By popular demand (and burning need for my game to be playable on platforms other than Windows!) Dr. X’s Rainbow Arena now supports keyboard only gameplay! No longer are you bound by the length of your 360 controller’s cord, or lack thereof, when you wish to partake in the development of the greatest nano-virus the world has ever seen! ADVANCE!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15756

– The Chemist

Fixed a few issues with Karyote:

Enhancement 1:

The disappearing food bug was the main thing. After playing for a few minutes, it seemed like everything disappeared. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Now you can play a lot longer. This is closer to the way it was meant to be all along.

Enhancement 2:

[mild spoiler alert]: fully implemented the mote behavior.  I don’t want to give it away, too much, but they now do something.  OK, I’ll tell you, when you mutate, they mutate also, into one of the other food types that are present in the game.

Enhancement 3:

Slightly improved the title screen by adding a larger title font. The old title text is now kindof a subtitle, I guess. I think it looks a lot nicer. Also added a graphic to the title screen which gives the controls, so you know how to play without reading the entry page. And added a timer to the Game Over to return to the title screen if you don’t start a new game after a few seconds.

Enhancement 4:

• Added grid lines to the background, to aid in conveying the sense of motion.  Mainly this helps when you’re in a sparse area or if you mutated into a slower organism.
• Fixed the mutation math so the player’s speed and turn_speed cannot be 0.

Enhancement 5:

• Added visual effects to the player.  As you get closer to mutation, your appearance becomes more unstable.
• New enemy behavior is now modified when you mutate.
• Added a new food type, Ziggy.

Enhancement 6:

• Added visual effects to the enemies.  There are now lots of colorful particle effects when enemies spawn, or you eat them, and during mutation.
• Dashboard life and food numbers have been replaced with bars.

Enhancement 7:

• Changed up the visual effects for the player a bit, due to limitation of HTML5 being unable to handle Game Maker’s additive color blending.
• Dashboard life and food bars have been replaced by hearts and dots.
• Mutation math has been tweaked to be a little bit less wild.
• Added some controls to aid debugging:
  • Press “c” to toggle the dashboard’s display of the count of instances in the game.
  • Press “d” to toggle the dashboard’s display of your closest enemy.  This also shows the target for the “Homey” enemies.
  • Press “z” to self-destruct.
  • Press “r” to restart the game (this has been present all along, not just when the game is over).

Enhancement 8:

• Added new food type, Whirly.
• Added level progression.
• Finally finally fixed the Homey chases the top left corner bug.  Turns out he would target the dashboard display, lol.

Enhancement 9:

• New soundtrack by Ian Faleer

Enhancement 10:

• Finally, the last feature for the game is complete!  Your sprite changes when you mutate.  New sprites are procedurally generated based on your new ability stats.
• When you mutate, your former forms become available to the game as enemy AI.
• HTML5 version has some problems with generating the procedurally generated sprites, resulting in oversized collision mask and unfair collisions, so play the Windows version to get the full experience.

Enhancement 11:

1. Player’s sprite mutation
2. Old player forms return as new enemy types

Play it!

Give it a try now:

Karyote by Chris Sanyk (enhanced) (HTML5)

Karyote by Chris Sanyk (enhanced) (Windows)

The Windows build has nicer particle effects due to the way colors are rendered by the Game Maker runner in HTML5.

Tags: bugfix, enhancement, Karyote

Unfortunately I got carried away again and left the game play (the most important part, right?) for the final moments and had little time to work on it. But hey! At least my game is prettier than my last one. =)

I learnt a lot of technical stuff but also subjective stuff like how to use your time better. Next time I’ll try to finish my entry with hours to spare so I don’t have these final stressful moments. I also want to have a more polished game with sound effects and music, both which I couldn’t manage to put into this one.

You can play and rate my game here or read a full report post on my personal blog if you like. =)

Let’s rate all these games now!

Hi everybody, here’s the timelapse I took while making my compo entry ‘Lucid’.

You can play the game here if you haven’t already.

In Gone With the Wind, O’Hara lives in the last stage of human society evolution and the consequent post-apocalyptic environment, due to it’s actions. His home was lost in the disaster and alone, he has to conquer a path filled with obstacles, struggling against time and the wind that threatens to do away with what’s left of his life.

Play and Post your Score! =D

Tags: 2D, actionscript

Having a great time looking at this years games, it’s astonishing that there are over 1400 games available for people to play. That’s over double the entire Sega Master System title releases during the lifetime of the console.

If you participated in the Jam, CONGRATULATIONS Your games are awesome and now I’m off to vote!

…and…you can play my game HERE

Eplilogue–The Book of Lives

We made a game called Living Tales, where you write the book of evoloution. It’s a sandbox-like game where you add objects by writing their names; and you see them appear and move around and interact on one page while the story of them is written on the other page.

The Ludum Dare version: Living Tales on Ludum Dare

The Kongregate version: Living Tales on Kongregate

What went right:

I’m proud of the work i did and i feel like i worked hard and did my best

We had fun!

I enjoyed collaborating with kkednekadnez. It was my first collaboration and it was pretty fun

I was able to upload to Kongregate
While i loathe Stencyl, using it DOES mean we could enter the Kongregate contest…and i got all my kongregate freinds to play it!

What went wrong:

Time zones
a 9-hour time difference can be a real pain in the ass when trying to collaborate with someone to make a game…

Stencyl
OMG dont get me started on Stencyl…it wouldnt let us share the file, it made the game lag, it made weird bugs…

Ludum Dare doesn’t allow collaboration credit…
…which means i don’t get to rate any games

Not enough time to add all the features we wanted
We were going to have giant mushrooms, dominating slug predators, and a giant pacman that ate everything, and more interactions among the objects that existed

We’re planning to make a post-compo version with a few more features

Toodles!

Tags: Book, kkednekadez, LD #24, living tales, madgnomegamer, postmortem

Hey everyone, well I finished up my LD48 entry and really want to make some pretty competition breaking changes (music and sound effects that is not my own mostly)  Would it be okay to include another build of the game within the zip clearly labeled “post competition version” or some such?  I don’t want to break the rules of the competition, but I want to do a few updates and bug fixes if possible also!  Feel free to check out the game too, I hope you guys have as much fun playing it as I did making it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10234

Cheers!

My entry is done. Give it a go! =)

Mad Scientist Monster Maker

– It’s a tile based smash-em-up that takes inspiration from Rampage, Mail Order Monsters, and The Creature that Ate Sheboygan.

– I wasn’t sure I was going to participate this time, and didn’t actually join until Saturday. Since the design ended up being rather complicated, I ended up in the Jam, which is fine, since I got to take it easy for a while…

– … Until the frantic finish, of course. I didn’t have time to add helicopters or custom buildings like I had planned, but I’m pretty happy with it.

– This is my second game using Snax, which is my custom mini-language for game development. If you look at the source code, and are interested in trying it yourself, let me know.

First of all, for all who played my game, thank you. And for those who also commented… you are the best! Really, thanks a lot! I’ll make something great from this game, I promise!

If you still haven’t, why not give it a try?

The boss I’m afraid no one will see… >_<

After one day of resting (and some 20 games played xD) I’m felling like writing a post-mortem about my LD entry: EVO – X.

I must say that this was by far my best compo so far (also, my third one). In the first one, I slacked off a lot… The result was a really buggy “game”.

Then, for my second one, I tossed my original project away and started a new one with less than 10 hours to end compo. Needless to say, the game was far from complete (and the hurry to finish it made me forget to include the theme… xD).

This time was diferent! I pretty much spent all my weekend working on my game. I’m really happy with some of the results, but I know that if I had manage my time better I would have made a better game…

What went right:

• Idea: This time I was able to come up with a fun idea from the start of the compo. It was also an idea I was pleased with.
• Graphics: I was amazed with what I could do! I’ve been drawing a lot of sprites in pixel-art lately, but none with animation. Also, one day before the compo I tried to make some tiles… which came in hand when I had to do a dirty and a grass tilemap.
• Audio: Somehow, I was able to compose all 3 songs in less than 2 hours. The menu and stage ones were really quickly done… The boss battle song took a lot longer, comparatively…

What went wrong:

• Gameplay: Ok, I had a nice initial idea, now I should make it into a great game! Only I didn’t… more like, I couldn’t… During the development, lots of design decisions made sense for me, but now I see (was shown, actually) that it wasn’t that way… One example?  Well… turns out throwing the player into a hole filled with enemies (innocently, so he can get enough exp to evolve… lol) without even letting him understand how battle works wasn’t such a great idea… xD
  
• Scope: Or “knowing what to cut out before it’s to late and you doesn’t have something half complete”. That sums it up. xD
• Graphics: What I did is nice… but there is so much that must be added… There’s no “contour” for the tilemap, the player doesn’t change form as it evolve, there’s no background, I forgot the goddamn particles, some of the character’s animation are weird (I swear that there is a “jump” frame… )… >_<
• Compiler: I made the following declaration:
  [stextbox id=”grey”]   private var mobs:FlxGroup;[/stextbox]
  and then, used it this way:
  [stextbox id=”grey”]   (mobs as FlxGroup).add(baddies);[/stextbox]
  Why did I have to cast something to it’s own class? And if I didn’t do that, an error would be raised by the compiler. @_@
• Audio: Though I liked the songs, I only noticed earlier today that I forgot completely about sfx (and I was going to use sfxr, so it wans’t going to be hard)…
• Checkpoints: I know that the game is quite frickin’ hard, but I had implemented some nice checkpoints, where you would respawn with all your stats saved from when you passed it and full life… But the flash kept crashing for no aparent reason whenever I tried to use it… It went as far as to make a variable that I assigned null (which was of FlxSprite type) store a FlxPoint… HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?? O_O I really need to fix some stuff…

So, yeah… it isn’t a complete game, nor is it good… but I’ve been improving! I’ll make something great, eventually!!

Thanks for reading. =D

Tags: ld24, postmortem

Created with Unity3D, a web player and exe version are available.

Web Build posted at the end of the Jam:

http://www.generhaters.com/Ludum24/Final_120827_01.html

An EXE version:

http://www.generhaters.com/Ludum24/TheyAreComing_Exe_120827_01.zip

Posting at the end of the Jam:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14890

Now available here! 

All in all, a rousing success!

Well… there’s some graphical bugs.  And… some non-graphical bugs.  And it implements about 60% of what we wanted.  And each member of our team spent at least a full day either short of sleep, reading silly things on the internet, coding things that will never be used, or otherwise being unproductive.  So taking all that into account, a rousing success!  How to summarize my thoughts?

Pro’s: I, at least, find the basic gameplay quite fun (and it is basic).  The art is beautiful in a neon sort of way (I loved the black-velvet-painting level from Psychonauts, too).  And incomplete and buggy as it is, it actually works.

Con’s: Now that I look at the finished product, it looks like we were HIGH AS KITES when designing this.  Not the case!  We had no drugs, only sushi!  Also, it’s begging for a soundtrack but we have no composer, and it turns out our original plan to crib Creative Commons music is against the rules.  And, while working, it is incomplete and buggy.  It’s kind of easy to get lost in all the shiny abstract art and lose track of what’s going on.

Theme: I personally found the theme somewhat uninspiring, but I actually quite like what we came up with. I couldn’t think of anything really interesting to do with Evolution.  We came up with a few ideas and tended to like the ones that involved the environment responding to your actions, so we went with the simplest scheme we had for that.

Tools: This was my first non-trivial project working with Unity3D, and while it has some weird bits and issues, it is all in all a great force multiplier.  Much better than working with pure SDL and OpenGL, or even Love2D.  Making it play nice with our source control system was a little hairy; we need to work on making that better.  C# is clunky but still probably the best more-or-less-system-level programming language there is (Go might be nicer, but is immature yet and has some bits I don’t like).  Alas this also means that we can’t make a real Linux release (though it might work okay under Wine), at least until Unity version 4 comes out and includes Linux support…  *drool*

Teamwork: This was actually fairly challenging, as it was our first time seriously all working together on a small project. I was unfortunately unable to participate in the last day due to having to teach a petrology lab, but David manfully shouldered the burden of two and pulled through admirably.  Doing a Jam actually might be harder than doing the normal LD competition.  More time means more time to burn out, and working with others means that you have to rely on other people more and coordinate with others.  With one person and 48 hours you just come up with something and then bum-rush your way through it as hard as you can.  With two programmers we had to figure out how we could each work on separate parts in a reasonable fashion, then put them together once we had something; I mostly did engine and AI code, while David mostly did UI and graphics code.  Paul doing art worked well once we all got a handle on what was possible and what was not and sort of got on the same page in terms of style.  When not doing art Paul did high-level game design which was actually very useful; I didn’t need to stop coding and think about game design decisions very much because I could just look at the design doc.  (Though sometimes it held me back because I’d ask Paul for a design decision and he’d say “I dunno man, whatever you think is good”, so you still have to be able to be flexible.)

So, once again, a rousing success.  We will definitely be cleaning up this game and turning it into something more complete, once we have recovered.

Tags: 2D, jam, postmortem, unity

Hi! I just uploaded the timelapse and playthrough videos! Later I’do the postmortem! Visit the game page!

I finish the game 2 minutes before deadline.

I am tired, tomorrow I will… what? where am I?

[HERE]

Tags: Love, rain, sad, sadness, unity, unity3d

Hey!

So here is Boxy the Boxcat in Evolution Escapades

Features!

• Cats
• Lasers
• Boxkittens
• Nuclear Waste
• And much more!

Play | LD-Entry

-Matthew

Tags: 3dsmax, kittens, max, unity, unity3d

The idea :

A vertical SHMUP with procedurally-generated enemies undergoing natural selection.

What went right?

• Planning : I had a solid idea of where I wanted to go with the game from the start – I followed through with that idea to the end, only changing the cosmetics of it.
• Taking Risks : I’d never created a shmup, or implemented a genetic algorithm of any kind before. I didn’t fall back to my comfort zone when things got tough – I stuck with it and learned a lot in the process.
• Implementation : I worked out what kinds of classes would be necessary for the game at the beginning, and implemented/tested all of them before starting. This ground up approach helped me maintain a grasp on the scope.

What went wrong?

• Organization : It seems the deadline got the best of me, as towards the end I started throwing quick hacks into wherever I could to get things working. This resulted in a chaotic mess of unreadable code – code which probably could have saved me time working with if it had been more cleanly organized.
• Playtesting : I got so caught up in finishing the game that I forgot the most important part – making sure it’s fun. I played the game, but only for the sake of debugging – not in the mindset of a player. This resulted in very unbalanced gameplay, and a poorly-executed difficulty curve.

Also, I forgot about autotracker. Definitely would have helped, as I had “musicians-block” all weekend.

If you’re interested, you can play my game Modula here.

What Went Right

• Got all planned features in
• Better way(than last LD) to understand game
• Graphics(In my opinion)

What Went Wrong

• Sound(forgot about it, didn’t get that ‘ca-ching! sound in’. Resulted in BFXR)
• Music(non existent)
• Victory/Fail(The game still played after you won and you could Win/Lose again)
• Sleep(I slept in till 12pm(6 hours before deadline), without the graphics, menu, and help done. got it in 20 minutes before.)

Overall I have learned a lot, as I hope everybody else has to. I hope I’ll be available for the next one, and if not, I can alwasy do the Mini’s. Now, off to rating! Also check out my game HERE if you want.

Tags: compo, final, html5, journal, post-mortem, postmortem

I’ve uploaded the Timelapse for Day 1, you can view it here

Also, I’m happy to have my game being featured on several websites that I enjoy reading :

• On IndieGames.com
• On BoingBoing.net
• On FreeIndieGam.es

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 4:00 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

And now that I am back from the dreamworld, I can properly announce that we finished our Jam entry, Aqualution

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5234

Have fun

Tags: evolution, underwater

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 4:52 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Plan M is now out and, as far as I know, completable. So that’s good.

Give it a play here!

