This blog post comes to you in two parts. Firstly, I finally got around to editing the two days of my timelapse footage together, and it can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWgxnj_boIk Sorry it’s so long, youtube’s editor doesn’t have a facility to speed it up, and once I had uploaded it once I didn’t want to have to do it again after running the video through ffmpeg. Also sorry it’s so silent, I don’t have any nice royalty free music at my immediate disposal.

Now, onto the post-mortem:

What I’m proud of:

-The maps, I love the map generator I wrote, especially given how quickly I wrote it and how simple the logic is. Essentially all it does is divide the whole map space up into 5*5 cells, in about half of those cells it puts a randomly sized room. Every room gets a corridor that goes out of one side of it and continues until it hits open space. Up until a few seconds ago I thought it was possible for the algorithm to produce isolated sets of rooms (which would be considered a bug), but actually it turns out that it can’t! At least, not in any way that I am currently aware of.

-The art, although by most people’s standards the art is pretty rubbish, by my standards the art is fantastic, especially bearing in mind that all of my previous Ludum Dare games have relied entirely on primitives for their visuals. Annoyingly the art looks much nicer when blown up about 20 times, but no one ever sees it like that of course because that’s not how my games shows it…

-The dedication, although this still falls a long way short by the standards of many Ludum Dareers that I see, it’s a lot better than it usually is for me. Normally a huge percentage of the time I’m meant to spend working on my game is spent playing minecraft or dwarf fortress or something, and that’s not really the case this time. Watching the timelapse it’s fairly obvious that nearly all the time was spent on things relating directly to LD, and within that a vast majority was spent on my game.

What I’m less proud of:

-Balancing, my game needed a lot more time put into it to make it properly balanced. I found in the last few hours that all the changes I made threw the game between two extremes, of being incredibly easy to get ridiculous numbers of levels without any skill or thought, and being impossible to get past level 2. The main reason this happened I think is because my attempts at balancing the game almost always involved me making 2 or 3 different changes in one direction, so I’d never really be sure how much of the resulting change was down to any given change in the code. As a consequence it’s very easy to rattle through levels in the published version of the game, as proven my a friend of mine getting to level 20 on his first try while at work

-Music and SFX, didn’t exist at all in the game, and they really should have, especially since I had so much time left at the end of the comp that could have been used to get these done (and put off porting until the next day). I think the main reason I didn’t go for these is because I have literally zero experience with either making sound or with using it in allegro 5 (the graphic library I use).

-The combat system, has loads of flaws, not least of which is the fact that you have no idea what’s really happening when you’re fighting so often you’ll die without even realising you were in trouble. A lot of this could be fixed with a few small changes, such as adding sound affects when you hit a monster, changing it so that a single attack action by you or a slime didn’t cause both of you to take damage and by having enemy stats automatically display when you start a fight.

-The interface, not much to say here, but the game could have done with in game instructions/an explanation of all the arcane numbers down the side.

-The theme, the original premise of the game would be that you would kill all the weaker enemies and the stronger ones would survive and breed so each wave was better than the last. That didn’t really work out that well because there was never a reason not to fight to the death, so I added a mechanic whereby offspring were stronger than their parents around half the time, but they still didn’t get harder fast enough to be noticeable.

What I plan to do different next time:

-So the only thing I can actually think of to put in this category is erm, everything! Next LD I enter I plan to use JS and HTML 5 because I think it’ll be fun to target the web for a change, and I refuse to learn flash or java. I also hope they’ll allow for a much more pleasant development cycle than my horrible mix of C  and C++ (due to a switchover when I finally realised why g++ wasn’t playing nice with allegro) that might even mean I get a bit more done. So I guess now would be a good time to start wondering where a good place to learn Javascript it

Ludum Dare #24 is now over, and it’s time to do a post-mortem!

Last weekend, pixelcake (fellow jammer) and I went out of our comfort zones and made a rhythm game.

In our game, you play as Charles Darwin, who’s had enough with natural selection and has decided to take evolution into his own hands with his 3-conveyor design artificial animal sorting machine. Switch lanes using the arrow keys, and press space to pop an animal off the conveyor belt. Only pop off the gray, sickly-looking animals!

All in all, it was a great experience. I’ll tell you how it went, starting at the theme announcement:

On Friday, August 24th, at exactly 6:00 pm, I was on the Ludum Dare IRC channel, waiting to hear what the theme was. When I heard that the theme for LD#24 was “Evolution”, I thought it sounded pretty good. I wasn’t going to start any sort of work on a game yet until the next day, around noon, when I would get together with pixelcake and begin development. Of course, we would still have more than 48 hours of jam time, but sadly, we both had school on Monday, which interfered with our plans. We still managed to pull together a game in about 28 hours.

On Saturday, pixelcake and I began development. Or not. The more we thought about ideas for a game about evolution, the more we hated the theme. Why couldn’t Evolution have been beaten by Parallel Worlds, or Survive? Surely both of these were more interesting themes.

After two solid hours of brainstorming, bouncing ideas off of each other, and screwing around on the computer, we cranked out a concept for a game.

Charles Darwin is in a rhythm game where he stomps out animals to the beat.

Charles Darwin! Evolution! Rhythm game! After having thought of such a great idea, we got right to work, programming, spriting, and composing music. By the next day, we had the core concept of our game finished. This left us with just a tiny bit of time to add a couple of finishing touches to our game. Finally, I filled out the almighty submission form, uploaded our game to Dropbox, and clicked Submit.

Overall, how did we do? Quite well, in fact. We probably won’t win LD#24, but we had a great weekend and made something we’re proud of, even if it could use a little bit more work. Next LD, I think the main thing to focus on for us will be maintaining a positive attitude, making better use of our time, and getting plenty of sleep. These are all things we improved on since our last LD, but I think we can do more.

And of course – here’s our game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3200

If you need a Mac or Linux build, drop a comment on the game page and I’ll try to get one up.

The Buffalo Joe LD 24 Compo Post-Mortem

A common question I get is, “What does Buffalo Joe have to do with Evolution?” That’s a good question! Because, I mean, all concepts evolve, right? And, well, the evolutionary concept at the heart of the game sort of caved in to outside pressure and, you know, didn’t survive? It’s actually sort of meta! Right?  =D

The Numbers

Ludum Dare Competition Count: Second

Tools: Unity (C#), Blender, Photoshop, Audacity, iPhone Voice Memo

Hours spent on:

• Sleeping: 9
• Meals with wife: 3
• Exercising: 1
• Solitary Eating Rituals: 1
• Wondering about it all, man, like: 0.9
• Fruitlessly Flogging Flocking Fixes: 2
• Audio: 1.1
• Texture/Model Creation: 3
• ??? (missed time due to likely abduction by forces unknown): TBD
• Fire (Discarded): 1.5
• Level creation/design: 1.5
• Remainder: 23 hours

Choosing the Concept

My wife and I went on a dinner date right after the theme was announced, and because she’s a bubbly font of creativity, we soon had a long list of good ideas. Ultimately, I had to decide between:

• Polytoad: Evolutionary Frogger! Your body adapts to match the cars which crush you. Mack truck? Throbbing metal hindlegs. Speedbike? Tapered waist. Honda Accord? More beige!
• Guy On A Buffalo: “Evolutionize” your flock in unspecified ways to meet unspecified dangers!

Really, in my heart of hearts, I knew Polytoad was the game to choose. It was Doable. But this damn song kept playing in my head:  Guy On A Buffalo! Right. Who could resist the Call of the Buffalo?

 F*cking Flocking

Right away, I made an LD n00b mistake by wasting time on tech I’d never used before. Flocking is a pretty basic computer science thing, but I was an English major. Oops. That time could have been spent on getting evolution in the game. Speaking of…

The Original Game Design

1. A fire is raging across the plains. You must escape across the river to safety.
2. There are packs of wolves / Indian hunting parties / Pioneer wagons barring your way. You can run them down if your herd is strong enough.
3. Eat grass to get baby buffalo and grow them.
4. Find special plants — Fireweed, Cloudpuffs, and Rustleaf — to start adding special DNA to your new baby buffs.
5. These plants will evolve your herd into stronger, faster, more powerful animals, which you’ll need for later levels.
6. You are personally a man on a buffalo who can shoot bad guys (slowly) and can’t get killed.

This had everything I needed:

• A clear goal (get across the river)
• A clear obstacle (enemies blocking the river will try to kill you)
• A clear way to overcome the obstacle (grow the herd so you can overrun them)
• Time pressure (fire, which was effectively a timer)
• Dynamic pressure (wolves would spawn at an increasing rate)

The one problem I recognized — but hoped would solve itself — was that evolution was not necessary for this game design. It would make your buffalo stronger, helping you achieve certain goals, but it wasn’t necessary. But instead of solving it then and there, I stuck with production, hoping I’d figure it out.

Issues Encountered

• I made sloppy states for my leader, buffalo, and wolves. This made finding bugs difficult. I ended up rewriting everything as components, making it more like a state machine. LESSON: Start with state machines.
• I got fire working, functionally (burned plants, animals, moved across the plains), but there was no way to make it look good in 3D in the time I had. That was about 60 to 90 minutes wasted right there. LESSON: Make sure game objects can be visualized in your game for a low cost. Cut them if they can’t.
• I spent a lot of time getting wolf and buffalo interactions to feel more life-like. In other words, buffalo would kill wolves if hit head-on, otherwise wolves would hurt buffalo. And wolves would eat dead buffalo, so you could sacrifice a buffalo to get away. Oh, and baby buffs would be weaker, right? And maybe couldn’t kill wolves… TLDR: Too complicated. Did not contribute to high concept, nor was it required. LESSON: Core gameplay must be simple systems. Expand later.

Final Game Design

1. Get your herd of buffalo over the deep canyon to escape the marauding wolves
2. Do this by eating enough Cloudpuffs to give your buffalo wings, so they can fly over.
3. Baby buffalo eat grass to make more buffalo.
4. Wolves kill baby buffs. You kill wolves.
5. Wolves will spawn at a continually faster rate, creating time pressure.
6. Your base score is number of buffalo divided by time.

This was a great design for a Ludum Dare. Too bad I figured it out so late!

• Goal is still clear and physical (get over there).
• How to achieve goal is clear (fly).
• Wolf / Buffalo / Leader interaction is simple and clear.
• Resources make sense (grass = health, blue grass = power up)

Everything got in… except the cloudpuffs and flying! So then the super final game objective became:

• Protect your herd while it eats grass to create more buffalo. Win when you get ten!

Ah well. Had fun, made some stuff, let’s do it again!

Ted Brown / oreganik.com

Tags: post-mortem

Hi! I’m Folmer and together with ambushsabre I made NICE SHOOT, an arena shooter/platformer with semi-randomized levels and evolving weaponry.

This is how life works.

Ambushsabre did the coding while I did the graphics. The concept and design came from us both. I don’t want to call this post a proper post-mortem, because there’s so much more I want to write about my LD experience.  I will say that it’s been a lot of fun and I’m extremely happy with the game we made!

What went right? 

I made a ridiculous amount of sprites.

What went wrong?

I made a ridiculous amount of sprites.

Fig.1: A sampling of enemy sprites. There are more in the game, and there’s a final boss that makes all of these dudes look like chumps.

Fig.2: This is what a fully evolved Poison Bullet looks like. There are 4 other bullet types that all have their own properties and unique animations so I guess you’ll just have to play the game all the way through at least 5 times!

(Fun fact: There are 120 frames of bullet animations in total)

Ok so that’s NICE SHOOT, I hope you guys like it!

Visit here!

Hey everyone! I am glad to announce that the third Hack-a-Jam will be starting on August 31st, and I am your host. There is only 3 days left until a theme is released, and the comp starts!

The Hack-a-Jam is a gaming jam that is different from others. Instead of one overall winner, there is an infinite amount of categories that you can win in, and there will always be multiple winners. Here are some examples of categories you can win in:

Most Psychedelic Visuals
Most Deaf People After Hearing The Game
Most extra items (dev logs, etc.)
Most Brainstorming
Most Rage-free
Most rage-induced
Most Suggestive Content Without Crossing The Line
Shortest Game
Best themed
Most Things On Screen Without Lag or Crash

The amount of time given in the jam is voted on by the community, along with the theme. You can submit themes, and most of them will be sent to the Polls section, where others can vote on themes.

By winning, you will get a badge and bragging rights, along with your name listed on the website permanently as a winner. When this jam gets to be huge, you will be really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really famous (that’s a lot of “really”s!)! The rules are not very restricted, as the jam is purely for fun:

1. All game content must be created within the set time. Note: You can use other music, placeholder graphics, etc. as long as you are allowed to!
2. Your game is not required to follow the theme, but would greatly improve your chances of winning. Unless every other game is not following the theme, it is almost guaranteed that your game won’t win anything.
3. You must work alone, and you must create everything included in the game.
4. All game creation tools are permitted, such as GameMaker, Photoshop, Flash, Paint, etc. Note: By game creation tools, I mean any tools that can be used to create your game.
5. All game extensions/DLLs are permitted. If you want to make it multiplayer (if you are using GameMaker), go ahead and use 39dll.

The third Hack-a-Jam takes place on August 31st, in 3 days, so you should sign up now! Good luck everyone!

Please join today on my stream now.

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

Forgive my mediocre play — the screen capture app I was using required that I not hear audio while it captured system audio. (Quicktime/Soundflower) You’ll do much better, I suspect!

Give it a shot, now that some catastrophic bugs have been removed.

evophonia – play now!

Had to fall back to the Jam, almost ran out of time.  Overall, very satisfied with the core game, just wish I had added more polish.  Play it here.

What went right:

Level format and code

I’ve never made a good tile engine before, but I’m very satisfied with this one.  Levels are stored in PNG format, each color corresponding to a certain tile type.  The entire level is rendered at once and trimmed, but the levels are small enough that there are no performance issues.

Basic gameplay elements

I knew what I wanted to do within the first hour, and I mostly stuck to my ideas the whole time.  Having a solid base allowed me to focus on programming the engine instead of design.

What went wrong:

Java

Java is awesome and all, but until two days ago, I had no idea how to use applets, canvases, or anything else in AWT.  It only took a few hours to learn, but that was valuable time.

Balance

I didn’t put much thought into the damage rates or enemy attributes, and there is no resource system, so it’s very easy to overpower enemies by spamming everything.

Tags: postmortem

My Jam game got an update (ver 1.0 is still available of course!) It includes over a dozen tweaks and bugfixes. However I will be adding MORE content soon, in the form of another update so keep your eyes peeled. Give it a try!

Also I’ve uploaded a LD24 time lapse so check that out if you want! I wasn’t able to edit out “sleepytimes” or anything like that becuase Sony Vegas was being dumb and not accepting the file, haha.

As it was my first Ludum Dare, I did not exactly use the tools I thought I’d use. Some weren’t used at all, some others not in the way I though it’d be used, etc.

• Language: Haxe + Javascript
  Did not changed much, although I didn’t really use Haxe.

• IDE: Sublime Text 2
  Really nice code editor, especially when you have to code for long hours (dark interface). Love the minimap too.

• Graphics: Inkscape / Gimp / Wacom tablet
  Didn’t use my tablet at all. Only used Gimp for backgrounds, for a total of like 5 minutes. I started with pen drawing, then polygonal representation in code from those drawings, and then Inkscape for the sprites. Shouldn’t have. Should have done drawings -> sprites -> polygons, as explained in my postmortem.

• Audio: LMMS / BFXR / Audacity
  I tried LMMS last week, it’s a great tool but I’m not ready to use it.. Didn’t like BFXR, so I didn’t use it either. As for Audacity, I used it to sync the enemies to the music Mathieu Hallouin made.. kinda unexpected use, but it helped!
  By the way, he did a really great job! Check out his LD#24 soundtrack, he worked on Prac Team‘s game too.

• Libraries: None
  Didn’t use any library. I don’t like using jQuery and such when I only need like 5% of it.. But I think I’ll make my own game library for next LDs.

• Timelapse: Chronolapse (?)
  Used chronolapse, and I kinda regret it. I’ll make my own LD-timelapse tool for next LDs. Timelapse video should be available soon by the way. I had to filter screenshots: even though I stopped chronolapse when I did real breaks, it still contained 30% of procrastination (games, facebook, watching lives, youtube, etc.)…

• Coffee
  I didn’t sleep much, but I only drank like 5 mugs of coffee in 72 hours. On the other side, I drank so many liters of water that I couldn’t keep track! Water is great, even if you loose time going to the bathroom every 30 minutes xD

Overall, those tools were useful. But I’ll need more preparation for next Ludum Dare to do it the way I’d like. I suck at graphics and music, and as I want to compo I’ll have to train that. This time I had Mathieu Hallouin for the music and did not had much to draw, but I cannot continue like that.

Sorry I didn’t post a pre-mortem / “I’m in”. I had planned to… Really!

It doesn’t feel like it, but this has been my 7th Ludum Dare, and as always, I’m satisfied. If you’d like to try my game, you can do so here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=1551 ← There is also a timelapse there, but I suggest playing the game first if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Here’s what went down, this Ludum Dare:
– I went to bed at 6am, when the theme was to be announced at 11am. 5 hours sleep.
– I made something and walked around in it for a long time when I could have been expanding what I had.
– I fell asleep at the computer for an hour or so, and then went to bed afterwards at I don’t know what hour, but when I had to wake up, It took me a while for my senses to alert, even though I was consciously trying to focus.
– Finally decided what to do with said thing I made, and started doing it. Started getting tired at about 2am, wasting more time and “play testing” my game. Had to take a break.
– A hot milo didn’t help. Tried to battle the tire because at this point I wasn’t satisfied enough with submitting what I had, and I was worried that if I went to bed I wouldn’t be able to wake up until after Ludum Dare ended. I fell asleep again at the computer.
– Luckily, I woke up probably around 2 hours later and had the alertness required to awkwardly record sound effects, compose a track and add some final touches.

*YAAAAAAWN*

So what can we learn from this series of events? I had one hell of a time. That, and also, something I’m beginning to realise, is just how much more could be accomplished with a focused mind and a plan. I feel I could have done twice as much if I kept a better todo list and had things in the front of my mind to do instead of wasting time playing my unfinished game. Oh, and also having a better rest, like last time. To be fair, I haven’t really made this kind of game before, so I was learning as I made this too. I still look forward to playing the games where everything went right; I don’t think anyone has seen what can truly be achieved with 48 hours, even though so many people leave Ludum Dare in awe.

Well, it’s time to rate more entries.
Laters.
(*u*)~”

Tags: maple, parental guidance, post-mortem, timelapse

Hi All, is there a maximum limit of votes and comments that a submitted game can have?

I tried to leave some replies to comments on my game today, but even though I’ve signed in it says “must be signed in to vote”!  wtf!?

finnaly fix a hundread bugs for my game, check it out!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14064

yes they where alot, so its fixed

Sorry about the stupid reference in the post title, couldn’t help myself. Also sorry about the text-brick post, I’ll make a cooler one when I have new things to show.

It seems some people are enjoying my game (yay!) but I’m not quite happy with it as it is far from what I wanted it to be and as they’re pointing out there are numerous things that could be a lot better. I will start working on a newer, better, shinier version of Dojo (I’m gonna come up with a cooler name too) right after this post but first an explanation of what I was going for and what I’ll probably change.

Original Concept
Luckily I just learned about the Fly Room, a fruit fly breeding room run by Thomas Hunt Morgan to study genetics and heredity. His original technique was pretty inefficient but I liked it, breeding flies in a bottle when he saw one with traits he wanted he would place another bottle on top of it letting them fly up. He’d separate the bottles when his fly got in and repeat, again and again until he segregated the one he wanted. I wanted to make a game with a similar idea, only hopefully more fun. It was to be about mass production and then segregation and feeding your lesser creations to the predator as fodder to stave off his attack, building up your super-being to destroy him.

Why I Didn’t Achieve This (yet)
I started with a push control, shoving your creations (students of your dojo) away from the cursor and when they collided they mated. I was hoping this would give a frantic feeling, which it seemed to, but unfortunately mating on collision made mass production a pain in the ass. As a result I wound up sticking to two children per couple, the population never grows your just stuck with what you got. The game still works like this but I think it would be a lot more fun if I got it closer to the original concept. Unfortunately I didn’t think of a good alternative control scheme until it was too late, that’s Ludum Dare for you I suppose.

New Plan
The controls will still use the circle indicator but no longer to push. Sorry to those who liked the push controls but I think it may be necessary to get rid of them. The circle will now be used to select every student within it and where you drag it to is their destination. If any students are in the destination circle the originally selected group will commence procreation with them.

