, before the competition begin.
• Test the game early… I found the “essence” of the game faster (and to much bugs…).
• Use translate google when I have a language doubt… (It’s obvious that I don’t speak native english D=).

Well! To much pros… And this is well, but the bad things of my LD was:

• I don’t prepare a “translator” of the map editor exports. Me long to develop.  //This is Chinese or English? D:
• I did the program too dirty… This made that I was lose much time to debug, find code and develop new things.

Emmm… I think that is all… I’m tired…

Good Ludum Dare for everyone! And lets to play games!

Tags: final, postmortem

After several hours, I’ve got some results.

Watch out the quicksand…

Try out the latest dev build here.

I decided to skip past the other tasks for now and prioritize the evolving AI. If the player accumulates a certain amount of repair points, the whole map is restored causing the virus to evolve and attack with more ferocity.

The sprite below shows how the change will look.

Recently finished:

• Upgrading AI

To do list:

• Smarter AI attacks
• Pick-up feedback
• Dying event
• Highscore indicator
• More polish

Did the trendy thing and made a time-lapse video of the development of Sun God. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3CUGS4V7Ng

Tags: timelapse

The “Jurassic friends” level (you’ll understand the title later…)

I finished my game! Details are on the entry’s page: One of the best birthdays.

My biggest regret is not finishing the in-game music (various boring and frustrating technical hurdles ate my time). But there is the somewhat catchy guitar theme song, at least.

I can’t wait to play all these games!!

I tried to make the deadline. I did. But I guess that I don’t quite know the limits of what I can do in 48 hours, because the AI in my game currently is horrible. I’ll switch to Jam and spend tomorrow improving it.

I had adjusted to the idea of when the deadline would be, so this is a bit of a shock to my internal schedule. I had expected for my game to stop taking up the entirety of my mind at 6pm today. So I’ll be taking a break for the rest of today and start on it again tomorrow.

Screenshot of the current state of my game:

A screenshot of my Ludum Dare 24 game.

So yeah, I finished and submitted. Yes! I’ll be honest: This is the closest I’ve come to missing an LD deadline. I was fixing things down to the last minute.

As close as it was, I enjoyed it. I’ll do a postmortem soon, but for now why don’t you just play the game. A couple bugs slipped through, but they’re being fixed in the post-compo version, which will be continually updated. Go there for the newest version.

Having about only 2 hours to work on my entry this week-end, I didn’t have enough time to do something playable.

One of my goal of this LD was to find a pretext to implement pathfinding, and it’s about the only thing I did

Sorry, no entry this time, but a screenshot:

Because it seems everyone else has uploaded one of these at some point.

Here’s my extremely average setup, along with my scribbled notes that could pass as “design papers.” And for dinner I have spaghetti and Dr. Pepper, one of my favorite sodas. I’m still smiling every so often because I’m happy to be done 😉

Here is all I could do within a two days time, folks. I’m satisfied of what I’ve done with the colorful graphics, but I’m afraid there’s nothing much interesting to play here, just a couple of unicellular organisms fighting in free waters. All packed in a cute html5 game.

My original idea was to let the player evolve through classes represented by genes : you choose two starter genes, and after each level you have two more genes to choose from based on your previous choice, each gene adding capabilities to the player from speed to gravity based moves. You start as a mere bacteria to slowly evolve into an animal, the finality of the game being to evolve into homo sapiens… then what may come after. But of course, I couldn’t do anything in 48 theorical hours (wich include at least 10 hours of sleep) and the game oncly features the two first genes, a short multiple-screens level (with a 1000 kittens secret) and some kind of end level boss that you must slay in order to end the game by finding its weakness. Oh, and I even added an intro + title screen and an ending sequence…

Anyway, I had a fun time working on this, let me know what you think about it 😉

Project page – Play EvoluTion

Tags: 24, Construct 2, evolution, game, html5, hvedrung, ld, ld48, Ludum Dare, microscopic

Hi guys!

Here’s my game for Ludum Dare 24, titled Flitter-Flatter. Sort of like Pikmin, my friend says (I haven’t played Pikmin).

Controls:

WASD to move

Mouse to aim (Note aiming is soft in the game and not exact)

To attack/swarm, you need to press different WASD keys rapidly. This can be done for example by rapidly hitting A,D,A,D,…. sort of trying to emulate vibrating.

How do you know you have a good girlfriend?

Spend the weekend in a silly adventure making video games from scratch, whilst killing yourself, instead of seeing her.

If she never complains once, comes to visit you, brings you food, vacuums your floor, washes your dishes so that “you don’t have to worry about it”, then, well, she’s a keeper.

I love my girlfriend.
And I love making video games.

~ScreamRawr

Primordial Soup

I knew this idea was a little too ambitious (for me at least) from day one, but I got stuck during the brainstorming and wasn’t able to come up with any other idea.
Anyway, I somehow managed to put everything together, smash at least some of the more annoying bugs and add a thin layer of polish.

The game; “Primordial Soup” is some kind of half-done-roguelike-like. Explore randomly generated dungeons, fight randomly assembled enemies, and steal their body parts and attach them to your little fish-person. O.o http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11939

I’m going to upload a timelapse and write a post mortem in a couple of days, but now I need to sleep…

Anyone with any knowlage of Game Maker, please see if you can help me. http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=552156

anyway, if I don’t get this fixed, I can’t progress and I’ll have to submit an extremely buggy and incomplete game.

Completed another game for another Ludum Dare. Yay! Okay, so it isn’t exactly completely complete, but close to it. The same thing that usually happens happened again… as usual, but oh well. Just took too long and let things get out of hand Sunday afternoon, so I had to rush things out, such as sounds/polish, to meet the deadline.

My game has some bugs, a possibly game-breaking problem, and the graphics/gameplay aren’t quite as polished as I had intended. Also the annoying, simplistic music is something I had really wanted to avoid this time around. Thought I would have time to compose a little something myself instead of using the same music generator I used last time, but alas, that didn’t happen either. Each LD I learn what to do/not to do. I was a lot more organized this time as opposed to LD23. I made a lot of mistakes last time and I barely made any during LD24. Still made some, though, and I will only improve next time.

I plan on touching it up over the week and releasing a new, enhanced, post-LD version for people to play. It should be much better and a better representation of what I had in mind.

Anyway, if you want to play it, go here. I would appreciate ratings and comments. I always love hearing from other people and it helps me to understand what I need to improve upon. Thanks, and I hope everyone had a great time. I know I did!!