What went Right

• The art is a continuation of the subAtomic style, and I think we’ve pulled it off pretty well in Plan M. My skills with Paint.NET have increased dramatically since subAtomic (thanks in large part to using it for other games in the meantime), and it shows in the increase in visual fidelity. On the other hand, you might hate gradients.
• The font is fantastic, isn’t it? I just wish there was a dedicated ‘outline’ version. It’s ‘Burvetica NC’ by Jayvee D. Enaguas.
• The humour is well and truly in-place. I didn’t have as much time to spend on dialogue as I had during subAtomic’s development, but I think the characters shine through their speech.
• Scale. I mean, bloody hell. Plan M is at least twice the size of subAtomic, and twice as long to boot. That’s something to be proud of.
• Speed of development. Plan M was coded entirely on day three of the jam. That’s got to be some sort of record for speed-adventure-game-scripting.
• Features to make playing the game easier. subAtomic didn’t have saving or loading. Plan M has BOTH!

What didn’t go so right

• Bugs. Ugh. I found 3 different game-breaking (as in ‘oh I can’t finish the game now’) bugs in submission hour. Every time I fixed one, another one appeared. If anything, it was because it was 2am and I was causing more problems by trying to fix things. As far as I know, it’s all now completely playable as intended, but I feel bad for anyone who tried to play it between last night and this morning. I hope they try again with the updated version.
  I also uploaded debug versions a couple of times and had to quickly replace them. If you’ve ever used AGS, you know that giving a debug version out to the public is not a good idea.
• Audio is non-existent. To be fair, subAtomic didn’t exactly excel in this area – it had one or two bleepy-bloopy sound effects, and some really rubbish music. Plan M, however, has neither of these things; we simply didn’t have time. They’ll be in for the post-compo version, though – so keep an eye (ear?) out for that.
• Scale. Okay, this is a good point and a bad point. There were a lot of things that we wanted to be in the game, and they had to be cut out if we were ever going to finish. A lot of this is to do with developing the character of Dr. M, who is practically a side-character in the Jam release. Again, this will be rectified in the post-compo edition.
  Oh, and the scale made it a complete nightmare to test for bugs.
• Gameplay variety is lacking, in my opinion. This may well be just because I’ve spent so long working on it, so I tend to overlook 99% of the gameplay. There’s a dialogue puzzle (subAtomic had several), but most of the game is an item fetch-quest. I’m not sure I like that. If I had time, I would’ve added some neat minigames, but them’s the breaks when it comes to Ludum Dare. If you want minigames, go check out my upcoming commercial point & click game Astroloco. It’s gonna be awesome. [/shameless plug]

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or (heaven forbid) bug reports, you can reach me in the comments below, or on Twitter (@GameDevIdeas).

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have 1404 other games to play.

Hello, I’m Isabelle, and this is the second time I participate in the Ludum Dare !

I really enjoyed LD23 (maybe you remember my game Tinysasters), and I wanted to do it again.

Lucas’s Quest Backwards was supposed to be a compo entry (like Tinysasters). I worked alone on it during the two first days, but then, about 5 hours before the deadline I realised that I couldn’t make it on time, the project was too big.

So I decided to go for the Jam instead and I asked Ygwee to help me with the level design. He designed the 4 levels of the game and I really like what he did ! I used the 3rd day to finish the graphics and add some sounds. Like a compo entry, all assets were done during the Ludum Dare.

Now about the game…

Lucas’s Quest Backwards is a platformer with many story inserts. The game is about a guy from a distant future who doesn’t like what humans have become and wishes he could go back in time to live with his ancestors. Trying to be more like them, he takes several steps backwards in mankind’s evolution.

But there’s a twist…

There are 2 endings to discover.

This game includes kittens. They actually play an important part in the story…

Now time for some screens !

I’ll probably write a postmortem in the next few days.

I hope you’ll enjoy the game. Looking forward to playing yours

 -> Play Lucas’s Quest Backwards <-

Hi there!

We have finished! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16484

The game is not finished because we didn’t have time to include all the features we planned. We will finish the game as soon as possible and also the game we developed on the previous edition.

In this Ludum Dare we learnt a lot and we have created our team :). We are very proud of our games and we want to participate on the upcoming editions.

Please, wait for the post-mortem and we will talk later ;).

See ya!.

Ok! The game has been finished… I wrote a postmortem review… And… What need now?… Mmm… Oh! Yes! The timelapse!

Click them:

Tags: timelapse

The first casualty of Ludum Dare. I left you all alone…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 6:12 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Doing the Jam in Ludum Dare 24 turned out to be an experiment of sorts. A proof of concept. We wanted to see if we could make a game, but also involve anyone in the Minecraft community we run at indiesquish.com. We’d gather all the troops and set them upon some empty worlds to build sets for use in the game. They’d have a custom texture pack that eliminated all the textures, leaving just coloured cubes, looking very similar to the final output after rendering the scenes in Blender.

All this turned out exactly as planned. They showed up, they planned and built a grand assortment of buildings, NPCs, monsters and UI elements.

The theme was “evolution”, which I naturally assumed would result in loads of high concept stuff from other devs that I would not be able to do. The engine I used is intended for 2D point & click adventure games, so we had to do something that stuck to those mechanics. The plan was to build the “evolution” part into the plot, and make a simple RPG with Japanese style turn-based combat.  Thus Lepton’s Quest was born.

Sadly, as the end of the 72 hours approached, we started leaving out more and more of the planned features, with the aim of at least shipping something by the end of it. And we did. Not great, but as a proof of concept I think it worked well.

What went well

1. The artwork. A bucketload of players showed up to help with the building, while our best builder  Nidhux coordinated most of it. We’ll post some videos from the livestream at some point.

2. Livestreaming everything. We had a livestream on twitch that showed the building and development work. It helped builders visualise their construction against the rendered output, and generally kept everyone motivated.

3. Community. We hadn’t given the sound/music any thought beforehand, and had several people volunteering to do music and sounds. Kas/Kong also hopped in on day 3 to create the lovely into and outro.

What was left out 

1. Combat system. It was to be a simple turn-based system. You have two attacks and one “drink potion” action. You get to pick one per turn. First is a basic damage attack with a chance to miss. The second is a low-damage attack with a chance to stun.

2. Monster encounters. The community built some awesome monsters, and in the spirit of the  “evolution” theme made variants on each type of creature. It would also feature random livestock around the village which would become mutated monstrosities.

3. NPC animations. This was never going to be too complicated, just enough to make them less static.

3. An underground aquaduct system. Down the well at the end would have taken you to an aquaduct system. You’d have had to defeat a boss monster (two headed crocodile) before being able to free the villagers.

4. Some sound engineering. The levels are way off… soft this, loud that.

5. Flavour. The plan was to add more flavour-dialogue to NPCs and add things for Lepton to look at and comment on.

6. Some added plot exposition. There was actually more plot to it, but we skipped some parts.

Tags: postmortem

What went right:

–Programming: Even if the game is a little buggy, it was my first C++ game, and I am amazed by the fact that I really finished the engine. It has a lot of unused or incomplete features, because of a lack if time.

-Beginning: I got the idea in the first half hour of the ld. Then I directly started programming. The first day was really productive, I designed the project’s architecture, implemented the level loading system, the player…

What went wrong:

–Audio: I totally forgot about audio. I added a few sounds in the end, but did not have enough time to create a soundtrack.

–Level design: My choice of making 16*16 sprites resulted in 400*100 tiles per level. Making four levels took me 2 hours. For the next LD, I will make a content generator.

-Bugs: I had a LOT of f***** bugs, mainly in the third day, maybe because of the stress. My compiler really made me have a bad time. I lost a lot of time in fixing some obscure file loading or allocation errors…

-Spriting: I have never been good in graphisms. Making 4 programmer-art mobs took me half a day in total.

-Time: I was absent on sunday afternoon.

Conclusion:

Pfew, I had a lot of problems during this first LD, but I also acquired a lot of experience that will be usefull for the next one ! Ludum Dare is a great experience !

Tags: Mortem, Post, post-mortem, postmortem

Here is the timelapse of the making of Egocell. Enjoy !

watch?v=kmLIPEU77E0&feature=youtu.be

Tags: Lapse, Timelapse Time

What an odissey. For the 24th edition of the Ludum Dare, with the given theme Evolution, I decided to try developing a conversational adventure, wich I thought will suppose less work than other type of genres… ERROR. In a more typical game, with its platforms, monsters and other details, one developed the concept and gameplay, It’s “just” (not meaning easy)  about expanding that world, designing new levels and making the game experiencie wider with elements wich had already been well defined. On last LD, with much less experiencie in game gev, I built Deconstructorium and finished lots of hours before the compo time limit. Moreover, counting that most engines come very well prepared for the platforming genre.

Ages of Irving is a Torture/Interrogating Simulator game with a short story at the background. Believing that the conversational genre won’t steal me so much time, I allowed myself the luxury of designing an art and context rich and well defined. In the end, I not simply failed to finish within 48 hours, but submitted my entry on the very last second of the 72 hours Jam mode, and with just the half of the content I planned.

Creating a deep conversation system, with enough possibilites, actions and reactions from a lot of different characters, generates a huge amount of variables. “This will be just a matter of writting”, I said. I present you the “profile” of just one character so you can make and a idea of the volume of the game. Epic fail on me.

http://pastebin.com/tWLdwNrg

I designed 20 characters. 5 for each phase of Irving’s life, which would have guaranteed a richer gameplay and more liberty as for the ratio of killing/confesing targets (In addition to more context for the story). It was planned that solving 2 of 5 cases you could advance in the game. Now, with just 2 o 3 per level you just need one of them.

The music is also missing this time. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to finish a compo with sound 😛

We plan to work on a more polished version, including all the things that were left over and publish it on clay.io.

You may play this Ludum Dare version here

(On Firefox 14+ tooks a looong time to load, on Chrome runs smoother)

Tags: Conversational, html5, impactjs

Congrats everyone on making a seriously fun selection of games – I’m hoping some of them will run okay under Wine so I can get to more of them, otherwise one of my windows-yielding friends may discover me in their office at 4am giggling at the screen.

Had a crack at syncing my local repository to github.  A few scary moments, but it seems to be there and working – though in my local repo I tend to store everything, so I had to delete a lot of pointless binary files before uploading – which may or may not have trashed some of the more recent changes – but everything looks to be fine. You can grab it HERE

Not much in the way of comments or organisation as I was only partially conscious for the last few hours of hot-seat coding.  But I’ll go in there over the next couple of days and clean it up when I’m giving my gaming fingers a rest from the remaining 1300-ish games I’ve yet to try!

oh ps. there’s also a Mac build now on the game page

Tags: compo, flash, flashpunk, ld24, ld48, open source, source, sourcecode

Hi everyone

That LD24 was my first LD, and also my first attempt at making a game. It didn’t go that bad since I successfully shipped an entry, a platformer named Breeding Cubes (spoiler : it involve cube reproduction !).

You can play it on my website (need the Unity3D WebPlayer plugin, but you already have it don’t you ?), download the source and rate it.

Theme

I headed for a straightforward interpretation of the theme. Your character has some abilities. You can evolve your playable character (new abilities or better ones) by finding another non playable character and breed with him (her). The new character resulting of this union possess the best abilities of its parents and can now overcome obstacles and progress through the level.

TimeLine

• Compo began Saturday at 3am.
• Woke up at 7am and started brainstorming on the theme while breakfasting
• The first day I worked 11h and implemented most of the features
• I slept from midnight to 8am on Sunday
• The second day I worked only 9.5h including 4 on level building and finally submitted my entry around midnight
• Compo ended Monday at 3am

How did it goes

Since I had no prior experience, I didn’t even really knew where to begin. And even if I did play around Unity before, it took me ages to implement basic stuffs. But in the ends, I successfully implemented almost everything I had planned without coming across major issues.

In total I worked only 20,5 hours on the game. That tells two things :

Unity is really a great tool to work with in very short period of time. I can’t wait to have experience to work faster and see what I can come up with in similar timeframe.

I had to take frequent and sometime extensive breaks. The second day, I was actually bored and tired of working, so I had to take a huge break from 11am to 3.30pm. But I did nod while watching an interview of Edmond McMillen, so it wasn’t a “lost” time on a gamedev perspective.

Also this LD confirmed me that I don’t like neither deadline nor crunch times. Am I fit for this insdustry ? Hopefully I am not working in it yet, I still have time to figure it out and adapt. Also I enjoyed the design, level design and level building phase much more that the coding phase.

Good job everyone who submitted something playable, I will try to play and rate fair as much entries as possible. I am also looking forward to hear from you about my game in the comments.

(If you want to play a great jam entry, let me suggest you “Porté par le vent” it’s really awesome !)

Tags: cube, first game, platformer, postmortem, unity3d

Hey all, here’s a download link to my LD72 game: Around The World in 100 Cards. (This is my first Ludum Dare so maybe I’m doing this wrong? I guess I should make a page for the game?) There are occasional card sizing bugs but nothing too major. Anyway I hope y’all enjoy it.

The game is about language and pattern recognition, but there’s a pretty big strategy component if you want to maximize your score. My housemate played it through at least 5 times trying for a better score (and she won’t let me give her any hints). My personal best score is 5200, if anyone wants to top that.

Peace,

Erin

@Livelyivy

So, It’s my second ludum dare at 17 years old, and I’m very proud of my game, Disease.

But during the compo, I haven’t got so much time to test and polish the game… That’s why I published an post-compo, “Easy Version”, which is easier and which fixes many bugs. Here is some screenshots 😉

I published too a Timelapse, a High Scores page and some tips !

What went right:

• The game is really playable and we can finish it correctly.
• I spent a lot of time to create music, and I’m very proud of the result. But Sfx aren’t really good…
• The map of the game is big (130 maps!), so it’s very nice for players 😉
• I slept enough time (around 16 hours).

What went not as right as I expected:

• I spent tooooooo much time creating the rendering/collisions engine with javascript/Dom. I should use more game libraries…
• I spent tooooooo much time creating an automatic map rendered. But it was fun ^^
• I’m not an artist, so my graphics aren’t as good as I expected. But it was my first game animations and I’m happy with this !
• There are a lot of bugs in my compo version. I’m sad. But you can play “Easy Version” to play without bugs 😉
• I had no time to add an help section of the game. If you’re stuck, read the tips in my submission page.
• Javascript/Php engine is very loooong to render. It’s sometimes unconformable for the player. Sorry.
• I had no time to create the “Online mode” : it should be a multi-player mode…
• I’m very bad speaking english …

It is the second time I used PHP to render, and it’s not a good idea. I would probably study HaXe, flash or java engines, which are great for web games.

So ! I finished my game with 1420 points (easy version) !

If you finish it with more points, I will give you a kiss ! ♥ And if you finish it in the compo version, I will… hm… no. Bad idea.

Play now !

Compo version (bugged) | Easy version (post-compo)

Submission page

Please give me some feedback

Tags: post-mortem

I’ve been busy playing and rating games (42 so far, to be exact) but I also went ahead and made a small addition to the post-competition version of Ninjural Selection – a spotlight! That way you can see where you are. And the punch and kick animations should stand out a little bit better too.

More updates coming – I just wanted to try this out really quick.

If you haven’t rated Ninjural Selection yet, here’s your chance to do it right now! 😀

I was pretty excited about the theme of Evolution.

This is my first comp entry, Biods.

Biods

Evolution:

I’ve always been fascinated with the interplay between finite, discrete rules and infinite, random output. Conway’s Game of Life was what first got me excited about emergence. Emergence goes hand and hand with evolution – you could even call evolution a subset of emergence: the pieces of a system changing over time to better adapt to their environment. The fact that the objects will *automatically* fine-tune to better survive in the world is pure emergence.

For Biods I started out with the code: Genetic Code that is. The basis of the simulation was the DNA of each Biod. In this case it was 7 attributes that described how a Biod would live. Color, Speed, Size, Features (like feathers, horns), Personality, Reproduction and BroodSize.

The different colors were essentially different species. Only like colors would mate, and Aggressive biods would only attack differing colors.

Each biod also required energy, which was replenished by eating food (or killing an enemy Biod). Depeleted of energy, the Biod would die.

And each biod could also act out 4 different actions, based on some rudimentary AI: Move, Eat, Fight, or Mate.

