GiRL2501 is complete!

Aaaaaand Relax!

Actually, I chose to do the Jam entry this time and found it a much more relaxed experience

I’ll have a post-mortem to come soon but for now, please play my game :p

“What has been seen cannot be unseen”

Psychiatric Evaluation is finished now!

Well, we technically finished the game yesterday night, and we ironed out a few details today (during lunchtime at work). 

It was a fun experience for all of us and we are proud of what we achieved. This was the first time we participated as a team on a project of this kind.

Although two of the members (Shadow, ilovepixel) had early experience with the ludumdare ride, there was a total newcomer this time around (so please, all welcome elmismopancho) which made things more interesting (and it looks like he is here to stay 😉 well, it’s only natural. It’s hard to quit LD once you try it).

It’s also our first time doing a collaborative process completely over internet. Thanks to SVN, Google (Mail, Chat, Docs), Dropbox and Skype we had no problems at all sharing information, discussing game design, and of course, developing the game itself.

We will write a post-mortem later, with a bit of the development/creative process, the good choices we made, our poor choices as well, the lessons we learnt, etc. For now we are happy to say that we are done. We made it!

We hope every other team and participant had a blast making his/her/their game (and we also hope you all managed to finish your entries) and we will probably be playing your games soon!

If you missed the link on top, you can find our game here. We would love to hear your comments/feedback!

My entry Darwin Award is mostly an infectious disease simulation with some population genetics thrown in.

If that description doesn’t sell a game, I don’t know what will.

A gameplay video perhaps?

Darwin Award gameplay video

Tags: gameplay, gameplay video, GIMP, java, LD #24, Piccolo2D, pickle, processing

Yay, first Ludum Dare Jam game is done….well done enough. Got a lot of the features in that I wanted to get in.

Learned a lot doing this, can not wait for the next one. Want to try and have a better formulated plan next time.

Well I hope you all enjoy it. Might go back after catching up on sleep and add some more levels.

Obsolete Upgrade

Get the game here!

Holy shit! I made something playable!

…

“Playable” being a relative term, of course.

I’ll try to keep this short, mostly because I am dead tired. Who knew that programming a game nearly non-stop for 3 consecutive days without getting a proper nights’ sleep could be this exhausting? (Other than everyone who participated, I mean.)

The idea:
I knew even before the theme was announced that I wanted to create something with an ‘arcade’ feel to it. I also knew the art style that I wanted to use; brightly coloured polygon-men on a black-and-white background. Don’t ask me why, I just thought it would look cool.
When the theme was announced I immediately had the idea to create a game with evolving enemies that adapted themselves to upgrades that the player picked out for himself.

The good:
– I like the art. I have always had tremendous fun with using code and simple art assets to create complex-looking shapes and animations and I’m really happy with the animations and effects that I managed to get in here. The text is still pretty rough around the edges though…
– I created something playable! You wouldn’t believe what a big deal that is to me.

The bad:
– The code is a mess. I didn’t plan ahead far enough when writing the code and that really came back to bite me in the ass near the end.
– It’s not done! Oh sure, it’s playable. (I know I had fun with it for a minute or two.) But it’s simply not done; the arsenal is very limited, the game balance is nonexistent and, most prominently, there is no lose condition. You can run out of HP but nothing will happen.
At time of writing I still have 4 and a half hours left, so theoretically I could fix these problems. The problem is: I’ve been staring at a computer screen for the past three days and I’m exhausted. I really can’t see another line of code right now. Heck, I’m too tired to come up with a name that’s better than “The Amazing Adventure of Magenta-Man.”
Now, I’m definitely going to finish this someday. Just not right now.

What I learned:
– Plan ahead. I’m sure everybody has already mentioned this in their postmortem but that’s just because it’s so bloody important! You really can’t make a good game if you don’t know what you’re about to create. Note that this point goes for game design as well as code.
– Stock up on coffee before this thing starts.
– Work in a group next time. Now, there’s nothing wrong with working on your own. It’s just that working in a group will undoubtedly improve the quality of absolutely everything about the game.
– PLAN. AHEAD.

Notes:
– Magenta-man is, as his name implies, magenta. I hate magenta, I really do. When I first created the character I made him magenta so that he’d stand out against everything and I could see his animations properly. At some point I tried to pick a new colour for the character and everything that wasn’t magenta just seemed wrong.
– I will definitely participate in the Ludum Dare again someday.
– “I’ll try to keep this short”, sure. Me from 20 minutes ago is a big ol’ liar.

500 years is a simulator in which there are 1-4 tribes on an island. You can set the tribe settings at the beginning of each simulation. Therefore, there will never be two identical simulations. As a player, you can’t control a tribe. However, you can unleash devastating disasters which affect tribes differently depending on their profile.

Each simulation lasts 500 years (1 year = 1 second).

Todays work :
-> modified the tiles.
-> randomized tiles.
-> disasters effects now vary depending on the profile of the tribe affected.
-> added pop messages when tribes reach a certain level in technology/warcraft/religion/politics.
-> fixed the message boxes closing when pressing arrow keys problem.
-> added information on the main menu.

You can find my entry : here.

Tags: 500 years

Evolution is the Key [link to game]

My game is done! Huzzah! The first game I’ve ever released, thanks to Ludum Dare.

“You are trapped in a maze that constantly evolves around you. ” It’s a bit inconsistent, is really short, has hardly any gameplay, but I’m proud of it nevertheless.

I’m an emotional mess right now. I’ll make some sort of  postmortem after I get some sleep.

Hi everyone !

I’m really happy to ended up with my game “3 Apples High” . It was my first LD. In fact, I had never heard about Ludum Dare competition before last Thursday… yes, the day before it begins :).

My main idea for the game came up in the first two hours of the contest : a 3D-roundish world with a paper/carton look, and a character who can evolve in size and shape. I also wanted to have simple keyboard controls, no mouse.
These ideas gradually evolved during the week-end and, as many of us, I didn’t have enough time to implement a lot of them.

I’m quite comfortable with Unity3D, no problem came from this side. So I mainly focused on the graphical feeling, both in space and GUI. I spend a long time for the textures and UI organization. I made some meshes in Blender, but it’s mostly primitives.

The critical feature was the landscape scrolling effect and took me some hours to look right. Nope, it’s not a shader !

As said in my entry’s description, I lost my musics records during the final day, so the game does not contain any music.
It’s turned up into a good thing : they were not very good and otherwise I could not have enough time to finish many other aspects of the game. In the last hours, I quickly generated some sounds with SFXR to fill the blanks.

My biggest disappointment is the level of difficulty, I waited too much to implement it. So the game is not hard to complete and finish suddenly around the level 10. It’s also became quickly boring. At least, you’ll have your delicious apples ;).

Link to the entry :
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15661

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, unity

I’ve written up the trials and tribulations of my game on my blog for anyone who’s interested. The takeaway: ‘Avoid beta software’. Who knew??? My entry is here.

In the rush of getting this done, we completely forgot about writing a journal

This was our first Ludum Dare, and only our 2nd Game Jam. I personally think that we did a pretty fine job on making a polished game.

The core of the game was built in several hours on the first day. This allowed us to really quickly start building up levels and messing around with gameplay.  This seems to be the way to go for any Game Jam. Simple mechanics that can be complex enough to be fun.

What will we improve on next time? Definitely a level editor. I wrote an importer that would read .fbx files into Unity and create the levels. While this wasn’t bad, it wasn’t optimal either (it required me to delete all the levels and regenerate them if I wanted to check 1 new thing). I would also like to get more feedback during the development from other people. Right now we only publicly released 1 other version (that was the one that was built during the first few hours), that made it difficult to understand how difficult/fun/frustrating/easy our  game was.

If you’re interested in the first version, it’s still online here: 
http://elwinverploegen.com/beta/cubism/

The team consisted of me, Elwin Verploegen (programming), Tino van der Kraan (art& level design) and music from Boulders Below (a friend of the team).
Looking forward to the feedback, hopefully it’ll catch on, as we have a lot of awesome ideas to add to the current version!

Hi again ladies and gentlemen.

I’ve made a Speedrun video gameplay for my game “Deal with It” that a lot of people can’t get to the final boss. So to get a correct puntuation I’ve made that video:

My current high score for my game ‘Sprout’ is 1054 feet.