As mass production will probably result in getting a lot of the goal creature I will likely make predators travel in packs so you need more to take them out. I’m also thinking about having jail cells around some levels that if the predators get to they free a different type of enemy so the player will have to keep on their toes and have a few types ready for action. Either jail cells or other groups slowly breaking into the dojo, if you don’t beat the first group in time you’ll have a lot more to deal with.

mottmatt mentioned having some way to asexually reproduce when you’re in a pickle. I agree, not sure what I’ll do yet maybe some sort of fertility idol or radiation chamber. Just wanted to let you know I’m thinking about it, hopefully I can get a good idea that doesn’t break the game. Oh, and I may simplify the three traits I have now to two if it becomes necessary. That should make it easier to read and when there are a lot of them not too painful to find the one you want.

Finally This Post Is Ending
I can’t say for sure when I’ll be done the new version as I’m getting busy right about now. Going to try and have something playable for those who are interested before judging ends so you can actually hear about it. Anyway, I shall return with a cooler post full of pretty pictures and more colorful wording when I have some stuff to show off.

Try out the game by going here.

To tell the truth, development on the game went surprisingly smooth and fast compared to my last LD entry. It was as if everything clicked perfectly albeit the problems that arose.  Here’s my attempt at listing what went wrong and right with Complexitivity.

What went right:

• Fun as the first priority – While art, sound and theme is important, it is the fun that sticks with the player most of the time even after they have finished playing.
• Focused on gameplay – Because of this, I was able to squeeze out the most out of the gameplay. I’ve unearthed and fixed many problems early on.
• Playtest early – Same as above. A lot of problems that needs fixing became more evident.
• Gave equal attention to aesthetics – I feel that this helped increase the mood and ambience some more.
• Jam instead of compo – This gave me a lot of time to work on the game with less pressure.
• Name change – The previous name, “ILOVEYOU Virus” lost its novelty pretty quickly. “Complexitivity” sounds more suitable to the feel of the game.
• A build for every platform – I wanted everyone to have a chance to play my game. For Linux, I tried the flash exporter which worked out great but with just a slight problem with the mouse.
• Proper sleep and enough rest – In my last jam I only slept for a few hours which left me tired and frustrated most of the time. This time around, development was fast and smooth.
• Inspiration and support – My girlfriend was there to support me the whole weekend. This gave a big boost to my morale and I was able to concentrate on my coding.

• Didn’t fix my broken source control repository – The absence of source control pressured me to be careful with my coding eventually slowing me down.
• Focused on speed instead of cleanliness – If you would take a look at my source code, I bet you will scream in horror. It came to a point wherein I had to reread my code to be able to make sense of the logic and flow of the code.
• Didn’t prepare needed tools – Since I didn’t have Blender installed, I resorted to making use of cubes instead of one-side billboards. Which, I believe, might have affected performance a bit.

Crazy how many game there are, no!? Really awesome. Participated for the first time and really glad we did it.

Now even before the ratings end, I’d like to find a game that has the most innovative view on “Evolution”.

Any recommendations?

Cheers,

Florian

Here’s a brief lessons learned from my 48 hour compo entry for LD 24:

• Seriously, really plan backwards from the deadline (even if to the nearest hour). And build in a couple hours of “oh yeah, that too” time. My goal was to be done and submitted by 7pm, and I pressed the submit button at 8:57pm
• If you believe in your idea, stick with it. I found the LD 24 theme to be quite intimidating in terms of doing something original. I came up with a great idea and immediately wanted to discard it. I slept on the idea and decided it was worth the effort. As a result, I am very happy with my entry, and have something fairly original and fun (in my opinion)
• Automation will save you a lot of time. A put some common code snippets into Hoekey, and I would estimate it saved me 2 hours over the weekend. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+D is way easier than finding, copying, and pasting a snippet of code dozens of times (mind you, I am using Game Maker, so things like the fairly lengthy draw_sprite_ext() will kill your time like crazy)
• Scope is never as small as you think it is (related to the first point above)
• Planning is worth it. I stayed up late Saturday roughing out ideas for my story and level  structure on paper. The next day, this brief (~1 hour or so) of planning paid off big time

Timelapse and Notepad:

• I’ve finished my desktop timelapse video. It’s on youtube right over here. (note as of 12:45am August 28 it’s still uploading…)
• I also have my notebook pages up for viewing over here.

I’ve played and rated some cool games so far, and I look forward to doing some more!

Cheers,

Richard

It seems like the majority of people who played my entry find out that the atmosphere and the wind noise are fine.

Well, I made it by making some random moves on Audacity, so if it can help some people in the future, I’m happy to share this little trick

-Open Audacity,
-Generate a noise (white)
-apply a WhaWha effect (you can choose your parameters, but it seems like “Wha Frequency Offset” is better with more than 60%)
- apply Change Speed (I’ve used something like -60%, and repeat it until I’ve made something which convince me)
- Add a new audio track (ctrl + shift + n)
-Copy/Past your noise on this new track, with a very little gap
- Put the first track on “Left Channel”, the second on “Right Channel”
-Export it  ;)

(Try to modify, appropriate this to make exactly what you want! [for example, apply more whawha with different LFO frequency to make a more complicated sounds])

Hope that will be useful for someone!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 at 3:34 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.

Screenshot (no, really):

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Bluh. I submitted my game to the Jam, but I’m not sure I can say I “finished” it. It’s a very rudimentary packaging of what I was able to program within the time limit, but it’s not really a coherent “game” without a lot of explanation. Also, I accomplished absolutely none of the goals I outlined in my “I’m in!” post; as usual, I simply didn’t have time. This is my third completed and fifth attempted LD; I should be doing better than this by now!

So, what went wrong? I picked a terrible idea. I don’t think it’s a terrible idea for a game when actually executed to spec, but it IS a terrible idea for a Ludum Dare entry. The kicker is that the primary mistakes I made, I already knew were mistakes. I knew working with a language that was not my primary programming language would slow me down; I knew making a platforming engine from scratch would decimate my scope. The problem was that making an ASCII platformer was critical to my idea at the start – I wanted to impress people by having the link you click on transform into the game, using the Ludum Dare page itself as a play surface and playing off that fact as part of the story.  That required me to jump through all these hoops that slowed me down, and I had rejected all my other ideas because they were either unoriginal or had a very low chance of being fun.

Thankfully, even though I was well aware of many of my mistakes, I did learn some new things from it that’ll help me be more confident and, hopefully, get much more accomplished the next time around:

• Technological experimentation in a time-constrained game jam is not a good idea.  I’ve read so many things about how the spirit of Ludum Dare is about going out of your comfort zone to create something unique; something you wouldn’t have made or perhaps even thought of otherwise.  That’s all well and good, and I love that aspect of LD, but I feel like that statement has some serious caveats.  Most of the experimentation I’ve done has involved structuring my games in uncommon ways that are not well-supported by existing engines.  The less you can rely on existing infrastructures and codebases to form the backbone of your game, the less you can get accomplished in all the other areas of game design, and the more potential there is for things going very wrong.  I spent about 50% of my time writing an ASCII platforming engine from scratch, and 50% of the remainder working on a Javascript exploit that was basically rejected by the submission form (in order for the game to be played on its own ratings page)- leaving very little time for art, level design, or anything approaching a coherent user experience.  Even though programming was the first game-related discipline I learned and one of my strengths, I think next time, I’m going to scrap any idea where the primary “wow” factor is supposed to be a technological aspect, in favor of experimental gameplay or storytelling methods that are easy to program.
• Innovation doesn’t have to be in how you interpret the theme.  When brainstorming, I didn’t even stop to consider any ideas where the player character or enemies were the ones doing the evolving, or where the evolution was literal/biological in any way.  As per the aforementioned spirit of Ludum Dare, this was in order to ensure my game was unique- but I think it ended up working against me.  A lot of other people try to think like that, and in the case of this theme (or any theme based on a verb), there’s only so many other things that can evolve.  Sure enough, one of the eariler games submitted to the Compo stated in its description that, like in my own idea, the graphics were the thing that evolved.  In addition, I realized that I was sort of fighting against the theme rather than working with it.  I was categorically rejecting all the ideas that would’ve come naturally because they came naturally.  I still like that common “scrap your first idea because everyone’s going to do that” piece of advice, but in trying to innovate upon what aspect of the game evolves or how it evolves, I lost sight of the fact that there are other ways to innovate.  I have a feeling I would’ve done better had I just done a standard “characters get upgrades as you progress through the game” bit, but done so with unusual characters, in an unusual scenario or genre, or given it a unique stylization or sense of humor.
• I should be doing FAR more detailed planning on paper.  I spent an embarassingly high amount of time looking at the top item on my to-do list (stuff as broad as, say, “enemies” or “collision detection”), wondering how to execute that particular aspect of the game, then getting distracted, forgetting the plan, and having to think it up all over again.  Here’s another thing I plan on doing next time: during the first 4 hours, I will do no programming, art, or anything else related to the production of the game.  I will simply figure out what idea I’ll be doing, then plan out the whole thing on paper, complete with time estimates and, where I’m not sure about execution, broad-level pseudocode.  I will budget for 13 hours of pure work-time.  In 48 hours, I usually sleep for 18, and since the planning would take 4, that’s about 26 hours of free time.  I cut those 26 hours in half because, having previous experience with self-estimates, I know that they tend to be pretty accurate (possibly even self-fulfilling, due to Parkinson’s law), but that I spend about half my time doing things “off the clock”- that is, real-life stuff that gets in the way: eating, bathroom breaks, distractions/breaks from work, phone calls, other unavoidable social situations, etc.  I say 4 hours for planning because settling on an idea usually takes me 1 hour (I was a bit intimidated when the keynote described it as “the first minute” of the LD experience- it took me a whole 3.5 hours to find an idea I liked this time, due to the flaw in my plan outlined by the previous bullet point), and the remaining 3 hours should be enough to make a very thorough plan that outlines the entire design (both on the user end and the programming end) in one fell swoop, so I can eliminate critical thinking almost entirely from the programming process (I work, like, 10x faster and more distraction-free when I don’t have to think all that much about it).
• EDIT: I need to stop being such a perfectionist.  Reading Sos’s excellent post-mortem reminded me about this one.  I caught myself several times hacking away at bits of code because they didn’t work in some obscure edge case, or testing, altering the gravitational acceleration by miniscule amounts, and re-testing because the game might’ve been a bit too easy or a bit too hard without those adjustments.  I know from experience that I have a very hard time letting go of little nitpicks like that, but I need to learn to move on and come back to it if I have time (even though, deep down, I know I won’t).  In my most recent (non-LD) project with a deadline, on my to-do list, I kept a list labeled “nitpicks” of all the things that bugged me about the game that I thought would harm the user experience.  When I was done with the rest, I went back and fixed maybe two of them before I had to submit, but it was all the better because I didn’t focus on those right away.  I guess I should start doing that in LD too.  After all, why spend half an hour on fixing minor bugs in the controls when you could do it implementing something more important, like sound?

I guess I’ll end this very long-winded post by saying that, while this Ludum Dare was less pleasant to me than usual because of all my failures, I’m still glad to have done it because of how much it has galvanized me to do the next one so radically differently that I might actually accomplish some polish that time.

Well everyone else is, so I thought I should do a quick post-mortem of my game since I didn’t do any blogging during the compo!

This is purely from my perspective, might be totally different from that of the other half of our team!

What went well?

Knowing our tools

We were working on two laptops, both loaded with everything we needed, and both of us know pretty much exactly what we were doing, AS3 and flashdevelop just seem to work. The flashpunk library was also a big help as always! This helped us to spend no time messing about getting obscure tools to work, we just coded away.

Constant testing

Suppose this could be a downfall too, but we spent a lot of time actually playing the game ourselves, which meant there aren’t really any gameplay bugs… just little things we forgot that would’ve added to it, but don’t break it. Also, staying at Connor’s (the other half of the team) house with his young brother and friends let us have a good stream of playtesters.

What went wrong?

Difference of opinion on the idea

Personally, I was going for a simpler, arena survival thing, whereas my team mate wanted a more story based evolution which went through different arena phases, we eventually settled on simple survival arena due to the time, but we could’ve done a lot more if we’d been clear from the beginning I think.

Having a party the day before

Speaks for itself really… Saturday morning was a bit of a fun one!

But hey, the game turned out pretty well, and it’s the first LD that  I’ve actually finished a  game and entered, so yey me! 😀

Go play it here!

ok so im considering making a new website for students in Ludum Dare featuring free hosting, resauses ect. If you are intersted please email me asap: students@nicholasparry.geek.nz. look forword to seeing you 😀

Figured I would give a quick post mortem about our game Obsolete Upgrade.

What Went Right

Well I was pretty happy with how quickly the idea came together, felt like we got a fairly unique idea put together

Art Work- Loved the art work that got done, I had to throw out some unfortunately. I will talk about that in a moment.

3d Models- It can be hard to quickly make 3d models that look semi decent. I was happy with how they came together.

Basic Gameplay- While we did not get everything in that we wanted too the gameplay, I felt, worked pretty well. There is tons of room for improvement but for the most part the game is playable.

What Went Wrong

Biggest thing that went wrong was the HUD. Artist put together a great health/evo gauge for the game. After getting it in the game I found out during the last day that the gauges would not work right because of how I had them programmed in. Bad programming on my part. After spending awhile trying to fix it I had to throw them out for some badly put together health bars at the top of the screen. I will be brushing up on my HUD programming skills

That darn collision dance. It’s possible in the game to hit the side of a platform and dance your way to the top. Still bugs me.

Level Design- This is not the best level designs I have done, might be listed under the worst. They get the job done but they seemed kind of bland to me. I would like to go back and really take some time to design out some great levels for it.

Toasters of death- Now I don’t really see this as going wrong. but some people seem to have a hard time getting past the toasters. They were not suppose to have the ability to jump on your head, that was a bug that got left in. Best thing to do is keep moving. Little pro tip. If you hit the keys just right you can roll backwards, letting you fire at incoming toasters.

What Did Not Get Added

There was more to this game that we really wanted to get put it. Main thing was more evolutionary stages. In the first write up of this game you would start as the PC on a skateboard and work your way up to a giant death bot built out of old electronic equipment. But we only got three done in time.

Various other map objects.

Boss Battles- Really wanted to add in some bosses to fight after around three stages. speaking of.

More Stages- The plan was to get 3 or 4 levels done. Got 2, oh well

All things considered I’m pretty happy with how things went. Next time there will be more planning, better huds, and no collision dancing.

*Spoiler*

One last thing, there is a cheat I forgot to take out of the version I submitted. Makes the levels way easier. Would like to see if anyone can find it

Tags: postmortem

Alright, time to do a little blog thingy about things that worked well and things that worked bad.

Play the Game

Good

• Love2D is awesome. Lua too. And all the libraries by vrld are the awesomest! (I couldn’t have made it without Hump and HardonCollider). It’s also awesome to know that the game will run on Windows too (I’m on a Mac and can’t check it)
• PixelEffects in Love 0.8 work well and have a very good interface. I’m not sure if I like the special GLSL sauce, but it may be good for starters.
• I had a good tool chain with a make script and very solid tools. My boilerplate project served me well!
• I spend a lot of time polishing things up which gives the game a very finished look/feel. First I hated the music but now I kind of like it because it’s different than most other music I heard so far here.
• I had hardly any graphic assets and build most of the visuals with shaders or creative blending. I hate making assets.
• Less caffeine then last time, which results in less brain terror.

Bad

• Next time I need to focus more on the game side. I’m more into exploring systems than creating games that are actually fun to play.
• Study some math. I had one problem with trigonometry which almost had driven me crazy. I also think that the  DNA merging would have been better if I had more understanding of maths.
• Last time I missed to build a level editor and spend a lot of time “trying things out”. This time I would have needed a testbed for the DNA stuff. At the end the version I shipped kinda breaks really fast (gets unbalanced).
• Code Quality. This one is really a mess and at the end (when it was too late to refactor) I had to duplicate a lot of code which made my life hard.

I didn’t make a timelapse or something but I recorded 4 videos:

• After 10 hours of work
• After 15 hours of work
• 8 hours to go
• Final Game

So yeah, over all it was super fun and I can’t wait for #25. I also might join the October Challenge and do something wit JavaScript. We’ll see!

Here is the video, timelapse of my ludum dare game !

Hope you will enjoy it.

Check out my entry here !

Hi everyone,

We fixed a lot of bugs wich made our game crash every time. You can play it on our submit page, here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14122

It would be really kind of you to give it another try without the bugs.

Thanks a lot.
Happy Gaming to everyone.

As is traditional, I can’t stop myself. I have been doing more work post-competition. A lot of you said the idea was really golden but that there just wasn’t enough content, and were confused by the “Force Close” that happens. I was already planning on expanding the story and the gameplay, but seeing all the encouragement really helps.

There. That one thought bubble is what I should have added from the start. Of course it still wouldn’t have given me the time to write part 2 of the story, or lead the user on into a different day in the relationship, but it would have been *something* at least. 😉

Jana created a gameplay video of our entry “kernel exception“, for all you people who can’t or don’t want to play the game! 😉

Tags: evolution, gameplay video, i love tags, kernel exception, my trousers are too small, shocked system, video

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I really enjoyed it! From what I read, it’s traditional to do a little write up of what happens, so here is mine for SURVIVE:

What went right:

• Framework: I learned love2d a while back, then I started a warm-up game before TIGJAM UK 7, and made a game in it there too. This left me with a pretty good understanding of the framework, which made programming it a breeze. The only thing that could have gone better here is if I had tried the HardOnCollider library before Ludum Dare; it made collision detection so easy post-compo, and really improved the game.
• Idea: Regardless of  anyone else’s opinion, I thought the idea was strong; which meant I was quite motivated to make it. Originally I didn’t know how I would turn the simulation of these organisms into a game; I had some ideas, but none were very good. As often happens, better ideas emerged as I played around with game and developed the other aspects, and lead to what I have now.
• Visuals: The game practically started as a screen-saver. It looked pretty, and that was really motivating. When it came to the point that the gameplay just didn’t work, and I had some horrible changes ahead of me, I decided to make the start/win/lose transitions for the game instead. This was a nice distraction: fun and rewarding – the game felt more like a game, even if it didn’t play very well.

What went wrong:

• Sound: This was a complaint from a lot of people. I thought I could make the game a little more interesting by throwing in some sounds that related to what was going on – a sound where the higher the pitch, the better the event was for you. In theory this sounded okay, but in practice sound is not so simple, and I should have picked the sounds more carefully. I ended up with lots of  dissonant bleeps and bloops that really annoyed people. This wasn’t helped by a bug that the each loss added a looping warning sound to the background!
• Playability: The game was difficult to figure out, even with instructions (especially since some people will ignore them – I know I often do). It’s a frantic game and near the end death often results in gaining control of an organism that’s about to die soon too. This leaves your camera jumping about a lot with no real way to get back into the game – very frustrating! Someone suggested the level should start with fewer organisms, you have a chance to work out what’s going on – this is probably a good idea, but I’d have to put in some controls to stop them winning before the difficulty kicks in!
• Organism behaviour: The AI was not very smart, which was one of the main causes for the bad playability because you find yourself taking control of organisms that have practically committed suicide already! I didn’t have collision detection in place and I really should have tried to do it – post compo I added it in just a couple of hours, and it made a vast improvement. Firstly it stops too many cells occupying the same space, which makes it easier to see what the hell is going on. Secondly, it made it much easier to detect nearby organisms in code, which meant I could improve the behaviour a lot – in those same couple of hours I added behaviour for the organism to try and create their babies in relative safety, and to attack closer enemies with priority; this really improved the game!

Overall, it was a very positive experience, and I’m left with a game that both looks great and is something I’d like to keep working on. I definitely will participate again! Please give the game a try. Rating it would be great, and comments are greater! If you like my game, there’s a post-compo version with improvements to organism behaviour.

Tags: love2d, lua, postmortem

This time we were not able to finish the game, but we do learn some important lessons :

1. make agreements with the team, believe on me : personal events during the ludum dare can ruin your tighty schedule, so before start make sure everybody involved is in the same pace, and with the calendar free.

2. practice the basics of the technology some days before, even knowing Unity3D, as it’s not my daily basis tool some basic activities took more than expected.

3. react fast, as we had some changes in the people involved in the project, instead of creating useless code while waiting for the artist, I should change the game plan and go with something that could be done with my own artistic resources.

4. share results on facebook is not that hard check on this https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/games/getting-started/

5. define as a team what will be the folder names for the game assets in unity, so when the export package all over the place madness start, you don’t loose precious time reorganizing files, materials all over the project.