The key to evolution was adding in some randomness, accomplished by mutation. Each time a Biod reproduced, the offspring could have slightly different DNA.

So now we had all the elements of life. I drew the Biods on the screen with some simple cartoonish circles, and let them move around with basic acceleration and velocity.

The first few builds all the carnivores devoured each other and a single color quickly dominated the entire screen.

I tweaked a few variables and rebuilt. Now, nothing would live more than a few seconds, leaving a wasteland.

And so it went for hours. There were dozens of variables to tweak, from the size of the biods, the speed they could traverse the screen, how much energy they would get from eating or killing, how fast they would starve, the rate of mutation, etc. Tweaking each one of these variables could drastically affect the outcome.

Sure, the behavior was emergent, but it didn’t mean it was “interesting” emergence. Let alone something that would be useful in a game.

In the end, I decided that a few of the variables would comprise the gameplay itself: Starvation and Mutation Rate.

Starvation and Mutation:

Decreasing the Starvation Rate means that biods won’t ever die. The dominant biods will quickly fill the screen, and there won’t be any evolutionary pressure in the game. Only aggressors (carnivores) will be able to kill other biods.

High mutation and starvation means lots of diversity and changing populations

Increasing Starvation will quickly kill off the weaker Biods. If carnivores have prey (herbivores) they will live longer, but as soon as the prey dies off, the predators will die off a few rounds later. Slow moving or static biods live longer and flourish.

Reduce mutation rate and populations will start to stabalize

Most games will work well with around 5 for the Starvation Rate.

Increasing Mutation will mean that offspring will differ greatly from the parents. This can be useful to add a lot of variety to the game, and eventually you’ll probably uncover every combination of Biod. You’ll end up with a lot of diversity, but no one color will dominate.

Only a few species of carnivores are left after a few rounds. Note the large amount of uneaten food.

Decreasing Mutation will keep offspring the same as the parents. This is key to completing the missions in the game, where the goal is to grow certain populations.

With no herbivores to eat, the populations of carnivores die out.

Usually you’ll want to increase mutation and starvation until you get a population you like, then decrease both and let those populations grow.

Interesting Patterns:

One of the fascinating things about the game was how lifelike the emergent behavior became. It almost reminded me of bacteria growing in a petri dish. As soon as a niche opened up, a biod population would evolve to fill it. Lots of food on the board? Asexual herbivores with large numbers of offspring would take over. High diversity of colors, but not a lot of food? Carnivores would dominate.

Static biods would also form little colonies in a single space. Since they couldn’t move, if food was plentiful, they’d always have a mate nearby. And since dead biods had a chance to drop food, the static colonies could feed themselves with corpses of their siblings (coral reef, trees?)

These kinds of behaviors made playing around with the simulation potentially more fun than the actual game.

Low starvation and mutation leads to homogenized populations that can be wiped out relatively easily.

Design:

But design was still paramount. Each one of those 7 behaviors that made up the DNA contributed to the final emergence. Also, I used discrete values for each behavior, instead of a continuous value. So I had to tune each category. Getting those values wrong could lead to boring or overly chaotic behavior, which would ultimately be less interesting for the player/user.

In the real world, reality “emerges” from every level below it, from particles, to atoms, to molecules, to biochemistry, to cells, to organisms, to ecosystems. In a simulation, we have to pick a perspective, and draw a hard line in the code: these are my axioms.

So design will always be key.

A group of herbivores moving towards available food.

Biods: The Game:

The actual game of Biods was tacked onto the simulation. The screens and controls were tacked on top of that. So if any polish needs to be done, it’s to the actual “game” parts.

The “goal” of each level is to raise a certain population of biods (50 Reds, 300 Orange, etc). Currently, this is defined by color, but could be changed to account for any number of traits.

It’s quite a challenging (and probably frustrating) game. I’ve been able to beat every level except 5. I assume the feeling of defeat is similar to that of a biochemist that discovers a contamination in his experiment, ruining the entire thing.

Just like in real life, once it gets going in all its messy chaos, it’s probably impossible to untangle. Better to just hit reset.

I’m still debating whether the game would be better if the player had more control. If they could tweak each individual gene, rather than hitting Mutate, would it make the game trivial? What about pausing the simulation, mutating what needs to be done, and then resuming?

A decimated population of homogenized species, once the starvation rate was increased.

I had a ton of fun doing my first Ludum Dare.  I’m looking forward to playing tons of games, and the next competition!

As for Biods, I’m going to clean it up a bit and port to Silverlight.

: ) Play Enthropy. Hope you like it!

Hi Guys!

My name is Dima. I’m developer from Lemon Tree team.
We are from Omsk (Russia).
We developed our game in one office with another 12 teams. (old48.com)
It was very very cool and fun!

In our team were 4 people:
Dima and Sasha – developers
Sasha – artist
Roma – game designer without prior experience (Cow game is his first game)

Usually we develop games for iOS with using cocos2d (Objective C) but we decided to take part in Ludum Dare and create game for Web (With using Java script, Cocos2d js, Box2d js).
It was our first project with using Java Script and Html5.
Also it was our first Ludum Dare (We were going to take part in the next Ludum Dare in December)
During first 2 hours we were thinking about theme and decided what should we do next.
Next artists started to draw art while Sasha and I tried to bind keyboard with our game code. We spent about 5-6 hours on this problem. We have found problem in cocos2d key dispatcher.

During first day we created first text based part, level editor and base mechanic for levels 2-4.
During second day we added levels, animations, intro and fixed some bugs.
Our Mistakes:
– Unknown language.
– Unknown framework.
– Before, we never developed the game for browsers.
Our right decisions:
– We had a solid team with experience in game projects.
– We were in one place and work together.
– We all realy love games!

Our result – Cow

Thank you!

Tags: ld24, postmortem

Behold! My slow descent into madness! (for your enjoyment)

Play | LD-Entry

-Matthew

Tags: 3dsmax, kittens, max, timelapse, unity, unity3d

Just a quick note, some of your Unity links are being used from Dropbox and start with :

HTTPS://

Many of us will just see the “Please install Unity” page, even though we have it installed. Please use:

HTTP://

in your dropbox links!

That confusion means a lot of us are probably missing out on some of your awesome Unity games! D:

Here’s a timelapse of Chicky And The Cats: Dorobou Neko! Have fun! Post Mortem is STILL to come 😉

YOUTUBE LINK

PLAY

Our comp entry is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5234 Also embarrassingly, apparently Aqualution is a soap brand name so that’s probably not going to stick.

Evolution is actually one of my favorite game mechanics, but I was completely at a loss for what could be implemented in only a few days. That was the biggest hurdle.

A lot of game mechanics fell by the wayside and the idea of evolving powers turned into just growing into a bigger newt and surviving a hostile environment. I got most of the art done that I wanted to, but Alex of AvibeGames didn’t have enough time to code everything in and make it functional so we worked with what we have ready in the framework. Jack did the music and got it to us very quickly for the few songs we needed for gentle ambiance. It was a pleasure to work with my team and friends, I learned a lot about how to make pixelart and it’s likely this project will roll into a bigger post-Dare game or another one.

Things we succeeded at:

• Making a nice atmospheric sidescrolling game
• Simple and varied enemies
• A health and EXP system
• Smooth water floating and dashing physics

Other things that got the chopping block:

• Icebergs
• Key/Door unlock mechanic
• Longer bosses and levels
• Moray eel and giant octopus

I always look forward to Ludum Dare, succeed or fail, as motivation and a learning experience every time. Even if you don’t finish, I think it’s important to post your work—you’ll get valuable feedback for later from your peers.

The secret to my success this time was remembering to take breaks, but not too many. Sleeping, cranking the music up full blast and getting shit done. And sometimes I didn’t, so I’d rush to make up for it, but I’m proud of what we have to show already.

Tags: action, alexandervrs, aqualution, avibegames, bcs, buttercupsaiyan, evolution, flash, game, gamemaker, headache, indie, jack darcy, jam, Ludum Dare, neoteny, newt, pixelart, salamander, screenshot, sidescrolling, sprites, underwater

Hey All,

My LudumDare 24 Competition Entry (Collect: Game about collecting and evolving) is enhanced and it became a lot easier and better and contains music is now online on various portals.

• Newgrounds
• Kongregate
• GameJolt

If you like the game consider voting on LudumDare page

Thanks and will write a postmortem soon

Bye Bye until then

So, I finally managed to finish my game yesterday !

I’m completely burned out but satisfied with the result. You can check it out here.

What went right:

– art: letting my girlfriend do the art for me really was a brilliant idea ! I had to switch to the Jam category, but I needed the extra day anyway.

– coding: apart from some head banging against the wall  and swearing (BitmapData.draw(), I fucking hate you), the coding part went alright. FlashPunk is cool but I really should have taken some time to play with it before the contest.

What went wrong:

– conception/planning: I had a really hard time with the theme at first. Then I thought about a bunch of concepts that would fit well with the theme, how cool it would be to have this and that, and I started coding stuff. I built a complex system and then tried to figure out how the player would interact with it… I ended up removing a lot of things and wish I had time to remove even more things.

Lesson learnt:

Next time, I will try to organize my time like this:

1. Think of one concept of gameplay that fits with the theme. Make it SIMPLE.

2. Code a playable prototype as fast as possible. If it doesn’t work or won’t be fun, go back to 1.

3. Think of ONE thing that would make the game better

4. Code it.Test it. Go to 3.

Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy the game !

Globally it comes down to this: The game isn’t as polished, long or varied as last time’s entry, however, if I do decide to continue working on it (and I can tell you that I will,) it has the potential to kick a lot more ass.

Since every upside has a downside, I find it hard to devide everything in “what went right” and “what went wrong” so I’m putting them together.

Programming: I have to say the platform physics turned out pretty great. The friction might be a bit low for the terrain you walk on (dirt), but it actually plays well, so I don’t really care about that. What can’t be seen in the final product is that the programming allowed for slopes and other things, but that does make adding on to it a lot easier later, which is of course a good thing.

The programming of the enemy behaviour and evolution is what I had to spend the most time on, it got more complicated than I had hoped, and in the end there was little time left for level design. This is what I am getting the most criticism on: that the game isn’t long/ varied enough. I don’t think the problem is that I spent all this time on enemy behaviour though, since the evolution of the enemies is at the core of the concept. What is a problem, is that it was done too subtly. A lot of people seem to miss the whole concept altogether, and think the enemies just evolve randomly, if at all. In truth, enemy evolution actually depends on your interaction with them. If you miss this, the game appears to be a lot more simple than it actually is. I just know this will cost me points, especially in the “theme’ category.

Visuals: This turned out pretty nicely. I’ve worked with the NES palette and colour limitations before, but I don’t think I  ever made a game that actually felt this old. And I love that. It gives me all the appropriate nostalgic feelings. I’ve looked at a lot of NES games for reference, and games like kirby’s adventure and later megaman games do look a lot better than this, but somehow I like it that my game doesn’t look that good. Those games don’t really look like NES games anymore anyway.

The palette I used. As you can see I even had one color left at only 15 in total.

Audio: Making a retro game, I used SFXR for the sound effects of course, so that didn’t take too much time. The music was made using 8bitone . The composing process was really fun, but export options are extremely limited, and this cost me some time trying to get the end result on my computer. I havn’t gotten any complaints about repetitiveness of the music yet, but having listened to it over and over again for two days, the music is starting to get on my nerves at least.

Design: I still like the idea, but in the end, there just wasn’t a lot of time for designing levels. I didn’t have as much time as previous LD’s, and I was very tired before this LD even started, so I guess it just can’t be helped. I am really looking forward to making this my next big project though. I think I will make it another metroidvania type game. The evolving enemy concept certainly allows for it, making backtracking less of a chore. There isn’t much, but what is there just feels like a good basis. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the main complaint is that people want more.

Conclusion

I’m not completely happy with the entry as it is, but if I continue working on it, I think this game could potentially beat all of my previous LD games. Especially when it comes to fun.

Play the game!

Let’s take that short.

This time the theme was the biggest challenge. If it wouldn’t be “Evolution” and if I would prepare my Engine for top-down stuff, everything would go better.

What went… “right” :

Kinda nothing. The AI was buggy, the time flew away. The only thing that went out not-so-bad was the BGM.

What went wrong :

Everything: From “Level design” over “Player and Mob graphics” up to “simple if checks”, all went wrong. Maybe it was just the lack of time because the theme was kinda a challenge itself. Map3 \ Room3 \ How you call it (I name it “lab3”) was the most messy thing: It crashed all the time because of an AI nullpointer OR dunnowhat. Also, the launcher was a mess, too. I also had to do a bugfix just after jam.

What I have learned:

– Prepare yourself. Preparing is the best thing you can do. Even just before LD, go thru EVERY single theme and get bunch of ideas for it.

– Extend. If you aren’t happy with the result, extend into the Jam. If you still aren’t happy, just continue on.

– Check everything before publishing. I had no time for that point, but the best thing to do is to check if everything works.

– Make easy level layouts and controlls. If people just don’t know what to do in one level, they may not know what to do in the other level. Misleading signs like “Rescue kittens” in a level where you CAN’T rescue kittens BUT in the level after the level in the sign… these signs should be clearified.

I hope your game went out waay better 😉 Here’s my game if you really want to play it … http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11776

First things first, you can check out my entry here:

Play “Dinosaur Survival Bash!!“

now, let’s take some time and evaluate what went good,
what went bad and what went simply ugly ~

What went right:

• I (again) used tools I know and used the flashpunk library which I’m getting very used to – I think by know you could say that I’ve ‘mastered’ it
• by now I seem to have advanced in pixel-art. I’m quite pleased with the overall graphical quality although I could have improved a lot of the graphics further
• another thing I noticed is that I’m actually developing a professional workflow and feel I’m an actual indie game developer now (although I already made several games before)
• the gameplay turned out pretty good – many people like it and the comments I’m getting are astoundig, I’m very happy

What went bad:

• my motivation sucked. I’m a fast coder (I made my last LD entry within 12h) but I also loose motivation very easily therefore negating that “bonus” completely. I could’ve done so much more if I would’ve gotten my ass up from procrastinating a lot
• music is sort of my weak spot – I’m very bad at composing. although I did try making some stuff it didn’t turn out decent and I threw music over board all together
• although the gameplay is quite good, there are some things I would like to tweak and add, like better AI and some more abilities and pick-up items
• I have to polish my games better, there are some simple effects (like screen shakes, shadows and more sound effects) that could’ve improved the graphics and game experience significantly

What went ugly:

•  the theme … I didn’t have any idea what to do with it, so I started coding some basic stuff (collision, camera movement …) without any idea what for. the gameplay somehow emerged out of it during development and it all felt very unpleasing. somehow I couldn’t think of something good to do with it for the first day

Play “Dinosaur Survival Bash!!“

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 9:51 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I have uploaded a walkthrough of my game Gems of the Evolving Land for thoes lazy people who don’t want to play a game.

Enjoy and comment all those mistakes in my commentation!

Really you should play it yourselfs here: GotEL on  http://staticvoidgames.com/

Tags: Gems of the Evolving Land, GotEL, video, walkthrough

Adventurers Evolution timelapse video.

Dash Dash Dash Screenshot

What Went Right:

• Made a game, a difficult but fairly fun game!
• Made a procedurally generated track.
• Boosted up my Unity3D Skills.
• Quick 3D Modelling in Milkshape 3D
• Ran 10k on sunday mid-dare in 1 hour 3 minutes, ohh rah!
• Made some design decisions on the fly and they held together well.
• The player always has something to do this time around, it’s a fairly intense game if you want to survive.
• The shooting triangles really seemed to make it for me personally, that was the moment it felt like a real game.

What Went Wrong:

• Lost a lot of time on Saturday due to an unforseen physics problem.
• Lost more time on Saturday due to a lack of naming scheme for my track tiles…silly me!
• A lot of the design was more on the fly than my past idea.
• There’s 2 bugs still inside the game. Read – Lack of testing.
• One of them involves the jumping machanic
  the other Only appears on your second play through, forgot to re-initialize the animation.
• There’s no real ending, except for your own demise, hahaha!
• Didn’t get to add some of the features I’d planned on putting in there including:
  • On-line high scores
  • Improved Difficulty Tiering throughout the game
  • An Actual Ending
• I forgot to put an exit button on the Windows / OSX Builds….Ha!