Can you beat it?

PLAY SPROUT

In “Living Tales” you write you own story, which turns to life.
You type in a word and if it is supported the equivalent object will appear at the left (e.g. a tree).
On the right will be simultaneous a story written (“A tree comes out of the ground.”). Spawned creatures will act without needing a command, they write the story, too.

code: kddekadenz
art: madgnomegamer & kddekadenz
sound: pdsounds.org, opengameart.org

We had more time than usual, but that still wasn’t enough.
Expect a update on this after the compo has ended.

click me to play

Here is what I have to do.

–TODO

Animations/Art{
All eves of player animation[]
Attacks[]
Blocks[/] I still feel like I have more to do
Items[]
Block Items[/] More Items are needed
}

Code{
Comic box text reader[]
Insec collision detection[X]
Simple AI[]
Attack types[]
Damg Detection[X]
Update Collision[/]still need to fix if in block to push you out.
}

Well, that’s it for the Ludum Dare version of Ninjural Selection!

I didn’t have time to add sound effects or *ahem* any sort of goal or progression, but it’s still a fun little playground. You can rate it here.

I’ll keep working on an updated version, which you can find here.

I guess it’s time to play and rate some games! See you around…

The Compo and Jam parts of Ludum Dare 24 have ended, but we’re not done yet!

Over the next 3 weeks, be sure to come back to play and rate games made by your peers. To be ranked, you need ratings! The best way to get more ratings is to play and rate games. Doing so improves your games visibility.

NOTE: Jam games, only the submitter gets to vote. Unfortunately, aside from sharing the account, we don’t have a way for the entire team to vote. Sorry.

Bugfixes

By now, you should not be touching your game code anymore (unless you’re making a post-compo version). That said, we do allow the following:

1. Crashes – If your game dies at an important moment, you are allowed to fix this.
2. Typo bugs – Little oops bugs, not features. Things you may have broke last minute.

Those are the only two types fixes you are allowed to make at this point. No New Features! If you want to add things, we call that a post-compo version. It’s your game, so you’re free to do whatever you want with it, but for the sake of judging we want you to preserve the version you submitted to the event.

Ports

Ports to different platforms are allowed after the deadline. You should get them in as soon as possible, and should be functionally the same as your submitted version. Porting to a mobile platform like Android may require adding on screen controls; This is allowed.

Remember: Web is the most popular platform. 2nd most popular is Windows. If you want to find Linux/other games, use the search box on the View All page.

Upcoming Events

Coming up next month (September), and every off month, members of the community run Mini-LD challenges. Check back in a couple weeks for that.

Coming up in October is a special event of ours the October Challenge. The October Challenge is where we encourage you take your first steps towards earning money from making games. For details, you can check last years event. Any companies interested in offering incentives can contact me (Mike Kasprzak) over here.

Finally, Ludum Dare 25 will be December 2012. Date to be announced as we get closer.

Thanks everyone, and lets go rate some games!

I cant believe it — we actually did it. A four level plat-former closely following the Theme of Evolution. The kids and my wife did some excellent work on the sprites, and we did need some help for the tile sheets and music and sounds. It was a very fun experience and I can’t wait to do this again.

Here is the link to our entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7135

I still have to blur some personal information out of my screen timelapse, I do however have a timelapse of our HQ during the Jam.

Finally our jam is over after.
55 hours of working and 6 of sleep , I’m exhausted but was really fun. We had to take out some features from the game because were buggy / unsubtle but… the game still has some bugs that I want to fix tomorrow.
We wanted to make this game epic but the time was soo fast and some bugs here and out.

I’m mhm… I’m  happy about the game, I wanted really to finish it. Some cool features and fluff was in but I had to remove for release it soon as possible,  so the game is nothing special but I think you can have fun for some minuts time.

You can try the game here and tell me what you think =)

I developed the game in C++ with the help of the library Allegro5 and some basic stuff ready coded by me some days ago (loop logistic, separated render thread, objects management)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2012 at 7:39 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 everyone,

We finally finished our first Ludum Dare experience.

You can see our entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14122

Play the game!

Ludum Dare #24 is over after an exhausting crazy weekend but, above all, it´s been a ton of fun. Joining the Dare has proven to be an excellent idea and I believe it’d be right to say it’s has not gone too bad after all, considering it was my first time. Here’s a little postmortem on the experience.

Evolution – The survival of the fittest

The competition’s theme was Evolution so I went for a classic 2D platformer starred by a funny caveman who has to get through the level while killing dinosaurs by jumping on them or throwing rocks which he collects himself. Yes, I’m aware I’m not going to get many points for sticking to the theme.

Evolution is written in Java using the wonderful libgdx framework and my personal code base (which I made available prior to the Dare).

Evolution – Menu

What went right

• Completion: I guess having delivered something at my first attempt it’s a win, even though the game lacks in many aspects. Time management was not completely disastrous.
• Graphics: Evolution has received very positive feedback art wise and being a programmer it feels a bit bizarre. The process followed to create and animate character was: sketching on paper, vectorizing and colouring with Inkscape, animation with Flash and Texture Packer to produce spritesheets. I’ll keep working on this line.
• Multi platform: libgdx was a good decision, not only is a very nice and powerful framework but also allows to target several platforms with no to very little effort.
• Box2D: using this popular physics engine empowered me to implement the basic movement through the level extremely quickly.
• Code base: although I discovered a fair amount of bugs in my code base, it behaved quite nicely. I also got a ton of ideas to improve it.

Evolution – Caveman fighting dinosaurs!

What went wrong

• Gameplay polish: I didn’t invest enough time to polish the gameplay, tweak values and play test the game and that reflects on the final build. It’s a noob mistake and that makes me sad.
• Content: I decided to invest the last moments of the competition in the little polishing I did instead of content creation which resulted in having just one level. However, I think it was the right call, I simply didn’t have time for everything.
• Asset pipeline: too much time was wasted in getting the export process right for some of the assets. On the bright side, I’ve learnt a lot and it won’t happen next time.
• HTML5 port: it would have been awesome to have a browser version of my game with no third party plugins requirements so people could just play. Too bad my HTML5 port had a bad crash.

Evolution – Jumping in the wild!

Conclusions

I can’t stress enough how awesome of an experience it was. So many emotions mixed in the pot: stress, joy, thrill, exhaustion and so many more. I learned so much and felt great for having been able to deliver something in such a short timespan. I will definitely try to be in next time.

Looking forward to get more feedback during the voting phase, best of luck to all my fellow Ludum Darers!

You can play the product of my labor, UNBOUND, here.

With this being my first Ludum Dare, I (like every other first-timer) had no idea what to expect. I spent the entire Ludum Dare in a Skype call with a few friends, one of them also doing LD (also a first-timer.) Overall, I feel like I did alright, but a few weakpoints of mine (drawing) showed through. Also, I had an interesting time dealing with planning with no ability to write, as I have a broken wrist. But anywho, onto a chronological post-mortem.

Day 1: August 24th

Right as the theme was announced, I felt I was in for quite the experience. I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do until about 2 hours in, and it sounded like a great idea. It would be called BIND, and the mechanics were something along these lines:

• Controls were added as needed. For example, the first time you approach a ledge, whatever key you attempt to jump with would cause you to jump from then on.
• Things you did more often you would gradually get better at, at the cost of losing your skill in your least-used skill.
• Enemies would adapt and evolve to counter whatever you’re good at.

And so I got to coding with these tools:
Code: Sublime Text 2
Language: Lua
Framework: LOVE2D
Art: Photoshop CS6
Music: MuseScore
Sound effects: Audacity, starring myself

I had no real engine to use, but I had been experimenting with a few techniques in LOVE2D, and I was already extremely familiar with both, so I started the game engine. It had some great code; I got about 500 lines down and some sprites before heading off to bed at 3 AM, Mountain Daylight Time.

