Keeping with the ludum dare tradition, time to do a little analysis on what went right and wrong during my development this time!  Before I get started with that though, for one I’d like to apologize, normally i do this at the same time as my “100 games rated” review and best of list but unfortunately so far my review list, though not quite at 100, to be perfectly honest i just dont have that many games that really stand out yet, not enough to make a real list, so expect that some time in the next week or so as i revew more!  Secondly, my timelapse is now up, accompanied by a nice track of classical music as always, so please enjoy this.

Get on with it!

Right! postmortem! The point of this post, for starts, here’s the link to the competition page itself

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

What went right:

• The theme: frankly i was dreading another dreary, artys/emo theme like “abandoned” winning again, those kinds of themes are simply NO FUN for us programmers and it’s horifficly hard to get a decent gameplay idea that’s not just bolting the theme onto the story/background. (I generally rate 1 on theme when people do that myself, as just tacking it on isn’t really “meeting” the theme)
• My engine: my game engine worked BEAUTIFULLY, a few minor fixes were needed after release but having a fully cross-platform engine set up and ready did wonders, so even though my idea made me write a full entity system and isometric renderer from scratch having windowing/input/state management/texture and memory management already taken care of made the task a lot easier
• My tools: the newest version of my sprite editor (available under the “tools” link at the right) worked like a charm, it made animating the modular sprites a breeze even for a crappy artist like me, this time around a lot of people have even said they LIKED my art style!
• Time: for the first time, I was actually able to be HOME on both days of ludum dare! So this was the first competition i technically actually had 48 hours to work in

What went wrong?

• Timing: This ludum dare took place on the first weekend college is in, in the middle of one of the hottest weekends of the year in southern california so of course we had rolling blackouts all day saturday, my UPS tried it’s best to keep my desktop running but i ended up with a few hours of downtime midday, losing a good 4-5 hours of development, I ended up having to cut features due to this
• Mouse control:  The game was meant to be controlled entirely by mouse using pathfinding, unfortunately due to being down most of the day saturday i ended up having to cut pathfinding or I wouldn’t have had time to make actual levels and art to play.  This made getting around corners somewhat tricky though thankfully still do-able (wasd also works as analternate, it was debug code though and not the way the game was meant to be controlled so it’s a little jumpy)
• No way to restart: Another feature i had to cut due to time was resetting the player after he dies to restart (the levels already reset, only the player needed to reset) so i was forced to put just a simple game over screen when you die
• Lame ending: Another cut feature, I was going to make a better image to show when you get to the end and to thank you for playing but again, due to playing catchup for saturday a lot of art had to be cut, so all you get now is a blurb of text for the temporary ending
• not all evolutions have artwork:  my game actually tracks a LOT of statistics when you’re evoloving, over 2000 combinations are actually possible but only a tiny portion make visible changes due to my inexperience in isometric art that’s not geometric in nature and lack of time. There is no distinct skin/leg/ear/or fang graphics for the other features that evolve, only general body type, head type, and back type are actually shown
• needed a statistics readout window:  I really needed a window to show your current statistics, the “overall” statistics modified by your current evolution status are  attack/defense/speed/flight/poison/and vision, a lot of people had trouble in the caves because they did not kill enemies outside first that would buff their defense before starting to fight the much tougher bats and spiders inside

And to close out, here’s a short gameplay video of how it all turned out!

Tags: C++, compo, ld24, linux, post-mortem, postmortem, SDL, timelapse

Dawn of Dimension is a collaborative platformer. It was released for the compo as an empty and infinite realm of x and y. 10 days later, quite a few of you have left your mark.

I wrote a tool to visualize the entire map, with 1 pixel being 1 tile. It’s nice to see the amount of edits going on, and I’m hoping to see a lot more.

[stextbox id=”warning” caption=”CRITICS ARE CALLING IT:” mode=”css” direction=”ltr” shadow=”true”]”not much to enjoy”
“quite impressive :D”
“I wish there was more of a goal ”
“really creepy”
“PUT SOME CLOTHES ON!”[/stextbox]

</comicsans>

It is said that developers spend so much time testing their games that they become an expert playing it. Because of this I was able to secure the top spot on the leaderboards easily and held the title ever since.

I thought that no one else can dethrone me, it seems like I am wrong. 😀

I congratulated the guy for beating me fair and square. The 150 mark is one of the hardest difficulty, let’s see if more people can survive past it.