What I’ve learnt during this Ludum Dare.

• I can really push myself harder than normal when I’ve got the time free to dedicate to one project.
• Working like this is probably the best thing for me if I get the chance.
• Tripping up then nearly running into traffic downhill is not advisable.
• Some more things inside unity, mostly physics based, ha!
• Keep to a nomenclature with assets, I rushed then neglected this to my cost.

Will I carry on development of this game?

Probably in a couple of weeks time, just so I can take a breather, my next weekend is fully booked also!

Might look to porting to Android / iOS in the future when some more bits are fully implemented.

Oh yes, a linky, I nearly forgot –> Play Dash Dash Dash Now!

Here is a gameplay video of our game Allel for Ludum Dare # 24 Jam (the player is very bad!). Enjoy.

• Ludum Dare #24 Jam entry;
• Play Online; 

Tags: allel

Here is some of the art I created over the three days for our fast paced fighting game ‘Revolution’. Our idea was very ambitious so we didn’t get to implement everything we wanted, but unlike last time we ended up with a game you can actually play! The idea of the game was going to be that you play as 10 different characters, and each time you get a new character you have to fight all the characters that came previously. Fighting on the inside wall of a circle is quite an interesting thing, which ever way you go, you’ll meet the same enemy, there’s no escape. We present to you, ‘Revolution’ – Rob. Download it here

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 25%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 11:32 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I had to fix the lag in my game so people would play it to the end. I also found out I had not tiled a part of the level, making it impossible to reach the end. I fixed all of that and it’s again in the competition. The lag is still present, yet, not so much.

For the actual game, I received a lot of positive feedback! Thanks to everyone who played, it is a great first Ludum Dare for me.

What I did right

People praised the game for the graphics, and I felt really proud of them. I think they create a good mood.

The engine felt really nice to play.

The ideia and realisation is almost all in the game.

What I did wrong

I only worked for less than 20 hours on this.

The level design isn’t that fun and challenging, and it didn’t convey the exploration part of the game I wanted it to be.

It was the first time I made such a large room, and I really can’t find the problem for it to lag over time.

Music was repetitive, but it was my first time creating music, and I wanted to create a music that evolved.

Anyway, it was a nice experience. Play the game! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14205

The horror of playing a Precision Platformer Arcade MMO…

…and dying just before you beat the global highscore.

Check out our game – SUPER Levolution – and see how close you get  

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16861

*Stay tuned for a Post-Mortem*

After I submitted our game yesterday I was numb and empty. I felt robbed of my vision of the game. It will never be finished, its purpose has faded and the goal has been declared reached. Since we failed to submit last time, we already severely cut back on the game concept this time around, which is why I don’t think this game is worth finishing.

Our unfinished LD23 entry

This time we started preparing weeks in advance; we got familiar with the programming environment we would be working and even thought up file formats we could use for animations. We also planned out our code structure a lot more carefully from the start and it did seem to pay off. In the end, all of this and the reduced gameplay mechanics were not enough, and I am not yet sure, whether I want to participate again. I fear having to reduce the gameplay even further will merely yield “minigames”, stranded outside the realm of multiplayer party games. Perhaps the 48-hour single-person version is better, I haven’t tried it; maybe it will avoid these heartbreaks by virtue of having the option of extending into the 72-hour jam.
Overall, this weekend overall has left me with great relief that it is finally over, but also with a bitter aftertaste of disappointment. I will have to recharge my enthusiasm.

Humorous animation mishaps

While the above certainly sounded very gloomy, I also learned a thing or two about creating games under pressure. I believe the key is to churn out a well-rounded prototype in the first 24 hours: the important game mechanics should be implemented and the game should play like a full albeit very short and contentless game. Then, in the second phase, which I like to call “content + balancing”, you get to spend time making the game fun by play-testing, adding levels, diverse enemies, creating cool animations and effects, and so on; none of these things should be difficult or voluminous in terms of coding.
In neither the last nor in this competition did we get to spend much time on the second phase at all – a few hours tops.

First DNA screen with misleading bonds at hour 40 (way too late)

Finished at hour 69: fancy “pizza crust rendering” technique (wayyyyy too late)

In hindsight, the new rendering method probably didn’t add that much clarity (although it looks way fancier!) and next time I would probably stick to the first version and concentrate on getting that done before the first day is over.

Closing this post, I am still confused and a little angered. Perhaps time will bring me wisdom.

P.S.: I would like to give a shoutout to Guild Wars 2 for stealing our only semi-competent artist from us just in time for LD24.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=13803

First off! It feels really awesome having to finish a game by myself! It’s not much but short and sweet… kind of like my brain-child. I’ve gotten SEVERAL AMAZING comments from awesome awesome people. Thank you so much (it means a lot).

With this, I can look at some stuff I did well/failed

SOMETHING I WOULD GIVE MYSELF A COOKIE FOR:

The most helpful thing I’ve done during the early phases of the game design. I really focused hard on a the theme and nothing else. I drew tiny creatures turning into people and pretty much developed a story around that.
I really thought the THEME is valued the highest priority in creating this game. (Not the only approach in making a game, just how I thought)

First day, instead of diving into massive artworks I created a schedule (stages, characters, items, effects). Putting most of my time on the environment and the least on effects. I actually learned to draw pixel art by looking and studying other pixel arts floating on deviantart and tumblr(if anybody was wondering). Compared to them, my art is pretty terrible (it’s true).

By the end of second day I started to really crank out code that isnt the basic movement (evolution stages whatnot) and pretty much through the last minute. You probably don’t want coding advice from me, even a rock can code better.

THINGS THAT WENT HORRIBLY WRONG:

I really really underestimated how bad of a programmer I was. I had to google half of what I was trying to do and wasting LOTS AND LOTS OF TIME. If you guys are art people using gamemaker or construct etc. Do not add a feature that sounds cool but have no real clue in. Googling takes time (LOTS).

As for art, I didn’t have too much trouble other than stretch your wrist out once in a while and don’t use too many colors! Keep it a simple pallet and it’ll look AWESOME.

…and that’s my experience from this LD48. I really enjoyed it and I might do it again next time

again thanks for all the comments! (I live on comments)
-Sakuyan 

Okay, before I start with my post-mortem, some advertisements.

If you’re interested in playing the original Meow for MUTATION! and rating the game, visit the entry page. There’s also the updated, post-compo version there, but I recommend trying it after rating the original. If you’re interested in timelapse, check it out here. Thanks!

This game contains kittens. In fact, mutated ones!

The Good

• Game design document. It’s very good to write what you want to do – even if just for future reference.
• Using a genetic algorithm. Generally it’s good to use stuff that you know best – and I did use such algorithms a lot some time ago. It’s a very simple implementation, but it took me very little time to code. It works neat, too.
• Graphics. Wow, 5 mins of searching in google “how to draw a cat” and I had a general idea of how I want my mutating cats to look like. Modular graphics were a great idea (although a little complicated in implementation), and honestly, I’m still impressed by my mad skillz. 😛 First drawings were made with real pencil on a real paper and that was also quite a good idea (later I used a tablet).
• Forums, community, overall help one can find on the web. FlashPunk forums especially.
• Employing event tracking in google analytics. This was quite easy, actually. Now I’m able to track how many people play my game, what’s their average score, and many other things. I will try to post some statistics later.

The Bad

• Reading “Game Coding Complete” and thinking (too much) about structuring my code just right (just stick to your framework!). I blame the authors.
• Not testing. This seems more important with every LD I take part in. My game is completely untested – and again, unbalanced and too hard (too few means of controlling the population; the easiest way to fix it is allowing the player to select specimens for reproduction, not deletion – this is done in the post-compo version). I keep forgetting that games need to be fun and playable, not concept-accurate.
• Trying to make something in FL studio for the first time without creating anything before (I managed to record myself saying “meow”, modify this sound into beats and stuff, create some simple, annoying loop, but it was just too much work) – I generated something with GreaseMonkey’s autotracker. It’s an awesome piece of code.
• Thinking too big for the compo. Wow, I was bold enough to think that I could also do a tower-defense part to the game. Like, on top of the general GA idea. I decided to cut the tower-defense idea after the first day.
• My mood, when I figured my idea might bee too much for me. Just in the middle of the compo, I was pretty sure I won’t make it. I even wanted to resign already, but kept coding anyway, just for the sake of it. After some substantial cuts to the idea, I was able to complete something playable.

The Ugly (truth)

• It’s a 48 hour competition: don’t waste time on semantics. Know what to do with your code structure and how you’re supposed to do it.
• In fact, try to not waste time at all: the simpler the idea or the more you’ve had experience with something similar before, the better the result. It’s great to learn new things during the compo, but this can reflect badly on overall quality of your game.
• Get some utils ready before the compo. Some basic stuff, some helper structures, etc. For example, I wasted too much time on coding Entities able to contain child Entities in FP, just to create some screens with messages. I wasted a great amount of time on reading the code of punk.ui and had to hack&slash it to make it work in my environment.
• If you don’t code games everyday, or you plan to use a language you don’t use very often, warm up before the compo!

Overall, this was a great weekend and I look forward to the next Ludum Dare!

Tags: post-mortem

First things first: I finished, and that is great: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3996.

I aimed for some tower defency thing and decided to learn some svg and svg animations this time (it is allways good to learn something). After the first day, I was afraid I would not be able to finish, because I got stuck with how svg animations are dealt with by different browsers, especially when using the same animation multiple times. I decided to drop safari support, sound, and fancy graphics. Keeping the prototype graphics seems to have been a good decission, first commenters seem to enjoy it. Safari support could be added later. Sound will come, when I do post-compo improvements. So I’m sattisfied overall.

I personaly like it how the creeps get better over time, but you can not quite put your finger on it, when it happens. To me, this feels much like how darwin explained his theory of evolution. Originally, I wanted to evolve the pathfinding, too, by tweeking the parameters of the algorithm, but I dropped it because time got thin and I figured most people would build one-way mazes, so it would not make any difference. Maybe I try it when doing post-compo things.

What went right

• I got the idea quite fast, only 1 or 2 hours of thinking and some sleep
• The simple graphics are minimalistic and not loosy.
• The simple mechanics provide a quick learning curve, which is perfect for LD.
• I actually implemented creeps, that “learn” how to break through your maze.
• I made it, allthough I got a normal amount of sleep.

What went wrong:

• Performance of svg rendering and animation varies largely between different browsers.
• SVG animations, that are triggered by javascript, are evaluated differently across browsers. This made me loose a lot of time and ended up in detecting, which browser is used. Details can be found below.
• No Sound. This annoys me especially since I had sound in all my other LD games so far.
• No decent graphics. Well turned out not so bad 😛
• No balancing. Seriously, I have got no idea if the game allways gets to end, or if you can reach a point where your towers get better and better and you can play endless. I hope that is not the case, as towers get more expensive on a cubic curve while the bounty increases linearly.
• No win condition, No highscore (I should have set up a server side scripting language and a database server before LD)
• I got multiple little fixes I delayed and forgot, I should keep a list next time
• One player said, he was not able to start, I hate it when this happens

Details to the SVG animations:

• FF and Chrome do not actually change attributes but apply a transform, but each animation is reset before using it again, so I still need to change the attributes manually afterwards and can not read them in between.
• Safari is not able to reuse animations at all, Once ended, it can not restart. So I needed to clone the element each time and start the new one. But it actually changes the attributes (Well, I think, I didn’t take a deep look into it…)
• FF supports the onend event, that fires after the animation finished. Chrome and Safari do not, I used timeouts as a workaround.
• The method “beginElement” starts an svg animation from javascript. In FF and Chrome, ALL animation elements support it, in Safari only the animate element does, animateMotion for example does not, so I could not start it from javascript and could not animate the bullets in Safari (It just shows a line to the target instead).

Tags: postmortem

I’m planning on writing a post-mortem of the game soon. In addition, I will discuss how the previous ludum dare (our 1st), taught us the important lessons to turn LD 23’s failure into a LD 24 success. In the mean time, play our game.

Sheep Breeder

The Good

• Following the Theme
  I was able to get a more strict adherence to the theme than most. Let’s be honest here, “evolving” a gun at random isn’t really evolving. It is mutating. For true evolution you need generations and traits passed on.  In playing a number of games I’ve seen this issue side stepped. My wife who is a sheep farmer (where you breed to get certain traits) has been educating me for years, so I felt I had a very good grounding in reality for this game.
   
  Basically with a theme like evolution you can:
  • Complain
  • Make the game you want and ignore the theme
  • Make the game you kinda want that you can kinda claim follows the theme
  • Follow the theme – ignore the consequences
   
  I’m glad I followed the theme, even if it felt more challenging.
• Content Generation
  This is more luck than anything else. I could use real sheep for sounds and pictures.
• VirtualBox
  While it might make playing some games harder, this was a blessing for me while developing. Taking a snapshot as I was developing was far easier than using any kind of SCC or other backup system. Time lapse became simple, you can even see the virtual machine reboot in my timelapse video.
• Visual Studio 2012
  Microsoft hasn’t changed Visual Studio much in the past years. Yes it is themed differently, but it works basically the same which helped a lot. I only stated using it 3 days before the compo so this worked out. It could have gone the other direction fairly easily.
• .Net 3.5
  I was able to make a game that will run on just about any Windows based machine without installing anything extra. This made me quite happy.
• SFML
  I only used the audio portion, and barely scratched the surface of this 3rd party library. I appreciate the ease of use and clean structure.
• Lack of Bugs
  Watch my timelapse video, there are very few show stopping bugs. Taking care while constructing my classes helped immensely with this.
• Finishing
  The last game I did was in Hypercard nearly 20 years ago. Tic-tac-toe. I’m proud that I was able to finish with something playable.
• Own Webserver – Semi-Live Stream
  On the VM host I was able to use the timelapse software to create screen shots as I worked. Those were saved on a network drive and shared via webpage as I was going along. This semi-live stream kept my server from dying (even though there was over 2 GB of files downloaded) while people were watching. There’s something to be said for owning the entire chain.
• Sleep/Food
  Typically I get 6 hours of sleep. I got 7 each night during the Ludum Dare. I know my brain was in over drive as my body kept yelling “Consume All The FOOD!” I was able to finish without coffee or any soda with caffeine. Beer did help as well at night to settle things down.

The Bad

• Following the Theme
  I had an awesome idea for parallel worlds/companion that I would have loved to do. Maybe next time.
• Content Generation
  I can’t draw to save my life. I can’t make sounds/music. I focused on the core game play as a result. The screenshot doesn’t look as interesting as most entries.
• Visual Studio 2012
  Microsoft hasn’t changed Visual Studio much in the past years. They haven’t fixed the bug where the tool generates a 32-bit icon it can’t edit. What’s worse, the default color pallet for the icon editor is all shades of gray, with no standard 8 bit pallet provided. Intellisense stopped working. You’d think after 7 years they could get this right.
• Lack of Experience
  I haven’t done a lot of game design, so this was tough in many ways for me.
• Food
  I needed more variety in my food choices. It would have made me much happier.
• Time/Features
  I had to drop a major feature that would have helped a lot with the game. The bi-annual fair, which was supposed to give the player money and help them see their progress. I just couldn’t do it in time.

I Almost Soiled My Trousers When…

• .Net 3.5 + SFML + VirtualBox
  I was using a 32-bit version of Windows 7. I had to submit my entry a few hours early due to another engagement. Right before I submit I tried my game on the host OS. It crashes with no information. I bring up the event viewer and see that SFML had an invalid image exception. Invalid Image? I’m not using the image library. WTF? Then it hits me. My host is 64 bit and the VM is 32. The invalid image exception isn’t related to media at all, it is the dll image. I quickly force my project to build in 32 bit mode. That diving catch prevented many other headaches later on.

For my second LD in compo, I created Pasazh, an action/rpg/adventure like Zelda. It was a little too ambitious for only 48h but I tried.
I used Tiled Map Editor for level design and I programmed it in Java and used slick2d.