“Day” 2: August 25th/26th

I woke up about 10 AM my time, giving me about 7 hours of sleep. The night before I had completed the base engine (with much left to do, however) and a few sprites (a top-down guy running with/without a gun, a tile floor, some dirt, and a couple mouse cursors.) After continuing work on the engine I decided that what I envisioned for BIND, which was to be a fast-paced gun game, would probably be too much. I also had made an error in the base of the engine that caused two issues I wasn’t happy with. First, I had a horrible flickering problem, but that was fixed by the helpful people in the IRC and a few minutes of fiddling about. Secondly, I hadn’t built the system with any sort of collision (let alone physics) in mind. Given the time constraints, I didn’t feel it was worth-while to either rewrite the engine and mirror every object into love.physics for easier interaction, or write the necessary components with my makeshift object system.

And so I went with another idea: a boiled-down version of Dear Esther with a completely different base. I kept the sprites I made, despite the fact they were less-than-stellar. I also kept the engine, disabling, but not removing, all the functionality that would have made BIND, well, BIND. I added in simple tile collision, added a slight light-swell effect for atmosphere, and made an image-based level format with 4 layers: 3 visual (red, green, blue) and 1 collision. (Alpha) I decided that the main mechanic would be “notes” left by someone who had been there a long time ago. Why you were there wasn’t ever defined in-game, essentially leaving it up to you (until I posted the entry, where I declared you were a journalist.) From there, I patched the level format, adding support for “special” tiles: ones that either had metadata associated with them or could be interacted with. I added 3 such tiles: Paper, Start, and LevelChanger, which was going to have support for more than just moving you to the next level, but hey, time. I looked at the clock and noticed it was 6 AM, and determined I wouldn’t be sleeping until LD was over.

I felt I had a relatively okay game base going there, so I went to compose the music. I came back after about an hour with a good few measures of a song that would define the feel of the game. I began working on more tiles and the first few levels. I added walls of various types, and made 5 levels that consisted entirely of tile floor. After adding my new walls to the first 3 levels, I scrapped the 5th level entirely and left out the 4th’s walls in the interest of time, because around that time it was 1 PM. I finished the music, giving a 1 minute loop, and began working on more sprites, such as a red-tint utility tunnel pathway that my friend Andy thought was “random rusted chain” — like I said, my art skills are lacking heavily. I started the actual writing about this time, which didn’t take very long. After all, I had finished many English writing assignments the night before they were due. I patched up the old tile levels with a new metal-floored access tunnel type floor for a couple parts and began working on the utility tunnel levels below.

These maps were much quicker to make due to the difference in tiling needs (in the tile levels, if I needed an upper-right-inner-corner wall piece, I had to composite three tiles together in the image, which was slow.) For these levels, I hard-coded changes such as turning off the music and enabling ambient noises (which were myself vocally letting out the agony I felt and hitting my desk.) At this point, it was 5 PM and I needed an end. I won’t spoil it here, but it required a new special tile to trigger it. At about 6:20, I finished up minor changes and details, packed, and submitted my game.

I then proceeded to celebrate quietly (because I was too tired to make much noise) just before falling asleep around the submission deadline passed.

I’m more happy with UNBOUND as a personal project than one of Ludum Dare, partly because I didn’t believe I’d finish, but mostly because of the different interpretation of the theme and general personal emotional importance it had for me. In the game, I took a completely radical (and probably incorrect) view of evolution: that of the mind. How do people’s emotions evolve as time passes, and situations become more hopeless?

I enjoyed Ludum Dare a lot, and I’ll surely be back for Ludum Dare 25. Thanks for your time.

`

Tags: post-mortem

Pewwww!

• 48 hours
• 5 hours sleep
• Every relative within 5 states visiting me.  (When it rains it pours.)

I made it.  This was my first flash game ever.  You can play it here.  I found a great tutorial for an Asteriod game.  By the time I made it halfway through the tutorial I had hit my stride so I ditched the tutorial and started making my game.  I struggled with my concept but I finally decided on a puzzle game where you move blocks to trap an evolving robot.  Each level the robot looks a little different and has different move logic.  By the time you get to the end it looks just like you.  I want to redo the game from scratch because it has remnants from my tutorial efforts in it but it work mostly.

Lessons:

• Flash is stupidly simple if you already have a programming background.
• It takes more time to create assets then it does to program.
• Don’t start programming until you have a complete game plan for your game.  (I was just happy to get sprites to move at first so my game evolved as I learned how to use flash.)

I am going to consider this a successful Ludum Dare.  I uploaded Evo to Kongregate and in the last hour it has already gotten 50 plays.  I think that equates to $0.10.  I doubt I will get the same rate of play but that is $876/year.  I am going to be rich.

Tags: flash

Here’s my entry for the game jam!

It can be played at either GameSalad’s Arcade page, here:
http://arcade.gamesalad.com/g/104669

Or embedded on my blog, here:
http://www.ryvvn.com

Unfortunately, since I stupidly used GameSalad, there are inexplicable problems that only appear after uploading and publishing to their Arcade site. I had the similar issues with my NaGaDeMo entry game back in June. The game is playable, and maybe I can find a way to fix it, but time constraints mean I have to present this entry the way it is.

You can view a previously recorded livestream of me demoing the game, working essentially perfectly, then publishing the game and witnessing it break right before my eyes, here: http://www.twitch.tv/ryvvn/b/330175650

Thanks to anyone who plays it, even if it is kinda broken…

The family team’s project is done. Almost all of the arts is by my little daughter (almost 3). She also had some impact on the strange name of the game ;).

Try and rate!

Tags: handdrawn, pygame, python

Play Cage Flight now!

Wow its just been so much fun   After the frantic coding over the weekend, we haven’t really used today to actually code or tweak much.  We’ve just been playing the game to bits!

At times we’ve had 10+ total strangers all wheeling, weaving and diving!

We tested the online game that we’re making for the Jam. There were around 20+ people playing throughout the session.

Here’s a screenshot of a few of us running around:

I’m hosting the game from my computer in Australia and it seemed to handle itself pretty well. At the peak there was about 30kb/s being sent.

Time to package it up and submit!

Today I got a friend to play my game together with me, and I realized that the interface is completely non-intuitive. Here is a small guide about how to play the game:

* Goal: Your goal is to please the different clients, by selling them cats that fit their preferences. Each client has a completely different preference, such as big cats, spotted, active cats, etc.

* Breeding screen: You start the game here. Select a Cat and click on the “breeding area” to select a cat for breeding. Ribbons indicate females. Small cats are immature and cant breed. Select a cat and click on the lens to get more info about it. Select a cat and click on the river to throw a cat away. Click “end turn” to advance the game: Cats will breed and eat food.

* Pet Shop Screen: You can buy 4 different items here. Click on an item to get a description of the item. Click on “buy item” to buy the selected item.

* Sell cats scree: The list of your cats, and the list of available clients can be seen. Select a cat, a client, and click on “Sell Cat” (bottom button) to sell a cat. Select a client and click on the mouth button to get some info about that client. Select a cat and click on the lens button to get some info about the cat.

Sorry about the lengthy manual. When my friend started playing the game, the confusing parts of the interface became immediately obvious. Many of those were easy fixes. This is why it is VERY important to get your game tested by another person during the dare (of course, to get your game testing, you need a working prototype early in the dare).

Hope you enjoy the game!

Tags: interface, java, manual, pitfalls

http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~ajkidd/ld24/page.html

This is my post for my game for the Ludum Dare 72 hour jam. I’m not sure if this is the right way to submit though…

This is our first (jam) ludum dare, after two very difficult days finally we can look with pride to our work!

And now, we can invite you to slaughter evolving aliens with us. Have fun!

This was my first time entering and I’m pretty satisfied with the results. Congratulations to everyone who participated!

Ultimate Plant is an html game. I used jQuery, Twitter’s Bootstrap, and SASS to build the game.

Here is a link to my entry:

Ultimate Plant

Evolution of my idea:

When evolution was announced I tried to steer my mind towards something new. I brainstormed all the things I could think of around evolution: dinosaurs, mutations, colonization, natural selection, culture, etc… I figured everyone would gravitate to some kind of dinosaur or sci-fi mutation theme (I’m surprised that I’ve only seen 1 dinosaur game in the results). On Friday I came up with a cool deck-building style card game idea that I planned to implement in video game form. By 3am I had sketched out a really rudimentary UI and had some crappy game mechanics that I wasn’t pleased with.