And for those of you still working on your games for the Jam, good luck and never give up!

I succeeded again at failing…some may not be excited by this and I know many people don’t understand it or may drop out if they know they aren’t going to finish. As for me I will always try down to the last second. I will fail to finish there is no question with only less than 3 hours and 30 minutes left at the time of this writing it’s near impossible for me to finish. But for those of you who need a reason for never giving up in a competition like this there is one thing you can count on, you will always come away with something. You can keep working on the game you started you will walk away knowing how much you can get done and what areas you have to focus in to be a more efficient programmer. Simply because if you write buggy code it eats up your time, if you don’t know how to do a piece of code and spend too long on it you will know how to do it next time. If you get stuck on the theme you fight through lack of creativity, if you miss the mark on in anyway it sets you back so definitely all a bunch of wins use every second you can get to work your way through just one more piece of code or content it is well worth it.

Just some stats,

LD#22 I did

646 project code
1373 engine code
2019 total lines

LD#24 I have done

3457 lines of code, one project this time, all written over this weekend

Post Mortem

More importantly than LOC is the fact that I experimented with isometric for the first time and figured out somethings I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do in such a short time. I was also able to create work through some engine concepts I’ve been toying around with in my brain for the last couple years now. I consider this to be a serious win and will definitely do everything I can to participate in the next competition.

Early on I could not come up with something to save my life, I mean evolution really!!!. Needless to say I started coding after the first couple of hours hoping something would eventually come to me which it kind of did but didn’t really take shape until towards the end of the first day of the compo. I made an editor which btw took very little time to make but unfortunately I didn’t realize that I should just put content in anyway I knew how instead of trying to fill-in the gaps in code with the engine related parts. I spent entirely too much time in the beginning of the compo making a complex input handling system which had some bugs and ate up a few hours dealing with those issues and then had to be refactored. Fortunately unlike last time I caught myself and started with more basic working code and doing the piece by piece building and refactoring after you get a piece to work.

I’ve found myself jumping in and making some very messy code at first that does only a single thing of what I really want and then after it’s working I rip it apart and refactor it. Seems to work, sometimes it’s a pain and you can loose a lot of time debugging again if you aren’t careful when you coded it or when your ripping it apart. Some codes just don’t want to be RIP…PED apart. Oh wells damn those codes.

So eventually I just said ok I am gonna do some isometric type stuff so I made all the GeneralPath stuff which is a lot of fun, making shapes and stuff with, then I had at least a bunch of tiles I could do something with and this is where things just dropped off the edge of the world. I said ok cool I can do isometric now there were some problems with it and some painters algorithm issues and instead of dealing with those I started making engines again. *Shakes* fist at engines, make games damn u make games, it’s not fair to the game to just have engine code. I should have continued the trail of adding a little bit of ugly code to make another piece of the puzzle and refactor it later to extend and reuse it. But instead I spent all my time on engine pieces hence the 3457 lines of code. *Shakes head* and uh *face palm*

Only in this last hour did I freaking realize what I had done to myself, so frustrating. Anyways my advice to um myself and whoever reads is start making content and gameplay mechanics immediately and always work on them don’t spend any time in structure or other types of code like file system code, make it as dirty as you have to, be creative about how to save time. These of course are things to apply next time which I can already say I am desperately looking forward too.

Final progress images

Some final screenshots for your amusement.

As always it’s been a pl…challenge and extremely fun…I will definitely be here for next compo we’ll see if I come a little bit more prepared I only really remembered about it this time a couple weeks before the competition started. I guess that is what email reminders and calendar events are for.

I can’t wait to start playing some of the games people managed to make and of course see who wins this evolution theme.

ttfn ta ta for now.

This was my first attempt at Ludum Dare, and I didn’t organize myself well enough.

But all in all, I’m pretty happy about the outcome.  I didn’t manage to get my game anywhere near good enough to show off, but I found that SFML is dead easy to use (I started using it for the first time about an hour after the comp started) and I now know what I should look into before the next comp (Collision Detection!!!)

Good job to everybody who managed to get a game out of it in the end.

Hello!

Take a look in my game:

This is my first LD I’m very proud of my LD24 game! It looks great! I’m not an artist, so this is very good graphics for me.

I’m new to HTML5 too, but by this tiny contact than I’ve with it, it seems to be the platform of the future! Easy to learn, easy to use, supported in any operating system, no proprietary tools needed, and a very high level language to program.

My game for this LD was a simple player-evolution and action based side scrooler. What I’ve to say about making a game in 48 hour is:

1. Make all level design *first*: I’ve designed at the start only one level, and because of this, I had to design other in the last 15 minutes of the LD.

2. Art is after *all*: If you’re alone, don’t try to make the art first, or any bug in your program can make you to extrapolate the time.

3. Write you physics before the LD: Physics is cool, but only if you have time to deal with it! Otherwise the physics can appear broken in your game.

4. USE PAPER!: This is very important! The state-of-the-art tool to making game design is PAPER, or even better a WHITEBOARD!

5. Know your tools: The last four hours of the LD I spent trying to find a strange bug in my engine, and after all the bug is solved by a simple javascript array trick.

Well That’s all. Please play my game and have fun! (or not).

P.S: My game is 5 star, isn’t it? So, please rate it 5 star!
P.P.S: Sorry by my english :). I’m brazilian.

progress update, probably too much wont be done tomorrow, so the rest will be completed tonight

worked solo today on the project, so less progress and i am significantly less skilled as an artist.

This is also my first jam.

You are a business man.

You have to avoid hippies / ghost hippies / (other objects that i invent

You collect money – 3 different amounts

You can level up 3 attributes – BRIEFCASE (Money Modifier), TIE(Move Speed), and SUIT(Defense)

You win by getting to $10,000.

Enjoy

will attack some photos of game in progress

We’ve got less than 24 hours left now, and we’re all heading to bed! The game is coming along really well though, we’ve got a huge pile of assets made, and a couple of levels now 😀

Coming along pretty well, but a bit worried that we don’t have too much time left!

I made a pretty crappy entry probably worse than most of them out there.  But I was so proud to put forth an effort into making something in about 2 hours and actually submitting it that I didn’t realize that I had to click a submit link.  Not only that but I had missed the submission period (that I didn’t even know there was).  A long time ago you could put final in your tags on the post for your game or whatever and it was submitted but i guess since it’s so big that now an official submission process was created.  I was feeling pretty good until I just learned that I can’t submit a compo entry because it’s too late.