What Went Right :
– Graphics, satisfactory for only 48h even if the hero sprites are not very beautiful.

– Level design, I think it’s rather good, I created 19 maps and they are not bad.

– Gameplay / code : satisfactory even if I did not have enough time to create all the features I wanted.

What Went Wrong :
– TitleScreen : no time to create a good titlescreen :/

– Enemies : I wanted to create a boss and more enemies, in particular under water but no time.

– Music and sound effects : they are bad but I don’t know how to compose a good music and I don’t control Bxfr.
My game :
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7308

erf, pictures are resizing :/

(PS : sorry for my bad English)

Here’s my timelapse of the creation of my game Sprout:

If you skip to the halfway mark when I start creating the art it gets a lot more interesting.

If it looks interesting to you:

PLAY SPROUT HERE

Tags: timelapse

Play/rate the game

First Ludum Dare for me.
I was initially going for compo, but I spent too much time procrastinating (currently making my timelapse video, and 30% of it was games, lives, etc. despite the fact that I paused chronolapse for every “real” break), and Mathieu Hallouin made me some great music so I entered Jam instead.

Evolution.
Hated the theme. Thanks for influence voters… Parallel Worlds would have been a perfect theme, but well.. next time?
So hmm. Took me some time to find something to do with this theme, something that I would be able to do with my pour level in graphics.

What was good:

• Polygonal collisions. First time trying that, and it worked perfectly (see bellow if you disagree)
• The music. Mathieu Hallouin is really good oO his soundtrack
• I made it in time. I spent too much time procrastinating, but in the end I was able to publish my game in time. I could have published it in compo, but as I was sync-ing the levels to the music I wanted to use the music and so I had to enter the jam instead.

What went wrong:

• Didn’t like the theme. But well, it happens…
• Spent waay too much time on some things, only to end up dropping the idea…
• No snacks. I have no money atm, so I only had pasta.
• Started the LD tired and drunk. Not good 😀 Well, I couldn’t skip this birthday party.
• Made the polygon representation before the images. NOT a good idea, even if it allowed me to work on gameplay before doing graphics. When switching to images, the polygon representation isn’t always centered and so the collisions apply on polygons but not on images.. To try polygon mode, execute this code : ld24.poly=1; with scratchpad or whatever. Doesn’t work on mothership, I added the sprite during last 30 mins and it didn’t go well…
• Lost more than two hours fixing something that actually was working.. Just not on firefox with localhost -_-
• My internet connection broke 5 minutes before the deadline.. Nice troll…

It was a great experience as a first LD, I learn a lot of things that’ll help me doing a good LD next time. I’ve got a game working, and I think I’ll polish it some time soon.

Do you want to play it? It’s available here. And do not forget to leave a nice comment

I am working on a new (Ninja!) post-compo levelpack, which will be online soon.

And if you have nothing to do – the leveldesigner is included (Just read the notes before using) 😉

Before I start talking about the ups and downs of my game and its creation I want to talk a bit about Ludum Dare itself.

This was my first time participating in a Ludum Dare or any kind of competition / game jam for that matter. The decision to participate this time sort of came out of the blue, I heard that the LD was going to be that weekend only a few days beforhand and just thought to myself: “Why not enter?”. But I also didn’t expect anything to come out of this (more on that later).
Overall I had a great time that 48 hours. Seeing all the blog entries, people building games from scratch in only 2 days, and then playing them was really cool. I really felt like I was participating in something greater, not just sitting alone at home making some game.
It was also, of course, very exhausting. All I did was basicly work on the game and sleep. I only took about a one hour break every day to eat and fulfill basic hygiene standarts and some very minor breaks in between.
But I think that in the end, it was worth it. And I’m proud to say that I made a game for Ludum Dare.

And now to the exhumation of the game:

The Good:

Making a game
When I started on saturday morning (about 7 hours after the LD had started) I was certain that I wouldn’t get anything done. I know how I usually develop games and that takes a lot of time and revision.
So the first few hourse I couldn’t come up with anything good and I was sure that by the end of sunday I would have no more than a buggy, half-done prototype with missing art and sounds. But when I finally got a good idea everything seemed to wokr a bit smoother. The first thing I did (as usual) was to make a little mock-up in gimp of how the game would look, after that I really had hope that I could finish something.
And I think that everything turned out really good, I’m quite happy that I got almost everything done that I wanted to. I never do any schedules or structure my time, I just do stuff. But the process worked very smoothly and it was a lot of fun.

Super Mario Super
I remember playing the little minigame, which was a remake of the old arcade machine, in Super Mario Bros. 3 a lot of years ago. And for the making of Super Robocade I played a little faithful remake of the arcade version.
I am very glad how my new ideas for leveling up and shooting worked together with the old classic game mechanics to create something really cool. It all fits nicely and feels great to play. And I’m also glad I could make a tribute to these old days.

Gameboy Flashback
I am really, really happy with how the graphics turned out. The color pallete, the little intro screen which is a homage to the old Gameboy start screen and other little details like having pipes as a reference to Super Mario. I especially love then Super Robocade logo on the title screen. It has a little flash/reflection animation on the “Super” which reminds me of old Nintendo games for some reason. I love putting little details like this into my games.
Also the sounds work well with the graphics and overall the game really brings that oldschool Gameboy feeling across.

The Bad:

Sticking to the theme
I like the way the game turned out in the end, but I also feel like I was a bit to loose on the theme. I think that Robocade is more about upgrading than evolution in a strikt sense. But after I was already halfway done there was not much I could do against it. I improved the concept a bit later on by making the enemies evolve and changing some stuff with the player evolvement mechanics but I still think that most other games of this LD kept the theme in mind better than I did.

Super Mario Ripoff
Here is a little contra to the point above, where I describe how I adapted and improved the old Mario arcade mechanics. Because that also means that I didn’t really think up the whole game in 48 hours. Most entries are completely original with innovative and cool new gameplay mechanics and ideas. And even though I like how I could add the evolvement idea onto the old foundation it still somehow feels wrong to take ideas from another game.

Improvements that could have been
After playing Super Robocade the day after the competition ended I noticed a few thing that I could have done better. If you are working on a game 48 hours straight it gets really hard to look at it criticaly and from a distance. As I already said, I think that evolvement should have played a great role but also I only realized after I day away from the game that the difficulty curve would have needed some improvements. It feels to slow and boring in the beginning (at least if you already played it a few times) and gets really hard to early on so that you can’t actually reach the last stage of the characters evolution (where it looks really bad-ass). Also the weapon should be a bit faster and overall the upgrades should be more noticable to the player, so they actually feel like they are getting stronger. I might be overexaggerating a bit because these would have been really minor tweaks to a few variables, but I think that they would have made the game feel much better.

And the Ugly:

Programming
As always sometimes I like doing the coding of game features and sometimes I absolutly abhor it, especially if it involves bugfixing or I get stuck with my limited knowledge. I just don’t like the programming part of making games but since I am solo there is no way around it.

Music
I used SunVox to make the music of the game. And even though it was the first time for me using the program I think that it really awesome and powerful. But what I did realize during the creation of the 2 music files is that I just suck at composing, I just can’t get anything good out of it. Music cost me a lot of time, almost the whole evening of saturday and also quite a few hours on sunday. In the end the music turned out to be ok, but not really that much fitting and how I wanted it to be. That’s also the reason why I don’t have any music playing in the main game, because the music would become irritating really quickly.

So, that’s it. My postmortem of Ludum Dare 24. You can still play and rate me game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=12412
I don’t know yet, if I will be participating in the next LD but I will definitly consider it!

Tags: postmortem

I still can’t believe that I made it in time.

About 4 hours before deadline my game wasn’t even playable. I didn’t have monsters, levels, money and ingame tutorial. So much to do but only 4 hours left. I was like supper effective and producing terrible code at the same time. It  definitely shows that nothing is impossible.

And this is how the final product look like:

Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16161

My work here is done.

What I would do better next time:

1. More time management – working at 100% efficiency isn’t enough. Next time I’ll make milestones at the early beginning.

2. Homemade html5 engine – It’s already simple to write game for html5 canvas. But some things are still stealing precious time for example particle engine, advanced trigonometry functions and content management. But with those extra features canvas is just perfect.

3. Making music in early stages – I don’t like making music but game without music is worse.

4. Plan some time for testing – my game would have been much better if I’d had just one more hour to play it trough and make minor changes.

For this Ludum Dare I did a game using Unity 3D. It has little procedural generated bugs and plants!

You can play my entry here and leave me a comment

Tags: timelapse, unity3d

Explore the vast unknowns on this epic island! We didn’t really get to finish it either, but thought I would post our results anyways. This was our first ludum dare, and hopefully not the last! Enjoy.

Move with W A S D, mouse and space

I’ll do a real postmortem when i get the chance, but here’s the time-lapse  of my game yellow dog.

As you can see, I abandoned a bunch of superfluous graphics about 2 minutes in. I realized that there was no way I could finish on time if I kept going.

Well, the game was pretty hard to play, so I’ve made some changes, and I think now it’s much easier to play it !

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

I’ve also made a timelapse :
(no music, you’ll have to put your own, sorry for that :/)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRcgLl3vYhc

And I think that some people just don’t get the link with the theme, so :

The word evolution comes from Latin, meaning unrolling

Last hint : try to click on the logo on the menu screen 😉 !

Good night ! (and thanks for all your great games, I’ve so much fun playing it!)

So after a sleepless night we managed to package the game and enter the LudumDare Jam. All in all we are satisfied with what we put together, though looking back we could have prepared more with getting to know our tools better. XNA is a relatively painless way of creating games, although limited to Windows and Xbox.

We came up with the premise pretty quickly, cutting a few ideas early (creature breeder with arena battles, procedurally generated Metroidvania) due to scope and style. We decided on evolving the character itself. By collecting items in the world the mechanics for controlling the character would change, and the way you interacted with the environment would change with it. One example of this would be how at first you could only breathe in water, and later only air. A lot of this we ultimately didn’t have time to implement.

Due to time constraints the final dragon form was cut from the game, as well as several intermidiate forms (e.g. fins for better swimming, another pair of limbs for wall jumping and running). One of the key issues we had was time management. We had a lot of ideas, yet didn’t take into account how much time would be eaten up by learning things on the fly and tracking annoying issues. Also putting effort into things finally cut from the final build can be a little frustrating. Case in point the running cycle for the planned second final form:

Running cycle for a wingless dragon

So what lessons did we learn?

• Manage your time! Complete critical tasks first, leaving polish for the last day.
• Cut features aggressively and early. This helps with the first as you are concentrating on things that are going into the final build.
• Take the time before hand to practice the different aspects and pipelines of your chosen framework.

Most of these are very familiar to us from reading others postmortems from previous dares, but I guess some things you have to experience to actually know them. Now we have a much better picture of how much work can be done in 3 days, which should help manage the process in future compos.

Take a look at the finished game and let us know what parts we did well and what we could have improved.

Tags: jam, ld24, postmortem

This is not my first ludum dare (its my 3rd one) and so as far as i can see there are a lot of grate minds for the future on computers, not only in videogame but software technology in general. There are many people here that deals with math problems , making complex coding to make an AI , to make a new way of drawing things, doing things, etc. What i don’t see here is a some kind of Technology ratting here, yes there should be some kind of grade to see which game does deserve some reward even if the game is not that entertaining but we know the making of the game has some core that can be extract to use it in other things and has some impressive and complex engine. Like the AI could be so smart but the game is not that fun to play but the AI is impressive and deserves a reward for that. That is in my opinion/petition for Ludum dare, making some kind of technology rating but just for does who use programming not games that were made by “Making games sofwares” that there are already tools to do all the work and the math for us.

I finally feel rested enough to write the post-mortem for Dorobou Neko!! Let’s keep it short, shall we?

The good:

• Ever since I played Prof Layton, part (I have no idea :?), I wanted to recreate the Toy Car minigame, as it seemed simple, funny, and isometric! And in the end, I did recreate it! This idea spooked around in my head for at least a year, and when I started to have that idea, I tried a few AS3 isolibs, with no real success (everything was just too slow).
• This time, I jumped completely into the darkness, using Flixel for z-Ordering AND isometry, and it even somehow worked! Awesome! That’s the spirit! Always trying something new!
• I made another game with Chicky! And cats! Those mischievious cats!!

The bad:

• I didn’t follow the theme, I followed the 1000 kittens! You see, the last LD Tiny World was abysmal for me, my entry had no inspiration at all. And when the theme was announced, I knew the same would happen, that’s why I followed the kitten running gag
• I jumped into the darkness!! Little did I know that I would be debugging for at least 6 hours this weekend! Just debugging! Because the zOrder was not completely correct, and without real zOrder, isometry can also not work right :<. You can still see bugs in zOrdering ingame
• with that, I lost time, and I actually forgot to implement working open bridges. Yes, Chicky can do a moonwalk over them…
• and, also because of no time, I didn’t had the time for ‘real’, or let’s say, ‘better’ animations. In the intro, Chicky and the cat are running funny (reference to the recent chapters of One Piece^^), as it is a lot easier, not to animate legs. But in the end, I even gave the isometric cat that running style. Because I was so sleep-deprived, I felt like dying
• also, when you watch the timelapse, you can see some parts that didn’t make it into the compo version: the level editor! At the end of day one, I had an editor which produced a correct level, but it was so buggy I couldn’t put it in. That was one of the key features I really wanted to add, plus a server component, ‘CREATE YOUR OWN LEVEL’, but, you know, this is LudumDare, there’s no time!!!
• and I had no time anymore to add Chicky’s trusty flying plane :<. All I did was modifying the offset

Anyhow, everyone, let’s have fun rating! Like McFunkyPants said, I’m also not here to ‘win’ anything, I’m here to have fun 😉

Our team submitted “Darbot Saves Science“, which will hopefully be approved on the Scirra Arcade soon, or we’ll get no votes!

Here is a time lapse from Sam.

This project was done in ~52 hours.

Adam Krause – Art, Animation
David Brimmer – Art, Level Design
Sam Sieg – Development, Sound

The primary development tool was “Construct 2” by Scirra, free license.

Art was done in “Adobe Photoshop” and “GIMP”.

Sound was done with “sfxr” by Dr. Petter and “Audacity”.

So this was the first time my group and I have participated in Ludum Dare. It was also the first time we’d ever even looked at ActionScript. That being said, I’m really proud that we ended up with a finished product at all. The first version posted was extremely laggy (and apparently crashed some Internet browsers o.o), but I think I fixed that.

As I said, I’m just happy we finished everything but some tiny details about the game. We couldn’t get the music or a restart button to work, but those are our goals for next time!

I’m happy with the graphics of the game. Since we knew we wouldn’t be the best at coding, we decided from the start that that was what we’d focus on. I really would have liked some music, but none of us knew how to compose, and we were busy getting everything to play.

Overall, it was a wonderful learning experience, and I’m sure we’ll do even better next time!

Play Fish in the Mud

I’ll confess that I haven’t been doing anything to Evergen since the compo and jam ended, aside from creating a mockup screenshot with different colors lol. I mostly played Skyrim. But, I’m going to begin development on the post compo version of the game when I wake up later this evening. I’ll start with re-writing some things that I hastily slapped together, and then start on implementing some new things I’ve come up with that will make the game feel more polished and complete, as right now it’s literally a single 5 minute, non-interesting, intro really to what would be a single level.

I’m adding real progressive level design, more turret and enemy types, and hopefully some audio. My most important objective is to show what this gameplay mechanic is capable of. Present it in a way that better realizes what I originally had in mind.

Also, I was wondering if anyone has suggestions of where to continue updating progress on games after the Ludum Dare judging and everything dies down. I can make a blog to publish news and updates on the game, but where are some good spots to place my game that will pull people to it so that I can continue to get feedback?

I’ve uploaded a timelapse of my photography game.

Play it here!

THE GAME

Hello fellow LD’ers. After these intense 3 days we came up with “Tower of Nugs”. You are an entity that is helping the Nugs survive waves of demon beasts. To do that, you place resources in the map. The nugs use these resources to build new floors of the tower, and find new technologies to make better floors.