I went to bed feeling a little dejected and not very confident about the next day’s work. I think my subconscious mulled things over while sleeping and while eating breakfast I decided to scrap my original idea and try to incorporate the Game of Life into some type of puzzle game.

What went right:

1. Simple mechanics: At first I felt the GOL (Game of Life) rules were too simplistic for a cool game, but they ended up being perfect for creating something that I could incrementally improve. GOL is used in code retreat sessions (http://coderetreat.org/) and I’ve implemented the core rules several times in different languages while practicing software development techniques. It was really easy to get a quick simulator working in html.

2. Simple graphics: I kept the initial graphics simple and planned to add a bunch of flower photographs later. I ran out of time to add many photos, but I think the simplicity made it easier to design a clean UI.

3. Early tutorial and playtesting: I created 5 “simple” puzzles and a tutorial to go with them. I had a couple playtesters give good feedback that the puzzles were not simple! I then focused on making my core game understandable rather than adding more complex flower and weed breeding puzzles.

4. Developing with a group: Canopy graciously opened their offices for a Ludum Dare Jam. Everyone mostly worked in quiet isolation on their own games, but it was nice to bounce a few ideas off people.

5. Todo list: It really helped to write down and prioritize all of the features I wanted in my game. After procrastination breaks it was easy to get back on track.

Areas for improvement:

1. Indecision and Too Much Design: I felt my game idea was too simple up until halfway through the competition and spent a lot of time sketching out complex puzzles and plant types that didn’t make it into the game. Next time I’ll implement each puzzle one at a time and try to finish a few more features as opposed to thinking up great stuff to implement up front.

2. Not enough time on artwork: I knew that I could spend a lot of time trying to make subpar graphics so I planned to just add photographs of flowers. I spent a couple hours driving to a nearby arboretum and taking a lot of pictures, but I ended up with time to use just a few in the final game.

3. Social obligations: Earlier in the week I had agreed to meet a friend for a birthday dinner on Saturday. I thought it would be a nice break from coding, but we ended up at the restaurant waiting for late arrivals before we could order food. I ducked out early, but it still took up most of the evening.

4. Practice with Frameworks: Most of my experience with html and javascript is on large projects with helpers and glue code that I couldn’t use in the competition. Next time I’ll build a few simple prototypes from scratch using only the opensourced frameworks.

5. Not enough time for puzzles: My biggest regret is the small number of puzzles in the game. I really wish I had been able to add 10-20 more puzzles with a few interesting twists. At least I can add some more to a post-competition version.

Summary:

I really enjoyed the competition and am looking forward to the next one. I learned a lot about managing limited resources over the course of 48 hours.

Tags: final post mortem, postmortem

So, I’m finally finished with Magistrate, my town building sim. I was plagued with issues which limited my time.

First, I forgot all about the start of the jam and so was sleeping when it started. When I woke up, I remembered and checked the theme. That day, I developed for maybe 5 hours but my social life took over after that. The next day I spent most of the time at an amusement park with friends. On the final day, I managed to polish the game a bit and release. I got less than 10 hours total dev time. Pathetic, I know.

Anyway, you can play the game here, enjoy.
Play

Wow! That was am intense few days but we made it through and came out with a pretty polished and awesome game!

You Play as Bat-Monkey, trying to escape from the evil Octo-Darwin using his experimental evolution gun against him!

Give it a play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16006

We’d love to know what you think and any feedback you want to throw our way. Try and beat our high scores!

So, I will add some level but all the interest of the game is lose because of the few level, I can’t make enigma (on the order which activate zapper). But you can test the concept ^^
In theory, the player should have to think where use the zapper to avoid to be block. So analyzing scenes is important.

Huzzah, we finished! Cutting it a lot closer this time than our last Jam entry back in May, but at least we finished! We had wanted to plan something that would fare better in the “fun” factor and strayed away from our last platforming experience, so we opted for a light puzzle game with multiple “endings” that can be achieved. Sort of. See what kind of results you guys get when you play!

Anyways, there’s a whole post-mortem’s worth of junk to be said about this…so we’ll stop the yabbering and post up SCREENSHOTS and a play link!

GAME PAGE AND PLAY LINK

Cross-posted from the Rheo development blog.

Ben McLean here, composer for Rheo. Apparently, Rob, our programmer, isn’t gonna get his demo together in time for the Ludum Dare 24 Jam deadline. He has stated that he will try to put something of some kind out in the future. As a consolation prize, here is the soundtrack I composed for the game, which BTW unlike the game’s code, was delivered on time last night.

By way of introduction, the game is supposed to be a cutesy platformer featuring a living puddle of water named Bernoulli who changes state from solid ice to liquid water to flying gaseous steam cloud and back based on temperature. I composed three different themes that would play when he is in the three different states. I was going for a happy retro sound, while not strictly adhering to any specific era, so be prepared for some ambiguously retro style musics.

Click here for the Rheo soundtrack!

In happier news, Rob’s sister had a baby!

I am hoping by taking a game design course in college to be prepared to compete as a programmer in my own right in future Ludum Dare challenges, assuming they aren’t based on such stupid themes as “evolution.”

[ play the game ]

I wanted to make a game that focused on the story for once. I really like writing dialogue for games, but it’s hard to justify taking the time to write a good story during a game jam. That’s probably why I don’t do it too often, but it’s still fun.

The story for Rise of the Morbels is based on one of the plots from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. The character’s name is a reference to Samuel Taylor-Coleridge, whose “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was supposed to be about this event. The story is delivered in voiceover that plays while you have control of the character, to avoid that “wall of text” feeling. I feel like this was a good choice, and it contributed pretty well to the feel of the game.

The sound quality’s not great, but I’m really happy with how the audio turned out, given that my last game had no audio whatsoever. This was the first time I’ve ever incorporated any voiceover into a game, and I think it actually sounds pretty good, even though I usually dislike my own voice. Speeding it up by 15% makes a huge difference, I guess. This was also the first time I’ve ever composed music for a game. Even though it’s just four notes, I feel like it’s appropriate for the mood, especially since I don’t know anything at all about composition. Combined with some creepy sound effects, it’s not bad.

For the most part, the audio work went smoothly. The music only took a few minutes, and I got five minutes of dialogue in less than an hour. I did have a technical glitch at the end, though. Every line of dialogue is a separate sound file, so you have to download 89 ogg files for this game. About an hour before the deadline, this was causing Chrome to crash. I managed to avoid it by downsampling some of the sound effects, but it was really tense for a while.

Of course, every minute spent on story or audio is a minute not spent on gameplay, so I knew that I would be making sacrifices here. It’s not the most fun or replayable game I’ve ever made, but I may talk about that in another post.

Tags: postmortem, story, voiceovers

Howdy fellow jammers! It is now 1 in the morning here in Belgium, and believe it or not, we’re still alive with brains in almost perfect working order.

Just a short update to announce the level 3 is now being finalized. A quick screenshot to prove it :

Player 2 proudly standing in ‘Baker’s Borough’

And just because we love you, a small bonus : the end screens.

Well, thank you… in advance!

Yay us, levitating team of awesomeness!

Our blue mad hatter, ready to roll again!

This is probably the last post before the last (you see what I mean). So we already would like to thank all of you who took the time to flip through our blog entries and left little <3’s. It really is encouraging!

Sooo clooooseeee. Definately going to be able to ship on time. Only problem i’ve got is WE WANT TO ADD MORE CONTENT.

Let us know of any ground breaking bugs and we’ll try and smash them out too. Submitting shortly… WOOOOOO

Ah yes. That contest. Ludum Dare 24. I remember it like it was yesterday…

Maybe, because it was. And I’m here to tell you how it felt to make a game in 10 hours!
________________________________________________________________________

This LD was a blast! I made a game in 10 hours! People are giving me nice ratings! People want a post-compo version! People are encouraging me! People are calling me the “10-hour-village-game-guy” in IRC!

I once before did a game in a short period of time. 6 hours to be exact, you can watch that here.
I’m not proud of that game and it’s development history, but I made it quickly. That’s what counts!

So, if I ain’t proud about my last quick game, what’s the difference with this one?
The difference is that I am PROUD of this one! I love it!