6. don’t make reusable code for ludumdare make straight forward code, and then after the ludum dare, find some time to refactor and reuse wherever you like.

cheers.

Tags: evolution escape, fail, final post mortem, lessons, not this time, schedule, unity3d

Last week end was my first participation to the ludum dare. I’ve been considering to participate for a few years now but I had never had the ‘nerve’ to take the last step. So here am I, and honestly I had a very good time! Let’s immediately skip to…

What went right :

– fortunately, I had already participated in game jams so I avoided the common mistake of seeing too big (though barely I must admit)
– I’ve made my mind on what the game would be 9 hours after the start of the competition (including 7 hours of sleep ^^) and honestly it could have been worse. Though some mechanics evolved during my implementation, I managed to stick to the original idea.
– I’ve used VERY FAMILIAR tools. I’ve been working with Flash for years now and I mainly used a small open source blitting library I’ve create with my partner at Alkemi several years ago. I know the thing inside out unlike larger frameworks like Flixel or Flash Punk. I’ve almost tried to make the game with Unity with which I’m very familiar too, but I’m REALLY glad I didn’t in the end. I love this tool but it’s definitely not as fast to use as Flash and it wasn’t required for my idea…
– I’ve managed to keep my tablet out of the way! I knew if I started to draw things with a tablet I would spend too much time on graphics and not enough on development so I kind of forced myself to do it 100% with simple vector graphics (and a WHOLE LOT of filters). I’m kind of proud that the whole game weighs less than 30Ko without sounds and less than 80 with them ^^
– The actual level design occured only 10 hours before the end of the competition but it went relatively well. Even if it did not turned out always as I expected, it gave something with some potential if not enormous interest.
– I’ve managed to keep the pressure off and work I’d say… 20-24hours during the week-end with wide variations in concentration and involvement and a few starcraft2 games in between 😉

What went wrong :

– I just didn’t like the theme… I prefer less open themes, less generic. Personnal taste that’s all, but it kind of bothered me for the whole first day.
– I ended up doing a ‘microbiological’ game like the project I’ve been working on at alkemi for the last year and a half. That’s my entire fault but I had no other idea than that (well no feasible idea at least). I kind of turned it into something interesting for me by tring to explore an art direction I had discarded for our game…
– I ended up doing if not a shooter, a shooting game which is what I have the most experience with. I would have liked to try something a bit more different than my usual, tread on new paths even if it meant to risk failure. I’ll try harder next time!
– Game mechanics didn’t turned out exactly as I planned. Well that’s almost always the case, whether you have written them down or not (personnaly I don’t believe in game design documents, I believe in experimentation and prototyping). Still, I like when things turned out as I imagined them and I still clearly need experience to run an accurate simulation in my head ^^
– I’ve done a few sound fxs with SFXR (an excellent tool I’ve discovered this week end…) but I could have, should have added a lot more ambiant sounds. I just didn’t have the juice left to do so…
– I’ve missed most of the SC2 MLG live streaming

I’ll definitely try this again!

Tags: as3, compo, flash, ld24, postmortem

Play/rate Mutation Flight! 😀

A quick post to recognise I completed the compo again! I’m not sure exactly what went wrong this weekend but my progress on Saturday particularly was not great. Don’t want to make excuses but I do have a bunch of distractions going on at the minute.

Anyway, I still managed to make this little arcadey shooter! It’s a bit slow to get going but the bullets will start to fly the deeper you go. As I tweeted, I feel good to have got this game out of me so I can push on to greater things in future! Oh and here is my timelapse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRe6MzKSTg

Congrats to everyone completing, some amazing efforts once again.

Edit: Struggling with embedding the vid, don’t know why

WTF Aliens!? is a Rythm/Shooter game. This post is a post-mortem of the development of that game.

This post is also a commentary on my Ludum Dare experiences so far, I found my involvement to be enriching and interesting so far, and I’m going to tell that story before going into the specifics of WTF Aliens!?

My first Ludum Dare entry was for #21. That entry was also my first ever video game.
The theme was “Escape”, and I recently played a tower defense game, and came up with a little mechanic of spawning the creeps in the middle, and having to place turret to contain them.
I opted for C++/SFML which turned out to not be the best option, I had issues with memory management and classes, which I don’t usually have, but given the tight timeframe, it was difficult to keep things tidy and functional.

One thing that DID work for me though, was that I came up with a simple, interesting mechanic, and rolled from there. Music has always been a strong point for me, so I made sure the game sounded nice, and I made the creeps green and said they were aliens in the flavour text. Hence the title I gave it: “OMFG Aliens!”

This first taste of Ludum Dare has changed me deeply, I’ve learnt a lot, I’ve gained confidence, I trust myself to be able to think on my feet and get things working when everything seems to be against me.

For Ludum Dare #22, I opted for a simpler framework: Lua/Love2D, and it turned out to be a good option. Making games with a high level scripting language pulls the focus onto the design rather than the implementation. Another benefit is the ability to change code and simply relaunch the game instead of having to recompile, which makes experimentation much more confortable.

The theme for #22 was “Alone”, and to be honest, I had NO idea how to build a gameplay mechanic around this. Instead I focused on a quirky happysad feel, and then added a twist near the end which brought in a more disturbing aspect. As I submitted “Solitas Exodae”, I was dissapointed at the blatent lack of gameplay, but the feedback I got was AMAZING. People who tried the game praised the amount of emotion the game induced, and some even told me they had to take a break afterwards to process it. These reactions may have been exagerated for effect, but it felt great to have offered a game that got such positive feedback. The fact that I scored 2nd for Mood, 3rd for Audio and 5th for Theme confirmed this feedback, and I was excited that I could make a game that had such a huge impact on people.

This is where things stay kind of good, but go downhill a little. Ludum Dare #23, theme “Tiny World”. I basically tried to reproduce the success of “Solitas Exodae” with “Robot in the Garder”, imitating the low resolution pixel style, with a few particle effects and a quirky audio ambiance. But this time it didn’t catch on, and in a way, I’m glad.

I didn’t make much of an effort making “Robot in the Garden”, I never gave gameplay much though, and assumed that if the pixels were pixely enough and the music was quirky enough, then I had another winner on my hands. The truth though, is that “Solitas Exodae” worked because the mood came from within, and I simply rolled with it, whereas in “Robot in the Garden”, I never game gameplay much thought, and instead chased after a mood that couldn’t really stand by itself.

The problem with this game wasn’t that the mood didn’t work, but that mood doesn’t often MAKE a game, instead in enhances a game.

I’m happy with this game in a way, but I’m dissapointed that I didn’t take the unique chance that Ludum Dare offers to go ahead and do something new.

This brings us to this Ludum Dare #24 that we just enjoyed, and the world famous theme, “Evolution”, has finally gone through.

The original idea that I had for this game was to have some kind of rythm game where the music would evolve as you went on, and your abilities in the game would also evolve. THAT aspect of the game I failed COMPLETELY, in fact, the only thing that evolves is that the game gets harder as time goes on.

I made the game alien themed, and decided that this game was a sequel to “OMFG Aliens!” and called it “WTF Aliens!?”. In a sense, the aliens from the first game evolved and now know how to use flying saucers. Yeah, it’s a totally cack way of shoehorning in the theme, but I ran out of time.

HOWEVER, I did what worked with “OMFG Aliens!” and “Solitas Exodae”, I chose something new, something that was just a slither outside my grasp and went for it. I like shooting aliens and I like music, so I went ahead and made them work together. And mostly, I’m proud of this game, it can come out last, and I’ll still be happy because I made a game I can see myself updating in the future, and I enjoy playing to try to get higher scores than my last playthrough.

What I’ve learnt here is : Make games that mean something to YOU, and you’ll be proud of your game.
“OMFG Aliens!” and “WTF Aliens!?” are lunch break shooty games with electronic music, a bit of humour and aliens, which always bring a smile to my face when I enjoy the cheesy brain dead fun that I get from them.

“Solitas Exodae” I made in a odd moment of my life, and while it isn’t a game I can replay, simply because there isn’t any actual gameplay to it, it meant a lot to me at the time. And I think the emotional impact came from the emotions I felt I needed to express when I made it.

“Robot in the Garden” doesn’t mean much to me, I’m proud of the technical feats, and I’m happy with the way it looks and feels, but it doesn’t carry the emotional weight that an “art game” should, and doesn’t provide the gameplay that an actual game should. I simply tried to cash in on the success of “Solitas Exodae”

And NOW for the post-mortem:

The idea of a game where tapping commands in time with a beat has been in my head for a while, and I was curious about how it could work. Note the key difference with a classic rythm game where you have to type the commands the game tells you to. In this game, you’re free to take your own actions, but doing so in rythm grants you bonuses.

In the original version, the player tapped four commands for the four beats of a bar, and then the game interpreted those commands while the player tapped in the next four. This was frustrating as it was hard to figure what was actually happening, and things got out of hand pretty quickly. So I implemented a “ghost” that would interpret immediately, so the player could see what would happen next, but it became apparent that is was more interesting to control the ghost directly, so I made the player character behave like the ghost and removed the ghost.

Another problem I had was syncing up multiple audio loops, which explains the lack of music in the game, since I only got that part working near the end of the compo. I would really have liked to have a little more variation in the music.

Then the final problem was telling the player how to play the game, since commands are tapped in with the beat, you get one “move” per beat, even if you spam the key faster. So if players didn’t understand this, they would become frustrated at a game that responds oddly. I didn’t want to include a forced tutorial either, since they get in the way when you want to play a game. And a seperate tutorial meant making a menu, and also making some kind of seperate level.

Instead, I added a dialogue between the player character and the commander, with speech bubbles which enhance the cheesy comic-book feel. And I simply go to the next part of dialogue when the player has performed the required action at least once. So players who know how to play can ignore the dialogue and get on with getting their high scores.

What went well:
– The game has an interesting mechanic
– It provides an addictive experience
– I like the humour and style I came up with
– Speech bubbles were fun to code

What went wrong:
– I was a little too ambitious, and didn’t have time to implement some key features
– It’s a little hard to communicate HOW to play the game
– Synchronising two beats is REALLY hard in Love2D, and I had to “cheat” a little
– Where’s the theme?

Play here! I hope you guys enjoy my game, and please let me know what you think. I’m thinking of making a revamped version with different levels, more weapons, more enemies and more music, does that sound like a good idea?

I don’t have a timelapse video. But I do have a set of screenshots that I made into a GIF animation. Haha. I guess this would do to show the evolution of my game, Complexitivity.

If you want to play the game, go here!

These last two days, I think I’ve been sleeping for… 24 hours maybe. Half of my time was to regenerate my brain from the Ludum Dare.

But don’t worry, the Schrödinger Team loved the experience! We had a lot of fun by making this WTF game! By the way, we were a large team. At least 6, but one day we were 9 (!) around the table coding, testing, designing, drawing, translating…

Working in a “big” team allows in the same time to have a fast work and a slow work. Fast, because we can do more. Slow, because everyone has to approve new ideas. That’s why we needed about 3 hours to agree with the initial idea of the game, after decades of other suggestions.

Brainstormings don’t work everytime.

When we got the idea, our new goal was to make a prototype. Prototypes are essential to balance the gameplay. Unfortunately, we needed 36 hours to make our first digital prototype. During all this time, game designers made a paper prototype, something like that:

Finally, the game we made didn’t integrate all features that we wanted. For example, the game should have a story with different characters (these characters finished on the main menu). Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy playing the game as much we enjoyed making it!

Play the game here (or wait for the coming soon update which will fix the music bug!)

Tags: post-mortem

Well since my LD game sucked, and was one of the first “games” I’ve ever made, I decided to start working on a project that will help me learn. I’m planning on it being a platformer, and getting an artist to draw stuff once I have some stuff in the game.

What it is
I used a game name generator(this one) to generate “Robot Buddhist Incident,” and I’m making a game revolved around that.
It’s just going to be a platformer where you are a (robot?) Buddhist monk doing puzzles, and eventually beating a boss(thinking of a big robotic evil Buddha thing).
I’m making it in a really small window because I thought it’d be cool to set some limits on what I can and can’t do.

Plans!
As I said, I want to use this as a game to learn from, and apply the things I’ve learnt to it.
I plan to learn a lot about AI and maybe some Procedural Generation to get some replayability up in here. I also plan to try to get better at drawing, as Sos(Sosowski) told me that it took him a bunch of practice to get good at drawing, so I’m going to try the same.

So far…
I have a main menu. I’m still working on the background image, I’m trying to draw a temple.

Main Menu

The title image sucks balls, and I’m going to make some button textures after I finish the temple. On the right will probably be something like the main character, or the evil-robot-Buddha-dude.

This whole thing is probably going to take me a while, but I’m planning on finishing it before the next LD.
Not sure why anyone would care about this, but yeah.

44 hours to go (3pm local time)

Finally got my wireframe looking kinda how I want. I probably spent too much time figuring out the CSS for nested lists, considering that I haven’t even validated that this kind of game will be fun. Good enough for now, anyway.

An early screenshot of Evolving Words

## 4pm (43 hours to go)

Researching algorithms around word changes. Levenshtein distances seem to be the big thing. I start wondering if I’ll run into speed issues with naively running through a whole dictionary (~50k words). I wish I was stronger at computer science — algorithms and data structures might be very relevant here. I wonder about trading off time for space, pre-calculating the nearest neighbours for all of the words.

A quick in-browser test seems that doing string matching over 50k words is quick enough to not notice. 500k is a bit slower but still doable. I guess I can start without optimizing.

48 hours to go (11am local time)

I wake up and check the theme. Evolution. OK, fair enough. The first thought that comes to mind is clusters of little round cells, growing and evolving to more complex clusters. A bit like a rounded, 3D “Game of Life”. I don’t want a non-interactive game, though.

A round arena with cells in the middle, and the player fires “evolution rays” or maybe just a destructive “trimming laser” at parts of the growth? Hmm. I like the visual.
How might the cellular growth work? I sketch out some circles and lines, and it looks like a bad soda stick animation. I don’t know if I can make this fun.

OK, what else is there? Evolving words?

Nothing new came to me in the shower, so I started work.

Okay LD-ers, you’ve actually had quite a long time to think about the theme this time, not just the 48 hours. That said, I’ve categorized games into 7 categories based on how they examine the “evolution” theme. I’ll pick five good games from the fifty that I’ve played for examples. To clarify: I’m picking games based on whether they represent these categories.

1. Munch and evolve (7/50): In quite a few games, you play a critter which has to eat things in order to evolve into better things. I’m choosing Nom’s Evolvathlon to represent this category. This is the “movie science” version of evolution — totally not how evolution works, but no matter. I like Nom’s Evolvathlon because you have to evolve the right set of abilities to eat everything on the board. This category also includes “Osmos” clones (3/50), and by extrapolation we can conclude that there are 84 Osmos clones in the contest.
2. Evolution as cultural topic (3/50): You don’t have to incorporate the theory of evolution when you can work with evolution as a cultural phenomenon. Evidently chose this route and made me laugh harder than I’ve laughed all week. These games usually play Church versus Science, perhaps in an utterly ridiculous way.
3. Upgrades (11/50): If you’re having trouble matching the theme, you can always think of upgrades as a kind of evolution. This gives you a lot of flexibility since just about anything can be an “upgrade”. I’ve chosen A Castle in the Desert for this category, which is a fun game but uses a broad interpretation of evolution. It has an impressive gameplay script.
4. Simulation (4/50): Some people made a valiant effort to actually simulate some evolutionary process, and Galapagos is a great example. You’re influencing the evolution of birds, but I managed to make the simulation go horribly wrong — I gave the birds too much food at once, which lead to overpopulation. They wiped out the food supply and completely died off. That’s what I love about simulation games — they embrace emergent behavior.
5. Evolution of the game (3/50): And some brave participants decided that it would be the game itself that evolves. Stevie Asteroid Rescues the Hovercredits is a great example in this category — at first it looks like the most horrible, primitive game. Then you get to the next level and suddenly the graphics and music are better — they keep getting better as you get farther in the game. Now you have to understand the reason I say brave here is because if you took this route, you basically committed to making multiple games during the contest. It’s hard enough to make one!
6. And finally, I think the sprite from my game, Digital Generation looks like Freddy Mercury wearing a space suit. Or something. The walking animation is more like a pelvic-thrust dance animation than anything else. (Incidentally, my game is also in category #5… and stringing together multiple games drove me crazy!)

The sixth category is none/background (21/50): for some games, evolution only really appears in the background, and you’ll miss it if you don’t pay attention to the text that scrolls by. Or evolution isn’t relevant to the game at all. I’ve played a few platformers this time where you just jump to the level end… I think if you can string a few words together you can make a platformer about anything.

And the final category is unique (1/50): games that I feel just don’t belong in other categories. The example I have is Vesuvius, which takes a “what does not kill you makes you stronger” approach to the game.

Well, time for bed, then I can play another 50 games…

Tags: review, theme

Beware the spikes

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

What went right:

Nearly everything. MelonJS was just wonderful. Some limitations but i got around it. I had no javascript experience before, but i know java and lua very well. So no problem (debugging javascript is still a pain). The game idea evolved during development :). I started with some gfx and made a small level in Tiled. Than i started coding the jump&run mechanic. I did some colored tiles but later i switched to Black&White. Why? It was a harder task to use only 2 colors and i run out of time to create a colored palette. I had some problems filling all 18floor but some friends playtested an early alpha of the game and told me what i can do better (thx to hagish & ghoulsblade).

What went wrong:

No so much.

1. Hitboxes where not optimal
2. the contrast and quality of your monitor/lcd decides whether you see the spikes or not
3. i don’t like the name of the game

Thats all :-).

I calculated 37 working hours (out of 48h) but in the end i only spend 26h on the game.

Used Tools:

• MelonJS (javascript game framework)
• Tiled (Tile Editor)
• Chrome (for debugging)
• Notepad++ (Script Editor)
• Paint .NET
• Irfanview (Screenshots)
• sfxr (Soundeffects)
• Audacity (Sound Editor)
• GarageBand (iPad) for the music
• WinSCP (for upload to our server)
• Total Commander (without this tool i’m off)

cheers

SiENcE

Tags: html5, javascript, MelonJS, schattenkind.net

Ah, forgot to post at the end of LD24, but I finished for the compo.

Presenting Walkabot. It’s kind of like Lemmings, but with robots and no lemmings. More info in the game’s description.

Give it a play, rate, what have you! Would love to hear what you think.

Hi again!

If you’ve already played my submission (I’d Change the World for You) and you had problems running it because of lag, even after the first fix, then I’d like to invite you back again because I have a SECOND lag-fix update.
(You might have to refresh the page to reset the cache)

The Submission Link

Thank you so much for playing!

Try out the post-compo version – if you get all 5 stars, you’ll get a new game mode based off of the joke theme!

Well I didn’t finish the game, but I did learn a lot, and I had really a good time.
Let’s look into what was happening with me and the game then!

The idea:
Platform shooter. On death the game uses what killed you to apply various character upgrades so you can deal better with hazards in future. For example, if you die from fall damage enough times, you gain the ability to fly. Get shot to death? You can reflect bullets. Blown up? Bombproofing!

The good stuff:
-I’ve got the hang of seriously fast, simple art, that looks half decent now. It’s all about big thick lines people!

-Even though I’m kind of sick of working in GameMaker it served me really well and fortunately I’m pretty good with it by now, so despite a whole day with no coding, I managed to develop most of the mechanics pretty quickly.

-Juiciness! After seeing this about ‘juice’ in games, I was inspired to try it out for myself. And it seriously helped. Even though my game still kind of looks like arse and the gameplay is far from balanced, it’s still reasonably fun because of all the extra little bits I put in. Obviously I could have coded more fundamental features instead of juicing it up, but I think this helped maintain motivation because it felt more like a game worth working on with that extra juicy boost.

-The mechanics work reasonably well, although they’re certainly not glitch free of current. But my concept (using death as a way to build immunity to hazards) was decent overall.

-Designing on paper is awesome! Here’s a link to a zip with all the notes I made if you fancy it!

The Bad:
-I have awful time management skills apparently, and spent most of day one seeing various people and dealing with personal tasks that I really should have organised better. Day 2 I lost 5 hours at a barbecue where I got drunk. Day 3 was actually really productive but by then it was too late. Need to organise the rest of my life to account for development time better next time.

-I didn’t like the theme, although now that it’s finally come up I hope there’ll be a better one next time. Still, the advice of ditching your first few ideas was helpful, as you can see above, they sucked! I kept going until I thought of something decent.