Try out and rate the original game here.
Try the post-compo version here.

Just a quick note to say that SineRider has just released a chiptune album that includes the music for my LD24 game Ninjural Selection!

You can get it here: Bleepy Bloopy EP – Ninjural Selection

Enjoy!

Hey guys,

So I just noticed this

It links to an own sub-section of LD-games on Kongregate, which is currently arranged by “highest rating”. This might explain how my play-numbers doubled in one day

It is also interesting because these rankings will most likely determine who will win the Kong-Contest. It’s a bit sad though that most of the traffic will be funneled through the top-entries.

(Note: I just wanted to share this. I present this neutrally without opinion on the validity/integrity of the “controversial” contest)

-Matthew

Tags: contest, Kongregate

I’ve just finished post-compo development of my latest mini-ld entry Ghostly Me (former Eruption) and the game will soon be available for play. It will be completely free I think.

Here’s a trailer

Hi guys, I have this bug I want to fix for the submitted version but i’m unsure if I should proceed or not.

Basically, the problem is that when the player dies and restarts a level, the difficulty of the game does not reset. It remains at a difficulty where they last died (the levels get difficult overtime). Although unintentional, this punishes the people playing the game multiple times. Newbies who couldn’t handle the difficult part get stuck with it which greatly frustrates them.

PoV’s post about the rules on bugfixes state that only crashes and typo bugs are allowed to be fixed. I just want to be sure if this bugfix is allowed and won’t get me disqualified.

You can tryout the submitted game here.

Thanks a lot, guys!

Play HERE!

Were taking this game all the way so stay tuned for the a fully fleshed out game sometime in the future!But for now here’s a quick update to the game to add some of the new features below.

Post Compo Version:
-2 player mode
-Xbox 360 controller support
-Sound!
-Enemy Flashing
-Harder Difficulty

360 Controls:
-Stick 1 Move
-Stick 2 Aim
-RT Shoot
-LT Melee

I haven’t yet decided whether I will continue working on my game, Primeval Laboratories, at some point in the future (October Challenge?). The feedback seems to be quite positive so far, but I’m not sure where to go with a low-scope XNA game, other than XBox Live Indie, a market I have been singularly unimpressed with.

Anyway, I though I would brainstorm what I might do to complete the game. Any feedback from those who have played would be great!

• Music and sound effects. These should be a critical part of the game, and I learned too late that they take time and skill to produce that I did not have. Free resources from the internet should suffice.
• A character sprite. Should be human but as generic as possible (a la Portal’s Chelle).
• A degree of player evolution so the player isn’t so static. Maybe issuing the player a new type of gun each round. The guns would receive small boosts each round (fire rate upgrades, spread, etc). This should involve some kind of choice on the part of the player.
• More variety in enemies. As much as possible. Prominent things I had to leave out for the compo game were armor plates (bits of the enemies that block shots from certain angles, have their own health), and visual distinctions between the enemies (visual guns and such).
• Add passive stat genes to the Products display panel in addition to weapons. Add an interface for saving enemies through the Products panel.
• Currently the player can only load two bots and fight against their offspring. May also include a feature where the player can load two pairs of bots and have them fight each other and evolve.
• Balance difficulty (restrict how good enemies can be on the first wave a little better)

I wasn’t too bothered by the theme this time.  I didn’t get the paralysis of the last two themes and sort of puzzled out what I wanted to do:

• In a crafty mood, want to do something involving making stuff.  No guns, no shooting this time if possible (last 2 entries were fps).
• Since it is evolution, you could craft to improve yourself.
• I wanted to use the cellshading I had been playing with, maybe I could make it look like the inside of a computer, and you could recompile bits to make yourself better?
• I’ll just take standard dwarf-fort materials and rename them to programmy stuff.

So I took off and finished right at the deadline with zero time for any polish or niceties.  It was a very close thing.  Here’s what went wrong:

BSP Level builders suck.  I’ve used them for the past two entries as well, but between now and then I’ve gotten really fast at max, and if you notice in the timelapse, the stuff I do in max is a blink of an eye compared to the time I spend in Quark.  If I want to use these libs again, I need to figure out a way to compile geometry from max.

A power blink knocked out all my machines and my kukuklok alarm, so I overslept several hours sunday morning.  Also despite being open for days, all the custom stuff I had set up in quark was gone, and quark was completely unusable.  I am guessing some file was autosaving and got corrupted when the power went out.  I had to uninstall and reinstall it.