I don’t want to enter the jam, I wanted to enter the compo and then play and rate some games.

So much for f*(#ing participation

I worked from the first second untill the last day, and I created a nice little game, but suddenly an bug appeared while I was adding AI that completely destroyed the gameplay and my network router crashed (i’m posting from my phone), so unless I get both of those fixed i’ll have to say I can’t submit, but I do have a game that at least used to work until I tried adding AI.

Hey, if anybody noticed, my game was not running for some reason and I had to go to work before the compo ended. Well now there is some great news: using JarSplice I managed to get the dang thing working! The game is unchanged from when I submitted it, its just that it was repackaged into a fat jar (and I hope that’s legal and all),  so you should check it out if you wanted to before.

Best of luck to everyone!

Cross-posted from the Rheo development blog.

Does using a time machine count as cheating at Ludum Dare Jam?

I mean, after all, there is no limit on the number of people who can participate. Using a time machine would just be having yourself fill several roles on the team instead of just one. If Harry Potter can do it …

I managed to squeak in under the wire. I never got a chance to make the more elaborate full program with graphics and a score element like I wanted. I was able to finish it in Twine. I managed to make a little flash music object for a little weird ambiance and do a little hack into the html.

I made a song in cgMusic which is the best generative music maker I’ve ever used. The song really is a strange kind of thing to keep the player off balance which is part of the concept of the game. I mastered it in FL Studio and it came out really nice.

The story got pretty complicated and I did a super quick edit through it while trying to get it in on the compo time. Then I realized I had the whole hour to submit. The final story web was pretty decently interesting and complex.

I’m conflicted about the story. The thing I was generally thinking about, was the idea of how society changes over the years and what would happen if my kid came to me with something that I found totally alien. It was an interesting exercise to make the arguments back and forth, but part of me feels like I was making way too good of an argument for something patently ridiculous and offensive at the expense of real people.  I like lots of the individual endings a lot more than the general tone of the piece. I tried to make it worth reading multiple times and tried to make it surprising and funny in interesting ways. My own criticisms of the story are pretty much embedded into the thing as well. If I’m being honest, the name was probably an attempt to try and undercut the whole thing honestly.

Wow, all the wordpress editor icons are missing, on account of the servers being bombarded by the comp submissions I assume…

Jam is 2/3 over, and for a first attempt at an LD (or anything like it), I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got so far.  Right now it’s basically a toy, but it’s starting to actually be kind of fun.  One day left to turn it into a game, add some loss conditions and a bit of plot.

Plays best on a touchscreen, so I’m hoping I’ll have the option of submitting an APK for anyone with an Android tablet/phone.  If not, I should be able to get linux/windows up at least;  maybe mac if I have time to spare.

Try out the latest dev build here.

The game now starts out easy and slow. But after certain points, the enemy upgrades itself, making his attacks fiercer, and the game harder.

This increasing difficulty is great as it perfect both for newbies to the game and to those who have already played it. Newbies can be able to start out easy and get familiarized with the game. Veterans can be able to start out and get some momentum as well as added challenge.

Recently finished:

• Better AI attacks after upgrade

To do list:

• Pick-up feedback
• Dying event
• Highscore indicator
• Kongregate API integration
• More polish

Hi again ladies and gentlemen,

This was my second Ludum Dare Compo experience, the first one was really a F A I L in big and bold letters, because I made my first Ludum Dare without experience, and the result was an unfinished-plenty of buggs-game.

But this second time, I’ve get an infinite better experience, that was funny to develope a game in 48hours this time, was entertaining and really I feel satisfied by my game (Deal with It – is the game name).

It feels like “Oh my god! I finally finished a game in 48hours! I HAVE DONE IT!” and after that It feels like “There’s a lot of people that accomplished the same”. That is a great experience, the good community of Indie Game Developers of Ludum Dare has converted the stress and frustration of making a game in 48 hours totally in HAPPYNESS, this is fucking magic.. it’s the magic of Ludum Dare…

Before the Theme was announced, I was like “Oh my god PLEASE 1000 KITTENS GIMME THIS THEME” I had planned a survival game.. if the theme was 1000 kittens I’ve probably made a character that was a Rat, and the 1000 kittens want to eat him but you maybe will survive.. or anything like that.. But really the EVOLUTION theme breaked me. At least at the start, at the brainstorm because  I had ZERO IDEAS.

But after that I remind Spore, and I started the planning of an rpg cell wars. But after 5 minutes of planning I discovered that I probably can’t finish a game like that in 48hours.. so I started to make the impossible platformer, now known as “Deal with It” because really was a simple idea, but I think and hope that was a funny idea.. I put’d my humor style in it and I  feel really satisfied now…

Now I feel more satisfied, because I’m viewing all the people’s commentaries in my entry.. I’ve done a good work and probably a lot of people are enjoying a thing that I MADE. Fucking awesome AGAIN.

So I created this post only for share my magic experience.
Hope see you all soon, thanks for reading,
Midgard. 

So I did it. First time too. I know the splash screen isn’t flashy. But don’t let that keep you from trying it out and giving me feedback. Heck I could use all the help I can get.

As for my thoughts on VS 2012, it is pretty. Once you get the menus to quit shouting at you and you get past the UI it is the same VS you know and love/loathe.

You can watch all ~45 hours of development here:

Just the days with the sleeping cut out:



(Yes I still need to add some audio…)

My challenge is to play and rate 10% of the submitted games. I’m really going to try for that.

Tags: timelapse

http://ld24.devbriggs.com/

It’s pretty hard to win and takes some skill with memorizing the level. Let me know what you think!

So many problems this LD, being the first week of the college semester had tons of homework and rolling blackouts in the area (thanks to the fact that a LOT of people are home doing homework, on a super hot day with the AC’s on, worst power outages of the year so far).  Actually lost power twice yesterday!  Thank god for battery backups and incremental saves though, I pushed through and though i lost a lot of time and didn’t quite do all I planned I managed to release a complete game again, just recorded a bit of it to show off the evolving aspect.  The creatures body parts are independant and when you kill anything you “absorb” it’s DNA/traits and it reforms you into some…generally pretty silly looking things. (blob with bat wings and a wolf head, wolf with bird head, etc…basicly any combination of the monsters found in the game)  It actually works pretty well and the dynamicly combining sprites don’t look half bad, especially for artwork I did 😀

check it out here, it’s short as i cut straight to the evolving parts, but then the game is pretty short too, there’s only about 7 map areas but they’re all linked and you can freely explore them. (the maps are all done in tiled so you can edit them and link in more maps too if you really want)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7131

Tags: 2D, C++, compo, ld24, opengl, screenshot, update

I didn’t finish everything I wanted and a couple issues near the end forced me to comment out some features. The core idea is you interact with your spaceship by touching individual blocks and you can combine them together by using button blocks. Click the image below to check it out. (requires the Unity web plugin)

not far from finishing the game O.o

Hi,

I did make a game in less than 48 hours, unfortunately I couldn’t submit it because I run out of time.