Overall:
I had a great time even though I didn’t finish. I wish I’d made a really tiny backup game though so I could rate some of these awesome looking entries, but I’ll have to try that next time instead.

I have organised my channel on youtube so you can find everything easier – I hope. Check it out!

Also I have started a review series where I try to review 5 games a day. Critics are based on my personal experience during gameplay and can be either bad or good! I review everyones game who rated mine and I also read the developement journal and rate. However I’ll not tell you how I rated and can be different from what you think by watching the video as rates can be changed and my opinion too.

Here is the first video, don’t forget to subscribe for more!

Rate my entry here!

Tags: review, video, youtube

Firstly Timelapse!

yeah it’s 16 minutes long 1 minute = 1 hour there ahhhhh.

Anyways not much to say this time, I ran into some slight issues with implementing features on time (player upgrades)  but it’s mostly playable so…
I’d probably want to leave some time to bug test and add sound as I had to do two quick bug fixes (1 to render the game playable second to make it xp compatable)

Anyways game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=1443

This is a timelapse for my LD24 entry : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ynB1iPgiHY

View my game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14354

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=53  — here is my compo game.  My original idea was to have the player and enemy (or enemies) evolve with each level, however because of my limited time I was only able to get this done.  True If I had participated in the Jam I would have gotten something more playable done.  But I didn’t want to do the jam I wanted to participate in the actual compo.

For those of you that know me I would appreciate it if you would play and vote (and it’s okay to vote poorly, it doesn’t really bother me)  The important thing is that I entered.  For those of you that DON’T know me, don’t feel obligated to play it since it will probably disappoint you 😉

Now if we can only get the rules to allow every entrant both a compo and a jam entry it would be cool.

That was going to be my next plan, even though I didn’t have much for the compo, I wanted to actually take the same game add more stuff and then submit it to the jam AT THE SAME TIME AS THE COMPO VERSION — It would have been cool because I actually got in something on the compo, and then at the same time the people who played the games would have had more fun with the jam version.

This was my first LD and it was just as awesome I had expected. I blocked off the entire weekend and dedicated every passing moment to LD.

I told myself not to come up with any ideas for the game before the true theme was announced. However, after strongly rooting for 1,000 Kittens, when Evolution came up I was very disappointed. But wait, cats can evolve, right? My friend Andrew pointed me to the Wikipedia article about evolution and I read it to get some ideas. I spent about 30 mins to an hour sketching out the concept and came up with Kitten Farts. Kittens mate and their offspring comes out mutated genetically and better fit for survival. The progeny then continues until (if left alone) only the strongest kittens exist amongst the population.

Things I think I did right:
-Initially built the game as a prototype with no story and all game play elements included early.
-Stayed fast with not allowing any feature creep.
-Kept the story small.
-Made a to-do list with priority items listed at the top, knocking them off first.
-Slept for at least 10 hours during the 48.
-Lots of caffine
-Somehow stayed away from booze. 😀

Things I wish I did differently
-Leveraged a framework for collisions and/or animations. Collision took me a few hours of precious time, and it is basically just recoding the wheel.
-Went web based instead of Windows. People don’t like installers and I knew this. However next time I will try to get familiar with a web gaming framework before the LD starts.

I’m super happy with how the game came out, and I have been having fun watching the kittens evolve and then destroying their population. I may make a port for Windows Phone soon and release it on the app store. Let me know your thoughts on the game!

It is called Kitten Farts, please give it a try.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14011

-Scott
Twitter: @scottrehlander

(Written by Hagay, the graphics guy)

This was our second LD jam (our first was number 22). Last time we tried to create an adventure game, we made all of the assets but ran out of time before we managed to combine everything into a working game.

This time around we had a much bigger team – seven core members and several more who assisted along the way with food, bug testing, etc.

We started working six hours after the countdown started (Since we’re from Israel, the competition started in the middle of the night and we wanted to get some sleep beforehand). Our first ideas were pretty generic – Evolving player, mega-man style levels, and so on. Eventually we found a good idea – a platformer with many weapons and enemies who react intelligently and evolve defenses against the weapons.

Brainstorming the game. Gal (The composer of the game’s music) helped us via Skype on the TV

After we had the general mechanics worked out, we thought of a plot which started as a joke – A Bollywood movie police officer – IN SPACE!

I went out and started sketching while the others started work on level design and writing.

Working on my trusty Cintiq 24HD

Yoni, the programmer, started coding the engine using temporary graphics from our previous game. By evening I already had the basic character graphics ready, along with the basic evolution of the enemies. The others worked on level design, animation, music and pizza.

Enemy with different evolved parts

Thanks to the amazing teamwork, we managed to have a semi-playable game by the end of the second day. By the middle of the third day we already had most of the animations, music and levels ready, leaving only some annoying bugs (mostly related to hitboxes) and polishing. However, due to the lack of time we had to remove the entire planned boss fight – Still, we had 8 complete levels, each with a different feel and gameplay twist.

Left to right: Gal (music and animation), Lihi (animation), Aviad (Writing and design)

So, what have we learned?

– We had two major bottlenecks – Animation (Walking and 10 weapons for each character in the game) and programming. the animation problem was solved thanks to the fact that both Uri (The designer) and Gal had enough knowledge to help with the animation work. Programming was harder – Yoni is an excellent programmer but he’s also only one man, and he had to work with six other people at once. This caused the game to end up with some annoying bugs due to lack of time.

– We were lucky to have a team with excellent communication skills – Bad communication can lead to lots of wasted time and effort.

– ALWAYS SAVE THE STUPID FILE oh god why do I have to redraw this entire level from scratch where’s my coffee aughh

– The best feeling in the world is playing the finished game for the first time.

6AM: Best feeling in the world (except for sleep after 72 hours of non stop work)

In conclusion, we’re awesome and we should win.

Play our game here.

Until next time!

The night before the theme was announced I was looking at the themes that were up for vote. What I should have done was come up with an idea for each theme. Or at least tried. Instead, I ended up focusing on one theme that I had a good idea for but then expanded upon it further until I had my mind set on Chain Reaction.

When I woke up the next day I saw that the theme was Evolution. I’m sure the first thing that jumped to everyone’s mind was Pokémon, because that’s exactly what I thought of. I also started thinking about the theory of evolution and Charles Darwin. And then I even took a look at genetics. Maybe I could put something about mutation in my game. Nothing really sparked a game idea, though. I was stuck with no idea and I was freezing up and fixating on it.

Luckily, I had to go on a marathon training run that morning, so I had a good hour and a half to come up with something. I figured with all that time, something would materialize. Instead, I ended up finishing the audiobook I had been listening to, which was Fight Club. That Olympics commercial got me hooked on the audiobooks.

 At this point, I was thinking of bowing out of the competition. I’m pretty sure every good idea I’ve ever had has been either in the shower or while I’m asleep. I thought back to the old StarCraft custom map I used to play called Evolves. In it, each player would control all of their troops with one unit who was separated from the battlefield. You would tell him which player to attack using this one unit. The more troops a player kills, the faster their troops will evolve. In order to win, you must destroy the other players’ bases. So usually, the fastest person to evolve their troops would win. It required a bit of strategy and luck, but it was fun.

Obviously I wasn’t about to go building the underlying RTS of StarCraft so I could make something similar. I dumbed down the gameplay significantly so I would have a feasible timeline. I was also using a new library that I haven’t worked with before: FlashPunk. It is similar to Flixel, which I had used for the 0 hour game jam in November. So I especially wanted to pick something simple. I started with just setting up the game loop and getting something drawing to the screen.

I then proceeded to get the controls for moving and shooting working. And hooked up a bullet system for actually firing something. The bullet’s velocity wasn’t hooked up in this screenshot.

Or this one.

You can tell I was testing how the controls felt from an early stage. Tight controls really make a game that much better. I would adjust the movement speeds of the player and the enemies a lot throughout the project. Next up was having something to shoot at.

In comes the basic AI that I came up with. Originally, I wanted to do a sort of Pac-Man style AI, where each of the opponents does something different. Purple was going to shoot at the opponent furthest from them, Red the closest, and Blue the weakest. Later on I would find this to be highly advantageous to Red.

I know what you’re thinking. What happened to the little nub on the ship? Sharp eye, reader. I was going to have the ships pointing in the direction they were traveling, but since I made the movement so fast, I found that it wasn’t necessary.

I fiddled around with the AI until Red wasn’t too dumb. At this point, it would just chase me around the screen and continuously fire at me, which was fine for now. I duplicated Red’s AI and tweaked the variables until Purple and Blue were created.  It was nice having these other opponents because red wouldn’t chase me down the entire time. At some point while playtesting with the AI, I thought it would be nice to have someplace to hide from the barrage of bullets. And I would eventually need a HUD for all the ships’ health and experience. So I built bases in each corner and built the information that needed to be displayed for each ship into the base.

I think they’re actually all going for me in that screenshot. Anyways, don’t worry. The AI would change before the end. There’s also a bug in that screenshot. Giant air high five to whoever can spot it. So I’ve got a player controlled character, 3 AI opponents, and the ships can actually destroy each other. Is it a game? Not yet. Still needs, at the very least, a win/lose state. And since Ludum Dare requires the theme to be in place, I need to hook up some sort of Evolution feature.

The easiest thing I could think of was boosting the stats of a ship once they gain enough experience. And with time being a factor, I made a quick decision to do 5 levels. Here’s what I initially came up with for the levels.

It changed as I tried it out and I think it turned out pretty well. The last round of evolution is now the craziest as ships are blowing up left and right as they race to the end. I added very basic game over screens for both winning and losing the game. And I of course put the option of restarting from those screens.

So the game was “technically” complete. The next important thing to get in was sound effects. I’m no expert in making sounds or music with a computer, so I opened up cfxr and created a few beeps and boops for various happenings in the game. I thought making each ship have a different firing sound would be cool and the player would be able to tell who was firing, but since the ships are firing constantly I feel that the effect was lost. If you try hard enough, I’m sure you’ll be able to tell the difference.

After the sound effects were in and tested, I opened up GarageBand to see what I could do with it. Turns out, not a whole lot. I gave up pretty quickly as there were so many things I wanted to polish in the game that would easily be better than any music I would make in the same amount of time. There were also a lot of samples missing in GarageBand, so I did a 1.2 GB software update to get them. I figured next time I tried I would at least have the entire sample library at my disposal.

Instead of an amazing soundtrack, I upped the visuals.

Trails for the ships and explosions for getting hit by a bullet and for being destroyed. I also managed to get a pulsating background in so it wasn’t just all black. It’s made up of 144 grey squares that scale up and down randomly. I had an idea about using the background to reflect the action as it happened. Let’s say Red had just been destroyed. The grey square underneath that could pulse red and send out reverberations of red to the squares near it. Something like that. It sounds cool and if I ever get back to this game, I will definitely try it out.

So it’s just before the end, and I’m noticing that the AI is way too smart. At least for Red and Purple. Going after the closest and weakest opponent kind of gives them an edge over me and Blue. I did away with the opponents’ sense of individualism and made them all behave the same way using a state machine. Every time between 30 and 60 frames an opponent will decide to either go to their base, move to a random spot in the arena, or go to an enemy’s current position. It will also choose a new enemy to fire at. This made the game far more balanced, with Blue and me actually winning some games.

Overall, I’m really happy with the way this Ludum Dare turned out. Even though I didn’t enjoy the theme too much, I managed to come up with an idea, a realistic timeline, and a complete game.

Now that you’re done reading about it, go ahead and play the darn thing!

Game: EVOLVES!
Tools: Flash Builder, Photoshop, FlashPunk, cfxr
Time: ~8 hours

So, for our first Ludum Dare ever me and Regus made The Joining, a centrally hosted 2D shooter MMO. Against all expectations, including my own, we made a relatively complete game by jam’s end. Unfortunately a 3-day-mmo is kind of like 5-minute-cake, a cool idea, worth doing to be able to say it’s doable, but the end result is infinitely less satisfying than what you’d get if you put the proper amount of time in. While running around pewpewing evil robots is fun, a lack of players and general aim and finetuning makes it only playable for 5-10 minutes before boredom sets in.

What went right

• We knew our tools. Despite the fact that XNA isn’t the best thing to use to get a lot of people to play your LD game, we decided to stick with what we knew in order to finish in time.
• Teaming up with Regus was extremely enjoyable, we’ve known each other going on I don’t know, a decade and a half now, but we’ve never made a game together. Working together was great, we had complimenting skillsets and we didn’t step on each others toes or had to wait for the other to finish to continue working.
• I’m mostly pleased with the pixel art I did. Pixel art is something I consider myself good at but I rarely get to do it anymore. Being able to do some again was very nice.
• The game is pretty well feature complete and stable. Our code design was mostly to thank for that, until the last day when cleanliness kind of went out the window and some of my rendering functions turned to spaghetti.
• We made an MMO, complete with combat, enemy AI, A* pathfinding and a neat sort of “level up” system. In three frickin’ days. How awesome is that? Worth it just to say we did it.
• I got to remind myself that even if your art and particle effects are only 50% as awesome as you want, it’s still a more satisfying experience to have a bunch of half-awesome stuff and a more complete experience, then an incomplete number of perfect things. The perfectionist in me needed this reminder.

What went wrong

• No music. I’m bad at music and didn’t have the tools or time to modify even an autotracker song. I subbed in ambient sounds instead and it works okay, but not the way I wanted.
• We didn’t actually have time to add some features that would’ve given the game a goal, like a boss at the center, better tuned distribution of enemies, and a global win/lose condition like we planned.
• The game wound up being not very fun. See my opening paragraph for thoughts about that.
• I felt kind of sick after the third day cause I pushed myself so hard and my sleeping patterns are completely shot now.

Overall a lot of things went right, far more than went wrong. Our first LD experience was enjoyable, and taught me some valuable lessons, or rather reminded me of them. And it was a chance to do a few things I don’t normally get to do, like make an MMO and work on pixel art. I consider it a win, even if I doubt our game will be getting top ratings.

We probably won’t work on the game for a post-compo version, I think. Nobody’s asked us to, which is a pretty good sign that it’s not actually wanted. Comment if you think we should, though. I’m tagging this SuccessStory even though the end result is lackluster, because… well, 3 day frickin’ MMO man.

Eniko, signing out.

Tags: mmo, multiplayer, online, post-mortem, postmortem, SuccessStory

First off, I think that you should all be congratulated for generally being awesome. Reasons for you being awesome include the fact that you just made a better game in 48 hours on your own, or in a team, than the entire Duke Nukem Forever team did in slightly over 14 years.

You’ve also once again managed to be really positive in most of the comments I’ve read on games, even when pointing out flaws. I’m still rather impressed that a community of people who suffer from severe sleep deprivation could do such a thing, but you all seem to pull it off again and again.

High fives for all! Let us share an e-beer! Or something like that!

Party on!

I WHIP MAH HAIR BACK N FORTH!

Anyway, all this aside, I would like to throw in a quick postmortem of what I think. This is mostly for m own good, so that when I write a proper one (after player feedback), I can see what difference feedback makes. Gain a little insight into… something or other.

Anyway:

The good:

• I finished the game. Given that before this LD, I was at 1/3 completions, I think I have a reason to be proud
• The art. I’m not expecting the #1 art prize. I’m not expecting top 500#. Heck, I don’t expect anything. I’m not an artist by any stretch of the imagination. But just like last the LD I completed, I seem to have somehow managed to pile effects and programming stuff onto each other and make something that by my own personal standards, is as good as it gets.
• The sound: I made some music within the short amount of time we had, and I thought it was good. Big deal, I did last time too. However, this time I nailed sound effects too. I created sounds that actually fit into the music! My mother would be proud…
• Kittehs: I included them in the story this time. This is a massive improvement over last year’s disappointing cat-free showing.
• Length: I managed to avoid just having 3 levels of the same thing this time round. 40 levels! Who’d have thought… Well, if anyone, me. I doubt anyone else really cares about the length of an unannounced, unknown game 😛
• Player empowerment: I successfully followed a design philosophy of “Power to the player” I took up for this contest. I did this by making them able to skip levels if they so wished (after trying and failing a little). This was done in order to make the game feel less like a challenge you HAVE to overcome, and more like… well… a game. I also think my tutorial system was better than a help file, and not as patronising as many of the triple-A games around. Nice that I can beat those heavyweights in some way 😛
• Game saving: It happens. It works. ‘Nuff said.

The bad:

• The theme… uuuuuuuuuggghhhhhhhh… Who’d have thought that little ol’ evolution would have escaped the theme pot victorious? So yeah, I was inadequately prepared for it, and therefore gave up on the theme. I decided “I’m here to make a game, so I shall make a game!” So I don’t mind if I get my ratings blasted for poor theme use. There are some clever games out there that deserve the victory.
• Some of the platforming (I’m looking at you, doublejump speed boost) was a little off, and by the time I decided to change this, I had done wwaaaaaaayyyy too much level design to be able to change the physics. So nevermind…
• The story: I checked on the timelapse. I somehow managed to spend four and a half hours at the end working on some light polish, but mostly the story. Which, if I may say so, is absolutely appalling… The oppening is fine, but the end…. Uugggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

The ugly:

• The cloth physics based graphics in this game allowed for some… interesting moments…

I’m not a pervert, I swear… That sign is, though. Watch out for him…

Anyway, it’s been a great experience, looking forwards to playing your games!

Shameless advertising! Play my game! Now! Or else!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=4104

Tags: postmortem

Hi all, this is the post mortem for my Ludum Dare 24 entry called “Silent Game of Death”.

Silent Game of Death, entry link

First of I want to thank the community for all the comments I’ve already received , this was my first Ludum Dare and I’m quite happy with the outcome.

Ok lets start from the beginning shall we? During the summer I made a small 2D framework, using C++, SFML for window management and OpenGL for rendering. I stopped working on it when I got back to work though, I still had some “minor” things left to add before I could start making games in it. One of the things missing in my framework was audio handling, I had no way of loading or playing sound. Skip forward two months and I see Notch post about this thing called Ludum Dare, I almost imminently decide that I want to join in and sign up. I still have a half completed framework so I’ll need to work that out before the Dare begins. This was the Wednesday before the start by the way. So I sat down on Friday and added the audio handling and went to bed at about midnight, I live in Sweden so it started at 3 in the morning here. Here’s a time lapse of my progress all the way from the beginning to the bitter end!

I wake up and see the theme. I get really excited and scared at the same time. “Evolution” is such a HUGE theme, I start by making an idea cloud and just writing up everything that comes to mind. I start working on a game, a HUGE game, a game about evolving creatures for customers but first you have to grow the food for the creatures to affect their DNA. It was going to be great! Well no, I soon realized this was simply to big, scrapped the idea but kept the grid I had created for the farm game (this is the reason the enemy block texture is in the folder “ground” and is called “grass.bmp”). I came up with a new idea of using Conway’s Game of Life in some way and decided that it should be the main enemy of my game, so that the player was something like a virus or a disease. This evolved into a top-down shoot’em up with a ship that fires plasma bullets on blocks, really original!

Anyways I was about 4 hours from the end of the Dare when I noticed the silence in my game and realized that I’ve completely forgotten about all the sound! At this point I had some game breaking bugs and also some major features I still wanted to implement (gamestates and stuff like that) so I took the decision to skip putting in some half-assed sound-effects and went on to make the game stable and not feeling buggy or broken.

Things that went well

• Using my own framework, I really were expecting to do some work on it while in the Dare but I didn’t have to make any major modifications to it!
• Working on the second idea.
• Putting work into making the game playable, and to some degree fun. Making sure the game wasn’t crashing or behaving oddly.
• Gamestates, a begining and an end, making sure the player isn’t overly confused on what’s going on.

• Planning, I should have planned my time from the beginning, not just coding away and wished for rainbows and green forests.
• Eating habits, junk food isn’t that good for energy purposes.
• Sleeping habits, I could probably have worked a couple of more hours on the  Sunday if I gotten up two or maybe three hours earlier.
• The sound issue.
• Final polish, the game feels ok but still needs a bit (a lot) more polish. This include both gameplay “smoothness” and graphics.
• Time spent on graphics, spent way too little time on the graphics.

 
So I guess that’s it, I’ve learnt a massive amount of what I’m capable of and not. This have most definitely lit my game-making “spark” again and I will join the next Ludum Dare! Please play my game and add some to the comments, I really love reading what users think of it and I will most likely use these comments when I complete this game.
 

 Silent Game of Death, entry link

This just really shows how much is put into every hour of Ludum Dare!

Tags: timelapse

here are some snapshots of my game, pretty boss, eh?

you can play it here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14064

Intrigued? Think you have what it takes? Are you CLEVER (and probably patient) enough to stop evolution on Earth?