I lost an hourish to a nasty level leak, totally forgetting that Quark has a really nice leak finder built in.

Rebuilding an entire level just to change some data in the entities is really bad.  I need a way to update just the entities (most of the other bsp engines have this).

My UI system works pretty good, but one thing that consistently costs me time is that I forget what I name the controls.  That means relaunching the tool, jotting the names down in a text file somewhere, then relaunching the game.  Each relaunch causes a full rebuild of the assets due to the messed up way visual studio handles shared content projects.

At some point I realized the names I was using for my crafting stations made no sense.  I had a compiler and a plugin builder.  I decided I’d rename them to compiler and linker, and did it where I thought the names came up.  Then later half asleep I changed one of them to assembler.  After awhile I was completely confused as to what did which, and what the name was.  I don’t even think they are named the same in code as they are in game.

I messed up my libraries and didn’t realize it till about a day in, when it was probably too late to switch.  I think I ended up using the libs from the last ludum dare.  I’ve made a ton of bugfixes and enhancements since then and just had to live without them.

What went well?  It is a much smaller list:

I used EZMuze for music again, this time a peer review early build of the new version coming out.  Got some good comments on it.

The cellshading with solid colors turned out ok, but I did get a comment about eye strain.  It is sort of a way to have lower detail and have the mind fill in the gaps sort of how pixel art works.  In the past I’ve built the geometry up then saved the textures for later, then I never had time to make textures, so my levels were just greyscale.

I’m fairly confident this will be my lowest rated entry yet.  Mainly because of the terribly confusing nature of it, but also because I had no time to normalize the audio and the mining sound is incredibly annoying.

I also had no time to play through the game without just cheating myself a ton of material (and I very nearly left the cheat in), so I didn’t realize how incredibly tedious it is to mine for 20ish minutes for the materials needed to win.  I think Eniko is the only one that had the determination to beat it (thanks Eniko!)

I didn’t have time to test the ending either, but thankfully it just worked.

If I had more time, I wanted to eventually have enemies that dropped materials and recipes.  There are actually 30-something recipes in the game, but most of what you can make isn’t useful.

I was thinking I’d have a boss as a sort of mmo style gear check, but instead of gear you’d need to have evolved yourself to the toughness and strength required to win.

Guess I’m a bit late to write a Post Mortem, but why not?

LD 24 was my first LD and even the first game jam I ever participated in – so I probably did tons of rookie-mistakes. Also went for the 72 hours right away because a) I didn’t have much time on saturday and b) I can’t compose music (ended up getting something from the NG audio portal).  When I saw the “Evolution” theme, I was kind of shocked – no idea whatsoever. So I decided to just jump right in and let my game evolve as I code it. I basically started off with the demo-swf of a simple trail-effect I created the day before – I figured I would just do a little, real simple avoider-game (where you upgrade over time) with it. I hated the idea of something that unoriginal, but I didn’t have a better one, so..

I would describe my entry viviDNA as “avoider-game meets snake”. You’re this white square with a rainbow-DNA-trail and have to hit the borders of the game screen whenever one changes color to level up (gain speed and DNA). There are enemies around you, that evolve, as well. You can either play offensely or defensely – if you attack enemies by bumping into them, you lose DNA, which is risky, to keep their numbers low. You can also focus on avoiding and use your trail to deflect enemies and “create a little base” to shield yourself from enemies. You have to survive as long as you can and level up as fast as possible in order to rack up a highscore.

What went right:

• Tons of accidental “discoveries” that lead to cool gameplay mechanics. Examples: I replaced the trail image of the demo-swf above with a rainbow-colored, 1 pixel high image. Due to the rotation, it looked like a DNA string!  Another thing: When there were no enemies and you could only steer your character, bumping into walls seemd kinda fun. So that’s actually a gameplay-mechanic now!
• Communicating and getting feedback early. I was in the #flixel IRC channel the whole time, and it really helped, not only when it comse to fixing little issues like weird bugs, but also improving the game. Near the end, someone who played the game said that “The trail is boring, it doesn’t do anything”. That is the sole reason why enemies are deflected by the trail now, which is in my opinion a core-feature of the game. It’s what makes the game unique and differentiates it from other avoider-games, makes it unqiue.
• Choosing a simple, easy-to-code game type. I’m not the most experienced programmer and doing something huge in only 72 hours is beyond my abilites. I focused on gameplay rather than an enormous amount of content, and it seems like it sorta worked out. At least I was able to finish the game.
• Choosing to use the most simple graphics possible (pretty much different-colored cubes only, there are only 3 .png files used in the game. The rest is drawn with flixels makeGraphic-command) and using the rigth tools (FlashDevelop + flixel)
• Getting sound effects from freesounds.org / Bfxr and music from NG.
• The title screen. Like how it turned out.