I wasted friday night and saturday working in a gameplay that didn’t work very well and it wasn’t funny at all.

On sunday I had only 5 to 6 hours to put together a new game mechanic, and finished a couple of hours after deadline.

Anyway, I submitted the game to the Jam compo (entry here)… and maybe tomorrow (I still have like 20 hrs) I made some changes to parts of the game that need improvements: more levels, better music and I may invite some friends to improve the graphics.

This is my 48 hrs game in case you care: 48 hrs HTML5 version

Good luck to all!!!

I thought I’d be in, but other commitments intervened, too busy with school. I spent 1 hour working on some basic code for a title screen, spent time debugging it to work properly in GWT (HTML5) and then realised I don’t have time to spend figuring out an idea that went beyond some basic mechanic about something evolving.

I take my hat off to everyone who did make something to submit and shall see you either in a mini-ld or the next LD in December with a more open theme hopefully!

Hello Hoverbot!

Yah, says the robot, thanks for bringing me into being!

Noo, says the robot, why couldn’t you make me better!?

Aghhhghahaha! yells the robot!

Haha! Excuse me being a tad delirious, here is some meaty stuff:

Making games is fun!

Packaging games for others to play, trying to make a timelapse of collected photos, and feeling really tired are things that are not fun!

Anyways, I am so happy, as I just got those unfun things finished (minus timelapse, which just was not working, so I kind of…erm…gave up), and here are my thoughts:

Successes:

• Learned new tools quickly, and managed to make a complete game
• Made more complex graphics and collision than ever before (but they are still quite simple, don’t get too excited, folks!)
• Finished everything up despite the approaching deadline, go TEAM ROCKET….oh…I meant to say TIME MANAGEMENT!
• Already rated a game, gonna go rate some more!

• Did not get a truly playable prototype quick enough, I had something running, but it wasn’t really playable
• Graphics were cool and complex, but did not get to round out the entire package
• Music creation, which I love, was pushed till the end, and I made a psuedo-decent tune in a few minutes and then shipped the game off
• Lacked knowledge of tools/language I was using
• Thus overall, some more polish was needed, and I needed to be more focused and a tad quicker

Hi there,

while we are developing the game, @Soraya_Alb have created the new logo for InfiniteDog, check it out!

About the game, we have made some progress but there are a lot of work to do.  We still have about 13 hours and we want to finish the game, at least the basics.

Sorry but no screenshots this time ;).

See ya!

We are glad to present what we have so far and hope to bring even more polish in the next day. Play it here.

“Darwing is a space dragon alien thingy and his egg has crash landed on a planet full of evil boars. Help Darwing evolve so he may escape. ”

Well, I finished.

My game has a good end to it and should keep you entertained/frustrated for a while

Click here

PLAY IT. It’s fun, but very hard. If the boss is too hard,  press w once to disable automatic world updates. Press it again to switch back to normal.

Yes, there are a couple of bugs, but they are not too serious (I hope)

If anyone has trouble, feel free to comment and I will try and help.

I will keep posting updates as I progress my game post-LD.

I hope you enjoy it.

What went well:

I finished

I have a good game that can be developed further

My game is fun (for me anyway)

I had a fun weekend

What went wrong:

It’s a bit short

The boss is hard and requires complex planning with water that is uncontrolable except with lots of complex wood patterns

No actual victory, just surviving the boss is how to win

Wasted 2 hours trying to learn GUI programming with LWJGL.

Lost my textures once when my laptop crashed

School lost me 5 or so hours

No sound (because you haven’t evolved ears yet ;D)

Impossible to win if you make a mistake.

Finally it’s over.

This was my first Ludum Dare and I’m pretty happy with the end result. Even though it was a bumpy road.

After the first ~35 hours, I realized that my game-idea was dull and needed way more work that I could’ve been able to do in the remaining time. So I kinda lost motivation and died inside. I decided that I was gonna skip the submitting and just play games you guys created. But after couple of hours of hard self-evaluation, I decided to try one more time. I had already finished a randomly generating dungeon algorithm and the arts for it. And thought I’d build something simple around that. That’s when I got the idea of “Dusty Balls” ;).

In Dusty Balls, player tries to move as many balls through the underground temple dungeons without hitting any hazards on the way.
As the game progresses, dungeons get longer( and spikier ) but most importantly the amount of balls you have to control at the same time, increases.
You see, each ball moves whenever you use your movement controls, so the game gives you a slight brain hurt, especially in the later levels ( there is total of 9 levels in game, which means the last level will have 9 balls bouncing around at the same time. You do have 9 pairs of eyes, right?)

I’m pretty happy the way I got the controls done, they feel very intuitive.

I think my personal best score is around 25 at the moment. Tell me if you can get close to 45, which is really, I mean REALLY kinda fricking hard. 😛

I’m totally gonna try and find time to participate to Ludum Dare in the future, I really like the atmosphere you guys have in your community.

Thanks guys, and let the fun begin.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14709

Tags: postmortem

I’ll do my post-mortem for Digital Generation now, rather than putting it off until never.

What went right:

• Gameplay: I focused more on simple, achievable gameplay this time. I focused on making the game start out easy, and introduce new elements that you can figure out one at a time rather than all at once. My last Ludum Dare game just dropped you into the middle of everything.
• Sound effects: I was hoping for music (see below), but I settled for sound effects. Even though some of them are shrill and annoying, they make it feel “real”. (Turn your volume down when playing my game.)
• In-game help: In the final hour, at the bottom of my TODO list, was an in-game help system. Each level has a list of strings which get printed at the bottom of the screen as help messages. People don’t read READMEs, after all.
• AI behavior on level 2: I just get such a kick out of how the AI behaves on level 2.