Play AvRvE and see how well you do!

And here, check out Cake’s timelapse of all the art.

It’s my first time LD48, I learned a lot and here is my post mortem.

It’s the second video game project I managed to finish. The first one, made during my studies, was a simple beat em all involving rabbits, birds and fish… In a group of two people, we ended up with a game visually nice but not fun at all. I had this only experience, but learned lots of things.
This time, I’m alone and I didn’t want to make the same mistakes (ie. focus on graphics and content, and not on gameplay) and make something more dynamic… Verdict ?

Play the game here

What went right (ie. the preparation…)
– Tools
I used Unity3D to make this game because I was the most familiar with, even though I wanted to make a 2D game. It was the simpliest way for me to make a game in time without learning a whole new language. Hours before the beginning, I had to familiarize with Orthello 2D, a free Unity framework to handle 2D, which helped me to gain some time.
– Drawing
Whatever the theme was, I knew I wanted to do a 2D game with nice hand drawn art (actually, I hate drawing pixel art, it’s so small..). Drawing takes a lot of time, I was aware of this fact, so I had to manage time carefully and create a limited number of resources with a simple art style. I looked for something to create sprite sheets, sprite fonts…

What went wrong (ie. development phase…)
– Balance
I didn’t have to check the balance of the game : enemies attack rate, enemies respawn time, player movements… Even though the game is playable, some variables are so random that winning or loosing can be a question of chance.
– Time
Since it’s my first time participating, I planned something too big for only 48h. Sunday night, I knew i couldn’t finish in time, so I gave up the compo and turned to the jam. It gave me an extra 24h, but it was still not enough, and I finished with an untested, unbalanced and unpolished game.
– Drawing
I actually spent too much time on drawing useless features like night/day, parallaxing background (these 2 are not even in sync, you can have a sun during the night)… Evolution related, I had to draw different different looks for my character and an animation for each one. Once again, I focused too much on graphics and not on gameplay.
– Theme
I really expected 1000 kittens

 
I plan to polish and complete it so feedback are appreciated
 

I’ve played over 80 games so far and have seen some really good stuff. If you haven’t played these 7 games yet, go play them now!

1. Parental Guidance – Maple – 48 Hour Compo Entry- This game is gonna win the award for mood, I don’t want to spoil anything.

2. Evoland – ncannasse – 48 Hour Compo Entry-This one is highly polished. Again I don’t want to spoil anything here.

3. Octogeddon – flyingbear – 48 Hour Compo Entry- In octogeddon you use your tentacles to attack incoming subs. When you die, you can choose to upgrade your tentacles to shoot fire balls, add another leg and more. I’m going to be playing this one again, a lot of fun.

4. Super Clew Land – Team Clew – Jam Entry-If you told me this was a long lost NES game, I would believe it. I felt like I was a kid again playing my NES. It actually looks and plays a lot like a Kirby game in my opinion.

5. Strike of Rage ! – deepnight – 48 Hour Compo Entry- Deepnight made this, that’s enough of a reason to play it. If you like beat’em ups, you’ll love this.

6. The Legend of Elzad – arkeus – 48 Hour Compo Entry- I JUST realized that elzad is Zelda mixed up, which is exactly what this game is, Zelda. It’s going to be interesting to see how far Arkeus takes this idea, either way it’s really good.

7. LD24 X0ut – X-0ut – Jam Entry-This game is just pure fun.

P.S And if you haven’t tried our game out, please give it a try!

Ancient Ruins – CappaGames – Jam Entry

People often wonder, “what the hell is going on in Jiggawatt’s head?”. Well, now’s your chance to find out with this timelapse of my LD24 compo entry, Manual Population Control.

One point of interest is that the visual style only gets designed at about 3/4th of the way, when I quickly slap proper images on top of the squares. I can’t even imagine having “excess sprites” like some of you have mentioned. You people are weird and I’m the only sane person here.

(Perhaps I should’ve checked if there’s anything overly private shown in that video before uploading. Oh well.)

I also made that gameplay video I wanted. People are pretty clueless about what’s going on in my game (and for a reason), so I hope this is at least proof that there is a point to this game.

See, I tend to make my games for myself, without the need to rely on buzzwords like “ease of use” or “tutorial mode”.

But I like to think my game is fair once you get the hang of it: you can always easily blame yourself for doing something wrong or having left something undone. It has that same addictive charm as roguelikes, in a sense, so I feel like it’s successful at what I set out to do. The mechanics are quite simple in the end (as a result of cutting down features), but there are some interesting strategies emerging from them.

‘Evolution’ as a theme was what I was hoping for but not expecting. I think my problem at the start was an excess of ideas rather than a lack of them. My first impression was that I’d make something like a strategy game where you indirectly guide the evolution of entities, and I had a couple of potential executions branching out from this vague “feeling” I wanted to capture.

I quickly decided I wanted to make something abstract, because fixing physics/collisions/pathfinding bugs has previously taken too much time from the actual design and content creation. It was a good decision because I had some spare time to fine-tune mechanics and just try things out, as well as add polish. Oh, and to keep proper breaks and have a good night’s sleep. Incidentally, MPC has probably the best graphics & audio I’ve made for an LD game.

It’s still not perfect, I guess, at least I want to believe that I haven’t hit my skill ceiling just yet. There are no proper animations, subtle things that would indicate gameplay events like who is attacking whom. That’s probably my biggest gripe because I realize how a developer can guide players with visual cues, and now I just resorted to writing a lengthy manual (plus the gameplay video) while leaving the rest for the imagination. I guess I should consider the user experience at some point, but it’s easy to get lost in the mechanics when there’s nobody else playtesting.

But overall, I’m once again satisfied at what I’ve done. It was my 4th LD and I’ve never failed to make a game, so I feel like I’m a lucky person when watching everyone around me give up. That feeling of clicking ‘Submit’ after two stressing days is just euphoric. You can’t plan everything in advance, so the end result is always a surprise from you to yourself. But that’s the point, to get over that perfectionism and just improvise and make a damn game.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5551

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse

this is my 8th vlog(wich seems kind of a alot) watch it here

or watch all of them here

thanks all

here are ome snapshots of my game, pretty boss, eh?

you can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14064

I made a trailer for my game ‘The Plain of Evolution’. Please check it out! And a comment would mean the world!:D

If you guys just can’t get enough of game jams, there’s another one going on at BaconGameJam this coming weekend. They usually get a modest turnout – 10 or 20 games – so it’s pretty chill.

I thought I’d be too exhausted, but after sleeping 12 hours a day since Ludum Dare, I feel great! And I’m excited to use this as an opportunity to correct my mistakes in Ludum Dare without waiting 4 months for the next Ludum Dare 😉

So if anyone is insane like me, maybe I’ll see you there

This was my first Ludum Dare and I made a game called “Moore’s Game“. It’s basically a journey through the evolution of video games – starting with Tic Tac Toe on a line-printer and ending with a ray-casting first person shooter.

Technology-wise it’s written in JavaScript, using the 2d-context of the HTML5 canvas element.

What went right

Speed – apart from the few times where I got stuck (more on that later), I was working pretty fast. Pong, Breakout and the raytracer for the Wolf3D-like level were done really quickly. It helped that I disregarded every coding best practice in existence. Even though faking namespaces via objects or closures is possible and common in Javascript, I didn’t do that and just put everything into the global namespace. That made for messy code (more on that later) but speedy development.

Although I (think I) was fast, I couldn’t finish everything I had originally planned. More on that later (that’s going to be a big what-went-wrong section, oh my…).

Technology choice – Modern Javascript interpreters (read: browsers) are blazingly fast, given the (security-)constraints in which they have to operate. The canvas API is simple and straight-forward. And the result is playable on every operating system with a modern browser.  What’s not to like about that? Javascript as a language has it’s share of problems, but it’s not too bad. It has really just the wrong syntax for the dynamic, lisp-like language it actually is.

The competition – as I said, this was my first Ludum Dare. I had the most programming-related fun since …ever, really! I also didn’t expect such a cool community. I was on the IRC a little bit, during the competition, and I was stunned how friendly and civilized everyone behaved. It’s the internet, people, you are expected to endlessly insult each other!

No, Ludum Dare is just great – it won’t be my last one!

What went wrong

Scope – that was my biggest problem. I just planned too much features. And while implementing those I had ideas for even more and more and more… I originally wanted to blend the gameplay from one game-generation into the other (that is, playing a bit of a Mario-Bros.-like jump-and-run with Pacman, for example) – but I had just no time for that. The games itself were all simple and small – but there were eight of them.

Which, by my current calculations, were at least seven games too many for a 48h-competition…

Code Quality – let’s not talk about that. This was hands-down the worst code I’ve ever written. I’ve written BASIC on my calculator that was better structured… I just didn’t have time to stop and think. So, copy-and-paste it was, mostly. And brute force. And a lot of “what’s the most stupid thing that could possibly work at least half of the time”.

Pacman– I still don’t know how the hell I managed to get completely stumped by writing pacman. I was on the wrong path, somehow and as a result I wasted much too much time even getting it to the sorry state it’s in now. The ghosts just move randomly, the frame-rate is ridiculously low, it’s buggy as hell. And it doesn’t even look too much like pacman. Not good.

Adventure – The lucas-arts inspired point-and-click adventure level was first planned to be the *cool* level of the game. The one that would pay back for all the bugs in the other levels. Well, no, that didn’t work out. I wrote half of an engine for it, but there just wasn’t enough time – and I didn’t really know how to actually write a point-and-click adventure game engine… So I started that level over – with about 4 hours left – and basically cut down all the features until it was just one big if-else tree. Not good, part 2.

Time management – It’s easy to lose track of just how much work is still to do when you’re working on eight different games at the same time. And losing track I did.

Knowledge – Before I started, I thought that I generally knew how to program all the games I had planned. Well, yes, generally. But what are good jumping dynamics for a platformer? How should I do collision testing? How do I insert scaled sprites into a ray-casted world? By which rules do the monsters move in pacman? I have no idea. Oh, and no time to find out… Not good, part 3.

What I’ll do different next time

I’m going to write one game. Like, one.

1

One! Eins! Uno!

One single, polished, working game that’s fun to play.

Not freaking eight badly made ones…

Thanks everyone!

Ludum Dare 24 was fun! 😀

Tags: postmortem

Hi, everyone ! If you played our game you probably know that we didn’t had the time to finish it properly and because we love finished work we decided to make an enhanced version post-compo :).

One of the new levels !

To be clear : This version doesn’t count for voting !

For more informations, go to Our post !

Ahah, it’s hard to test a game with one tester (who’s also the coder), on one computer, on one OS. I just discovered with a friend that the slower is the computer, the faster the character falls. Totally uncool :p

So I made a small post-compo of my game ( run and transform ), correcting theses strange bugs, and taking in account some feedbacks. The game is now far easier (it’s the cool word for “playable”).

Downloads :

Windows, Linux 32 bit, Linux 64 bit, MacOS, .love file, for sources and MacOS

The .love can be opened on Mac with LÖVE (love2d.org) or renamed to .zip to get the sources.

Also, discovered the hard way that if I don’t write a comment and hit “save” on a rating, it’s not taken in account. So much lost votes

Have fun!

Tags: post-compo, screenshot

I originally uploaded a gameplay video for my game Alien Rockpool (playable here) shortly after the competition ended, but Youtube kept corrupting the upload and it looked like it was being played on a clapped-out old TV which was getting very bad reception… (the effect would’ve been quite funky had it been intentional)

Anyway, with a faster connection I finally managed to get it uploaded properly. Couldn’t fade in the sound, so it’s a bit….# BWAAAA! So verily, tuneth down thy digital luggole transmitters. o___O

I’ve decided I’d like to take the game further and develop a new version taking into account some of the criticisms (very helpful – thank you!) which have been posted so far. I’ve had such a great time with this competition (given I loathed the topic when it was chosen) that I’m really looking forward to the next one!

What went right

Coding – In past entries I spent far too much time and energy trying to maintain good coding practices. That was completely thrown out the window this time around, and, though we had to deal with a lot more bugs during development, I actually finished a game.

Basecode – I owe a lot of that success to having a solid basecode this Jam as well. In previous attempts, I had a basic idea what I wanted to make and prepared base code for that. More often than not, the theme would completely shatter those ideas leaving me with very little useful code. In this jam, I included a wide variety of libraries, and was able to choose ones useful to my project.

Map Editor – In particular, having the ability to import .TMX files right from the start was a godsend. The ‘export to lua’ feature of Tiled is great, but not perfect.

Teamwork – Despite being in separate locations, it was a very different experience having someone else to bounce ideas off of, complain to, and test gameplay. It’s much harder to justify slacking off to someone else than it is when you are competing alone.

Graphics – This was my first time entering with a partner, and having someone else looking after graphics removed one of the most stressful parts of a compo for me. It also changed my design pattern. Normally I use placeholder graphics, and then create final sprites/textures once the code is solid. This time, Alex had a lot of the graphics done before I even had the code to support them. This eliminated a common trend of my past entries where I would write a feature which later had to be cut due to lack of graphics.

What went wrong

Timelapse – I messed up my Chronolapse / VNC configuration, making my timelapse screenshots completely unusable.

Music – We had planned on being a three person team, with someone else looking after the music. It didn’t end up being finished in time, so we had to use placeholder music I created earlier in the compo. (I used GreaseMonkey’s Autotracker, OpenMPT, and FL Studio 10.)

FPS – I didn’t have much, if any, time to optimize the raycasting engine. While the walls are pretty fast (using quads to draw them in stripes) the floor and ceiling are drawn pixel by pixel, which is painfully slow at anything but microscopic resolutions. Fortunately our graphics were already intentionally low-res, but even so, the game simply doesn’t look as nice scaled as it does full res, and I know a lot of people are not going to be able to play it with those settings.

Theme – We had to completely scrap our original idea due to the theme. I’m still happy with how the game turned out, but it definitely took a very different direction than we had intended.

Tags: ld24, post-mortem, postmortem, video

This was my first Ludum Dare and it was amazing. For the first time in my life, I produced a binary that can run on (some) other people’s machines and actually looks kinda nice, in a retro/minimalist way.

This is not to say I’m completely happy with my performance.

The Plan

My game: Cannibal Slugmage of Eden. (link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14121 ). Originally, the idea was to have a generic roguelike where instead of mana, you harvest evolving slugs. However, I have never done AI before, so by the time I decided I should probably stop planning and start coding I was wondering if having enemies was a bad idea. The solution: make the player one of the slugs.

You are a slugmage. Your sisters(*) mock your gift, but you’ll show them all. Use your sisters’ life force to fuel your unholy might as you slowly shape them into mana-thralls. Your goal: to gather enough power to ascend to godhood and remake the world in your own image.

Sounds good, right? And in fact, I am pretty happy with a lot of things about the game. But as always, it didn’t work out quite the way I wanted to.

Animations

If you try Slugmage, one of the first things you’ll notice is that it can be hard to tell what’s going on. I didn’t do (perfect) collision detection because I’m lazy, so slugs will occasionally step on each other, making them hard to interact with. Often, slugs will seem to disappear, when in reality they’re hiding under one of their sisters. But sometimes when they disappear, it’s because they’re actually dead (either at the hands of a sister or from simple drowning). Some of this confusion could be alleviated by a simple animation that plays when a slug dies.

There’s a similar issue with spellcasting. There is virtually no visual feedback that you’ve just done a wondrous and blasphemous thing. I wanted lightning bolts to actually feel impressive; I wanted flames to flicker; I wanted to see an expanding wave of the player’s color consuming the world. None of this happens.

The UI

I’m actually pretty proud of the UI I made. It’s pretty in its own little way, and it does show off some of the most important information. Parts of it were even tolerable to extend! (In particular, supporting spells and inventory-slugs in the information panel was pretty fun for me.)

Unfortunately, the UI was the most rushed thing in the whole game, and it shows. The problem?

COORDINATE TRANSFORMS.

For the most part, despite some of my triumphs, working with my UI was a nightmare. For starters, rather than passing click events to UI elements, there was a single global click handler that had to try and guess what you clicked on. (Literally “guess”. For example, if your mouse is ANYWHERE on the blue bar across the bottom of the screen, it uses those coordinates as an index into your inventory (which thankfully comes up nil)). Then, once the global click handler has figured out what it wants to do with your click, it has to do its own coordinate transform… which means it needs to know the size and position of literally everything on the screen.

I must have spent ten hours trying random permutations of arithmetic operators in search of one that worked.

I am… not good at coordinate transforms.

The Future

I’m not done with Slugmage. I think it was an awesome idea, and it deserves more than 72 hours of kludge.

Unfortunately, I did some things to my game that will make it very hard to extend, especially toward the end of the competition when I was desperate to add as many of the essential UI indicators as I could. Fortunately, I don’t care. I have learned enough from these three short days that I’m eager for a total remake (or perhaps a sequel with the same mechanics). I think I’ll call it…

Divine Sunsnail of Elysium

See you next Dare.

— Alyssa Trillioneyes

* I have ended up thinking of all the slugs (the Slugmage included) as female. Why? Simply because, in the code, slugs that are about to be added to the world (perhaps they had been birthed by a font or dropped by the player) are referred to as daughters, by analogy with mitosis.

I played some very fun games yesterday, laughed at the the one I helped create, and I hope to play more today so please go to my stream at 6 pm PST (-8 GMT) today.

I WILL PLAY YOUR LD24 GAME just as I did during LD 23 relax stream. Suggestions for other LD 24 games are encouraged as well.

I added a timelapse!

1/2:

It sounds really cool when you play the album blind.

Be sure to check out  my entry!

My first ludum dare, and subsequently my first LD post mortem.

I’m a game programmer for a living, but not in this time frame and not while having to come up with an idea and create all my own content. It was exciting to have total control over the end product, but also much more demanding.

I used ShiVa as my middleware engine, mostly because of my familiarity with it. I ended up up choosing to do a tower defense, but the core gameplay was just a vehicle to show off the genetic algorithm that generated the enemies and the towers you used. Anyway, lets get started:

Right

• Planning – After getting the initial idea, the planning on paper I did ended up being pretty accurate to what was needed for the final product. While planning it, I had an idea of what features would probably not make it in time, and those ended up being the only ones I cut.

• Genetic algorithm – Super proud of how well this worked, and also all the UI work I had to put in to show the player what was happening behind the scenes. This component took at least half of the total time spent on the game, and I really do love it. It nails the theme and makes the game procedural instead of static.

• Art – Since I’m a programmer, I knew this would be my hardest aspect. I ended up making it work for me by making most of it programmatic. I drew a basic grayscale version of the dragons and towers, and cut them up into pieces. I then scaled, tinted and assembled the pieces in code to give the various colors and sizes of the objects in the game. This meant that 80% of the art was done in code which ended up perfect.

Wrong

• Core game – Choosing tower defense is a LD trope, and I wished I had picked something else. The surrounding genetic generation stuff which I was most proud of could have just as easily fit into a twin stick shooter or RPG system. Anything would have probably been better.

• Testing – Didn’t get a chance to do much playing during the process. I had a goal in mind and worked towards it. Turns out the game can be either too easy or too hard simply depending on the initial tower and dragon generation. I should have put more limits and constraints during that process to even it out. Also you can craft comically broken towers, but I would NEVER fix that because it is great.

• Polishing – No time for this, was hoping to give the game objects some basic animation and adjust the maze layout. I spent the only time I did have on what I hoped would be the high impact inclusions, the particle effects and sounds.

Overall I’m happy with what I shipped, a game about dragon sex, and feel better prepared and even more excited to participate in future Ludum Dares. Thanks for reading!

Play and rate Mutating Scales

HELLO EVERYONE. I finished my game for the jam, but never posted here. So I’m here to deliver a public service announcement, you should play my game (and rate it)!

Play and Rate ExoSlime

There were a couple performance issues at first, but I’ve fixed them. If you tried to play before and it didn’t work, please try again.

Thanks!

Tags: gif, love2d, moonscript

Last year I entered alone. I quickly got short for time and had to drop a lot of ideas!

However, this year I had friends to do art for me, even though I was still the only programmer, I had a lot more time! My game ended up being polish and Bug free (I hope!). My friends had never done art like this before and were complete novices. Still I could not have done it without them and I am so very grateful.

So, Next time grab a friend who may not have any talent and force them to help with art, story, descriptions or Anything that will save you time!