What went wrong:

• Not having enough time on Saturday.
• Throwing good programming practives over board. I basically coded as fast as possible in the beginning and totally regretted it in the end. If I had written cleaner code from the start, it would probably have taken me less time in the end, simply because it caused so much stupid bugs and confusion in general.
• Not getting enough sleep. Yeah, I’m not very productive when tired.
• Probably overusing the trail effect – I imagine the game lags pretty badly on older machines because of that.
• Not working with an artist – I was going for the jam anyway, so that could’ve improved the visual quality of the game a lot. Plus, not working alone makes things a lot more fun.
• The theme – My game doesn’t fit it perfectly if you ask me (very few games do, but still). There’s something that sorta looks like DNA, and you and the enemies “evolve” / level up, but that’s pretty much about it already.
• Not having a real idea of what the finished game should look like from the start – I know this is something I wrote in “What went right” as well, but it has pros and cons. While it worked out this time, it surely won’t always, I just “got lucky” I guess. Doing at least a bit more planning won’t hurt for the next game jam.

So yeah, LD was a rather fun experience overall, though exhausting. Apparently, (according to comments here on LD) some people even think my game is fun to play, which is just awesome. I’m looking forward to participate again in the future!

I decided to focus on making the post-compo version of my game more visually appealing. To achieve this, I decided to give my interfaces a… ehem … face-lift. Here are some before and after shots for your viewing pleasure.

Main Menu Interface

The screen on the lower-left shows the player the playing field. It gives them an idea of what to expect when they click the start button and it helps in making the menu less dull.

In-Game HUD

I still kept the visor concept and overhauled it a bit to make it look more futuristic. The icons on the bottom represent the number of “repair bullets” you have left.

I still haven’t uploaded the new build yet as I am still working on the other menus. Sorry about that, I was so happy with how the interface turned out that I couldn’t wait to share it. Haha.

While waiting, you can try out and rate the original game here. If you would like to check out the latest compo version, go here. 

It’s on my blog here: https://jacobwgames.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/game-time-evolution-postmortem/

tl;dr version:

Some things went right, some things could have been better, and I ran out of time to add some new features. But I had fun.

Play it HERE!

ZEIK

Zeik here, the code half of Cake&Code. This being our second Ludum Dare I had a vague idea of the kind of stuff we’d run into and knew that time was going to be unforgiving yet again. This time we did not do a warm-up game but I was messing around in flash days in advance to get back into fighting spirit!

What went right:
– I knew I was going to use Flash and had FlashDevelop all ready to go with a vanilla copy of FlashPunk at hand
– This time around I downloaded Chronolapse and it worked flawlessly to document the days
– We knew that we wanted some more unique music so we had a library of tools available before starting the jam this time
– Despite having work on Monday, we managed to finish at around 5:30am that morning
– Within the first hour or two we had a vision for a game, that vision became AvRvE
– Creating the isometric engine was not as difficult as it might have been, everything seemed to fall into place as I wrote it and extending it was easy enough

What went wrong:
– Though we learned last time that sounds take a lot of time to find/make/integrate we still ran out of time to find well-suited sounds to fill in the gaps in the game
– No tutorial level meant that the levels themselves had to ease players into the gameplay, this turned out to be a bigger challenge than I expected
– The preloader turned out to be a huge problem until I realized that by assigning a value to one of my main class’s static variables from inside the preloader code I was forcing the load of all the assets before the preloader could display, after removing that assignment everything worked flawlessly
– Feature creep, as always, seemed to come from every direction; I built an overly robust level loading system, an interaction halting animation scheme, and was even planning on adding more items

What I learned:
– Sounds still take us forever to do, there have been no revolutionary advances since LD23
– Music is fun to edit, but takes forever just like sound editing does
– A weekend game jam is not the time to implement every feature that comes to mind
– Layering sprites for proper render order is not something to procrastinate on, get it done right and get it done as early as possible

Finally, I just wanted to extend a congratulations to all the participants! We’ve been rating your games and even though we’ve only scratched the surface it’s already been a wild ride, full of great experiences. Pat yourselves on the back, then give each other high-fives! Hope to see you all next LD.