As a concept, we wanted to explore the technological evolution of a society while the other fields are left behind. This way, the Nugs discover new technologie but remain a pre-historic civilization. It also helped with the humor.

We’re sorry for the art, as we are three programmers with almost zero drawing capabilities.

We hope you enjoy it

Team Kl0n

PS: Have a Nug Avatar:

So over the weekend I knocked out Soul Jar, and between lack of sleep and constant LD high, this is what went right and wrong in order!  So first up a quick trailer to give you an idea what the game is like:

What went right:

Atmosphere & Theme:

I am happy with how the overall feel of the game turned out, originally I had planned that the game was going to be two parts, the first part were you learn from the human on earth, and the second played solo as the robot returning home, though I had to scrap that pretty early when it was clear that I wouldn’t make the deadline in time, instead I just focused my efforts on making the desert believable, added sandstorms and such, I thought it turned out pretty well but I would like to do some more with the areas I missed in future.  If anything I would have liked to invest a bit more time into the landscapes to make them a bit less procedural, since they are quite bland at times, but I think that is an adventure for another day also.

Personality:

I think I managed to get a great deal of personality out of two (almost) silent protagonists, the droid beeps really added heaps, and the way he learns new abilities was pretty decent, even if lacking in prompts to tell the player what is going on, it was vague but I think with a bit more polish here it could be something really awesome.

What went wrong:

Controls:

Long story short, I started the game using box2D for mmf2, but a series of problems and my lack of experience using it had me frustrated by about hour two, I just fell back on doing a standard mmf2 platforming fastloop movement, which probably resulted in some less than optimal controls.  I think the major problems are the climbing up controls, and the odd up/down pickup controls, though due to the time restraints I don’t think much of this could have been avoided.  Definitely going to overhaul it with box2d when I find the time.

Content Ambitions:

I wanted a pretty intricate item system at the start, with hopes to have around 20 items, and a complex digging/scanning system, the whole thing just fell apart though with lack of time, since the digging wasn’t fully implemented and the controls were clunky and the items were about 10-12 in number including the story items.  The whole mining system just sucked.  Other content that provided a bit of a problem aside from the extra levels mentioned earlier was a pushable block system that I had half implemented but didn’t get around to actually using, so there was a bit of wasted effort there also.  Oh well.

Plot Vagueness:

Another thing that due to lack of time, had to take some cuts.  I initially wanted a text system in the game but that seemed pretty unrealistic after day one, I had to settle for a bitmap popup of what the human says initially when the robot lands, also hints related to finding the item that removes the ships shield so the robot can return home was also scrapped due to time, and I think the game is much more vague because of it.  Ideally if I did it all again I would probably try to tell the story more visually if that was even possible, and scrap the idea of having dialog at all.

First time sound making and music making:

I knew I wanted to use SFXR, but when I had the sounds in-game they sounded really out of place within the context of the game, I ended up wasting too much time into the night and just had to cut the sound effects short, and instead tried to cover up the flaws with a sandstorm-ish sound constantly playing and I filtered all of the sound effects previously made in SFXR through Audacity and gave them a more high def sound, some were redone with my mic but they didn’t turn out the best.  I think I will leave the audio to people who know what they are doing, I am totally out of my element here…

Well thanks for reading guys, you can check out the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10234

Happy to answer anything I missed!

Paul

Well instead of writing a summary about my own game I’ve spent a lot of today looking at what everybody else has done. It can be quite tendious to find good games that can be run from your browser. So below is some I’ve played, and some that I believe really do need to be shared a bit more:

The Best: you have probably found these already, but I am certain that they will all score highly

• Cubevo by NostraDamon : 3D world building game with tense puzzle elements
• Evoland by ncannasse : Amazing Zelda style game that as you play develops by adding all the features you expect from a modern game.

The Underexposed: these games are gems, but sadly have hardly any ratings or comments, please pay them a visit…

• Mars Evolution by morganquirk : play as an astronaut terraforming mars, the atmosphere and pixel art is amazing, but sadly currently only has 7 ratings
• Radioactive Space Bunnies by zimmy87: a very random platformer where you play as neon coloured bunnies.
• EvolutionWars by Spouwny: adapt the genome of your troops and workers to attack the enemy base who is doing the same.
• Fantasy Map Tactics by McFunkypants: move your 3 herralds around procuduarly generated map with a lord of the rings style pen drawn look to it and  bring the word of science to all the cities while avoiding evil armies.
• DNA by KEFIR: play as a fish that can evolve to walk and fly around the map.
• Targeted Evolution by johnfn: humourous platformer where you “fix” (destroy) terminals collect powerup cards with the help of the professor and combine them to grant new powers.
• Alien Rockpool by DustyStylus: lead a swarm of alien tadpoles to take down 3 predators (bosses)
• Shit! It’s evolving by fruitfly: best title yet, a self explatory retro 2.5D shooter

The Worst: just had to point out the single worst game I’ve tried

• simUniverse by Rex Peppers: Hold down a space bar and a counter will increase, the description says something interesting happens after 200  million years.

If you got through all that lot then prehaps you might like to try out my own game (shameless self promotion), “Bear Selection” its a relaxing sandbox game where you watch creature mutate, evolve and multiply. You have to manage them by prevent overpopulation and starvation caused from eating all the foliage so that the creatures can evolve to the final stage… a care bear! Its more of a sit back and watch kind of game, but its my first ever LD entry, my second ever game and my first object orentatied Java Script program. (Until now I have only coded in C for a University numerical methods course and some VB in college).

Tags: games play, list, underexposed, web games

So, I made a game called Revolvolution for this Ludum Dare. (Unfortunately I’ve now learned that ReVOLVOlution was the name of a marketing campaign by Volvo, so a google search shows nothing D:)

24 was my first proper Ludum, and I’m very happy with how my game turned out. You can play it right over here. Feel free to drop a comment, I’m definitely doing a post-compo version and I’d like to know what I need to fix.

So, back to the topic at hand, Revolvolution postmortem. Here we go!

The Positives 😀

• I made a game in less than 48 hours, and people seemed to like it.
• Some people (Two that I’ve heard, Ditto and Bluefoxgs) even liked it enough to bother finishing it. That’s a good 10 minutes work, at a guess. I’m surprised they gave it 1 minute, never mind 10.
• The art style of the game. Kind of old-school, so fairly pixel-y, it didn’t take long to do and turned out great. I tried to keep it fairly persistent throughout the game, and don’t think I did too badly! The carpet in levels 1 and 2, what many people seemed to like, was the very first asset made (it might have even been made before the code) and is modelled on the one in my grandmother’s sitting room. Keeping it in the family 😀
• I enjoyed myself! Definitely going to try and do the next LD.
• I had a fairly unique take on the theme, imho , after vowing not to do an inevitable petri-dish shooty-thing, or some variant.
• The game is fine for both QWERTY and AZERTY, and anyone else can use the arrow keys. It’s suitable for leftys who use their mouse backwards too, because both the left and right mouse buttons work. It’s also okay for colourblind people, but you might not get to admire the lovely carpet in the background.

The Negatives D:

• Really big thing: the Processing version that I’ve been using for the past few months (2.0a6, in the hopes of getting Processing for Android working) decided to stop working the day before the LD.  So I went and downloaded the newest build, 2.0a8. I gave it a quick run-through, it all seemed fine and dandy, and off I went to bed. I had a heart attack the next day when I tried to export though: the newest alpha doesn’t yet support exporting to applet. So no web version, or JAR, or webstart. Just native applications. (It’s okay, I’ve fixed my problems!). But that panic wasn’t great. Felt I should’ve been better prepared.
• No music, or sounds. The way you add that in Processing is through the Minim library. But I’ve had troubles with Minim in the past, so I decided to leave that as an extra thing to add if I had time at the end. I had Autotracker create a few tunes, listened to them, but hadn’t time for anything more. (Hope I’ll have sounds in the post-compo version).
• The FOV. I had a gradient pasted over the playfield centred on the player. Although some people (including me!) liked it, it had a bit of an impact on the framerate (made it up to 10fps slower in some cases) and some felt it was too limiting. I agree now that was a bit restrictive, so I’m rethinking it for the next time.
• Uploading. Mediafire denied all but the Linux version of the game. Twice. Then Dropbox uploaded an early build of the Windows version fine, but took too long doing the others later on, so I had to give up and try somewhere else. After some quick searching I found CX.com, which seemed to do fine. But the Mac version is on Mediafire, because why not. I wouldn’t have had to negotiate all of this if my program had been a Jar, as I’ve never had a problem with StaticVoidGames‘ uploading…
• I didn’t have time to make any posts or interact with the community during the compo D:

So, that’s my story.

Revolvolution Game Page

Play Revolvolution on StaticVoidGames

Tags: evolution, ld24, postmortem, revolvolution

A filter on the games list, so you can set which platform you’re on. Currently fishing for web or windows… Gaaaarrrrrggghhh!!!

Well I finished within the 48 hour deadline and my game is in a playable state, for that I am extremely happy!  I’m glad that I decided to participate and look forward to doing it again.  Next time I think I will try to target web or use MonoGame so that it will be playable on Linux.

What Went Right

The Artwork
It’s very crude but given my skills I am pleased with how it looks.  All of the sprites were drawn by hand in Paint.net.  Also I decided to add some 2 frame animations to the virus and antigens, which was well worth the effort.

The Music
I was hoping to do a piano and drum track, but given that I have no skills in music production I had to resort to tool-generated music.  I think it sounds good and I’m glad I added it.  I’m especially happy that I was able to add a special track to play when you beat the game.

The Map
I was able to implement a map 5000×5000 pixels across that wraps the player around to the other side when they cross the boundaries.  I had never implemented a map like this so it was a fun challenge.  I almost had to abandon the idea when I realized that I would have trouble with drawing when the player is near the edge of the map due to the fact that I would need to render something at the other end of the world as if it were close to you.

What Went Wrong

Collision Detection
I really need to figure out an efficient algorithm for collision checks.  Normally efficiency is far from my mind, but when an algorithm is running 30,000+ comparisons 60 times a second efficiency is extremely important.  Because collision checking took so much system resources, I was forced to abandon some of my gameplay ideas.  If I continue to work on the game after this competition this will be the first area I address.

Gameplay
It’s more of an extremely casual simulation than a game.  It’s trivially easy to beat, and you probably won’t die a single time unless you try to.  I’ve learned from my other game experiments that getting fun gameplay is the hardest part of game design, and that remains true here.

Things That Were Cut

• In-Game Tutorial
• Additional spawning of enemies and cells to make the game harder as you progress
• Ability to name your virus
• I wanted to make the cells wobble
• Animations for virus birth
• Collision between cells
• AI for virus/enemies (white blood cells should seek out viruses)
• Background texture with parallax scrolling
• Alternate textures/rotations for cells so everything doesn’t look identical
• More evolution paths (including the ability to infect white blood cells)
• Different cell types (tissue, blood, and nerve)

Play the game!

Tags: postmortem

I forgot to post this earlier after uploading the video, but the timelapse for the Legend of Elzad is up. Watch me slave away for the weekend trying to get everything done.

Click here to watch the timelapse

Click here to play the game

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 6:28 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.

So one Ludum Dare later, and now the world has “Disgruntled Paddles VERSUS Evolution“.

I’m not quite sure yet whether that’s a good or bad thing.

More or less it’s a pong game that evolves based on active (none of that behind the scenes passive evolution or adaption here) into different play styles.

This is the first game I’ve completed since the 5th grade (it has been in layman’s terms a veeeeeeeery long while), I’m glad to finally not feel guilty when I tell people I make games… (“Awesome! so can you show me anything you’ve done?”  “…um well, I can show you about 13 unfinished projects, 25 if you count unutilized sign documents.”)

WHAT WENT RIGHT:

• The Design / Scope: I took the time to think about what I was doing, I got up saw the theme and started spit-balling. My initial idea was to do pretty much what I ended up doing except that instead of evolving PONG / Breakout clone I was going for evolving jRPG clone, but threw it out almost immediately due to excess of scope. I spent an hour drawing blanks after that, but eventually I realized I could maintain the unique aspects of my initial idea and maintain a smaller scope simply by switching to a simpler Genre, the “first genre ever” came pretty quickly, then I realized I could go crazy non-liner by adding breakout (and for a short period of fantasy space invaders) elements (which is something that didn’t exist in the original jRPG idea). What really helped me with all of this was how modular everything was, excising elements from the design (as I did with plot mutations, visual mutations and a space invaders evolutionary path) didn’t effect the integrity of any other element, just the game variety.
• Slick / Java: I come from a background of trying to handle very “abstracted” visual programs, Game Maker, Stencyl, and RPG maker which I could never quite get a hold of given the amount of “workarounds” needed to implement certain features or genres I desired, Java more or less gave me complete control. Slick was just great to work with, simple and intuitive and with a wealth of tutorials, I went in knowing nothing about the framework and by day 2 I felt I had enough knowledge to tackle any (2d) project I desired.
• Food: I had some leftover pasta, which I ate each day for lunch. I used a store boughttomato based sauce which I spiced up with some ripe freshly cut tomatoes, olive oil, “chunky” sea salt, and parmesan. For dinner I’d eat either a combination of veggies and meat balls or low fat yogurt and something bread based. Throughout the whole jam I felt satisfied, full, and digestively undisturbed.

WHAT WENT WRONG:

• Planning code structures: Not really something I won’t repeat next time, but I spent about an hour planning my code structure day one, but as it turns out this is a big no-no when you’re walking into a framework / library system you’r unfamiliar with. I’d have probably made the same mistakes had I not planned out, but having to dump all the code work on the first day and lose that hour probably wasn’t good.
• Slick: As I said slick was awesome, but -turns out- new technology is not your friend during a game jam. As I mentioned I made a drastic mistake on my first day in regards to how I understood slick’s structure, and I ended up having to dump most of the coding I had done that day. Not to mention I had never ever exported a project out of Eclipse, which was troubling once I figured out whatever I exported didn’t work. I still don’t know the reason why, but a series of (probably redundant) workarounds later I finally got  working, and three hours almost ended up going down the drain. All in all the lost time ended up costing me balance testing, AI, and Sound.
• No Testers Lined up: Sure I ended up barely making the deadline, I’m not referring to basic bug testing, but even afterwards I had no way of knowing whether the mac or Linux versions were working at all which as it turned out weren’t, I think I’ve got it fixed, but I have no way of knowing until someone with Linux or OSX comes forward with a confirmation. Having some testers lined up from day one could’ve cleared this up earlier.
• No Kittens: Seriously guys. This one is on you.

So, thar you have it. My first java game, my first game Jam. To many more! Hopefully I’ll get time this weekend to fix some annoying glitches, balance and speed things up where needed, add sound and post a post-LD version for y’all to enjoy. Till then: Toodles! (I’ll be playing other entries now. Forever.)

-Sam (you can find Disgruntled Paddles VERSUS Evolution over -> here)

Tags: jam, ld24, post-mortem, postmortem

What a fantastic 3 days!!! Thank you LD! Congrats to everyone who entered, we make the community awesome.

I’m too dead to do a post-mortem right now, but it’s coming

Until then, here’s the 3-day timelapse of the art development for our game, Arcane Dungeons ( aka Evil Lord vs Angel for the salvation or perdition of a hero’s soul)

Watch it on Youtube

I edited out almost half the boring time inside Fruity loops, because I was just humming music to myself and that never makes for compelling viewing.

Love,

Christina

Tags: LD #24, ld24, timelapse

It’s only the second half of the competition, because the first half didn’t record.

My entry.

Tags: Game Maker, game maker 7, ld24, timelapse

PostMortem: Adventurers Evolution – a family game

Adventurers Evolution is my first Ludum Dare entry. I loved every minute of it and now during the rating still do. My game, Adventurers Evolution, is a little dedication to family life with some personal feelings and a request from my son in the mix.

Family matters

The main menu of Adventurers Evolution has a tree on it. I am not someone to make art, but I tried to draw a young tree. I have a young family. My son is 7 and my girl is 4 years old (maybe there will be pink ponies and purple kittens in a game at her request). So that is what the tree stands for.