Here is what we ended up with this jam: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7301

– Zoomyzoom

yes! its finnaly here, the never before special edition of mohammads game for the ludum, compleate with Q/A,behind the sences, and a walkthrough!

will mohammad stay on LD?

will he compleate the game?

will you be a smart and  play it?

then, DO SO RIGHT HERE

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14064

for your Q/A can be answered here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH4WfnCtCNY&feature=youtu.be

and if your too lazy just watch the walkthough here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMz6TagnvRA&feature=youtu.be

and check out my site for more stuff! (or shit)

https://sites.google.com/site/mohammadgamescom/

although i have meger threats from my dad, the school i go to became a…E-SCHOOL!

so that means that my dad has no choice but to allow me to use the laptop for school,homework,textbooks,ect!

you know what that means!

oh and btw, im making a video editing program because i feel that maya’s C.G.I special effect option is too expensive to get, so ill develop one and release it to the public.

what you can do with it is that you can model and animate a 3d model in a background witch is your video. that way you have no more trouble having to use a green screen, adobe after effects (a big rip-off!), or anything else, just this.

more of this will be  released during the october challenge and mabye even released for…1 dollar!

(once i get a debit card…)

man, am i going to piss off maya and adobe!

better get my lawer!

My Ludum Dare Jam entry is Those Stupid Aliens. It’s a top-down space shooter.

The player is firing from a capital ship at the bottom of the screen. It has just gone through a battle, defeating the enemy battleship, stranding hundreds of aliens. As a result of the battle, it only has enough shields to withstand five hits. Your technicians are routing power and fixing subsystems, but they are tired. When you defeat a wave of enemies, it builds up the morale of the crew and they repair one point worth of shield. And that brings us to Those Stupid Aliens, and your job, as one of the last remaining gunners.

Using the mouse to guide the targeting reticule, and the left mouse button to fire, your goal is to shoot the alien ships that appear. They will show up in groups and express different characteristics based on the makeup of their internal properties. As the game goes on, the successful aliens will have their internal properties inserted into the gene pool, and the next waves will be created from this information. Eventually, you should see ‘smarter’ aliens which are more difficult to defeat.

What Went Right

I used Flash/Flex/AS3 with FlashPunk and the FlashDevelop IDE. I’ve been using them for over a year with a few different unfinished, but ‘demo-able’ projects so I was confident in my ability to use it for Ludum Dare and be able to complete something in 48 hours. I will definitely use FlashPunk in December’s competition and likely beyond.

My last successful entry was in LD48_15. The biggest thing I took away from that was the scope. I was essentially trying to implement a clone of a game I loved to play as a kid. Therefore, I already knew the features that needed to be implemented and tempered my desire to feature creep. For this competition, I tried to make sure that I limited what I intended to implement to make sure the project didn’t get out from under me. I came up with an idea that didn’t require level design or a sheet full of tiles. That certainly saved a lot of time and work. I kept the original , knowing that I wouldn’t have time to implement them all anyway.

I knew I didn’t want the player to have to use the keyboard much–or at all, if possible. Therefore I just implemented mouse movement and single click firing. No other buttons on the screen. If I had to, I was ready to implement a “Shift-Click” for a secondary action, but I never really let one enter the scope. The idea behind keeping the controls simple was that if I made something worthy, I could easily port it to a mobile touch device.

On Sunday morning, updated my placeholder capital ship (which I’m still not really happy with), added sound effects and the explosion particle generator. Once I did this, it’s like the ‘game’ part of the game jumped out at me, even though the gameplay didn’t change. It really gained an old arcade feel and I think was a psychological milestone.

What Went Wrong

I spend too much time doing other things this weekend. Mostly it was stuff with my family, but an hour here and there adds up. When the 48 hours were up, I was not done, and had to fall back on the Jam. Though I must say that this project moved along much better than any previous LD attempt in the past three years.

For the bullet, I took the target location (the mouse click) and projected out the location that it crosses the top of the screen. Each frame it would move towards that location. For the alien movement, I tried to do something similar using the direction of travel (a normalized point relative to the original location) and the current location to create the target on the edge of the screen. That target would be recalculated whenever the alien changed direction based on it’s internal properties. It worked ok, but later I realized I only needed keep adjusting the target point to something beyond the max speed every turn. A simple multiplication instead of trying to figure out the math behind the projection and deal with different quadrants.

One thing I didn’t get a chance to implement, or even figure out a decent signal for it, was feedback on the evolution of the aliens. I wanted to give some sort of indication that the evolution was happening or that there were successful aliens in the current wave. I never really came up with a good idea, so I never implemented it. I think some sort of feedback would have been great as it would help give the player a sense of change, rather than just witnessing wave after wave and having to notice changes all on their own.

Neutral

I made the music using the online instrument Circuli. It’s a neat thing to play with, but I don’t think what I used fits the game all that well. I purchased the iPhone app, so I’ll probably mess around with it again, but I probably won’t be using it in the post-compo version.

I have a background engine hum during play mode instead of music. I don’t know how annoying it might seem for other people. I debated switching it to music, but the intro music didn’t fit and I didn’t have time to create anything. Since it’s constant, I don’t think it would work out with music at the same time. If the ship moved, then it could potentially only make sound at that point, but it doesn’t, so I think I have to decide which way to move forward with it.

I think the idea behind the aliens becoming smarter is good. It’s a survival of the fittest process, with every trait possibly live from the beginning. Every time you play, a new initial gene pool is created from randomized DNA. This makes it impossible to set a difficulty. You may get an initial gene pool that consists of aliens that are slow moving, large, and don’t fire very often. Or you may get  small, fast moving sprinklers. I sort of faked some progressive difficulty it raising the number of aliens in the wave. I’m not against that idea, but I wanted it to be gradual.

Aliens Future

One of the first things I’d like to do is change the alien graphics. I think I want to use bitmaps, but I also kinda like the vector look. (I’m actually cheating, the vector graphics are really bitmap placeholders.) At first, my intention was to use the look and the colors as purely cosmetic traits, but I to like the idea that they represent something internal. It would be a way to solve part of the problem of feedback that I mentioned earlier.

I also need to redo the evolution component. I never implemented mutations, which would serve to introduce traits that did not exist in the initial gene pool, and reintroduce phased out traits that might have better success in a different combination. I’d like to come up with a way that makes it possible to use the traits to have a couple difficulty modes without relying on wave size. The way I do it now is closer to a true evolution using survival of the fittest (which fits the theme) rather than a carefully planned difficulty progression (which some entries passed off as evolution). Somewhere in the middle is the solution.

Right now the enemies hover near edges, which makes sense since they are introduced there and often don’t have traits that move them away. I need to get them out of the edges without making them predictable at the start of the wave or do something that obviously goes against their internal traits.

Conclusion

I think I’m fairly happy with this project. I ended up with a game that feels like a game. Many times I’ve ended up at the halfway point and I don’t know what I’m doing or how I’m going to make it fun. I managed this time to come up with what I feel is interesting and has promise to be expanded to keep attention longer than a few minutes.

I definitely did better than I thought I would with the theme. I had originally been a big proponent of Evolution a few years ago, but cooled on it when I realized that it would take a long time to get a good algorithm set up. I’ve been thinking of this kind of stuff for over a decade. I used to sit in biology and other classes and diagram out some sandbox DNA projects that I never did implement. I’m surprised at what I have done in the weekend time frame, so I might go back and visit those old notes sometime, now that I’ve had a little taste of it here.

For the past few years I’ve been pretty disappointed in my LD participation over the past couple years. I mostly didn’t finish and gave up. Sometimes it was because I didn’t feel I had come up with a good enough idea on the theme, or ran into problems and didn’t have the heart to finish, or had too many other activities that I couldn’t avoid.  After my experience with LD24, I’m really looking forward to December.

Tags: as3, flashpunk, postmortem

If I’d had even another hour to tinker with Mesh before the deadline, I probably would’ve been able to add 3-4 more levels. I’ve been pretty busy at work, but took some time to knock a few levels out at lunch one day. I’m using a Google Doc as a level designer (see image at bottom), then translate that into rough JSON, then minify the JSON and test. It’s a bit cumbersome at the moment, but quick enough that I may not bother with a level editor.

For a live look at levels as I cook ’em up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsSkS1z3LMmMdF9wMzVNQS10T3ZxRjdDUHFyOGJCakE

Also I’ll try to keep posting updated builds to a new URL on one of my dump sites: http://www.simianlogic3d.com/fun/mesh/001

For the theme evolution I made a game with beetle teams fighting each other.

Please play it here !

The player control none of the team but he can bid for one of them. If he win the other team evolve and he have to switch his favorite team or persist on the first one for the next fight. Until he fails.

There’s 16 different skills but you will never select any of them.

The most difficult part of the gamedesign of beetlefield was to not let the player focus on one team as “His” team. That’s a bit frustrating, but I wanted him to concentrate on analyze rather than the classic level-up-your-character thing

I was really unsure about how it will work, so I added an incentive to the game.

Player can save the last team they bid for so they can sort of “possess” it to fight with other players team.

What went right :

– Experience : This is my 6th ludumdare and the first one when stress is not overwhelming me. That makes my week-end more enjoyable than the other LD. I even finished my todolist 3 hours before submission time, which is a very reassuring thing to do

– Music : That was my first time creating my own music for a game. I’m always spending few time before LD searching for a tracker I could use, but this time I think I found one I like. This is sunvox and I plan to train with it for next LD. I know the menu and ingame music I created are a bit basic and repetitive but well… I’m still proud of them

– Surroundings : We were gathered at the Motion-Twin company office. 11 developpers working altogether, it was a very good athmosphere. They all made an amazing work which really helped me to push my limits further.

What went wrong :

– Few Skills : Since the game engine was ready on saturday morning, I had tons of time for titlescreens, music and all. But I regret now I did not spend more of this time for extra skills. They are the game core and with more skills all the battles would have been unique.

– Fonts : I was never satisfied with fonts and spend to much time looking for them.

– Sfx : I reduced the tweaking time on Sound Fx because of the time I had spent on music. The result is my sfx are poor, especially the button tick and selections. I’m only happy with the beetle death sound.

– Not enough beds

Tags: LD #24, post-mortem

What I had in mind

I wanted to make a game where you play a kind of a nerdy guy, at the top of human evolution. He happens to be stranded on a desert island after a plane crash.
You’d have to explore the island to learn and discover a way to get out of it.

The idea behind this concept is that you’re back to a primitive state at the beginning of the game (weak and naked) and you must evolve to escape the island: you have to improve your survival skills and become a kind of Tarzan at the end of the game.
The game mechanics revolve around a platforming with adventure/point-and-click elements.
What Went Right

No unexpected crashes or bad issues during the weekend.
I developed a craft system, it was the first time I thought about that kind of thing.
I managed to submit something!

What Went Wrong

It was way toooo big for a single man. The game represents less than a half of what I had in mind. It’s a classic mistake, I knew it but I fell into the trap.
I spent a day and a half to develop the game system and only 8 hours on level design, art and animations. It’s absolutely not the right balance.
Nobody has tested my game before I submitted it and the game suffers from that:
– A lot of Level Design issues: I did not realized that people would try to escape from the island by swiming away from it and I didn’t put any invisible walls to block the end of the room. Everybody’s falling into the void at the end of the ocean and the game is over: awful design mistake here!
– The craft system is not really understood at first and it’s a bit glitched: you can’t craft a recipe with two ingredients if there’s a third one in the top slot.
– Some recipes are not obvious enough. It’s ok for a LucasArts game where you accepted to spend time trying to combinate items, but I think a lot of people will not be so patient for a little, free, snack game.
I had no time for music.
User Interface took me too much time.
Drag and Drop Interface for crafting –> way too big
Conclusion :
As I said I made a very usual mistake: the concept was too big for such a small development time. I knew it when I had the idea but it was challenging so I gave it a try anyway. It’s a semi-failure because the game does not represent what I had in mind and for many people the experience will be ruined because of design issues.
I think I will do a post-compo version with the whole TurboDindon team, with new graphics, sounds and a real Level Design. You’ll be able to play it soon!

Thanks for reading, and remember to avoid leaving the island by swimming if you play the game.

Cheers!

Bisou

Hi everyone ! Because we really love finished work and because peoples are wanting to play our game but find it too difficult we decided to make the enhanced version in two difficulties (Easy & Hard) !

In comments, people said that they really loved the music. Thanks everyone, it’s a pleasure to read this kind of comments. Because you loved it, we have decided to make it available to everyone. Feel free to use it or just listen it but if you want : you can leave a comment on our post to say so ;).

All the download/play links are available Right here on our post !

Bonus, a walkthrough video with the entire history (alternate ending also) :

About the HUD of body resistance :

I’m pretty glad about the simplicity of this hud.

To remember, in Evolvorous you evolve in differents environnements to adapt and transform your species in order to survive.

To know where your species can move, we made a special hud showing the resistance of your body to an environnement because when your species walk onto an environnement, she takes damage if she’s not prepared to live in. Logical.

In this HUD, the middle green cube show the default environnement (plain) where all the species can evolve without trouble (except with enemies :)).
Each of the others cubes show an environnement where you will adapt your body in order to survive. So when you can survive to train your body resistance to an environnement, a new cube appear and a part of your body evolve ! The limits are in the amount of resistances/cubes that you can get because it’s equal to the numbers of parts of your body you can change. And it’s 3.

I will probably develop this Hud in future games, because it’s clear, easy to read and simple.

To test it in game.

My pairs and Me

This Ludum Dare 24 was my second participation to this great event. I totally love the principle of the LD compo. I think it’s all about find a simple and effective concept, that we can lead as far as possible, and polish at maximum to provide players a lovely little sincere and fun experience. We shouldn’t go into something too complex, ‘cause 48 hours is kinda short. So find a concrete idea and go for it !

The fact is this time the theme was Evolution. Not a bad theme, I think instead it’s a word that speak a lot and bring many ideas quite easily. Maybe too much and too easy. I wouldn’t do anything too obvious about evolution, especially since I was already working on a project on this theme outside the Ludum Dare. So when the theme went out I was like AOW NO, NOT AGAIN…

Finally, I started coding without knowing where I was really going. I wanted to do something about evolution in society and in environment, and about religion and leadership, with humor and things… Gradually I went on something finally too complex, with random behaviour in ten guys who tend to evolve differently depending on a number of features and action YOU messiah do. In fact it was really not concrete, and it became a sandbox experience, I think.

Sandbox here I mean there is no goal, exept the goal you want to reach. And regardless what your goal is, you have to experiment, try, restart again and again. Then, you’ll begin to understand, maybe, how it works. It’s an experience for curious and patient gamers, and I wish the players have fun trying to understand what the huck is happening.

Reading the first comment on my games, I understand the side “WTF happens ? But I laughed !” is working. And I’m happy to see that the overall incomprehension can provide some kind of fun. On the one hand, evolution is not something very “square” and concrete, obvious, so the incomprehension in the game could be a part of the experience. But I don’t want people to think that all this game is about random events you cannot influence, and that’s why I’ll try now to explain how some secret mecanisms in the game work.

To summarize the game first, you control sort of prophet holding a stick that can throw lightnings to dig or punish. You live on a small island with 10 of your pairs, who’re not holding a thunder stick but who live their live on this small randomly generated world. Each of them have somme kind of personality, with different value of violence and fear. All of them tend to happyness, but violence and fear decrease the happyness. In the game, more people have free place to move (that means a dirt block with 2 free block above), more they are happy. Plus, more big they are, more happy they become.

So ok but what happyness is about ? Happier they are, more the guys have chance to find a job. There are 3 job in the game : Farmer, lumberjack and fisherman. The farmers plant wheat that can be eaten by other guy who become bigger (and happier, you follow me ?). Lumberjack go choice a tree and they huh, turn around it. Fishermen go to a water point and begin to catch fish.

Other points…If a guy stay too much time in water, he becomes a fish. If a guy stay too much time in air, he becomes a bird. When you destroy the house of a worker, or a tree of a lumberjack, the guy becomes a rebel, and start to follow you and beat you to death. If there is not enought space in the island, there’s a chance that some people become rebels too. More a guy is violent, more he has chance to hit a pair. When a guy is beaten, he becomes more violent. A lightning in the face decrease the violence but increase the fear.

I realize that it can still a bit confuse, but hey, that’s how is the evolution, maybe…I just want you to understand a bit more the not-concrete system of this sandbox experience. The goal still yours. Do you want to make a peacefull place with golden wheat fields and happy lumberjack ? Or an oasis with fish family ? Or a bird colony ? OR PUT ALL THIS WORLD ON FIRE ? In fact you can do lot of things. If I had more time, I would have added more jobs and animals, and behaviours and things, like a rebel master stuck in a bunker and shooting around everything that moves, lava blocks that throw fire particle, meteor shower and all…I think this is a kind of experience, like most of sandbox experience, that becomes better with more content and polish.

Anyway, sorry for my broken English, I hope you’ll have fun playing this crazy game/experience/sandbox thing, earing the crazy sound and enjoying the crazy bugs, and thank you and I love you all awesome people =3

My pairs and Me

This JAM was really interesting and a great way to see how we can work effectively to reach a little game :).

Like the most of us, we weren’t searching about succes but more about challenge, fun, testing ourselves and getting comments on our work to evolve ^^.
Evolvorous is available here !

Let’s see how Evolvorous evolved :

Basic construction of the map

Putting some elements to making this more diversified

The map real size with many hex. Many hex in this game creation !

Putting the first grapbics of the snow environnement

Adding others graphics to see how this could render (even if the graphics willn’t be used, they can construct the idea)

Adding a new graphic for the snow

Tree graphic for snow

Adding the desert’s graphics

Adding some old monsters to work on characters placement

Adding the fog of war to hide the other species/enemies

Adding the swamp’s graphics

Adding the volcano’s graphics

Changing the size of graphics for a better rendering by reducing number of hex on the map

Adding the plain’s graphics and changing the testing ressources graphics  and changing to those provided in the game

Random placement of graphics for the ressources used for food

Adding the first monsters ! It’s the monster for volcano species

Adding new species !

All the species are created and they can be merged

Defining how the species should look like when the player escape or attack in his way of gaming

Polishing the species with more beautiful and harmonics colors.

Working a bit more on food ressources

Adding new graphics to represent how carnivorous and herbivorous should look like when they eat food.

Duck mouth for the herbivorous and mouth teeth for carnivrous.

Final polish onto all the graphics

Adding the HUD

The final render :

Hey all,

I know its a little late to write a postmortem about Collect (game about collecting and evolving) but I was busy past few days on work so I didn’t have the chance to write here

1st Day (6 hours of work):

First of all how the game idea pop out?? that’s was pretty strange as on the first day I found someone posting a picture about his game (I don’t remember the name of the game nor the user right now) but the image was blue background with white box around it and there was some white circles in it and some drawn lines. I didn’t know what his game about but when I saw that picture I remembered an old game by Scattle called Constellation Chaos, it was sponsored by newgrounds at that time and it had a nice track by Souleye (musician behind VVVVVV) go and check it (link) it is worth checking

So I started thinking how could I make a game so I told myself why I am not a shooting star and leveling trails behind me and these trails will cause me to reflect with it. and my goal is to kill all enemies and I get experience every level where I can evolve my shooting star (at that point I decided there will be moving enemies and they are killed if the collide with my trail like in constellation chaos and I stop from jumping when I hit a + sign on the field so I can re-jump again)

So I started to make my engine for checking intersection and reflecting the player, I wrote the physics engine but there was a bug I couldn’t figure out at that time so I spent around 6 hours trying to make a shooting start that leaves trails behind it and it reflect with this trails if it hit it, but that doesn’t work which was bad.

So I was upset and I had a meeting with some friends outside so I decided to go out and when I returned I got to the bed early to get up early and try again with my engine before using Box2D physics engine.

About the art style I always been fan of simple figures with some awesome effects you can check most of my games since I started all use that (because I am not so good at drawing art especially making animation) so I decided just some simple figure (lines and ball) and since I love to make an overlayer to add effect to the graphics that makes the game looks nice and before LD48 I was talking with Noel Berry about the scanline effect he made in his game and he said it is just an image no special effects and send the image to me so I used that scanline image effect to add to my game after making some modification on it

2nd Day (12 hours of work):

I started at the early morning straggling with my physics engine but I figure out it is not worth all that and if I keep struggling I will waste my second day without making the game so I decided to try Box2D and it was my second experiment with it and most of time I didn’t know what to do and I got lots of bugs but I figured out most of the issues and make the engine works very nicely.

After I finished that I started thinking what to do next so I decided to remove the idea of enemies and start deciding what are the upgrades in the game so I got 4 types of upgrades (speed, distance traveled, bouncing) but since I removed the moving enemies and any moving platforms so the speed is now useless so I decided to fix it and keep the other 3 upgrades.