CAKE

Wow, FINALLY Zeik and I have the time to sit down and write our post-mortems. To be honest, it’s been a crazy whirlwind of activity for me since LD#24 wrapped up, so neither of us have had the time to really sit down and work out our thoughts on AvRvE. Well now that I had a little more time to mull about it, I think it’s about time I crunched out these thoughts!

What Went Right?
– I struggled to find the right art direction for this game. The initial mockups for the game looked a lot like Pow! Pow! Pow! until I decided to just go all out dark. It was colorful and had great visual impact, just as I intended it to. 😀
– I’m a designer by nature, not a digital artist. This time around I actually had to sit down and draw all of our species out, as well as our character from different perspectives. For someone who typically doesnt do digital illustrations, I think I did alright.
– Having the multiple endings was fun! And I’m glad we went with a puzzle route this time around.
– I ate a lot better this weekend than I did the first LD we did. Granted, it still wasn’t GOOD, but I went out of my way to actually prepare food more often than not. I snacked a bit much though. 😛

What Went Wrong?
– I had company over for a chunk of the weekend. It really decreased my producitivity and I found myself having to multitask working, communicating with Zeik, and keeping my friend occupied.
– Despite the fact I’m really happy with out the game’s aesthetic and look came out, I feel like it lacked the kind of detailing that Pow! Pow! Pow! had.
– Level designing was something I was already not great at. But designing puzzle levels? Yeesh. :\ Zeik took a hold of it for the most part.
– SCHOOL!!! Ludum Dare happened on the weekend right after school started. Seems like it’d be an easy workload right? NOPE. Grad school is kicking me in the butt and threw a lot of work my way. So I was even more busy that weekend than I wanted to be.

Things I Learned for the next LD:
– FREE UP MY WEEKEND. Make sure I don’t have any work in the way and that I don’t have any unexpected guests. 😛
– Get BETTER food. I ate well this time, but there was a lot more room for healthier and energy-packed snacks. Also…less coffee plz.
– Do more art research and experiment with styles. I don’t want to look like a one-tricky pony, so I’m going to experiment with more in-depth illustration styles.

And of course, congrats to those that finished! 😀

Tags: SuccessStory

I added a quick debug feature to the post-competition version of Ninjural Selection – now you can edit the level as you play!

Hold down the space bar and a cursor will appear – you can drag to draw and erase tiles.

I added this in so I can experiment with level layout quickly, and hopefully figure out what sort of arrangement works best for this gameplay. It will be tricky – as I’ve written about here – but hopefully it will be possible.

Eventually I’d like to get some procedural level generation going!

Oh, and if you haven’t rated the game yet, you can do so here! 😉

> rate me
> post compo

the positive

+ i did it. my first game was made in this Ludum Dare contest. my first game

+ the feedback, the sensation of someone else playing the game, the comments. some people even completed the game!

+ i learn a lot more about Unity. this is the tool.

my recipe for a better JAM

+ sleep/eat WELL.

+ put a limit to the “get the idea” step, you can lose a lot of time in this.

+ try to get the game mechanics in the first day.

+ always reserve 4 hours of your total time for music/sounds!

+ team-up if you can!

i will see you in the Ludum Dare 25!

Tags: Love, post-mortem, sad, sadness, unity, unity3d

Here is my timelapse, more for fun than for real retrospective but, ok !

TIMELAPSE MY PAIRS AND ME

Anyway you can play and rate the game too !

MY PAIRS AND ME

I wanted to create 3D games, so I decided to learn Unity! Expect the next MiniLD entry to be 3D. I didn’t made any 3D games before (I only made not-really-3D ones) and I don’t know C#, Java or Boo (I know C++ thought), so I won’t learn it as quick as I would like, but I’ll try to.

For now, please post something you find useful for me.

Hey there!

So if you have checked out my Ludum Dare game, you’ll know that I failed this Ludum Dare. For some reason I didn’t enjoy it as usual, and wanted to quit. I eventually gave up.

I was sad about not being able to complete a game, but I’m happy for the Evolution theme to finally being used.

Anyway,  a few days after Ludum Dare, something amazing happened.

http://www.indiegamemag.com/indie-intermission-day-2-perpetua/#.UEnu_Y3N81F

My game got reviewed. I kinda freaked out when I saw that. It made the downloads of the game go from 200 to 900. Really, really awesome! It’s also my first review ever!