It also has it’s own website here

Now let’s go through a chronologic timeline, shall we?

TIMELINE

Saturday – 8 a.m. – I was in Italy. I looked at theme. I panicked.
Saturday – 12 p.m. – I had an idea. I couldn’t realize it though.
Saturday – 9 p.m. – I decided to hang around in IRC. Slightly depressed.

Sunday – 4 p.m. – I was at home. Finally. I was able to start a game.
Sunday – 5 p.m. – I had first interface sprites and the functionality in place
Sunday – 6 p.m. – Food. And first gameplay. You could now build a farm.
Sunday – 7 p.m. – Fiddling with the sprites to make the UI nice and functional.
Sunday – 8 p.m. – More sprites. Drawing sprites. Coloring Sprites. Drawing Fury!
Sunday – 9 p.m. – Code! Code! Code! Mild signs of last minute panix.
Sunday – 10 p.m. – Sprites! Sprites! I need too many damn sprites!
Sunday – 11 p.m. – Coffee Break. Thinking on what to do next.

Monday – 12 a.m. – Last minute panix. Cutting out features (i.e. walls)
Monday – 1 a.m. – DRAWING! CODING! OMG! PANIX!
Monday – 2 a.m. – README! MORE README! PANIX!
Monday – 2:30 a.m. – PACKAGING! UPLOADING! PANIX!
Monday – 2:40 a.m. – Submitted 20 minutes before the end of the compo.

Now on to the right/wrong list!

What went right:

• Graphics. I had next to no time, but I made really pretty art!
• Idea. I had a very good idea from the start, and it was simple to do.

What went mediocre:

• Theme.I can’t help it. I would’ve loved to keep Evolution in the voting.
• Game. I’m pretty happy with it, considering the 10 hour limit. Still could’ve been better.

What went wrong:

• Time. I was in Italy for most of the contest! No way to do anything!
• Audio. It was a close call! I just didn’t have the time!

_____________________________________________________________________

And this is about it.
Also some advice for the new guys:
DO NOT DO THIS! IT’S NOT AS COOL AS IT MAY LOOK!

I am also working on a post-compo version! It’ll have to wait until I finished the website for my classmates, though!

I’ll go to bed now. It’s 1 am. I’m tired. And stuff.

– Folis

Well, we did start a project. But as one of us is on Holiday, well… Holiday comes over Ludum Dare unfortunately. So with that being said we couldn’t really enter anything. Although I might share what we accomplished in the first few hours of making the game. But, maybe next time.

So, its a full day since I finished my Ludum Dare game entry, and I’m glad today was a holiday, since I think I’ve only recently recovered from the whole experience. The last 8 hours before submission were so intense, productive, and mindnumbing that I somehow blocked out everything else that was going on.

The Good

• Getting ideas down paper – all the sketches I did at the start of the night when the theme was announced really became a source of inspiration and guidance throughout the project.
• Delivering on those ideas! Unlike Last Ludum Dare where I had ambitions bigger then my capabilities, I think I reeled this project in close to my original vision. That’s not so say I couldn’t have made a better game, but I’m really happy I got my estimate right for the weekend, and proved I could churn out what I’d envisioned.
• Haxe / NME – proved an excellent language to program in again. No hold-ups working out what constructs to use, or messing around with the build process. Was a 1 line config change to get it working on Android. Brilliant stuff.
• Paint Shop Pro – saved my ass again when I needed to get the character artwork done.
• Audacity – made recording and editing the sound effects simple when I was tight on time and needed to get them done. I used one project file with frame labels, and exported all the individual files, as mp3s, with the same names in a snap.
• Evolving parts! It seemed worth putting in the effort to get the changeable character parts and simple animation frames. I think I put the bare minimum of states in to make the characters look interesting without over complicating the art side.
• Solid GUI elements. Having a single screen, and a looping flow to get the player into the game quickly, meant I could concentrate on game play and not with menus. I’ve not been using any frameworks for these last two projects so things like menus can really eat up coding time.
• The food. Delicious cold snacks, sausage rolls, mini snack-eggs, quiche… pints of tea, and the occasional cider, well worth it. Kept me going all weekend.

The Bad

• Flash CS5 IDE crashed on me, crashed my character file, almost destroyed my project. At this point I grabbed my output images, made a new image template, and GTFO’d to Paint Shop Pro to finish doing my character art. I basically went and stood in the kitchen and banged my head against the wall for 10 mins after this, but I just cut my losses and got on with making the art assets in a different way. I was going for a smooth vector feel to my art, but I’m not that good, and I’m much more comfortable outlining in pixels, so probably I should stick to my strengths next time.
• Combat – it sucks. In my defense, this is the first time I’ve made a combat game like this, and I really didn’t think through how this core mechanic would be varied enough to call “fun”. Late addition of bouncing the enemy back, and freezing them for a random amount of time, and changing this distance based on Attack Damage helped, but that is just one kind of attack, and doesn’t make the game very interesting. The decals and sound effects unique to each character type helped mask the problem, but not really. If I was going to remake this game, having different attack moves per character, and maybe two types of attack available would be at the top of my list.
• Evolving is not obvious. Its assimilation of parts, based on which characters you kill. I think if I had given a screen which the user could use to decide which parts to evolve and which to keep it would have made the game play much more strategic, and hopefully fun.
• The music. Should have used a generator or something, was just embarrasingly bad this time around. Barely made up with it with sound effects.
• Writing alot stuff from scratch – I should have planned ahead and got some framework code together. Just a few helper libraries here and there, or a template project with a few basic files in it. I might go so far as to use a framework on my next one like flixel or some other game library to avoid some repetitive code.
• Image pipeline – for character art – I spent far too long sorting out UV coordinates and templates for doing my character art, instead of actually drawing, and then I had the problem with Flash CS5 crashing, which had all my art and coordinates in one place. I need to get a better flow for brining in assets, or I should have mapped to a square based tile grid and made it dead simple for myself.

Welp. That’s all I can think of. Really happy that I managed to complete another game. Starting to build up a mini-portfolio now.

See you all next time!

My first LD ended successfully with a game submission at 3.00 A.M.
(and today I had to sleep off my “hangover” caused by staying up so late, but I had a good time playing other people’s games!)

When I woke up on Saturday and saw the theme I decided it would be easiest to translate the evolution theme to a “nature” graphics theme and some kind of clever powerup scheme (which is what many people did, but it leaves a lot of room for creativity). I took my tablet while still in bed and sketched up a little game design, based on an idea I once had about jumping around from cave wall to another.

Nom’s Evolvathlon first sketch

Somehow I love caves in games, even more so if they are procedurally generated and have water in them.  And evolution is all about crawling out of the water and stuff, right?  I’ve had creative block when it comes to starting on a new game, but now I was getting really enthusiastic.  Most of the ideas I thought up during the first 20 or so minutes of the day I would implement in the next 20 hours.  Actually, the worst part was the pathfinder algorithm, which has some nasty singular cases, which resulted in more than 2 hours of work and a bug I decided not to fix within the time frame.  The second worst part was the control method, which I wanted to be touch screen compatible.  The third worst part was inventing a name for the game. I finally decided upon a name that is easy to Google.  And the best part is that it is actually a playable and interesting game that plays well on a tablet.  I’ve had too many experimental gameplay ideas fail miserably because they just weren’t any fun.