What went wrong:

• Audio subsystem: The audio subsystem is my most recent addition to the base code library, and it’s got some problems. There are a couple bugs in it that I know for certain can cause crashes. The resampler is also total garbage, and the game only sounds decent at 48 kHz. If your system is set to 44.1 kHz, it sounds terrible.
• Music: I wrote background music, but the audio subsystem doesn’t support it — so it goes to waste. The soundtrack is available as a separate download.
• Sleep: I felt seriously ill half the time I was working on the game, and I think it was due to a combination of excitement and bad sleep patterns. Or I could have been genuinely ill, who knows? If I do Ludum Dare next time, I’m keeping to a strict sleep schedule. It doesn’t help that I’m trying to prepare for 8 hours of jet lag.

Tags: postmortem

48 hours of game development has been condensed into a little over a minute and a half of video.

It looks as if a lot of the creating parts happened in small bursts of a few seconds, done around IRC and eating. B-)

Tags: timelapse

Two levels complete and starting on the third — we might just finish our 5 level goal. I am very proud of how we all worked together this weekend. It was a lot of fun.

Latest drop is here:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/16969200/LD24/ld24-6.2.zip

PS — Yes we totally ripped our tile-sheets from SM3!!!

Took a break from art because OMG my wrist.

Spent most of today mucking about with Reason. Conclusion: I am a terrible composer, and I should be banned from touching Reason ever again. :S

Here, have a screenshot of my piano melody…

Jade is working on adding text + UI, and we’ve realized that in its bare bones state, our game plays exactly like it was made in RPG Maker. Rest assured, this is not the case. Dx

Hey LDers!

Time is running out for us Jammers! Better get those final touches in! Don’t forget music! (Even though we probably won’t have any) lol.
Here’s a few screens for ya. I’m not going to make this long cause I’ve got work to do.

It’s currently 2am and I have to get up in the morning for work. I don’t get off until 5pm. I’ll get home around 6pm, and LD ends at 8pm for me! Not fair!

Welcome!

~ScreamRawr & Jif

This is my first ever LudumDare out of 4 when I managed to finish my game in time. No sounds though but everything is working fine and every feature I wanted in the game is implemented. So I consider this a big success!

So what are you waiting for? Go diamond hunting on staticvoidgames.com! Just click ‘Applet’ on the left to play Gems of the Evolving Land in your browser.

Here is the entry page please rate!

Tags: done, finish, success

Hey !

We’ve managed to submit in the 48h timing, it was quite a challenge but we did it.

I figure we have achieved the peaceful, contemplative and eye candy aspect of the game. I still think the game could much better with another level of gameplay, it was hard not to break the contemplative side : death, bonus and such could easily ruins the simple pleasure of moving.

But i do have many ideas for solving this, maybe abe will be ok for spending another 48h to polish it and expand the experience.
Also, the game would be really sweet on touch device, unfortunately with the use of shaders, a simple port won’t be easy.
I’ll try to figure out how we could make an android build of it.

If you have some feedback, i’ll be happy to ear about your feeling upon the experience : how many level did you played ? Did you find the “burst” (click to boost) ?

thank you all, this year again, it s been a pleasure to ludum with you all.
Bisou to you.

—> Play the Balance

Four levels out of 5 are now designed. Time for a wrap-up of the levels’ environments.

Level 1 : Very West

The first level is in 8-bit mode, and takes place in a western-like environment.

Level 2 : Jurassic Friends

This one is in 16-bit mode, and taking place in a… wait for it… Jurassic environment.

A level with cuuuute inhabitants, and less cute ones…

Cute

Not cute

Level 3 : Baker’s Borough

The 3rd level’s a low poly 3D, reference to our good old PSOne. The atmosphere could be described as a mysterious London…

A cat’s hiding behind a window… LYRA???

Level 4 : Call of Battlefield IV, Medal of Warfare

We had fun finding the title of that one.

The evolving graphics continue : this one’s a 3D AAA level. The context? Well… war.

We don’t have screenshots for this level just yet… sorry!

Level 5 : Indievisible loot

The Indievisible Loot will be fuuuull of easter eggs (as you could see in a previous post), lots of references to famous Indie games! Why is that? The adventure of Player 2 will give you all the answers when you’ll be playing. We will say no more.

The level’s the reign of pirates, yarrr!

And that’s all for our ordered levels preview!

I’m extremely happy with how its coming together. I hope in the next 18 hours I can polish it well enough.

Here’s the current version:

http://seanmgames.nfshost.com/ld24/applet.php?gamefile=ld24_0.4.jar

Darwin just arrived at the island:

And he is ready to kick some snake’s ass:

Crawling through cave, don’t paying attention to his predcessors remains:

Going into the water:

He doesn’t need any treasure, he need skulls:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9tcTTmg_Vc

Our game is coming along swimmingly, check out our post process test!

Tags: fishkin

The Compo has ended. Game submitted. Ahh ….

That was my first LD, so for me is a succes. I had 2 days of fun, and an hour of serious problem. Eventualy everything went well and i’ll describe it in post-mortem. But now the second !!FUN!! begins.

So you’re welcome to play “Bug Hunter Evolved” wich can be found here. I did my best (especialy in art) to finish it and make it fun. There will be more content added.

If you rate thats great! If not i hope you enjoyed gameplay and idea.

Stay tunned

Tags: final, screenshot

You can play my game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10767

I basically got sick of this project. Nothing would work right and it was my fault.. I didn’t (and still don’t) know much about game physics.

I did learn some stuff from it though..

What went right

-> I was using a custom framework to make the game. This meant that I was very familiar with it and that I could proceed with the development of the game very quickly

-> I had to attend school for about 5 hours on the first day of the competition. This allowed me to go through multiple ideas in my head and pick the best one without implementing one too quickly.

What went wrong

->After I got some basic features working, I spent about 3-4 hours just reading about physics engines. This would have been OK except I didn’t get any of them into the game. This is because i was totally unfamiliar with these engines.

->After I decided not to use a pre-built physics engine, I started making my own. But the problem was that I had very little experience with game physics. This led to me reading a lot of articles on physics.

Ultimately, I pretty much gave up on physics because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to learn and implement everything in the limited time that I had. So I implemented some more basic physics and called it done.

The circles still don’t work right at all as a result.

Wow, I really did stay up all night. The sun is coming out already…

Anyway, I added a title screen, and a nifty little tutorial in the background thanks to the awesomeness of FlxScript, making its second appearance as an extra after its starring role in The Love Letter.

Also added music courtesy of SineRider… But of course you can’t hear it in the screen shot.