So because of that I decided to update the game. It took me a few days, but I’m finally done!

What did you add/change?

• I added 2 different endings. With these 2 you are actually able to exit the game.
• Hats! Unlock achievements to receive some cool hats, and play the game with style.
• Credits! Because I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own.
• Easier boss. A lot of people were stuck at this point, so how to defeat the boss is more clear now.
• Easter eggs!

Download

http://danielhaazen.com/download/mirror.php?file=Perpetua.rar

Right now the game has 936 downloads. I can’t wait for the 1000!

If you have already played Perpetua and you liked it, then I’m sure you’ll like this version even more

You guys are a great community! Thank you for that!

I finally got around to writing a mini-postmortem for my Ludum Dare #24 entry. For those of you who like reading these, the link to my blog post is http://blazinggames.blogspot.ca/2012/09/ludum-dare-24-postmortem.html .

Tags: postmortem

Hm… I felt like my performance was stunted to some degree, in part due to stress with the LD weekend having been the last weekend before school started, and in part due to my crippling addiction to British sketch comedy.  As for the game itself, I’ve been more creative, but the programming actually worked out pretty close to the way I wanted it to.  Here’s the link, so you can see what I mean.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8522

I’ve had this idea for a while: to make a video showing how my entry came into being. It’s not a timelapse! (Your eyes won’t bleed.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay5IVWgZuxQ

I’ve gone through my version control and checked-out some important commits and cut those into a video.

If you’d like to share yours: it’d be fun to have a look at it!

Hello everyone, I’ve uploaded a timelapse a bit ago for the development of my game ExoSlime. If you haven’t played it yet, you should! Here’s a preview of what to expect:

Click here to play and rate if you haven’t already!

And here’s the timelapse:

Tags: gif, lua, moonscript, timelapse

Visit here!

Hey everyone! I am glad to announce that the third Hack-a-Jam will be starting today, and I am your host. In a few hours, the theme will be released, and the jam will start!

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 is in a few hours, so sign up and prepare now! Good luck everyone!

Just like the last few times, now that I’ve passed 100 games rated time to pick some favorites that I think could use a bit more <3 !  This time is a little different though, I’m not going to pick “overall” favorites, as to be honest this LD every game so far that i’ve loved in one way has managed to frustrate me in another, so I’m going to categorize some favorites based on what I think is their strong suit!

As always, in no particular order (games that would fall in multiple are only listed in the one i think they’re strongest in)

Best Use of Theme:

• Poggle Island – Rose
• Digital Generation – Dietrich Epp
• Empire of the Petri Dish – quadtree
• Emergent Dungeon – attagcatc

Most Fun:

• Kinetic Dream – mdkess
• Goo – Cipher
• The Erebus and the Terror – sfernald
• Title Goes Here… – eShredder
• This Is Totally About Evolution – GreaseMonkey

Best Graphics:

• Badass – Sos
• Flitter-Flatter – aeveis
• EVILUTION – GothFraex

Best Music:

• DeviLock – Misfit
• Lolicopocalypse – quasist

Some of these still only have a handful of plays, go try them out and give them some feedback!

And as always, I could always use more feedback on my entry as well if you havent played it already !

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

Tags: 100 club, best of, ld24

The post-compo version with the improved UI and graphics is now playable here!

Users can now also adjust the volumes, change the control scheme, and tweak the mouse settings! A “How to Play” section has also been added for new players!

Kindly tell me if you encounter any bugs! Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Time for my post-mortem!

This is my 5th Ludum Dare entry, and my second 3D entry. Overall I’m very happy with the result. There’s still lots of work to be done to make it a complete and enjoyable game, but as a concept it’s nice and it shows what it’s all about. Play it here

What went right

– Choosing XNA again. It makes so many things much easier to do. With the experience I gained from last LD, it was a breeze to set up the initial 3D rendering and the billboard graphics for entities.
– Scoping. My minimum goal was to make a game where you have a camera that can take pictures, which can then be viewed in an album and be saved to disk. This is all possible.
– The birds. While they were a bit tricky to create, it’s fun (for a few minutes at least :D) to watch them do things. And without them there would be no fun at all taking pictures.
– Polish. I’ve added menus again, with keybinding, mouse sensitivity and inversion, sound options, etc. There’s also music and some sounds, and imo it looks and feels finished (as far as LD games go)