Thijn, My Son

My son loves video games and he is just like me when I was his age. I am very proud of my son. What makes me so proud is he can do the basic things like reading, math and his vocal expression so much better then I could when I was his age. He exceeded me in many ways and I hope will do the same in years to come. So when he came to me a month ago with the request to make a game where he could kill zombies with a lightsaber, I promised to make a game where he could kill zombies. The lightsaber part I was not so sure of at the time. Now you know why there are zombies in Adventurers Evolution and the story behind it.

Fatality

So the weird battle system of Adventurers Evolution, where must I begin. You walk around and there are zombies just standing. So, is there really a reason to fight? Yup, because zombies will go and eat your family. I just did not had time to program some AI. If I did try to write some AI, I would not had time to finish the game at all. I chosen to make a simple battle system. The formula is something like this: damage = defense – (attack + strength+(random with the max of 2)). All fights are till someone dies. The player can not win the game, so you will always die. That is not a bad thing, because your child will follow up. All you want to do is protect your family against the zombies and avenge your fallen dad. If you love your family, would you not die protecting them if there was no other way? My personal feelings tell me I would. Too bad I did not balance the game a bit more, because the zombies will pull your head off anyways now:-)

Dar for the win

“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is a painting by Paul Gauguin. He was a French artist. The questions which make up the name of the painting are important to us. Evolution has influence on those questions, but also the path and role we choose for ourselves. Parents have great influence on their kids. That’s why I wanted the player to pick from 3 lovely ladies. Picking the wrong lady in the early generation can have an impact on later generations. Don’t you want your kids to have a better start then you did? I do.

What went wrong?

– Wife had her birthday, so my focus was not super.
– Kids monkeying around next to my ear. They just kept breaking my concentration. Lucky for me it was only a few hours on Saturday morning this happened. They were exciting for the party.
– Made new bugs because I rewrote code.
– Some bug in Action Script which made removing of a bitmap impossible.
– There was a bug with the zombies and it toke too long to fix it.
– WAV files converted to MP3 on the Mac did not work as expected. So I had to convert those on my PC.
– I really wanted battle output in the game, but all the above made me skip it.
– Next time I am using Dropbox instead of my email to get files from my Mac to my PC.
– I used a free version of FDT, so I can only do caveman debugging. I just really missed using breakpoints and stepping through code.

What went right?

_ I read the book of McFunkypants.
– All the tools were ready to go do their job. I tested all days before.
– Kept all things I am not good at simple, KISS!
– Took enough breaks and walked away from the mac.
– Eat well.
– Drink well.
– Slept well.
– Discard my first idea for the evolution theme, which I thought of the day before.
– Stick with the new idea and removed things I did not think to be necessary.
– Wrote a framework and used it as the base for the game.
– Used FDT to write the framework, because I never used FDT before. I just wanted an IDE to write AS3 code.
– Started with pen and paper.

I want to finish by thanking everyone who left a comment. I really like to have feedback on adventurers Evolution. I am not done with Adventurers Evolution, yet. If you have not played it: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14830 please do!

I didn’t take the time to make a postmortem on the previous ludum dare, so I have to write it now, or I will forget again

The game : My entry is about kitten shooting stuff and eventually beating out the evolution theme because it take the spotlight as the main theme of the compo, and as we all know, kittens should be popular everywhere on the interweb !

What went right :

• Better time management : despite having less time than on the LD#23, I have been able to finish the game well before the deadline. The scale of the game was much smaller, but my knowledge of the creation pipeline also helped a lot. I also have been able to add a decent menu and end screen.
• Content creation : I spend way less time making sprite and animation this time. The result is not better than before, but at least I didn’t struggled as much.
• Code quality : I didn’t got much feedback for the moment, so I don’t know for sure that I haven’t some ugly bugs lurking in the shadows, but the final source code is cleaner and more bug free IHMO. I tried to keep things well separated, and it worked quite well.

What went wrong :

• Theme usage, I feel ashamed when I see what people made with the theme. I made the mistake to decide my game type before the annoucement of the theme, and wasn’t able to change direction after I realized that I can’t make the theme work well with what I have imagined
• The game again is too generic. there is not enough enemy type, or kittens action (like special attack and thing like that). I feel like I got the basic framework right, but I lacked time to implement the features that can make it stand out.
• The map feel too tiny, I feel like the game concept is wasted with the map size I used.
• Sound, I added some sfx this time, but having some music would have been way better.
• Graphics, but that doesn’t count, I’m a programmer I would like to improve in this area, but relying on ludum dare for that is not the best option since you take the habits to cut corners :p
• And using a laptop for a game which require level with scrolling I never missed my dual 21″ screen setup as much than this week-end.

Finally, here’s the link to see kittens in fierce battles : Kittens vs Evolution

I feel I should share some thoughts, if only so I can read them some time in the future.

What went right:

• I came up with a game idea I really liked only about an hour into the competition. I was able to spend 95% of the time implementing/reworking that idea instead of trying to think of one from scratch.
• The level design and basic code and graphics were all finished halfway through. I was able to spend the rest of the time adding some polish, and doing the code that didn’t directly impact the gameplay, such as the ending scene. I wasn’t too rushed at the end.
• I made backups which alleviated a significant amount of frustration when I encountered a game-crashing bug. Gosh it’s annoying how Construct sometimes doesn’t tell you what caused the error!
• Being pretty experienced in Construct allowed me to glide through all the coding without having any serious problems. I pretty much knew exactly how to do everything from the get-go. There was no confusion with how to use the editor, etc.
• Real life didn’t get in the way! I was able to work the whole 2 days.
• No computer / internet problems.

What went wrong:

• Overall, Construct classic is a great program, but there are many small bugs, both in the editor and in the applications it exports. These caused small bits of frustration in development, but more importantly it prevented at least 1 person from being able to play the game due to a crash. When working in Java, I know that no matter what, the application is guaranteed to work everywhere if it works on my machine.
• I realized at the very end that some ambient music would have made the game feel a ton better to play. I just put off finding or making it because I knew it would be a tough job, and it just didn’t get done.
• There are a few bugs that I never discovered from playtesting, and I only found them when my friend told me. None are game-breaking, but they’re just kind of small annoyances.
• I procrastinated on the parts I didn’t want to do, such as making a title screen, screen transitions, ending cinematic, and saving progress. I ended up having to do them all in the last 7 hours, which was when I was the most rushed. I didn’t have much time to play through the whole game multiple times and find obscure bugs.
• I thought and thought, but wasn’t able to come up with a fitting title. I think this is one of the hardest things to do in making a game. No joke. I’ve had this problem on every single one of my projects.

Overall I’m very pleased because this is the first game I have finished ever that I am actually proud of and want people to play it and might even show it to my friends. Playing all the entries is so far very fun and pretty humbling.

This has been my first LD ever, and I have to say that it’s been quite a satisfying experience, from which I’ve learned some interesting lessons. To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure that I would end up submitting an entry at all, so I didn’t take it seriously enough and devoted less hours than I would’ve liked to, but still, I am proud that I applied in the end.

What went right

Having a clear objective.

I already had some ideas for games based on evolution, so once the theme was announced I only had to choose between two different approaches to develop it from a common core concept: an evolving ecosystem. Thus, that core concept was always in the horizon, which helped me not to ramble too much.

Focus on simple goals.

Rather than getting lost in architecture details, that frequently lead to a dead end (well, at least that tends to happen to me), I split the steps to reach that goal into small, simple tasks, so that I could iterate quickly and had new things to show (not necessarily in a visual sense) all the time. The feeling of accomplishment is really rewarding, and pushes you further towards the next goal.

What went wrong

Language choice.

I really like programming in C++, and I’m always eager to keep learning and improving at it, so I take advantage of every opportunity that allows me to do that. However, and despite what I previously said about the feeling of successfully reaching some minor milestones, the main objective of the Ludum Dare is to develop a game in a really short time. This means that we should be smart enough to choose wisely the language, tools,etc, that will allow us to optimize that time and, especially, reach a larger number of people.

To code a full game from scratch in 48 hours (well, in fact I would say the actual time devoted to it would be more or less one third of it) using C++ is probably much less time efficient than the other alternatives I’d considered (AS3, Pygame), even if I had the feeling that I was spitting out features at a relatively high speed. Yeah, it is more powerful but, being realistic, a game intended to be finished in less than two days will not probably require that much.

And then, of course, there is the issue of distributing your game.

I only did a Windows release, so that leaves Linux and Mac users out of the equation (even though a port to Linux could be more or less immediate, but I don’t have any distro installed on my laptop). What’s more, even for Windows the probability of errors or crashes due to missing DLLs, incorrect build executables, etc., to appear is relatively high, which puts an additional barrier to your public. To top it all, since I finished quite late, I couldn’t playtest it with friends or family, so I could only trust my computer.

This led to some chaos on Monday, where the initial build submitted was using a debug executable and crashed in several machines, or there were strange frame rate drop issues (about the frame rate, I realized that the main loop implementation I chose left to be desired, too…but the disparity spotted in one case was unreasonable). I submitted a fixed build, but there are still some crash reports.

So, the conclusions are: First, think carefully about what you want to achieve: is it learning? Ok, but then don’t complain if you spend twice or thrice the time and can’t have so many things done; Is it developing a fun game? Then use something that allows you to have a fun game FAST. Is it a mix of both? (Yeah, I’m stubborn) Well, in that case, FFS, USE SOME CODE BASE. A basic game core, functionality for rendering text (which isn’t trivial using SDL_ttf plus OpenGL as I did), sprite drawing, sound, UI components…all of these can really help reducing the time spent developing low-level stuff, leaving you more time to make the game fun and cool-looking, which is what matters.

Second, if your application artifacts are platform-specific, test it, test it and test it once again in as many different computers as possible. And, if you’re making a multiplatform game, test it, test it and test it in as many different platforms, browsers and devices as possible.

Lack of overall focus

This may sound as if it contradicts one of the epigraphs in the “What went right” section, but in reality they’re two different things… Here I mean that my commitment to start coding wasn’t 100%. I would wake up in the morning and debate between overall procrastinating, playing something or developing the game, and when I realised I’d wasted several hours. Yeah, once I launched Visual Studio and started typing I’d enter the “flow state” and I could spend hours coding non-stop, but all that time lost was invaluable. Of course, the final result has resented.

Gameplay? What gameplay?

Being a gameplay programmer myself, this is probably my main grip.

Since I’m interested in genetic algorithms and evolution, I focused too much in having a simulation running with mutations, crossing and selection of the fittest. Once I had that, I would then give the player the ability to interact with the world and give them some challenges. However, on Sunday morning and during most of the afternoon I barely did anything until a couple of hours before the deadline, which means I ran out of time to put on the actual “game”. I just threw a couple of unbalanced or just plain useless actions to alter things such as reproduction rates or…let’s call it “non-organic food”.

A player would have a toolbox or options to give advantages/disadvantages to the survival of creatures. The goal of a level would be to get to a given number of specimens fulfilling a set of traits in a set number of generations. Since she can’t choose the traits directly, all she  has in her hands is the power toolbox. Thus, she might raise a plague affecting…let’s say “mostly blue” creatures. Or perhaps provoking a flood. In addition to cooldowns, using those powers would use some amount of an undetermined resource.

Another really basic feature that I regret that I couldn’t implement was AI. I don’t mean flocking behaviours or anything like that (at least in the beginning ^_^), but simply giving preys the ability to detect and flee from predators, and make these able to chase them would have been a really interesting thing to do.

In the end, creatures were left with a really limited set of genes: speed, the way they got the energy, how they reproduced, their starting life…and not too much. I regret not having put things such as “sight”, “locomotion”, or “personality”, for example.

Some other, more advanced features that I had in mind included a somewhat hostile environment, and some resource management aside from the living creatures interacting with each other. This would have opened the door to new creature traits (flying creatures, amphibious, temperature…the possibilities are endless), and new ways for the players to alter the world conditions and make thing easier to increase or decrease the odds for the creatures to survive.

As you can see, the whole concept can become too complex really easily, and you have to constrain yourself to something doable in 48 hours. A noob’s mistake =_=

 No polish at all

Again, as a consequence of the lack of time, I couldn’t go past the primitive-based procedural shapes and put something nicer instead (actually, procedural wouldn’t have been that terrible if I could have done something similar to Dawkins’ biomorphs). Some sound or music could have been nice, too.

 Ø——————- Ø——————-Ø——————-Ø——————-Ø

TL;DR: For the next time, I’ll try to start small, with a clear, complete idea. Then, iterate over it, getting incremental, but working and testable functionality, and commit to the jam 100%. Also, I should favour web deployable solutions over C++ unless I had a minimum set of libraries to save some time and focus on gameplay. Last, think of the childr…eeer, of the public (meaning: test it if possible in more than one machine, and try to port it to Unix-based systems it it’s not a web release)

Here is the timelapse/making of Room 24 !

Enjoy !

When I was creating my game I was in a hurry because the competition was not only ending but I had to leave. Because of this I accidentally made the spawn rate of enemies too high making the game unplayable. I also forgot to put a cap on the fps so it renders faster than necessary. Would I be able to fix any of this? Please help.

Firstly, if you haven’t played our game yet, please do so, it would make us happy: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11523

So, with a good night’s rest and return to normalcy behind me, I figured now would be a good time to reflect on some of the details of the game. This is mostly a talk about the AI and gameplay, since Flixel did most of the heavy lifting with regards to sprite pushing. This is also fairly elementary stuff since I wasn’t going to make any breakthroughs in AI in 72 hours, although is hopefully of interest to people who’ve not had much exposure to the area before.

AI – Wander Behaviour

The standard (red top) enemies in Blob’s Gotta Eat alternate between two behaviours : standing and wandering to a nearby point. Since it doesn’t exactly take a lot of code to make an enemy stand still, let’s talk about the wander behaviour. When an enemy decides to wander, it first makes a random choice between staying in the same room or going to an adjacent room (I’ll get onto what defines a room in a bit). For the final game we decided to make it a 50/50 chance of whether the enemy would change rooms. Once the enemy has decided on a room, they’ll pick a random spot in that room which is unobstructed by furniture and then walk to it.

We went with this behaviour so the enemies would have more of an interest in staying in a general area of a level, than if they had randomly picked a point in the entire level. I.e. you’ll see them hang around a room, maybe walk to a couple of different nearby points and then move to a nearby room, giving a better impression of having some interest in the environment.

Pathfinding

For path-finding between two points, I simply built up a graph of all unblocked squares in the level and then used Dijkstra’s algorithm to find a route from their current location to their desired target (whether it was in the same or different room made no difference, since the graph covered the whole level). For those unfamiliar with Dijkstra’s, the basic jist is starting out from the nearest node (in this case 2D tile location) to the start location, you calculate the distance to neighbouring nodes, finalising the distance to the closest node, and then re-calculate distance to the neighbouring nodes of that, and so on until you’ve reached the destination node. There are plenty of good articles on the web on it, and a lot of places will also recommend the A* algorithm (which achieves similar results quicker) although for the sake of a small game there won’t be difference in it (I only needed to generate a path about once every few seconds for each enemy, and Djikstra’s is quicker to implement).

(Here’s a crude representation of the links between nodes in a section of a level. Each red line between two tiles is a connection that can be walked by an enemy)

Room specification

In our game, a room is defined by a series of rectangular areas (so a rectangular room can be defined with one area, an L-shaped room with two areas, etc) and the indices of rooms which it considers neighbours. Interestingly, since the pathfinding is totally separate from the definition of rooms, we can actually define any two rooms to be neighbours, and the shortest route between them will be treated as the accepted passageway followed when switching rooms, be it one square or a long snaking corridor through the level. When we are reading in the areas bound to a room, we iterate through each tile in that area and add to a list of unobstructed tiles for the room. This list is used when randomly picking a point in the room for an enemy to visit and means each tile has equal probability of being chosen regardless of room shape. It also means we can guarantee that the first tile randomly picked will be unobstructed; if we’d randomly picked a tile in one of the room’s areas, then we’d have to check if it was free and then potentially pick a new tile, and re-check if it was free and so on.