I guess I might as well submit a build. The level design could really use some work – I just kind of scribbled it out – but maybe that can wait…

We accomplished a lot today.  We now have collision detection between bird seeds and birds, and the birds will fly away when full.  We also have music, bird animation spritesheets, and an animated title screen.  There is still a fair amount of work to be done though:

• Track the player’s score and display it
• Flip the bird images depending on which way they are flying
• Animate the birds (in progress)
• Create an instructions screen
• Sound effects
• Polish

Hopefully I can get all this done tomorrow and submit a game to be proud of!

Some people are complaining about the difficulty: “It’s too easy”.

So here is my hint:
Try to win the game with the starting monkey and you will see how hard it is. To solve this you don’t have to use the mutation blobs but instead jump over them. The bad about this one is, that you don’t have any spawnpoints ;-).

the game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10298

Tags: html5, javascript, MelonJS, schattenkind.net

Should’ve done this yesterday before the deadline. Oh well. 😀

I’ve added a post-compo version of my game with a widescreen resolution, 1920×1080 photographs, and (as a result) slightly higher hardware requirements. Give it a try if you enjoy the game, but don’t rate it! Use the original link (Windows) for rating.

So now you can take photos like this 😀

You can find it here

Hi Guys,  is there a way to sort through the game types?  (e.g. web, unity, windows, etc?)

Hey. I’m currently pushing through the last bits of gameplay code. We only decided and finished (this time for real) the npc interaction last night, so due to lack of time we had to cut some features and simplify that part of the game. Nevertheless, we can see our final milestone, and it’s just a matter a quality of assets that might hold us back! Also, the game system that we developed was rushed a bit and we noticed that some parts of the games are never reachable. This involves some serious graphing to solve that, AND redesigning npc interactions. That’s beyond the time scope we had, so we adapted the game endings to the interactions that were not looping and dependant on eachother.

OK. So stuff above might not make sense before I introduce the npc system itself. Basically, there will be a planet which will have 3 types living beings (the Protector, the Dreamer, the Father) and fourth being the planet itself (the mother)

(Your average dreamer)

Each of the beings will be able to have a state of affinity, they will have different characteristics depeiding if they’re in the negative, neutral or positive state). For example the dreamer will be a slug in his negative state, a sheep in neutral state, and a fluffy cloud in the positive state. Each of these represent the essence of the creature. A cloud is something pure and elevated, with little connection to the real world, while the slug is bound to ground, slow and parasitic due to the corrputed nature. Each being and state (almost) will have a positive and negative actions, dedicated to another being/state. The negative actions will either kill the creature (with the exception of planet), or evolve into a negative state (this chance will depend on global being affinity). A positive action will have a chance to invoke evolution to the positive state. Both of these actions will also affect the global affinity for the targeted creature (which affects the chance). Lastly, there will be several combinations of creature interactions, which will trigger different endings for the game. Oh and also, the player will be able to punish a being, removing it from the planet (without any affinity change). This is how the evolution will be controlled.

Oh. by the way we are in a desperate need for sounds! any suggestions?

Try out the latest dev build here.

Finally came up with a better name: Complexitivity. Yes, the previous name “ILOVEYOU Virus” lost it novelty after awhile.

Oh, and one thing I really like with the new name is that the word itself is complex. Haha.

Also, I’ve managed to hook up the game with the API integration in accordance to the contest rules on their website. Not sure if it is working as intended, will leave it for now in favor of other tasks. Lots more to polish!

Recently finished:

• Name change
• Kongregate API integration

To do list:

• Dying event
• Highscore indicator
• Remaining tiles left to next level
• Virus version (the current difficulty level)

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to make my game in time. I think I will need to try to know what I can make within the time limit. Also, school means I can’t work on it tomorrow in the morning. On the bright side, here’s a screenshot of what I have created:

‘Twas meant to be a game where you ran through evolution.

Okay so last night I entered my game, Artificial Selection into the competition. I thought I’d just make a post with a little bit of information, The game is a top-down, RPG style game. You play through trying to build a boat by collecting materials from all over the map. As you play through the game it is pretty difficult as enemies are walking round in high numbers. However you can build armor and weapons to defend yourself with. However these weigh quite a lot, therefore you can build some bionic arms to help you out. The idea of this game was to steer clear of natural evolution and rather stay close to artificial evolution (you building upgrades for yourself and the boat evolving as you gather materials) I will be releasing a helpful website that will show all possible crafting information, but I have to find somewhere to upload it to. For now here’s the game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14482Artificial Selection

So, I’ve been told that my game isn’t running. I’ve updated the app, now I just want a tester to test it.

Click here to download the app. (2.39 MB)

The LudumDare entry page.

Thanks

Just finished my LD 24 Jam Entry:  Block Shoot

It’s super minimal. I spent about 15 or 16 hours on it.

Game turned out OK I think, although the evolutionary aspect needs improvement because it’s not super obvious what is happening.

Anyways, Peace.

My first Ludum Dare is (finally :D) over. I should think more about what i want to do before doing prototypes and game itself.. 😀

Here’s my game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=6511

Also here’s time lapse from my second day of making: http://youtu.be/bVAQrYXeIaM

And from first day: http://youtu.be/bVAQrYXeIaM

Wow! That was an interesting 48 hours.  I had to change game ideas once, because my first one sucked… but the other was was good. And, I finished (just barely) in time! I’ve learned so much about games, mostly the Slick2D API.

Anyways, I felt I would share my thoughts on a few topics surrounding the Ludum Dare.

• Editing your game after submitting is ok, as long as you don’t change the gameplay. I think that doing things that help play-ability is ok. Things like changing a few lines so your code works on someone else’s computer is fine by me, as long as it doesn’t change gameplay. Performance improvements aren’t as ok, but if your game is running at a low enough fps, that its noticeable, its fine also.
• Evolution is a tricky theme. From what little I’ve seen, there aren’t that many original interpretations of the theme. If I see one, I’ll rate it 5 stars, otherwise, I’ll rate it based off of how important and evolution based gameplay mechanics are.
• Most lines of code should be an official award.
• Devs should test their browser-only games on all browsers.
• I like getting comments, so I give them!

Please feel free to shear your thoughts on my ideas, or add your own.

[Mandatory game link]

Try out the latest dev build here.

I decided to add more info to the HUD screen. I labeled the points accumulator and added a new indicator which tells the player how many he needs to get to the next level.

I believe that these information are essential to the game play. Not only does it serve as a counter for progress, it also gives the players a goal to reach.

Also, when the virus is upgrading, a new node will only appear after the upgrade has finished. This will give players time to breathe and it will tell them that it is the start of the next level. It’s subtle compared to having a “Next level” screen appear.