What went wrong

– The birds. Yep, they went right, but the process I used to create them took a lot of time (relatively speaking for a LD game), so I had no time to other types of animals. Having to create three separate views for them, and having to split up the body parts while keeping them aligned and ‘blendable’ so they could be animated was tricky. Speaking of animating them, that was horrible. They look decent though, but if I want to achieve something similar next time, I’ll have to rethink how I want to do it.
– Gameplay. Right now the only thing my game has is emergent gameplay. But it’s not really a game. There are no goals to achieve, only two numbers that can be increased. You’re dropped on an island and that’s it. I have no regrets skimping on gameplay, but it’s one thing in hindsight that I should’ve worked on a bit more. Basic goals with rewards to achieve would help a lot to improve the fun factor.
– That stupid glitch where the bird is moving forward, but is drawn backwards very briefly. Or vice versa. I completely forgot about it, but it’s so annoying. 😀

Things to keep in mind for next time

– The terrain. There are 4 ‘layers’ of the island. Only three are shown, which are the beach, grass, and snow. Due to limitations on the default XNA shader, it’s impossible to blend the textures together. So the transition between beach and grass is a bit ugly. Next time, if I want to achieve something similar, I’ll have to make my own shader modifications to allow blending. However, I’m very happy with what I achieved with the default shader and restricted settings for older video cards, as I now have an easy way to split any heightmap of any size into 4 different layers based on height, while still being supported by low-end machines.
– Collision and efficiency. As it is right now, it’s probably impossible to make birds interact with each other without a huge performance hit. So they don’t. But for next time I’ll really have to work on a proper way to make a large number of entities aware of each other.
– Animations. I’ll really have to compromise on something here and make a choice. I like the 2D billboards, but dynamically animating them is a pain. So I’ll either have to make that process easier, switch to full animated sprites, or move on to 3D models and animations. I don’t really want to go the 3D route, so it’s a choice between the other two. If I can make animating them an easier process, then that’s perfect. But it’s something I’ll have to investigate. Oh, and I should add 8 different view directions if possible, instead of 4.

Final words

<3 LD 😀

Hi everyone! sev_inf (programmer, that did almost everything wrong) and KillToLive (artist, that did almost everything right) here and its time for our Super Darwin post-mortem.

First of all we would like to thank to everyone who played and rated game, your feedback was really great!

So, what went right:

• graphics –  a lot of people liked game art and the design of the game page;
• having a base code – allowed us to start creating the game as soon as we chosen the idea;
• idea – we pretty quickly decided what we’ll be building and a lot of people loved our version Charles Darwin story;
• features cutoff – initially we planed to do a lot more stuff, but when we realized that  we can’t get everything in time we dropped few of our ideas and spent the last day trying to make game to feel complete, and we think we did it right.
• game is beatable, despite its difficulty.

Things that went neither right, nor wrong:

• game engine – I’ve chosen cocos2d-html5 because I had previous experience with cocos2d-html5. In many ways this was right solution, but html5 version was in alpha stage during LD, so I spent few hours fighting wis game engine bugs;

And now, things that went wrong:

• don’t having a collisions code in my base code repository – I spend almost all first day implementing the collisions;
• jump physics – a lot of people complaint about it and we don’t like it either;
• combat – it is difficult to figure out cane attack range, in few places Darwin lacks ability to duck;
• enemy placement – lot of enemies are difficult or impossible to avoid;
• difficulty – previous two items combined  + lack of the continues or checkpoints.

We’ll definitely participate in future LD. Here are few tips for the next time:

• make a much easier game;
• probably, try different game engine;
• try to implement all game features during the first day and spend the rest of the time on level design and polishing;
• and don’t forget about AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards.

This is it, I rated 100 entries.

Before going on, here’s a list of my 10 favorite (Compo+Jam)

1 – Ages of Irving
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11045

2 – Deep See Fish Loves You
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=4958

3 – Beetlefields : The Forecast
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=2952

4 – Neural Nodes
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15598

5 – Revolution
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=12722

6 – Meow for Mutation
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=5431

7 – Lucas’s Quest Backwards
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11243

8 – Crab
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=16516

9 – Plan M
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7835

10 – 2-deoxyborose
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3222

Ours isn’t in the top 10
But you can try it anyway
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=1874

 
Also, most of these games were reviewed in french on http://oujevipo.fr

Greetings to all Ludum Dare developers/judges/staff! I am not familiar with any major programming languages like C++, Java or C#. Yet I would still love to take part in the competition.