(This diagram shows the actual rooms in a certain level and their connections. Enemies are allowed to walk on other parts of the level if their pathfinding is quicker that way, but they will only head towards points in the defined rooms.)

Line of sight checking

To determine if an enemy can see the player we need to perform a line of sight check through the level, to see if a straight line from the enemy to player would collide with any walls or furniture. This is done by first calculating the tile coordinates of the start and end positions, and the angle of the line between them. Then from the starting position, via some good old fashioned trigonometry, we calculate whether the line has to travel least to reach a new x or y coordinate. At that point we update the current tile coordinate and see if the tile is unobstructed (in which case we return false in the line of sight check) and if not then we continue until the next x or y change. We repeat this until we reach the destination tile, and if we have never earlied out due to passing through an obstructed tile, then we have a clear line of sight.

(In the example above, I have added lines projected out from the enemy horizontally to the next x & vertically to the next y tile boundary, and from those points back onto the line from enemy to player. As you can see, the line going horizontally from the enemy maps onto the closest point on the line, so we’ll check the tile to the right first, and then repeat as necessary until we reach the destination tile.)

The only special case is when we pass exactly through the diagonal midpoint of two tiles (which can and does happen). In these cases, we test both tiles either side (the algorithm would normally snake around, going horizontally by one tile and then vertically by one tile leading to erratic lines of sight).

Putting it all together – Gameplay decisions

So, by default enemies would alternate between their stand or wander states, also checking each frame as to whether they could see the player. Before doing the line of sight check, enemies would check that the player is within 60 degrees of their current direction, thus allowing the player to sneak up on enemies when their backs are turned. On seeing the player, enemies would allow a grace period of one second before they actually open fire (the gun draw animation and “huh” sound effect indicates the start of this), thus allowing the player to experiment with how far out of cover they can be without being instantly punished. Once an enemy has opened fire, they will stay facing the player as he/she moves and is within line of sight, to prevent the player from just circling around to the back of the enemy. Once line of sight is broken, the normal behaviour in most stealth games is for enemies to head directly for the last-seen player location, but this would likely be a fatal move for the AI since they would probably move to the player’s attack range before they regained line of sight (and when under the time restriction of a game jam, it’s one less behaviour to implement).

You’ll also see a couple of different coloured enemies, to provide some variation in the levels. White coat enemies are set to have a zero probability of deciding to leave their current room when in their wander behaviour. These were added to counteract the random nature of the red enemies occassionally causing them to all bunch up in a single room (which is near impossible for the player to tackle, and makes the rest of the level rather uninteresting). Blue coat enemies consist only of the stand behaviour, allowing me to set the areas infront of them as guaranteed kill-zones for the player until the player has followed the level around to kill them from behind, forcing some structure to how the player tackled the level.

So, to conclude, for most of the jam’s duration, I coded the AI behaviours of the enemies, since these are what make or break a stealth game. The AI have to have means of detecting the player, be deadly when they have done so but still have some identifiable flaw which allows the player to take advantage of them. Hopefully you found this interesting (I apologise for the huge length), and please play the game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11523

My game: Survivalism

One night’s sleep after the compo I looked at my game and found that I had neglected a ton of things that I would usually be very picky about – sleep deprivation hooray. A quick postmortem summing up what I learned already:

What worked well:

First off, I finished the thing in time, mainly because I had a clear picture of what my planned features would require and therefore had most of the crucial features working within the first day. By midnight of day one i basically thought I was done

Here’s an impression of what it looked like after day one:

Also the enemy design worked out quite well, considering everything consists of procedural primitives. As a theme I had picked the microbiological world of cells and bacteria – which I interpreted quite loosely – and got some appealingly odd cellular shapes together farly quickly.

I also think that this take on arena shooters plays quite differently, as I turned it all into a more casual yet potentially more frantic experience. I got comparisons to bomberman and pacman have come up, for whatever that’s worth.

What went wrong:

Turns out the Timeline system I had built still invovled quite some effort to get some playtime together. Now I wish I had gone for randomised respawning and rather created a potenially endless game, even if that would have meant to give a lot of control over the pacing away. What I used essentially required me to define every enemy wave quite elaborately and lead me to reuse stuff over and over in order to get to an end.

The color palette I picked is fairly tight but the rigid reuse of all colors made the whole thing far busier and not as readable as I’d like. Items share colors with enemies, Icons are small and tend to move quite fast, all of which creates a bit of a clutter at times.

Player feedback can be misleading. The player’s attack should express the weapon config and its efficiency. Some of the more suicidal enemies tend to explode when crashing into the player which looks remarkably much like killing them. This of course makes it quite difficult for the the players to clearly judge the result of their efforts.

Survivalism Gameplay Video

Conclusion:

I learned a bunch of important lessons already and I will quite probably revise this thing after collecting some more feedback. It might not be my most monumental prject, but that makes polishing it just a bit more even more tempting.

Check the game here

And here is the link!

hi. i’ve been quiet all weekend, but i (along with two teammates) did make a game. i was pessimistic about this theme at first, but it fortunately ended up giving me a really inspiring idea.

the game has you platforming and using a dash attack to defend fellow dinosaurs against continuously spawning aliens. it’s a very skill based game. you have to jump around to avoid attacks while lining up your own attacks fast enough to keep the aliens from overwhelming you. eggs will periodically hatch in groups around the map, which triggers waves of aliens to be beamed in to evolve the hatching dinos. dinos that get hit with the alien evolution rays turn into new enemies for you to deal with. as the game progresses, they evolve into tougher creatures. you can see the whole level at once, so you’re able to be a little strategic about mopping up the aliens and evolved creatures. the gameplay is very fast paced, fun, and even flow-inducing.

overall i’m quite happy with how it turned out. it has excellent pixel art provided by one of my teammates, and a little story to boot. so check it out!

entry page

larger screenshot

MatterSplatter: Play in browser here: LINKY-LINK

This is my first LD, and I’ve loved it from start to finish. The build up, the frantic two days of cobbling something together, then the playing and rating. This community is brilliant.

So then, I guess we start with…

What Went Right

While it was my first LD, I do make games as a day job, so I knew not to try to put too many features into the game and end up with a bunch of half finished junk. No, my junk is as intended! I pretty much got all I wanted to in the game, and the bits I left out made room for a bit of polish. All in all I got a playable, sort of fully featured game done between 6am Saturday and 9pm Sunday, and got a walk round the park with the GF and a couple of pints down the pub on Sunday afternoon before the final push…!! Pacing was spot on!!  

I am way proud of the music. The sfx are amusing, but sfxr does that by its nature, so I can’t really take credit for that. But the music was laid down note for note in Garageband. Death music is cinema epic, IMO!  

Environment. I’ve been doing some development in Unity so I knew it would do for a platform, but in the whole 48 hours the game didn’t crash once. If a script hits an exception it just drops out and the game keeps running. It’s brilliant.

Controls. I wanted to make an semi-hardcore arcade game that played using keys in a browser. That I did!

Bizarro. When someone leaves the comment: “Sex and defecation: precisely what I want from my games. We only took 31.231 seconds to inseminate the queen. Beat that!  The music is really nice, and the game itself is hilarious XD”, you know you’ve done something out of the ordinary!

What Went Wrong

Well, I concentrated on gameplay and sound, leaving the graphics functional at best… Which really doesn’t leave much for screen shots. I was worried whether anyone would actually play the thing, but such is the rad votes/cool system, that’s not been a problem!

I’ve watched family and friends play the game… it’s waaay too hard! The positive being that I’ll take this lesson into future games.

Experimentalism. Seeing the super-badassedness of other entries, I’m kind of down on the base game I came up with: move and shoot – yay! Next time I think I’ll gamble on total commitment to experimental gameplay.

Timelapse video – I forgot to restart it on the second day… Oops!!

Closing…

The game does a few cool things in Unity though, (a core object to store persistent state, cheap shadows that follow an object, spawning prefabs, collisions that respect layers, floating physics). So ask any questions you want, probably best to ask at VAMflax@gmail.com as I might not be monitoring this site regularly after voting is done.

I think the 48 hour challenge will be a once a year event for me as it’s pretty disruptive. But I do fancy the Jam, as I could get a few friends over and it be a bit more laid back, (not that it was entirely un-laid back this time!).

Next up is to bring out my current game, Chopper Mike. I’m going to do iOS and Android versions. Check progress at VAMflax.com!

To the dudes who organise this… you rule! And to the dudes who participate… you doubley rule!!

High fives all round!!!   XD

Hello everyone Gabe here, it was really fun and everyone was so nice. I am so glad that I actually submitted something, its really only my second actual game I’ve ever made. During LD22 I really wanted to make a game and even made an I’m in post, things didnt go well from  the begining and I decided to forfiet and watch notch’s livestream the rest of the time. This severely reduced my confidence of finishing this one.

How I came up with the idea (As mentioned in the comments on my submission) :

“A couple things that influenced me in the story part were, ‘The Last Book in the Universe’ by Rod Philbrick and the movie ‘In Time’ (2011) starring Justin Timberlake, Olivia Wilde and Amanda Seyfried. I would highly suggest those.

In the book, the world is separated into two groups of people, the commoners and the proovs which are genetically engineered to be better, think super-natural selection. That gave me the idea of evolving to be wealthy.

 In the movie, everyone is engineered so that once they turn 25, their ‘clock’ turns on and they have one year of time. When your clock hits zero, you die. Everything is based on time, its the new currency: “the more wealthy, the longer you live.” That idea is the reason you need to hurry (or else). Also in the movie, inorder to cross ‘time zones’ you had to pay a toll, which was a way to keep the social classes separate, so the rich, who were also the oldest, lived on one side of the country and poor on the other. And that is the reason, you need money to get closer to your parents and the people who could help you find them. ”

Things that went right:

• I finished the game in time
• It runs well on the systems I’ve tested
• I learned a whole bunch about packaging, jars, and jnlp’s
• Story sounded okay
• Lots of positive feedback
• Music ended up working (thanks greasemonkey)
• Didnt have to worry about Math this time (although as a CS/Math major I should probably be better at math)

Things that went wrong or I  would do differently:

•  My story didnt really work with the theme
• AI is horrible
• Collision Math is just for walls (it shouldve been for the other balls too, so that everyone was pushing off each other and space would push people away from you. This changed the entire story and gameplay)
• It takes a while to get used to the invisibility, and so in the beginning you just mash buttons until you can just make out the character
• Graphics were not the best, just colored circles and handmade text
• no splash screen

Link to submission

Link to Timelapse

Link to Book(wikipedia)

Link to Movie(wikipedia) (imdb)

Please join today on my stream at 6 pm PST (-8 GMT) on 8/28/2012 (about two hours from now).

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

Prance Prance Evolution was my first ever finished game (although it’s arguably still incomplete…), and the Ludum Dare experience was awesome! Schedule permitting, I’ll be participating in these from now on!

Prance Prance Evolution is a Race Horse management simulation, where the goal is to raise the perfect horse through both breeding and buying. Since I had to cut a lot of features to make the 48 hour time limit (An extra day for the jam wouldn’t have made much sense, since Monday is a work day), it’s only marginally fun. It has several redeeming qualities, particularly since it’s my first game at all, but in retrospect it could have been better. Anyway, I’ll start with what went right.

What went right:

Uniqueness: I’ve only reviewed roughly thirty other entries so far, but my game is very different from anything else I’ve got to play. I’m really glad I was able to contribute something somewhat unique in a sea of games.

Time Management: One thing I constantly did over the weekend was carried times in my head of when I wanted to be done with certain aspects. In my time zone, the competition ran from 8pm Friday-8 pm Saturday, which created some surprisingly convenient windows. For instance, I planned to go to bed at midnight Friday night (only missed by an hour!), and my goal was to have the concept, what features would be required, what things would need to be coded that I had either struggled with in the past or had no experience doing, as well as a general idea of the assets required. Saturday, I planned to have all of the locations (And a good deal of art) done by noon, and be feature complete by midnight that night (didn’t quite make that one.) I made imaginary schedules like this constantly, and I believe it was hugely beneficial.

What went wrong:

Identity: This is, in my opinion, the biggest flaw I had. I never really considered what was core to the game.  Moonmagic: “I enjoyed the rainbow horse sprites and the dizzying array of statistical options, but found myself wishing for the entire game to be a lot more ridiculous. I encountered a horse called Chevy, and I wished that it was Chevy Ray Johnston, and that caused me to wish for many silly horse names and Acme / Mariokart style random events during the race.” Moonmagic nailed it on the head. I had very conflicting styles. I had a colorful (although ugly) pallet of colors, a pun for a title, and some interesting horse names, which were appealing, but never really committed to going that route. Ultimately, I wish I would have less time coding, and more time thinking about what I really wanted to create. I think making a functional game trumped creating something worthwhile, which I hope to correct next time around.

Sound: There is none. I thought I could use music borrowed from the web, as long as it was legal for the purposes I was using it for, but after looking online, it seemed like it was a lot more restrictive than that. Because it was so late in the comp., I didn’t really have time to make something from scratch, and I also had no idea where I should begin, anyway. Anyway, this is totally my fault, but I’m not sure what the quality would have been like had I known, either. It is likely, however, that even bad sounds/music could have made it feel a lot more complete. This would have been especially true of music, since the game primarily takes place in menus.

Gameplay: My game, while interesting, isn’t all that fun. Because there is are limited options as to how to achieve your goal, the game can sometimes feel like a grind. This problem mainly came up because I did a poor job with creating my base classes, so I spent way too much time creating each individual menu (which are butt-ugly, to boot). If I had spent more time creating flexible base classes, I could have saved time for play-testing, animating, and sound later on.

Graphics: My game isn’t exactly pretty, lol. I’m not a great artist at all, so it might have been better to choose a less graphics intensive design. Ultimately, I need to learn and get better in this area.

There’s a lot more to comment on, but I think that’s plenty for one post. I just want to thank the community for the push to actually finish something, as well as all the comments! It’s a very cool thing to think that people all over the world are playing something I made, even though I’m not totally proud of it. Thanks for the support and motivation Ludum Dare!

After failing to make a playable game for LD #23, my first attempt a non-mini LD, the motive for making a game for LD#24 didn’t really kick in until after the theme was announced. I didn’t want to repeat the failures I made in LD #23, so I actually took some time jotting ideas into my notebook before opening up FlashDevelop to set up the framework for my game.

What went right:

Planning. After the theme was announced on the IRC channel, the first thing I wrote in my notebook was “EVOLUTION!!! FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU!!!”, then I had some ideas about monkeys evolving, then about ‘devolution’, where you have to remove genes to make a species dumber, eventually leading to extinction. I finally settled with a game where you have to ‘evolve’ a spaceship by defeating enemies.

Keeping things simple. I made an effort not to make sure the game mechanics didn’t go beyond my abilities. I’ve never tackled AI in a game I’ve made before, so I just created a very simple ‘AI’ system.

Sense of getting stronger. I really didn’t know about how this turned out until I played my game after submitting it.

What went wrong:

Work commitments / Real life. I spent the majority of Saturday at work, leaving me with little time to work on the game.

Lack of play testing. Some felt the difficulty of the game was too hard, and others said it was too easy, once they’d figured out the tricks in defeating the enemies.

Not knowing what I was doing. Sometimes, I would forget what I was working on within my code. I feared that some things could be left unfinished.

Cut content. I had originally planned on having the player destroy smaller, lower level ships in order to gain health (which would’ve given a greater sense of evolving), but instead, decided that stopping vertical movement would restore 5% of your health per second instead. I also considered having icons appear above the enemies, to indicate their ‘dominant’ stat (the one which will be upgraded when you defeath them). I was running out of time, so these features were cut, as well as a score system, and a win condition (getting to the ‘Dragon’ level).

Why did I name the game ‘Gravallax’? Because I work in a restaurant that serves Gravlax, and I thought that the name of this dish sounded like a retro space shooter. We sold a lot of Grav(al)lax that Saturday.

You can play my game RIGHT HERE