Nom’s Evolvathlon: final product

>> Play Nom’s Evolvathlon here. <<

I definitely want to make a more polished version.  Here are some postmortem thoughts:

• It is hard to balance a game with so many features.  Either create a simple game and balance it well, or create a complex one and accept that it won’t be well balanced.  Luckily the audience appears to be quite understanding.  Nevertheless I erred on the easy side, so as not to put off players who encounter a difficulty peak.  I also included the possibility to start at any level you like (I recommend this to all who submit a game to LD).  The final product is a bit too easy.  Health should decrease more quickly, generating much more suspense. It would help if the enemies were more aggressive and harder to kill.  There should be suspense to the very end, whereas in the current version, the end of the level is usually spent running around collecting things without any threat to the player whatsoever.
• I was taking a risk of putting players off with such complex controls, but again the audience appears understanding.  I didn’t manage to make them really user friendly within the time frame.  I think the worst part is that it’s hard to tell the game whether you want to move or shoot.  And maybe I should also try an Angry Birds type jump control (power + angle) instead.  I am happy I did come up with useable touch screen controls other than a “virtual joystick/keyboard” approach, which I really hate.
• At the end of the cycle, a to-do list is a must! Just hours before submission, dozens of last-minute fixes kept popping up, and I would have forgotten to do half of them if I hadn’t written them down.
• The method I used for creating graphics was fairly effective.   I spent around 20 minutes total on the 16×16 sprites during development of the game, focussing only on the colour schemes and distinguising different animation frames.  In the last hours I spent a spare 20 minutes improving and shading the graphics.  I think the result is reasonable for a non graphical artist, though the bird sprite definitely sucks!
• I would have liked to implement caves that get larger and larger, a zoomed playfield for the Android version, a Flash version of the game, animated water with bubbles and a nice splash when Nom hits the water, etc.  Maybe in the next version!
• Last but not least, I think it’s a pity warmup games get so little attention, I for one didn’t receive a single comment on the gameplay of my own warmup game. >> Play my warmup game here. <<
  

I’m out, but I had a lot of fun. My game idea never really went anywhere, but I was able to spend some time with friends and mess around with something new. :3

Here’s the game – it’s not finished properly – but play it for about 15 seconds and you’ll get the idea.

http://www.magneticboots.com/BIN_ME/SIX.html

Needs a bit of ingredient X to polish it off – will add this tomorrow lunchtime & repost.  Some of these other entries are so *toight* – enjoying MANY of them !

I spent for it, about 25 hour.  And I can’t find how submit it

http://amsmirnov.ru/ld24/

=== STORY ===

Evolution looks cool but things can go wrong.
You have to stop the evolution of a new life form !

Why ? Because one day they will steal our ideas and violate our patents.

Thoses life form are agile, unpredictable and they can divide themself or revive from a dead body.

Burn that sh*t as quick as you can !

–end transmission

=== GAME ===
http://www.yopsolo.fr/wp/2012/08/25/ludumdare24/

=== TOOLS ===
free open source IDE, flash developp > http://www.flashdevelop.org/
free open source Flash GPU accelerated framework, Starling > http://gamua.com/starling/
free open source sound generator > http://www.bfxr.net/
free online photoshop clone > http://pixlr.com/editor/
free online particle editor http://onebyonedesign.com/flash/particleeditor/
free fonts ( metal mania & geo )from http://www.google.com/webfonts/

music Kraddy : Android Porn

=== OTHER ===
twitter : @YoupSolo
website : yopsolo.fr

See it here at:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15698

With an hour to go, I have uploaded my competition entry. I’ll inform you all about what went well and what went bad tomorrow. As well as testing out some other games.
P.S. The worst thing was learning object orientation for the first time, I probably did more on the 3rd day than the first two!

Blood bear wants your soul…

Anyway goodnight, hope you enjoy my game!

Tags: finished, goodnight, jam, javascript, ld24, link, web game

Perils abound down the Ribbit Hole.

This was by far the craziest of my three Ludum Dare experiences, and the first time I’ve jammed with a team. On the one hand, we’re all ridiculously happy with what we’ve managed to do, in terms of the game mechanic and the quality of the art production, and the potential for a much larger game built on top of what we’ve got here.

On the other hand, there’s no getting around the fact that the amount of content and story in the actual official jam build is painfully small… just one scenario. It’s really short, and it doesn’t even really have an “ending” screen.

What went right?
The theme :
I admit that I didn’t like the theme when it was announced. We all struggled to come up with an idea that wouldn’t be derivative or play into the whole eat-or-be-eaten trope. After spending two hours brainstorming we felt like we’d hit a brilliant twist by making a game about the evolution of a relationship, or rather correcting the de-evolution of one via time-manipulation.

The team :
The textures are gorgeous. Jordan rocks scene lighting and ambience like nobody’s business. You see how alive the scenery in that apartment looks? It’s all in the lighting. Ray on the modeling and the UI took one look at the little frog pictures I’d taken during LD23 and decided to just run with them. The scenery and the model have a certain charm and warmth that there’s no way I alone could capture.

The tooling :
I’m no stranger to using Unity, but the tool really made the job of rapidly testing and building very easy.

What went wrong?

SCOPE –
Everything that went wrong in this project, and the reason why the game really isn’t very complete, is all down to how ambitious we were in our ideas. In order to really sell our take on the theme, here’s a short list of things we had to build out, in ascending order of OMG levels of work:

• A fake smartphone operating system
• Translation of raycasting from the user’s physical screen to the virtual “phone” screen
• A convincing script with relatable characters
• A conversation engine that ranks your responses to questions, including timeouts that are interpreted as you ignoring the questioner

Did I mention we didn’t have any of that stuff just laying around?

And how much time did it take us to concept out these ideas? I feel confident in saying that we spent almost a total of 10 – 15 hours doing nothing but writing up scenarios, playing with dialog options, running through things you could pick up and use in the phone world.

All this is to say that the idea was big. It was really big. It’s way bigger than a game jam game should be, but it felt like too good an idea not to pursue. It’s still astonishing to me just how much we did accomplish even with a game idea that required such heavy investment in nothing more than script writing and screenplay.

PRIORITIES –
One thing I think I as the programmer really should have done was to actually flesh out why that force close screen happens. It’s actually part of the story and intended to signify that you’ve completed the scenario… but without some messaging or apparent effect after it happens, it just leaves people confused. It didn’t have to be that way. I could have diverted some effort away from things like making the textures all import at the best quality level, or fiddling around with dialogue during the encounter, or adding in the pickup items, and I could have used that time to just give the player a clue that “hey, you did it! But there’s a mystery afoot.”

Next steps?

To finish this story. The idea is too good not to follow through on, and it deserves more than what it’s got as of 6pm Monday evening.

Well, after having to pull back to the Jam just to complete my entry, I couldn’t be prouder of this game. It’s just as good as I expected it to be. I love it, and I hope you do, too. Postmortem to come.

Play Adaption

I have no right to call this game my own. This game is your game. It evolves into what you want it to become.

That is, assuming you want it to be one of four distinct and pre-chosen genres.

-Puzzlem00n

I’m finishing up my jam game, and I just need some quotes on religion and spirituality, especially in regard to science and evolution. Anybody have any favorites?

I’m more in need of quotes in support of religion and spirituality, so those are especially welcome!

This was a surprisingly stressless weekend. It’s so much easier if you work in a group

Ok, and we didn’t reach for the skies. We worked with melonJS, which sets the type of the game almost naturally to Jump’n’Run (at least if you follow the tutorial). But after all the game works pretty nice and we had much fun and that’s all what matters

Hope you guys had comparable experiences

Have a look at Jump’o’lution if you like:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16049

I’d planned to release first for Android, followed by the Unity web player, but I’m having difficulties getting Unity to recognize (or generate) a keystore, so I can’t publish an apk that Google Play will accept. I could still throw the apk on my site in the meantime though, for those who want to sideload.

Anyhow, this was a major case of overscope. We shot for the Moon… for Mars, even! We definitely made it somewhere into outer space, at least. You’ll see shortly.

Finally finished – we’re all exhausted – the kids already went to bed – we’ve just fished off the build and put our entry in.

It was a great time – we did much better than last time. I think it was the experience of doing it before as well as the change of tools to GameMaker Studio – this helped a ton.

I think next time we’ll get a copy for everyone and set up a team environment.

There are still lots of bugs and unfinished pieces, but we still feel good about it.

Please have a play and let us know what you think.

Thanks – it’s been a blast!

The zipped version

The Web version

I kept forgetting to turn on the time-lapse script but still got a good amount recorded check it out!

View my entry here

Tags: timelapse

The Game

Meant to be played with a friend!

P1 – A to jump

P2 – L to jump

Space bar to move between scenes

First to 640pts wins!

If you let a tiger go by, then he will appear faster on your opponent’s screen! Use for MAXIMUM STRATEGY!