At the beginning I was deciding that the upgrades will be shown after each level and on death but a spark ignited in my mind a decided that only will appear if I die so I can improve that generation and produce a new one and since the new generation made is new so I decided to repeat the levels again as if it is a real experiment and new creature better than old one is evolved and to be sure he is good we must re-evaluate it across all tests.

Since the enemies are removed so I changed the level goal to get all the + signs in the field and told myself to make all the tricks in the bouncing.

After finishing everything in the game except the game levels I decided to make 10 levels at least but while I was developing the game I find out it is very difficult to play the game and the bouncing is very difficult to be predicted so I decided to cut the levels to 8 levels and none of them needs double bounce or more to solve a level

What I think about what happened:

Using Box2D was something amazing it is very efficient and I am glad my engine didn’t work as that make me learn and use Box2D and figure out how much it is awesome.

Working on game for LD48 is something amazing and having small time frame caused me to get a small nice idea that is weird and nice at same time

Wasting a lot of time in developing my physics engine left me with small time frame of one day to finish the game where this limitation caused me to change the idea to a better form (in my view)

Like Petri Purho (guy behind Crayon Physics Deluxe) said having limitations and being poor is something nice and not bad in lots of time (link to presentation)

Thanks for reading and Plz Check the game and rate it, Hope you like it

Collect: Game about Collecting and Evolving

It helps to stay relaxed when making a game all on your own.

My first Ludam Dare/game jam/non-tutorial aided game, and I gotta say, this was a blast! I asked a lot of seasoned game devs in my city for tips, and at the top of the list was scope. So the first thing I did was to get things moving on screen! I didn’t even write a design doc, I just drew one, and even then it wasn’t much to begin with.

Yup, this is some wizardry right here!

Once I decided to make the head follow the player character, things started rolling. I added a few obstacles, and a way to progress. All this took about two hours. After that, was level design!

I didn’t expect to have much fun with making levels, but it turned out to be the best part of all. I often caught myself playing for about 30 minute stretches, just testing and tuning for fun and difficulty. By this point I was confident I’d finish my game. That being my only true worry from the very start. Not how cataclysmic my game mechanic would be, not the number of plays it would get, but just getting it finished. That’s one skill I want to hone.

Sprite sheets are kinda satisfying to look at. Kinda.

I can go into more detail, but I’d rather just sum things up here.

Suceeeess(es)

Getting the damn game done! – I wasn’t too sure about this, but the small scope of the game almost ensured it would happen

Coming up with a mechanic that was simple, yet fun. – A rabid rabbit head hounding it’s body, as it grabs food and dodges death on the way. And guess what? You’re the body on the run! I actually feel I can take it a bit further and make a polished game out of it, but that’s for after I make a few more games.

Making all the content myself – I managed to make the music, sfx, art/animation, and coded (simple as it may be). I had no idea what a time sink each element would be! But I learned a lot in the process.

The art! – I can draw just fine with a pencil on paper, or with a tablet on screen, but this time I was confined to the mouse. For I picked a style and toyed with symmetry a bit. this saved me a lot of head aches.

I kicked the editor and agent out of my room! – I didn’t judge myself unreasonably, or start thinking about “the market.”  I just got up each day, and made the game. It was as natural as natural as a kid crying for candy at the super market (whatever that means XD).

To Be Improved…

Even after the successes that have been mentioned above (and more), I still definitely need to gain more command of programming. there were a few things I wanted to add, but I ran out of headaches to spare, during the jam.

The volume of my sound wasn’t as I’d expected! The music was low, for some reason I didn’t have time to look into in time of the deadline. Poooooo!

*****

One of the easiest levels in the game.

Anyway, that’s about all I find worth saying about my game. Please give it a try, and let me know what you think.

Good Jam I can’t wait for the next Jam. JAM JAM JAM JAM

Spoilers! This is the last screen of my game.

Play/Rate

Young Earth Road Trip was my first LD game. I had a great time (for the most part: see Period of Despondency), was able to include all of the major features I wanted, and learned a lot.

What Went Right

• My game plan worked very well. Friday brainstorm, Saturday build, Sunday polish.
• I only had one strong concept idea, but I was able to develop the rest of the story and the game play very quickly once I decided that my core idea was, “YEC pilgrimages to the Creationist Museum.”
• I narrowed my scope early on. The original neighborhood had eight neighbors, plus Miguel’s house at 316 and a few other locations, but I decided to go with the four strongest characters and only have 4 locations.
• Gained confidence in my graphic abilities. I mentioned this when I finished the game, but I thought the real crutch would be graphic assets. But once I got started, the graphics part went very quickly and the assets are “good enough” to convey the story and some of the humor.

What Went Wrong

• Most notably, music. I “scouted out” music tools beforehand and decided, “Oh, I’ll just use inudge.” Somehow, I didn’t notice that inudge had no convenient way to export the song, so when I started working on music about three hours before deadline I realized I was stuck. My computer doesn’t have speakers, so I couldn’t even record a crappy version that way. I didn’t trust myself to learn how to use new software before the deadline, so I ended up pecking out something on piano for the ending (the rest of the game has sound, but no music).
• My Period of Despondency: Early afternoon Sunday I started to wear down. I was tired and I wanted away from the computer. The game was technically complete, but there were a lot of graphics, music, and sounds to add. I didn’t think I would be able to finish the ending sequence, which required a lot of new images. Fortunately, I got a second wind (had to give myself a little pep talk there).
• When I leave an asset, I really leave it. Forever. On a number graphic assets I told myself I’d come back and add detail work, but never did. In the future I’d go ahead and spend the extra minutes polishing up each one before I move on.

The Future
I ran out of time for a few things, like a parallax bus-driving scene and blinking eyes, but overall I was able to include everything major that I planned for. With the exception of adding music and a splash screen, I probably won’t make any changes (and I might not even make those, since this game is a nice time capsule of my current skill level). But I’d like to take some of the things I learned (like how to make the random God hints) and apply them to new games.

Tags: ld24, postmortem

Link to my LD-Entry Firefly

I don’t want to present a list of good and bad things, so I’ll take a bit more of a narrative approach to my post mortem (although english is not my native language)

The Idea – and how bad at drawing I am

This is my first Ludum Dare entry. I didn’t really know what to expect from myself, and the first few hours after theme anouncement, I was constantly switching between a “lets try just to have fun” and a “Lets see what is the best I can do in 48h” mood. I ended up somewhere in between and I felt very good doing things as I did them.

I had a very precise idea for an evolution based theme in my head but I took some time to make up some others to see if I could find a better one. The only one that I really came up with was  “The Darwin Award Game – Kill yourself as dumb and fast as you can” which I gave up on once I told my girlfriend about it and she only shook her head, saying nothing. So I decided to go for the “plants and bee’s”-theme.

I wasn’t really sure what the final mechanic should be like. I only knew that one fundamental process should be part of the game-play: Bee’s pollinating plants and mixing genes following rules similar to mendels-rules.

So the first thing I did was drawing a sketch of what a game-screen could look like. Here you see a comparisan graphics of what the sketch, and what the game that I finally submitted look like: (I am not good in drawing obviously, but for the amusement I’ll add the sketch anyways – and hey! It was 5 AM!).

The Programming

I had decided the day before theme announcement, that I would start with very sketchy placeholder graphics and spend the first 24hours coding. I would then start to create nicer graphics and add sounds to finally do some polishing. I stuck to that plan and dived right into an empty eclipse project that I had prepared with the libraries that I chose (Libgdx and Artemis Entity-System-Framework).  I planned to submit an Android and a java version of my game. That was important to plan upfront because I had to map all interactions to touch-input (at least in my head) when designing controls. Artemis proofed once again to be a perfect match for rapid development like it was required for LD. But I really feel very comfortable with libgdx and artemis anyway. (I ended up messing with the Entity-System pattern a bit when I had no time left and produced some not so good looking code :))

I think it helps a lot not to spend all the time with a new api or tool you haven’t tried before. Why do so many entries choose tools or libraries they never used before for a LD entry? It doesn’t sound like something fun for me (unless you need to give yourself a handicap because any bunch of numbers turn into an incredibly looking, sounding and playing game if you only look at them).

Sunday morning, I finished the last systems I felt mandatory to be present to… yes … to what? I realized in that moment that somehow I was still not really clear on what the gameplay should be like exactly. What I had was:

• Plants, growing blossoms (not really because the placeholder graphics didn’t look like it, but I knew what it could be like).
• Three slots where you could put a plant.
• A weather-system which would randomly spawn snow, rain or heat.
• Plants could die from weather that they were not resistant against.
• Bees were flying from plant to plant eating their pollen and pollinating other plants

If you played my game, this might sound familiar to you, because this sounds very similar to the games tutorial – for a reason.

The Game-Mechanics – or how I would first do something else

Not many things changed concerning the game play. Things that I introduced sunday morning to have at least something to work with was:

• The pollination process got a bit more complex (Mutation was added for example).
• Generic-Seeds that would give you some start-stats and are required to grow plants with new random stats were introduced.
• Blossoms were made harvestable after being pollinated so you could plant them and grow a new plant with the blossoms stats (which are independent of the plants base stats after being pollinated).
• Bees were renamed to fireflies (because bees suck).
• Bees could have stats attached when they entered the game that were random (to bring a bit more diversity into the whole setup).
• The player was able to smash fireflies if he didn’t want them to pollinate a plant with stats he didn’t like

That’s basically it. I didn’t think about what the gameplay would be like anymore because I couldn’t spontainously come up with something and just started to hope that I would stumble about a brilliant idea in the process of creating the assets. So I started creating graphics (I did them all in inkscape).

This is what the game looked like sunday early morning:

I started to work on the plants and played with different background graphics. It was fun to do, but I always had in mind that I still had not the perfect game-play that I wanted.

Another step in the process:

So you have seen in the beginning of my post what the game looked like in the end, so I won’t insert more screenshots. (Pro Tip: To find out what it really looks and sounds like, it’s helpful to play and rate the game ;-))

I finished most of the graphics around 5PM on Sunday (around 10 hours before the deadline) and started to search for the cables that I needed to record from my e-piano to my computer. That took a while (I drank far to many energie-drinks by that time – thats really a don’t. I could hardly concentrate and giggled like crazy for  a while…). Once I had calmed down again I recorded the music for the game (that was really a quick thing, I knew I didn’t have much time to work on it because there were several other things to be done). An hour later I had the music cut, and written a system that would load and play them in the game. I created some more sounds for selections and mutation on plants but ran out of time quickly so I couldn’t record sound effects for the weather or the fireflies for example (Would have liked to do that).

The Wake-Up-Call

Once these things were ready there was not much time left. Maybe 3 hours. I was really pleased with what the game looked like, given my drawing talent and the short time. But I was (and am) very unsatisfied with the gameplay. I mean its all fine, once you read the tutorial or found out what possible interactions are, it’s really playable. There is goal to achieve and there is actually quite some complexity involved in it (The goal is to cultivate a plant that survives 5 minutes) But when I was play-testing, I could hardly achieve that goal. There were two reasons for it:

1. The feedback loop was hardly present. As mdkess wrote in my games comments later: It was hard to figure out how good you were doing.
2. The game was actually to hard. The pollination process was rarely beneficial and you had only a low chance of a mutation to be beneficial either.

But the deadline got close and I knew I had not enough time to change the game to improve point 1. So all I could do was to insert an easy and a hard game mode. The hard game mode has all difficulties left as I describe them here. The easy mode really is much easier, so if you want a challenge, try the hard mode (though I suggest to start with easy mode to get to know the game). The other thing that I put into the game within the last hour before the end of the compo, was a tutorial. I really don’t like what it became like. Obviously I couldn’t integrate an interactive tutorial (which I usually like to do). So its just 10 screens filled with text and some spare graphics to explain everything. There is now a tutorial outside of the game that is a bit cleaner and easier to understand. I suggest to read that one 😉

So I guess now that I wrote so much about it I actually want to do a list :D:

What was gooooood

• Schedule was nearly perfect. Although some things are not as polished as I like them to be, I feel like I really spent my time on the right parts to have a full game done by the end of 48 hours.
• Programming was great. I really did some not so pretty things shortly before submission deadline, but that was not avoidable to get done.
• Idea to game conversion worked really good. Comparing my sketch with the result its actually not that far away from each other.
• Graphics and sounds are much better than I thought I could do.
• Porting the game to android was a matter of 60 minutes. Planning for an android release really paid off.
• Really not many bugs throughout development. If there were some, I found them fast and it didn’t take long to fix them.

What was baaaaaad:

• This whole game-play thing really sucked. Now, a few days later I really think the game-play itself is great, but it’s the lack of communication to the player that prevents it from shining.
• Too much caffeine. I know, there isn’t sth. like too much caffeine – but – yes there is.
• One of the libgdx extensions I used (freetype) has a bug which led to most of the first visitors of my game not being able to play it. Took a while to figure that out. In the end it wasn’t my fault, but I hated that people who wanted to try my game were unable to do so. (It should all be fixed  now).

Can’t think of anything more right now. Maybe I’ll remember sth. later and add it.

So much for my first Ludum Dare. Thanks for reading this, hope you found at least parts of it interesting.

Now go and play it if you haven’t

Best,

Tim

Link to my LD-Entry Firefly

My game ^

Postmortem thingy:

What i did wrong: >Time, Balance, Progress, Evolution.

What i dd right: > Tweening, Lighting (THANKS FOR IDEAS SOS), particles.

Eh, since you’re still here, Feel free to like : http://www.facebook.com/Cellusious

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2012 at 10:47 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.

As I said, I wasn’t able to participate, but I was making a game anyway. The game appeared to be too complicated for time I had, so I didn’t finish it yet.

The game title is “Groundshaker”. It’s a shooter-like game, but instead of shooting, there is throwing! (Of course, I didn’t know the theme) You throw a stone and it lands where you click. It also considers heigth of objects, so you can throw the stone above the wall if you throw properly.

The ability system is also original. You can have up to 3 abilities at a time and you can use them at the same time. So if you use both “Big stone” and “Vertical throw” abilities, you both deal double damage and throw the stone very high (shown below). But is requires much more energy.

And yes, this game is minimalistic. (Most graphics are placeholder)

McPixel is on Steam Greenlight! Help McPixel get to Steam, he needs your thumbs!


Vote McPixel for President!

Hi everyone,

This was our first Ludum Dare entry and we’re so happy with the community response up till now, we’re already giving it a complete sucess mark! We’re just two students from a Computer Engineering degree – me (Ivo) am majoring in Multimedia and I’m going to do a specialization on games; Sandra is going to major in AI and hopefully build something that conquers the world.

Check out the game if you haven’t at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15074

So enough of the pleasentries let’s go straight to the point:

What worked:

Pixel art – People keep mentioning that our graphics are great but to me it’s just simple art done in GIMP. Since I’m a programmer thats about all I could do, however here’s a few tips to all in the same situation as me:

1. We’re not artists but if we’re not satisfied with it we rework it. Yes its easy to just draw some cat and be done with it but then we can’t be entirely satisfied with our work, can we?

2. Check and recheck if animations feel real, I can’t stress this enough because this is the point of animations: to feel real – and that can only be seen while playing.

3. If you’re like me, and you’re no artist, then look at images of what you want to draw,  I did that with the tryceratops and I think it looks awesome.

Triggered events – We aren’t here to make extensive compeling story-based games but we can do a couple of interesting things with 2D triggers. If our character passes a certain X something happens. This was our basic storytelling tool, expecially for the ending.

Music – We didn’t do the music, like it’s stated on the credits it was made by Brioskj (from the album Escape To The City), but since it’s tied to Creative Commons by Atribution it’s not Copyrighted. Creative Commons is becoming majorly spread and I think thats great for indie development. The sounds were also licensed by Creative Commons but we were careful not to use Non-Derivative sounds because we might always need to edit them. For more on Creative Commons go to http://creativecommons.org/.

What didn’t work:

Music – The music worked great except it was far too big, not sure if people compress it or stick to one track, the only thing I know is that my game file is huge and can’t be submited to Kongregate u.u.

Pacing – We really wanted to stress out that the Cat moved at different speeds and that Baby Cat was more energetic than Old Fat Cat but, you’re all right, we did overdo it. We ourselves felt it was tedious and frustrating, and despite that being the feeling we wanted to convey – that old age makes us unable to do the things like we did before – it’s still a game so next time more speed (just a bit).

Level Design – This one came as a total wake up call to us, I study game design and production in my free time but I never did level design maybe I should start. And if we had decent level design in the final level players wouldn’t be so frustrated to play with Old Fat Cat because then there’d be something else to focus on.

Well that’s it people, hope our insights help some of you, and we’ll keep on participating on this awesome competition.

And to all who said nice things about our game — Thank you!

“Pre” because the game isn’t actually finished yet…

This was only the second LD I’ve made an attempt at, and as such I think I did fairly well even though I couldn’t produce a submission in time. I still really like my idea, and fully intend to finish it.

I suppose the biggest lesson learned is that I really should know my programming system BEFORE the timer starts ticking, instead of assuming I’ll pick it up fast enough as I go along. That’s a good lesson. Hope I remember it.

One excellent decision I made was to keep my basic idea small and relatively simple, something that actually had a hope of getting itself completed in the allotted time. That’s well worth remembering. Another thing worth remembering is to come up with a halfway decent idea as quickly as possible, and then stick with it, instead of wasting time waiting for a lightning bolt of supreme inspiration. (I need to apply that to my writing.)

I also learned quite a lot about AGS programming, so that was good too. The really biggest A-number-one thing I learned here was related to the reason I ran out of time. I was stuck — absolutely dead stuck — for a day and a half because of a programming error. It turned out to be a mistake so stupidly basic that I’m too embarrassed to say precisely what it was. Eventually some nice folks at the AGS technical forum pointed it out. (Thanks, guys!) But by then it was too late to put the rest of the game together in time. So that’s definitely one mistake I’ll never make again.

Thanks to all the great people here who posted such entertaining updates — and especially to the OVER 1400 PEOPLE (!!!) who managed to put together a whole working game and submit it in time! I doff my hat in humble awe.

Looking forward to trying my hand at the next Mini!

Pre-LD Warm Up

Going into LD #24, I knew that I wanted to create a faster-paced, more “arcady” game, since my previous two entries were a turn-based strategy game and a moody story-based game.  Two weeks before the competition, I decided to do a warm-up based on a theme that NEVER wins the LD voting…Evolution.  So…yeah.

One valuable thing I learned, after a few dead-end ideas, is that while I *love* simulations and that I’m really interested in simulating biology and evolution…it was hard to find the game in literal evolutionary processes because it’s supposed to be rather…automatic and non-interactive.  I couldn’t come up with something that was simultaneously enough of a “game” but also felt like “legitimate” evolution.  Just making a _________ and tacking on an Upgrade system is pretty ridiculous.  If that’s the kind of thing that’s acceptable, then 90% of the games on the market are about “evolution”.

Ultimately I decided that the right thing to do would be to start from a strong gameplay concept and use evolution as a pure story/visual theme, rather than a mechanic.  So for my warm-up I ended up doing an (incomplete) implementation of a Tower Defense game in the style of The Space Game or Creeper World, where you are building a linked network of structures.  You would represent a multi-cellular creature that was developing specialized cell/tissues/organs.

I still think the Tower Defense evolution game would have been great, but I didn’t take that route for the actual Ludum Dare because:

a) I’d already done a partial implementation and I always want to try different things.

b) I assumed that Tower Defense games would be very common submissions. Turns out they have not been, and now I’m wondering if I should have gone for the TD idea because I think it would have proven very fun and popular.

PINBOLOGY: An Overview

In addition to a more fast-paced, arcady game, I was also hoping to do something that had a very “physical” tone (this would give me a chance to really explore the physics engine in Unity 3d, something I have not done before). I decided to go very literal with the physicality and arcadiness and called up my love for classic pinball machines for my submission.

PINBOLOGY attempts to faithfully mimic the components, mechanics, and physics of old electro-mechanical pinball machines while incorporating zones, combos, and special actions themed around evolution. Fun gameplay would be top priority, along with a sense of real physicality.  I wouldn’t have the opportunity to measure the actual physical response of different surfaces of a pinball table in 48 hours (different rubbers, plastics, wood, metals, glass, etc…), nor develop really good shaders, but I would do my best to create something that could possibly exist in the real world.