15 hours to go.

Recently finished:

• HUD Indicators
• Next level delay

To do list:

• Dying event
• Virus version (the current difficulty level)
• Compass (pointer to next repair node)

‘Only’  47 Hours my new record (this is my first LD and that was y idea of a joke – come for the game stay for the humor eh?)

Here is a timelapse showing the method behind my madness

My game now has Windows and Linux versions here.

There’s no sound and the theme isn’t very well developed but I’m happy with the bits that are done.

You need coffee? no ? I need coffee, COFFEE TO WORK F-F-FASTER !! Gah !
To more pressure !

Play the game

What was great:

• I was really happy when the overall combat feeling! Diablo 3 inspired me a lot, they use many great & clever tricks to achieve this feeling.
• the traditional beat-em-up gameplay is faithful to original models
• I made a music Well, I know it sucks and it is really basic, but I made one!
• I was in coding fury on Saturday Lots of work has been done in quite a short time!

What went wrong :

• I couldn’t figure a game idea until Saturday morning, and thus lost lots of time
• I wasn’t really efficient on Sunday : I lost myself in trivial detail, and didn’t work on important parts…
• couldn’t make a decent ending

This leaves lots of room for a post compo version, so maybe I will work on that soon

I completed my first Ludum Dare last night; submitted it around midnight local time (BST). The first issue was that the theme was only announced at 2AM my time, after a full day at work. I stayed up for it and brainstormed until I had a workable idea and a whole load of elaborations. This meant I didn’t sleep until nearly four and only started coding in earnest at midday on Saturday. I’d planned to sleep as little as possible but the way it played out, I had two full eight hour nights.

I had decided ahead of time to aim simple, not use a framework and just get something working by the deadline. I did not shoot far enough, most of the work was done on the Saturday and by Sunday I was pretty pissed off with it. Turns out I love coding but not so much level design, also I got quite lonely. In my professional life, it’s all big groups and large teams. I need that more than I realized.

I think next time, I’ll plan a couple of hours out of the house with other people for the Saturday night. Saying that, I had a friend on google plus which helped more than I thought it would. He play-tested for me and also when I was convinced my game was pants told me to just do it. Which helped, as I did.

Next time, I’ll work out how to make some noises (or at least organize a microphone) ahead of time. Also plan some levels out properly before I get bored of it.

Hi ! That was my first Ludum Dare and it was very interesting !

My entry : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15327

I’ll make some modifications soon to make it easier to play
For those who don’t really get how playing it (my bad, no more time to improve control and add tutorial),  I’ve just recorded this video :
http://www.twitch.tv/lapinou_/b/330118505 

What went right :

-I’ve made a game in less than 48h
-I manage to sleep a little
-First contact in this side of Ludum Dare

What went wrong :

-To much time lost in some features because of lack of knowledge
-No more time to change the controls, game is pretty difficult to play I think
-No more time to  polish more the game, more sounds, effects, challenge…

What to do next time :

-Be more prepared (tools, libraries, …)
-NEED TO LEARN HOW WORKS SOME MUSIC TOOLS
-Post more about the development
-Maybe try the Jam instead of Compo?

I want to make a game about this creature some day. Read about snapping effects. It’s just crazy!

Some numbers (remember it’s all about a very small shrimp):
60 miles per hour
218 decibels
5,000 K

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_shrimp

Watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1irhDyDKtw

And download, play & enjoy the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14327

I told that I’ll be using Unity3d, but I changed my mind and worked with Flixel.  To be honest, I couldn’t use the past 2 days efficiently. I suppose I need to remove some features I planned…

Here is a screenshot showing the ongoing work (My purpose is to give a post-apocalyptic atmosphere) :

There’re shitloads of work to be done. Today’s gonna be a long day
– Be bold, stink forever!

edit: grammar

So, the awesomely named Ninjural Selection is now playable here.

You know, like natural selection, only “ninjural”, because it’s selection by a super awesome ninja of death (that’s you). Kind of like Thor, with his two-ended hammer of life and death, you have two attacks of life and death. Shooting from afar with your gun brings death. But when you kick and punch an invader from close up, you hit so ninjurally that you hit eggs out of it, which hatch into new life.

It kind of works. The main issue is that the line between fun and frustration is very dependent on the particular level layout, and I haven’t yet figured out the sweet spot. Right now there’s just one predefined environment (though eventually I would like to have them procedurally generated) which gets the idea across, but could be better.

The tricky thing is that there are several layers of consideration, and an environment has to do well by all of them in order to be fun. First of all, the invaders move like Goombas, like marbles or water flowing perpetually down. The way the platforms direct this stream and funnel it is key to how you experience the environment. Secondly, the environment is also a means for you to navigate the space with your ninja-like abilities of running, jumping, wall-sliding, and wall-jumping. Platforms have to have enough vertical space to allow for big jumps, but close enough to jump from one to another above. And you want enough vertical surface for wall-jumping. Lastly, the environment is also a means for lining up shots with your gun. A long, flat horizontal platform is where you’ll find a lot of invaders bunched up together. If there is another platform at the same height, it is easy to stand on that platform and pick off invaders as you choose, or take the whole row out with one charged shot. But if not, you have to awkwardly jump, or go to trickier locations where invaders fall too quickly to get a good shot at them.

Anyway. Something to dream about, maybe. I mean, literally – I haven’t slept all night. I think it’s time to take a break, before I can do any more damage…

Later! I’ll be back.

I tried making some kind of ambient thing but it’s just not working out. Anyone know of some kind of generator that would be good for ambient music? That allows you to actually export to a file? And is free?

Well I got distracted by social life and didn’t do a thing for ludumdare. Many next time         Kix

Well, after failing to livestream I said I’d make a timelapse. Which is exactly what I’m doing. I’ve gone through the screenshots and removed ones of say, facebook, or my screensaver. There’s just over 1000 of them.

I’ll stick in the video once I’ve exported it.

Haven’t done a full project with box2d before so that was a new experience, found almost straight away that it doesn’t lend itself too well to platformers basically due to the controls.  Physics libraries tend to like input being done in the form of applying forces or impulses but while that works very well for things like racing games, it doesn’t feel good when trying to make a fast platformer which needs really tight controls.  I ended up having to hack around it by managing the player velocity in my own code and just telling box2d what to do – essentially using box2d for the collisions.

This is the second project I’ve done using allegro5, the previous one being my entry for LD#23!  Still liking it – very easy to get stuff up and running, I extended my use of it this time to drawing arbitrary polygons so I could see the physics proxies, admittedly this was only for debug but it let me test the mechanics without needing to draw lots of complicated art.