I’ve just uploaded my “game”.
It’s more or less a level with enemies and a (shooting) player.
It’s not as I want it to be, but enough for an early alpha.
You can test it here:
http://www.seiby.de/games/mutants/mutants.jlnp

Please leave a comment if you want to know anything or got an improvement.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=4423

So, even if I can’t do the game as I want, it was a funny experience. It was the first time I really create a game, and I’m suprised I can make not too bad graphism.

Just in the nick of time. And to relax, Here’s a video of me being chased by my own enemy AI.

(Spoiler, they lose)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrhwzwGRzuE

In the final hour, having made many bad decisions over 3 days (including what idea to go forward with), this miserable pile of inside jokes is complete.

If you’ve ever wanted to play a Ludum Dare game that didn’t want to be a Ludum Dare game, or a Pokemon quiz that was made with the sole purpose of not being about Pokemon, then you’ve come to the right place.

Check it out.

‘Evolution Is A Boring Theme’ captured in screenshot form.

Now, it’s late, I’m so tired I can’t tell if the subject lines grammar is right and I’ve read it so many times in my head it’s starting to sound like someone is taunting me. Oh, hey, there’s a bit more General Chicken in the fridge…

The Evolution of Business.

Windows only.******

THE GAME CAN BE PLAYED HERE

You are a businessman.
You can upgrade your speed, armor and money multiplier.

Avoid the hippies and ghost hippies.
Everytime you get hit by one, you lose $25, 1 armor, 1 cashmultiplier
Win by getting to $10000.

Going to mention that this is my first LD ever.
First Jam for us.

Matt Miller – Programmer, Artist, Concept
Darren Yee – Artist, Concept

Finally done with my entry! Here it is, Bio Hierarchy!
It was hard, I’m not really satisfied with the game but with the help of my girlfriend I managed to finish it 😀

SOOO TIRED!

You can download it here: DOWNLOAD

That’s right, the moment the whole Internet has been waiting for for 72 hours has come: the moment that I, Pitzik4, submit my game! Just kidding. About the whole Internet caring about my game, I mean. I actually did submit. I find it to be a very fun game, and entering the Jam instead of the Compo gave me enough time to make a much better game. Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8883

Screenshot:

A screenshot of Untitled.

Done Easy shit

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8048

I’ve just finished uploading and doing all that associated jazz for Project: Maple, the jam project made by me (Max Loy) and Jonathon Cobb. Made at Orca Jam 2012 (the theme for which was… maple syrup), Project Maple depicts a crazed maple syrup monster attempting to escape the government facility from which it was spawned. As you explore the randomly generated dungeon other monsters will attack you, and you can breed with maple syrup vats to produce more viable offspring.

Overall, this (very silly) entry was huge fun to develop, and I’m looking forward to contributing next year.

I only had about 4 hours to start and finish a game, but I did it. I’m glad, because I was pretty bummed about missing out on such an awesome theme.

It’s pong between Darwin and Jesus- the winner finally decides the debate between science and religion!

Yes, it’s ridiculous, but maybe it says a little something about the conversation, I don’t know.

Play it if you feel like it! Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=rate&uid=5364

WHOO

This won’t say much now, except that I can’ log into the ludum dare sight and I’m hoping that making a post with mathemagically fix this >.<

After some intensive 72 hours, Meatify is ready.

Meatify is the story of Zacarias, a boy whose dream is to become a butcher. And here’s where you come in. You see, Zacarias is still a boy and cannot fend for himself, so you have to help him gettin to the end of the level, because… there’s bacon over there.

You control the level by adding or removing blocks, each with different properties, and as Zacarias evolves your power enhances, just kidding, your power actually diminishes, since not only Zacarias doesn’t need as much help, but also, we have to make the game harder as you go on.

The World around you  changes as Zacarias changes, getting more details and more refining, not only in visual but also in audio.

We managed to include a level editor, so you can create a level and maybe share with others, allowing you to pwn them and also to pwn our level making skills.

We had a blast making this game , taking part in this awesome event, and probably we’ll be here next time. We are happy with the result, though we know it is not the best however we would like you to try it out and tell us what you think of it, good and bad (hopefully good): OVER HERE

That’s for playing and have fun!

Here’s the timelapse of my entry, Meow for MUTATION! Also, having no time to test it during the compo, I managed to finish a post-compo version today, with a quite different mechanic – I think it makes the game a little more playable. If you want to rate it, be sure to take into consideration only the original, though!

Tags: post-compo, timelapse

Evophonia is game with music that evolves according to the player’s abilities.  Starting from the seed of a single note, the music evolves in shape, sound, and in key-triggers as the player successfully plays it.  Mistakes cause a relapse into previous iterations of the music, while success leads to an evolution into complexity.

I’ve been backpacking, so I didn’t make it to the compo this year.  Still, I made a genuine effort to make an evolution game, and, after reading up on some genetic algorithms I thought that a proper evolution game would use the player as the selection criterion!  And here we go.  It’s SUPER rough, but it kind of almost works!

Well,

 
It’s here : Human Fatality.
Sorry
The end is very rotten, we did’nt had enough time to set it right.
A bug on the end from doing the real end.
Now, the end is only an alert ()

We will have a post-mortem tomorrow.

We had some really great ideas! We came really close!

My team and I were unfortunately not able to bring our entry to a satisfactory level of completion, but you can see what we’ve got here: http://rusticgames.com/games/swarm

We plan on continuing to work on the game after the jam, and I’ll reply to this post with updated links should we get anything done in a reasonable timeframe.

WHY CANT I UPLOAD MY GAME

I pressed submit but it said i was’nt logged in when i was.

The enhanced Jam Version (v1.1) of GeneRogue is up !

Defeat various different enemy types, also roaming the surface world.

Epic boss battle at the End. (sort of)

Also lots of deco and other tweaking =)

Jam Version: (72h) WebPlayer (chrome recommended)  Win-Binary     (.love for mac and linux).  need Love2D engine for mac/linux.

Original Compo Version: (48h)   entry

Whew! It’s over. That was one hell of a jam. Evolution was a challenging theme to condense into a game in such short amount of time.

My game Next Generation was definitely an ambitious life simulator game for only myself to do.

Lessons learned: If you want to enter the compo, when you take your “break,” don’t take it at 8 pm and play the Game of Thrones board game till 6 am the next day. And don’t bet drinks while you play either. Just don’t do it.

But I had so much fun! This idea was actually planned to get scrapped. But with all the research I was doing on the biology of reproduction, hereditary traits, and evolution I couldn’t help but have the urge to create it! I don’t think I’ve every learned so much and it took a game jam to do that.

In traditional at home game jam fashion, my diet consisted  of only burritos, pizza, hotpockets, and beer.

I’ll be updating the game all tonight and after.
Anyway, Next Generation needs tons of feedback. What are you confused about? Where did you quit? Where did you get stuck? How did it crash? What did you like? What do you want more of? All that jazz.

This community is amazing. The IRC chat was wonderful, polite, and funny. I love you guys.

Hodor!

-George Katsaros
http://www.georgekatsaros.com/
@FedRive

Whew 72 hours are really short 😀

The game is finished and I am actually proud of it.  I hope at least one of you will enjoy the game as much as I enjoyed making it ^^

That’s it for today, I’ll try to write a post mortem someday, timelapses will be included also 😉

I finally let go of my “left and right arrow keys only” purity and adding aiming up and down with the up and down arrow keys. 😛 It’s fun! I think for this game, optional complexity is totally fine. You don’t have to shoot up or down if you don’t want to…

Wow!  I am so finished with this game!

I think it came out alright.  Fun to play, I am told.  Anyway, here’s the link to it if you want to give it a shot!

Signed,

Tags: completed, jam

Sun God: Jam Version

So, just in time to submit it for the Jam, I’ve made an updated version of Sun God – now with enemies!

So the 48-hour compo gets the pacifist, relaxing Sun God game and the Jam gets the challenging, violent version. You decide which is better!

Face the challenges of evolution in this action packed side scroller!!!

Adapt to the environment by devouring the right types of food!
Hunt for meat or gather fruit? Bigger isn’t always better…

-5 different enemies!
-6 different evolutionary states!
-Exciting boss fight!
-Easy to learn, hard to master gameplay!

Have fun, and see you next time!

Yes! I finished nothing!! For neither compo or the jam.