Five Things That Went Well

1. Livestreaming: There is no better motivation to continue to work well past the point of tiredness/boredom/craziness than having up to 500 people watch you program. It does prove as a bit of a distraction at time, especially since I tried to narrate as much as possible and talk about why I was doing certain things and how I was doing them, but I still wouldn’t trade it for anything.
2. Building Scenes in Unity 3d: I’m a programmer first and foremost, and I get turned on by things like randomly generated procedural content. That sort of thing is not appropriate for a pinball game, so instead I played to Unity’s strength: hand-placing objects.  Since pinball tends to be extremely fussy about exactly where objects are, there was a CONSTANT need to tweak object placement, especially as new components were added in and the overall shape of the tabletop evolved.
3. Building Objects in Blender: This was my first time doing a 3d game with anything more than basic primitives, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to figure out how to get everything working, but everything went really well!  I feel that I pulled off some nice 1950’s components (bumpers, kickers, flippers) and somehow managed to make a complete mesh level that works well in the physics engine.  I would have liked rounder curves and there’s one messed up set of vertices on the right-hand side that causes the texture/lighting to look a little wonky in that spot, but altogether I’m counting this as a win. That being said, while most of the objects were also quick to put together, the level geometry ate a LOT of time.
4. Making What I Knew: As with writing a novel, programming a game that you already understand is a huge boon.  I know what components make up pinball tables, I understand how objectives should flow together, and from start to finish I knew what how each feature would need to behave. I didn’t have to stop halfway through and re-evaluate my core gameplay mechanics. That being said…
5. Learning Something New: I see LD as an excuse to try learn at least one new thing. You don’t want to overreach here, but this was my first time using Blender to create objects that I would then use in a game. This was my first time really using UV mapping and mesh collisions. This was also the most I’ve done with the Unity physics engine.  This is significant, practical knowledge that I can draw on for the future.

Five Things That Went Badly

1. Overspecialized Code: I failed to properly general the code for my components, so as a result I ended up writing very similar code many times.  I should have planned things out a bit better so that I could have reused more of my scripts. Not only did this make debugging a pain, and reduce my ability to improve my scripts, it also substantially cut into my available time, which led to problem #2.
2. My Schedule: I’ve always used the same schedule for LD’s, and it’s gone perfect in the past: Friday night is for coming up with the basic concept and doing a rough implementation to make sure it makes sense, with the idea that I can always restart Saturday morning if something proves unworkable.  Saturday is when all major features get developed. Sunday is for polish, like replacing the placeholder art, adding sounds, main menu, GUI, etc… This time, I was still working on major features on Sunday — I was even added the rotating disc 45 minutes before the deadline! I had to do quite a bit of tweaking and tuning to the level mesh, and I had to rebuild the ramp three times to get the look, physics, and just general size and angle where I wanted it.  This lead to problems #3 and #4.
3. Artwork: My art is always going to suck, and I’m not going to freak out about that too much, but there are several things that I wanted to do and could have done which would have *dramatically* improved the game, but I ran out of time.  A slightly better main menu, to establish the theme right away, would have been one thing. By far the biggest thing, though, would have been decals on the table surface to label various features. Real-world pinball machines have this for everything. “10,000 points”.  “Ball Lock when Lit”. That sort of thing.  Makes a huge difference for gameplay, but also theme. Decals would NOT have taken very long to do. Maybe an hour, tops. But time was that tight.
4. Game Balance: This pinball machine is HARD. Many old-school machines are also this difficult (since they were designed to eat quarters), but this isn’t terribly appropriate for the competition.  The Extra Life bar is set a little too high (partially because for a while there was a bug that gave away excessive bonus points).  The DNA targets and Ball Lock area are rather hard to hit, partially due to the width of the table (because I wanted something “organic” looking and also to accomodate wide-screen monitors), and partially due to a last-minute change to the maximum angle of the flippers.  The biggest problem with this isn’t that you run out of lives too quickly (you don’t have to feed it quarters to play again), but rather because it’s very difficult to execute the combos…and that’s where almost all of the theme lives.
5. Theme Execution: Between the artwork deficiencies and the fact that a casual player may never unlock the “Survival of the Fittest” multi-ball, the Evolution theme is not obvious.  To me, this is my largest failure because I’m actually extremely proud of all the “real” evolution references that exist in the game: Extinction events, geographical isolation, genes, etc…  When you trigger a multi-ball, the color of the balls diverges from the parent — and the last one standing becomes your new species (i.e. its color is locked in as your ball color, at least until the next multi-ball). I think these things are GREAT…but they’ll only be seen by people who really know their way around a pinball table. You have to know how to trap balls, how to abuse various cycles, and how to tilt the table at just the right time.  Otherwise?  You just get a green pinball table and no real hint that the theme exists.

Going Forward

After LD, I always dream of developing my game further and turning it into a real, finished project. I don’t know if I actually have the time to do that, between my day job, my existing projects, my YouTube videos, and family time.  But I would like to very much:

• Re-write the scripts that manage the component behaviours to be more generalized, so that components act more consistently and to make it easier to add more.
• Re-write the “toast” (notifications/achievements) system.
• Re-make the level mesh to be more polished, but also narrower (and therefore play a little easier).
• Add very nice shader effects.
• Add considerably more models.
• Add more tables with different themes.
• Add an in-game level editor and the ability to share and rate designs.
• Make a trillion dollars.

We’ll see how that goes.

In any case, I can’t wait for LD25!

In the interest of less typing, first, read my post from last ludum dare on this topic, as it covers 90% of what I want to say right now.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/27/how-to-ensure-more-people-can-sucessfully-run-rate-your-game/

Basicly though, the short of it is, if your game REQUIRES a setup procedure, or requires me to go out and install some other libraries or runtimes on my system itself before I can play, I will (most other people will too) click the “back” button and move on to the next game in the list of 1400.  This goes for you too love2d people! (ESPECIALLY love2d people!) Even if i did manage to figure out how to get the mess of severely outdated libraries love uses on my system without destroying my entire OS I would still have to deal with the fact that love versions don’t work with games made in other versions, so no matter which one I install it would only work for half the games!  Pack the interpreter for love, it’s a TINY set of executables and libraries, i showed a few people how to do this last LD and it seemed to be a huge success, a lot of people were able to play the game that otherwise wouldn’t have.

To add on to this as well:

* No I will NOT install a different web browser, if your game has issues in firefox I talk about the issues in firefox and rate it based on that, sure chrome may be a better experience in your game but I don’t use chrome.  If it has MAJOR issues under firefox i just leave a note saying it doesn’t run on firefox and move on. I’ve seen a lot of instances of people pointing out bugs/lag issues that break the game and the response basicly being “oh…just test it on chrome”

* No, I will not upgrade my system core (libc, libstdc++,etc…) just because you compiled with the latest git version of gcc and don’t want to take 10 seconds to copy those shared object files into the tarball.  “just upgrade gcc/libc!” as a fix to get your game working, leaving me with a month worth of tracking down every package that breaks and bug testing all my code against a new gcc version is not going to cut it.

* No, I will not install sun java 7.  Seriously, unless you have some sort of HUGE PRESSING REASON to be compiling for sun java 7, set your compile target for java 6, now magially those 90% of users complaining in your games page about “crashes on start” or “wouldn’t run” can run the game just fine!  Also stop using the non-standard java extensions for different sound types included in sun and microsoft’s jre’s only, it breaks your game under the default vm’s on android, linux, and basicly any system using anything but those two vm’s

A few extra tips to add on to the ones in the linked post:

* Linux Games:  on top of what i already posted last LD (READ THAT POST!!!)  another common mistake i’m noticing is distributing the linux games in zip files.  Remember, zip does not preserve permissions! This means that your executable files will not be executable after download, and you simply have to hope that the user knows how to re-flag the file executable. (you’d be surprised! linux is far more mainstream now, the majority of users do NOT know why that file “just wont run”…even in something here like LD) . The preferred distribution format is .tar.gz , i don’t know offhand the gui programs for linux that can create them but even from a shell it’s as simple as

tar -pczf filename.tar.gz /folder/path

* Naming your links:  Please stop simply calling everything “web” it makes filtering for platforms next to impossible, and LD’s search function next to useless.  At least make them say, “web(html5)” or “web(unity)” so that when i’m  browsing html5 games on my android or such every other “web” link isn’t silverlight or unity telling me “lol…i trolld you, i don’t have a web plugin that works on your device!”.  There’s also quite a few games that named their links “windows” “mac” “linux” and all three of them point to a windows executable, sometimes with a blurb that it “hopefully” works under WINE.

* Don’t put things like “sorry linux users”  “sorry mac users” “maybe next time i’ll do html5” or things like that in your description text, it makes your game come up when filtering for those platforms and makes the ludum dare search feature entirely useless.

* Make sure your zip/tarball has a well named folder your entire game is contained under in it, do not have all your files simply sitting on the top level.  there’s 1400 games to test, most games do this properly but a few still do not, if you dont contain your stuff in a folder it will happily unzip all your files all over other peopel’s test directories, generally containing other games we’re testing or want to keep around to try farther/review, and now instead of just having a folder to remove i get to hunt and peck files, sometimes hundreds of them, from the main directory trying not to delete the ones i meant to keep…

Tags: ld24, ld48, protip

Play De-evolution.

This was my second try at Ludum Dare, and in the end it was very similar to my first attempt, Tin World — it’s a side-view shooter where you walk right and shoot enemies. But it wasn’t supposed to be like that. I spent half a day thinking about a game that would use the theme nicely but at the same time be simple enough for me to make and tweak in the limited time. Nothing. Then I started sketching things to find inspiration. Somehow only guys with guns as simplified monsters were drawn. I posted my drawings here, and somebody suggested a gun that would evolve or de-evolve things, similar to the Portal gun. Then I decided to go with similar mechanics to the last time, only more advanced.

The good:

Graphics. Basically, I used the same technique as the last time, but with some more time spent on the details and more character to the main character. I’m rather happy with the effect — the black-and white, sketchy pictures, with a white outline, animated by moving them around — no frame-based animation. It was inspired by the minipato anime, by the way. A lot of people seem to praise that in the comments, so I will certainly stick to it in the future.

Scrolling. That’s something that I planned for my previous game, but didn’t have time to do. No I planned to have scrolling from the beginning, and it’s there. There are some tricks to keep it very efficient even with limited PyGame options, but I think it works quite fine.

Level. This time I decided that I can’t just randomly throw things at the players — they need to have a level that is designed, so that they can actually finish the game. I really like the feeling I get from finishing games, so I wanted to have it here.

Release. Last time I did some experimenting and managed to package the whole game in a single exe file for windows, and an executable zip file for all the sane platforms. I used the same approach this time, and it worked without any problems — preparing the release took me 10 minutes, including booting an old windows laptop for it.

The bad:

Controls. In my previous game, people complained that the controls worked sometimes, and sometimes they didn’t. After some investigation it turned out that people didn’t realize that they couldn’t move after shooting, while the weapon was being reloaded. I introduced that, because I wanted them to think a little before shooting, to make sure they will have the few milliseconds to reload safely, before pulling the trigger. It didn’t work, turns out players just want to move all the time and don’t want to plan their trigger pulling. Fine.

This time I really made sure that you can move around freely from the beginning. I even added some nice inertia effects to make all the movement super-smooth, and I made it possible to move around quite fast. That was a mistake — people complain about the inertia making it harder to control the character. A second mistake I made — despite the experience from the previous Ludum Dare — the energy gun didn’t feel powerful enough, so I made the player character stop while shooting it. Soon enough I saw my mistake — the very first comment complains about “lackluster” controls.

I think I have learned my lesson: never stop the players from moving their characters.

Difficulty. My decision to have a designed level backfired at me. Or maybe it was just that I underestimated how much work it would be to make it. Anyways, the level is much shorter than I wanted, and because of a last-minute change to the last wave of enemies, the game is insanely hard — almost unbeatable. You seem the last monsters were initially very weak (but lots of them), but then I decided to add some variety, and since it’s at the end, and I didn’t have a debug mode, that part wasn’t tested as often as the others…

Code. In my last game, I used some clever tricks to make all the animations and effects easy to code (I used python’s iterator generators for effects). This time I went with a haphazard approach, just doing random stuff that seemed straightforward. The code is a mess and much more elaborate than I would like, as a result. I will stick to the generators in the future, they work really well for this.

In summary, I’m really happy that I finished a game, but a little disappointed that it turned out to be very similar to the last one. I hope to really get a better idea next time. I will definitely stick to this graphics style and iterator generators, but I will make sure you can always move.

First off, thank you everyone for your reviews on my first LD entry “Entourage.” I was meaning to participate for a while and I am now glad that I took the time to enter. It is ironic that I entered at the same time the theme “evolution” finally got its light of day after many years of voting. Lucky me heh! Keeping an open mind during the theme voting, I was pondering on the gaming ideas for each and every popular theme. When “evolution” was announced, I figured I could develop a game with parasites that have their own set of instructions that they could follow after certain things happen. Glad I had finished it, so now I would like to share how my development went!

Things went right…

Objective — My primary goal was to take control on parasites and give them commands to eliminate the bad ones when certain conditions were met. When that happens, it will execute a command with or without the selected target. Overall, I believe my objective was presented clearly, but there are still some clarifications needed to be presented. Although, more could have been added to improve the idea of “Entourage” to give it more depth.

Stability — I did put a good amount of effort for bug checking. The logic for looking through instructions were complicated, but, after taking little steps of a time, I was able to pinpoint the cause and found a work-around. As of now, the commands were executing correctly, there are no problems adding new instructions.

Structure — The parasite’s instructions seems to be running as it should; although, not 100%. More needs to be done to allow certain conditions to be executed properly without cancelling other executed instructions and so on.

Focus — Considering how complex the game was, I only focused on getting the game play finished while keeping graphics and audio at the very least priority. Regards, I wanted to get the user interface prepared so everyone could play the game easily; even if the graphics were a bit plain.

Things went wrong…

Execution — Sort of a hit and miss depending on how you play the game. For me, I take one parasite and add instructions for attacking the bad, and then program the other parasites to follow that parasite. Tedious? Yep. Of course, I was keeping it simple and keeping my focus on finishing the main objective.

Preparation — Unlike other game programming tools, BlitzMax leaves you with nothing other than a few modules. So in order to make information windows and buttons, I had to program them by scratch. It wasn’t hard to do, but it did take some time to get them working properly. Another thing too is using some new things such as using the mouse to zoom in or out and move the field around. It was supposed to be simple, but the math has gotten to fuzzy. After several hours of trail-and-errors and drafting, those procedures seem to work basically well. I could had worked on a few small BlitzMax products before participating Ludum Dare, but I was feeling the need to challenge myself!

Using BlitzMax — I would say that I’m experienced enough to use BlitzMax at the fullest. However, because it had been while since I last used BlitzMax, there were some problems that appeared during development that I had forgotten. One example was to add images with transparency. While I know in general how to add pictures with transparency, “Entourage” doesn’t want to keep the transparency. After trying a few methods, I was already taking too much time doing that. Therefore, I’ve left the background black and added the pictures with black backgrounds.

Performance — It is not a major factor in this case since the game was made on a small scale. I did adjust the number of good and bad parasites to 200 each — making a total of 400 parasites — too see how the game takes it. Yeah, it was pretty slow; so that was why I maxed each parasite to 100 each. I sort of expected that since it was looping through every existing parasite 5 times. I could have definitely find a more efficient way of updating each parasite, but due to limit time obviously, I just let that be.

Too many ideas — Each parasite has its own HP and EXP, but they weren’t used to their full potential. EXP was supposed to make a parasite better at many things, but I didn’t give it much time to work on. At least HP was working as it should, with an advantage to recover after certain hours were passed. Definitely a lot of ideas were cut at the last few hours, but my main purpose was to present the game’s idea. So many ideas at a very little time, making the game watered down to the very last bit.

What’s next for me?

“Entourage” seems to have potential according to you players. Although, I do have another game that I wanted to get through first before I move on. I’ll just say that I’m returning back to my original ways of developing new games and actually enjoy it for once. Meanwhile, I’ll keep “Entourage” stored away and come back when I feel the will to fully construct it.

If you like to see my other games that I’ve made in full, check out… http://www.acoders.com .

Philosoraptor

Evolution for me was the worst choice of all possible themes. The problem was that I thought of evolution as a linear progressing system with no real conflict. But what drives evolution is always competition between parts of system. The reason for evolution isn’t adaptation. Adaptation it is the outcome of the process. The evolving creatures are not aware of the fact, that they are adapting themselves to be fitter in the competition. I thought that it would be interesting to turn this concept upsidedown: so I created advance wars with dinosaurs.

Dinos and Eggs

The game is a turn based strategy/tactical game where the goal is to eliminate all opponents. You move the dino around on a tiled and grid fixed map. When you a dinosaur breaks an egg, it evolves.

Jurassic Crunch

Ludum Dare is always exciting but this time I went deep down the rabbit hole. Even though the produced code is not in any way ‘good’, the whole time I felt in control of what I am doing. Normally when the crunch at the end of day 2 sets in my code quality suffers and due to concentration problems it takes a lot more time to debug stuff. Not this time. Because the idea was quite simple I had enough time for some debugging in the end. That made the game a lot better(=less embarrassing bugs) than my previous entries.

Pixel Rex

Pixelart and retro snes music are always fun to make but I hope to try out other art styles(maybe a bit more ‘serious’ and less cute) in a future LD. However, I had no big problems making them. My trusted set of tools – Pixen for art and FLStudio+Supercollider for music, did not let me down. As a more code oriented guy in real life it is always great to dive in this side of the gamedev process

Conclusion and Future

I am still working on this game and a bugfixed version with added mouse(!) controls is available here. I tried(and still try) to improve everything that was criticized by you guys. I am also planning some boss fight, different levels and more stuff for the future to make this a more complete game.

I hope the fun I had developing translates at least a bit into the experience of playing. Let me know what you think. Have fun testing this little game!

After some waiting, some LD game rating and some more rating, my timelapse is finally rendered and uploaded. GLapse destroyed the quality on the last part of it, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. Anyway, the timelapse is below and my game is here.

Tags: ld24, timelapse

Here’s my gameplay video and postmortem for “EvoWord”. I had a great time, and I think this entry, though not without it’s share of problems, turned out really well. I’m definitely getting better at making complete, if not yet very polished, entries.

Unfortunately youtube squashed the video so it’s a little stretched, apologies.

Evoword Gameplay Video

What Went Right

• Time Management – Yep, I can finally put this one in the “went right” column. I certainly didn’t have enough time, but for once I feel like I budgeted it well and if I had spent more time in any one area others would have been even worse.
• Waiting for a good idea – I had some ideas initially but I wasn’t sure about them, but I thought it through and waited until I had an idea that felt both realistic and fun. I’m really glad I didn’t just go with my first idea, in retrospect they seem pretty ridiculous.
• Making a game that I want to play – I really like word games, even capturing the gameplay video above there are long stretches where I got absorbed in the gameplay. Thankfully I’ve edited most of those out.
• Gameplay first – I had the basic game working with just floating letters and no graphics at all before I started on anything graphical. That’s always been difficult for me to do, but this time I stuck to it and I think it paid off.

What went wrong:

• Overcomplicating the creature evolution algorithm. My initial algorithm seemed simple enough on paper, but as I got to coding it it kept revealing itself as too complicated. The final creatures don’t have nearly enough variety (only size and color scheme, really) . I think I could have gotten further if I started with the simplest thing that could possibly work, and then building on that.
• Testing and Release Builds – I waited until the last hour to try a release build, and it crashed. Because of this I was unable to include the cool floating bubbles. There are also a handful of small bugs that I could have fixed if I had stopped and took breaks for testing every so often. I’ve made this mistake a few times, maybe this time it will sink in.
• Overcomplicated the graphics – I had big plans for the graphics, including blender sculpt mode and normal maps and a shader that wasn’t terrible. I wasted a bit of time on those things, but not too bad, I fell back on the simple creature soon enough. However, those few hours of experimentation would have been better put to gameplay.
• Clarity – It’s obvious to me how to play because I wrote it, but it’s not at all obvious to a player, especially with no tutorial or instructions. In the future, making sure the user is aware of what they can do at every step is going to be my top priority. Even so, this was more discoverable than a lot of my previous entries so I’m getting better at this.
• glBindFramebufferEXT() – I spent over an hour trying to debug my thumbnail rendering code, thinking it was something complicated wrong, when really I just forgot to bind the framebuffers again after the first draw. Always go back and recheck the simple stuff, verify your assumptions and make sure your code is actually doing what you think.

Anyways this was a lot of fun, and I hope I’ll get a chance to go back and add more depth to the creature evolution code and tune the gameplay a bit to somehow eliminate the long stretches of waiting for the right letters. This was a lot of fun, as always!

Jovoc