Art style is very similar to my previous games, basically because I’m terrible at drawing!  I think I need to get a graphics tablet and some better software before the next competition – mouse drawing in Paint.Net can only get you so far!

What went well

Well I got a game submitted, that’s got to count for something!  I’m fairly pleased with the gameplay, controls are mostly nice (see “what went badly”).  Basic forms of all the mechanics were done by the end.

Making an editor was a great idea, it’s built into the game executable (although only accessible when in a debug build).  Being able to switch between modifying the level and playing it with one button gives you a huge amount of scope for experimentation and polish.

What went badly

Realised most of the way through that I hadn’t implemented the core evolution based mechanic yet!  Next time I need to think more up-front about the theme and get that core gameplay in as the first thing I do!

There are a few problems still in the game, mainly around the controls – the player doesn’t like steps – no matter how short they are you just hit them.  Also it’s not possible to wall jump off walls that overhang, even if it’s only by 1 pixel on a wall that’s 250 pixels high!  This coupled with the arbitrary polygon based levels mean’t that I had to tweak the levels more than I perhaps should have needed to in order to make sure that there weren’t any places where this bug hit.

Summary

Went pretty well!  I’m happy with the result.  I had a lot of ideas for extending the evolution stuff to drastically change the level as you were going through it but I didn’t have anywhere near the amount of time that would be required to do that.

Oh and obligatory game link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=6492

Yesterday’s technical glitch* just ate up too much time. I’ve still got the bulk of the gameplay and artwork to do, and it’s just not possible to do it all in the time allotted. Especially with a sick husband and work deadlines thrown in.

But I still like the idea, and I’m going to keep working at it. And when I’ve finished it, I’m going to drag it round here and make you all look at it, so there.

I had loads of fun (mostly) and learned a lot, so next time will be even better. And I also learned how to get a Gravatar for my posts! Hooray!

Good luck and a doff of the hat to everybody who managed / will manage to finish.

——-

* EDIT: Technical glitch is still there. I think I’m right to bow out. My whole game is based on clicking buttons, and at the moment it’s impossible to click a button. The game looks pretty nice, but is completely non-interactive.

So sends my first Ludum Dare!

Looking back on it now, the choice to compete was the best choice I could have made for my weekend.  All last week I was working nights, spending most of the time doing nothing or conference calls with China, so I had some spare time.  I decided to pick up Java gaming once again (for real real this time!), and venture forth.  I started making an extendible tile-based game capable of being updated via the Internet, and made decent progress.  Come Friday, though, I was burnt out on the process, and put my computer away for a day.

Saturday morning, I browsed Facebook and found an interesting entry – a friend was participating in Ludum Dare, a competition I had heard much about.  I decided to give it a shot, and dove right in.

The topic was evolution, and like most people I focused on the mechanics of evolution – natural selection, mutation, reproduction – and started designing a game based around those principles.  I began with a color-based turn-based strategy game, where you’d upgrade (evolve, I guess) your village to a town, then city, and compete with your neighbors for scarce resources.  I continued with his game for much of Saturday, into the night, when I hit a wall.  I hit a wall like a driver at 200 mph, and the destruction of my ideas was total.  I found myself with nowhere to go with the game, bogged down in minutiae like UI programming.  I tried to think of a different path, but quit.  I also needed some dinner.

On the way back from dinner, I had a spark – why focus on mechanics at all?  Why not focus on evolution as a whole?  One idea led to another, and I was met with Just a Theory – a game about educational reform.  In my game, you play a science teacher at a Texas school trying to retrieve pages from great scientific texts.  The school boards have been on a crusade to remove this, and other ‘inappropriate’ material from the textbooks, so you need to get it back.  The game would be in an overhead 2-D style, my favorite game style, with you running around, dodging teachers and school board members, interacting with students, and retrieving pages.  The final product is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16532

As you can see, I did not meet all of my design goals – there are no students to interact with (in fact, the school is rather empty), and the   hostile’s AI is horrible (to put it forgivingly).  The game lacks challenge, is quite void of interaction, and a rather dull affair – and I couldn’t be more proud of it.  This is the first time  I have EVER completed a game, start to finish, and implemented a top-down scrolling system and rudimentary AI.

So what did I learn?  To start with concrete examples, I learned how to implement a top-down scrolling system, a concept that had eluded me for some time.  I am thrilled to see how my scrolling system worked (and work it did, with minor tweaks).  I also learned how to implement a simple animation system as well as an AI decision-making system (a very simple one, and one frought with error and stupidity).

As for more abstract learning, I learned about planning and designing.  I have a tendency to jump into my task with little heed for documentation, error-handling, or story design.  When I find myself hip-deep in my own foul game-mess I lose concentration and will and inevitably end up giving in on the project.  This taught me a valuable lesson in the benefits of even a simple hour-long planning session with a class diagram, simple storyboard, and some concept art to inspire you.  I could have used this planning to find my final idea sooner in the process – I started Saturday afternoon (already many hours behind) and spent a few hours on a wasted project – putting me nearly 24 hours behind before I even really started.  A well-planned process would have given me much more time to polish the AI, add sound, and fill the space a little bit in my game.

As it stands, though, I am extremely pleased with and proud of my work.  It won’t be winning any awards for art or sound (unless you hear the sound in your head), but I like the creative idea and the execution of concepts previously unknown to me.  Thanks Ludum Dare for this chance to take the next step in my game development development.

I made it so when you punch or kick invaders, they turn into little eggs, which then hatch all together, each one a slightly mutated clone of the one you kicked. They’re a lot more fun to kick now, since they’re small and they don’t get trapped by the platforms. Invader eggs fly pretty far when you kick them. 😛

I think the basic invader interaction is finally solid. What’s next? Maybe goals and scoring, maybe sound.

It looks like I am staying up all night, hmm…

How’s it going everyone! This is my first time entering Ludum Dare!

I have had so much fun programming hardcore(staying up until 4am) for the past couple of days!

Now that I have finished programming this game, I feel like a programming genius!

Thank you all for being there with me through this hard grind!

Special thanks to the Snakey Team: Ryan, Jason, and Zach for tons of support crunching this game!

For my past blog post and updates, please navigate to these links:

Snakey LD Update 1

Snakey LD Update 2

How the heck did I learn all this in less than a year?

Tags: beginner, dCoye, evolution, fissuredev, ld24, unity3d