However, I have an old mobile phone that only accepts java apps, so today I started implementing a game to play on it. I wanted to see how far I’d get in the time limit of the last Jam day. Here’s what I got:

Things To Notice:

– A totally legitimate Norse Viking Name Generator (Thor Thorsson!)
– Different potions with randomized effects
– Simplistic combat (really simplistic)
– Explosions, oil barrels and fire!
– Dynamically generated walls

All in all, this LD wasn’t a total disappointment from my part, I guess!

Well, the job is done just few minutes before the deadline 😛
My entry is here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=12512

Some bugs/errors/missing elements I have to update later:

• the scoring system is broken
• the music don’t loop, and the SFX are non-existent.
• the collision system.

Some screenshots:

Tags: LD 24 Jam

I finally posted Egocell ! It was hard to do, and I faced a lot of nasty bugs, but I did it ! You can check out the description Here

I had to leave my PC for the sunday afternoon, and until then i got really late.

The game finally has 4 big levels and a few mobs.
I will post a decent post mortem later, and a timelapse.

Tags: finished, game

I didn’t understand the rules of the Compo/Jam at first and continued making my game after submitting to the compo, i.e. I thought I could submit it to both compo and jam. Turns out I can’t, so I now have a piece of content that will go into an update once the whole thing is over. You, however, can play it right now. Link to the “jam entry” is right on top of the description. Compo entry can be played the usual way

PLAY DISSOLUTION

I am really frustrated right now, so you might as well show some love and toss me a few ratings

Tags: dissolution, rules

We did it! Ran into a nasty bug with the release build just before submission hour, but thankfully Jade was able to straighten it out in time.
Entry page is here!

This is our second LD and our second submission, so we’re two-for-two right now.

Dragonom is a tile-based game about nurturing a baby dragon. Your character must explore the floating islands to collect food for him.

Enemies like bats will hurt you, so hit them with your magic!

Please play and let us know what you thought.
We’re going to be stress-testing everything some more, and will do a postmortem post as soon as we’ve had some rest.

Well, it’s that time and officially we have failed.

We built the entire game from scratch, so too much time got eaten up writing collision and sprite code, meaning the last few hours have been a mad scramble to put all the visuals into something playable.

We managed to get a bare bones version of the first level working here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-Xy-sCsNttpS3prSm8xZk9aWnM (Mac) and the Windows version will be out soon.

Originally the idea was that the number of enemies make the game unreasonably tough and that defeat forces you to adapt – increased stats and slow, physical evolution to overcome enemies.  The ultimate challenge being to complete the game without dying and remain human, or to evolve for greater benefits and ease.  A lot of stuff, such as enhanced attacks, particle effects, sound and health drops are missing but you can get a feel for the style of the game at the very least.

After a bit of a rest, we will try to finish the game and update you when the final version is available, as we think the concept is fun and merits a bit more work.

Next time…. we’ll try not to build from the ground up.

I bet this was because the theme was really hard.

Anyone want to share stories about difficulties they had with the Dare this time, or the theme?

For my part, I scoped WAY too huge. I spent most of the 2nd and third days scratching out different ideas for my game that I realized I had absolutely no time to do.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2012 at 11:51 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.

Its Finished! Our Game is finished!!!

Its a sort of sandbox game, where you need to explore the combinations of creatures and terrains to earn a lot of funny achievements!

Hope you guys enjoy it!!!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3438

::Recursive Frog presents::

Peer back into your own past and try to stop the deevoloution of your relationship with Em, via an app that was mysteriously uploaded to your smartphone by an unknown person.

Yo Dawg, I heard you like Android, so I put a mobile game in your mobile game so you can play while you play

I’ve personally tested this out on my Nexus 7 and on my Asus Transformer, and while there are at times a couple of UI layout quirks, the act of using a smartphone to view into another world where your character is also using a smartphone to view into another world just blows your mind. Unfortunately, the Gyro controls on my Droid 3 were not nearly so nice.

There is also a Unity web player version available for those of you who can’t play the Android version for whatever reason.

Pfiou…

After some killing debugging and balancing, I just hope people will be able to play correctly.
So much satisfaction for my first LD !

I planned to submit to the Compo, but i ran out of time yesterday. That’s a good thing they added 24h with this Jam, I could polish the game a little and finally add some minor sounds…

Pursuit of True Self

The Game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15238

Well its the end of the Jam and this is where we are.  Would have loved to put in more abilities and more features, like traps, but there is only so much time.  Our team worked together very well, mostly because we are friends but also work together professionally.

Stay tuned to the game if you like it.  We are going to be adding more polish and features in the coming weeks.  Hopefully this game turns into something really great that we can then sell for $$$ and retire to the French Riviera.

-Team Quality Assurance
Ryan Burns, Joaquin Del Canto, Billy Do, Andrew St Clair

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=4192

Jimun and I did it! It’s up!

EVO – a Love2D based game. (now in Windows!)

We’re finished!

Will post a post mordem later!

~ScreamRawr & Jif

My first LD48, and it was fun. Here is a shot of the title screen:

Wow that is a lot taller than I thought it would be…. So anyways, here is a quick recap.

1. Come up with insanely overcomplicated idea as usual
2. Get half way through saturday coding like an insane person
3. Try and explain the game to someone after having zero human interaction for over 16 hours
4. Look at the lack of understanding and interest coupled with dismay on their face
5. Go back to the drawing board, come out with something 100x simpler

What went right:

The tools/libraries I chose are solid gold, and I stand by the tools and give praise to their makers:

• FlashDevelop is top notch
• FlashPunk is really impressive (used my lib on top: AuxiPunk)
• Aseprite is so nice an just works
• BFXR maked sounds zo fesht it ferked up my keyz
• IceCream inside ableton for a quick song no snags

What went wrong

Started with overly complex idea involving balancing the hosts health via natural selection and random mutations.

I always do this.

I can’t think of simple mechanics.

I always come up with something that looks like Wiley Coyote planned out on a cave wall.

Also I ate too much candy.

Luckily I found a way to simplify the game play and actually I think the game came out overall very fun

Here is a screen of the actual gameplay:

And finally click here if you wanna give it a spin.

Thanks for reading, and for letting me part of something so awesome as LD. It was a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to start playing all the games!

Well now that the jam has been over for 72 minutes, it’s probably a good time for me to write my first blog post for the event.

My team and I created an arcade game called Beast Feast. It’s hip, happening, and all around groovy. It’s got retro pixel art, jamming chiptunes, and is very, very fun. You blow up monsters with egg bombs and eat the meat that they drop to evolve. Reach 50 on your food counter to win! Just don’t get caught up in your own bomb blast and don’t run into enemies or else you’ll lose 5 food! Try to beat the game in the lowest time possible and HAVE FUN!!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7580

Screenshot:

Me and the rest of  Live Evil, have finished our Jam entry Praegressus! It’s a top down shooter/rpg with a pretty big emphasis on story. For this entry we really focused more on game play and story than on graphics. We had a lot of fun this LD and can’t wait to do it again in December.

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3824

First of all please join me on my stream at 6 pm PST (-8 GMT) on 8/28/2012 on Tuesday because

I WILL PLAY YOUR LD24 GAME just as I did during LD 23 relax stream.

Postmortem: Well, the team at NRGSoft joked how evolution was entered often but never chosen as a LD theme. We really wondered if 1,000 kittens would be picked, but then evolution was picked and we were shocked.  For a while nothing popped up, until an inside joke turned into the game.  Make a game about a hot dog, and then the journey began.

What went right:

• Decent funny sprites
• New perspective on drawing sprites in general
• I actually drew the title screen really fast

What went wrong:

• No sounds or music, no time to add all of it in despite making them
• Fell asleep in my chair end of day 2-3=unhealthy
• No cookies

Do my eyes deceive me, or did we get the EXACT SAME NUMBER OF GAMES THAT WE DID LAST TIME??

Edit: I guess the LD guys let 3 poor souls submit their games after they missed the deadline by a few minutes…cause even though it was 1402 after the Jam ended, there are now 1405

This is the Game Fruitmon, create to luddum dare N#24 GameJam.

Enjoy!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15700

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_wmVCx3UQ8&feature=youtu.be