My only experiences with programming were (and still are) with CMD which is an integrated program in Windows. I do know this scripting technique very well and created countless files with it.

It would mean a lot to me if my games were accepted in this community even though they’re just written in this very limited programming language.

Hoping for good responses, Steinheide

It seems that many people has/had some problems with my game. Today i sit and recorded whole game step by step.

I think this should solve all problems.

Actually I wanted to write my favourites, but scrolling through the list of my rated games, I got sad because there are at least five in my list that have less than 10 ratings :/. and not (!) because they made unrunnable entries (ok, it applies to _some_ of them)

Please consider rating those as well!

Ahah ok now a timelapse with my screen, better…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEXH-IiJ-0U&feature=player_detailpage

I know it’s late but is it okay if I post my post-mortem now?

OMG a slime!

If you haven’t already you can play it here. Legend of Marilia is a 3D first person Zelda like game. The game has 2 levels where you get new weapons and items that make you able to progress and a boss at the end. The final level is just the last boss fight, I really wanted to make it a complete level too. At first I also wanted to make a decent story to get you going and make an overworld to link the dungeons, but had no time for it.

What went right:
– Unity: Unity is the engine I’m using the most right now, and I like it a lot. The best thing about it is that it’s so widely used, any questions you might have have probably been answered already. Not only that, it’s really easy to use once you understand how everything works, and it can port to windows, web and mobile.
– Pixel “art”: Making 2D enemies was really fast and even though they look simple no one complained about them being ugly, which is good I believe (hope my graphics rating isn’t very bad haha). I used the free Sprite Manager to use 2D sprites in my game, and it was really easy. One day before the compo I tried it out and learned everything I needed to know to use it.
– Learned a lot: One of my goals in this Ludum Dare was to learn a lot of different things, like 3D modeling, making music, using Sprite Manager and more about Unity in general. I accomplished all of these, so it was a great success!

What went wrong:
– Theme: I didn’t like the theme very much. In my past LD entries, I was very bound to the theme, and after the competition got a little annoyed that some people just threw the theme away and made a game they wanted to make. This time I had to do something like this. I wanted to make a 3D game using Unity, and all I that came to my mind about the theme were organic life forms evolving. Needless to say, making a 3D model about this would be too difficult for me. After some time I decided to make a Zelda like first person dungeon crawler, since I would be able to do everything I wanted with it: 2D sprites for enemies, 3D models for the weapons, and use Unity to make the camera and controls very fast. Some people did complain about my game having nothing to do with the theme and might penalize my score because of it, but I don’t care much, I had fun making it and I guess this is what it’s all about
– Music: Unfortunately I had to make sounds and music in the last hour, so it isn’t very good. Music was made in less than 10 minutes, and I was a bit nervous, so it’s small and might hurt your ears lol. I was sure to put a mute button because of that.

One last thing, I decided to put my game in the Kongregate contest and I’m glad I did. By now it has more than 2000 plays and a lot of good feedback, some people even said it was the best LD game they’ve ever played, and reading this just made my day. At first I was skeptical about the contest, but when PoV pointed out that it was an attempt from former LDers that made Escape to help the community, I decided to give it a try, and I’m happy I did If you want, you can play it here.

This was my 3rd Ludum Dare, and I can say it was really enjoyable. Not only did I make a game I’m proud of, I got to play
great games and saw that the community is awesome. I’ll definitely be here next time

Another post-mortem!

So I’ve decided to do a post mortem about our Jam entry “Stickman Evolution”, which is my second ludum dare entry and already a lot better than last time.

So, what went right:

• Physics:  The physics engine was done a lot faster and better than I thought. It only took about 40 hours to create the entire engine,    including the shooting physics as well as the terrain and the (really weird) physics for the enemies. The Physics engine for the enemies is based on line-to-line-distance function to find collisions between the each two “bones”, which can be represented as thick line segments.
• Graphics: The graphics based on DirectX didn’t cause as many problems as last time, and making the models went well. We had used Gimp to create heightmaps for the environment as well as a colormap and a detailmap for each world and a small scripting engine to define light settings as well as the fog options. For models we used Blender and images of  the weapons used in the game to create goodlooking and well-textured models.
• Sounds: Despite the problem of not having a gun or something, I managed together with a friend to create suitable sounds for the guns. Of course they are not too realistic, but I like them better than the sounds that sfxr or something generate.

What went wrong:

• Enemy behavior:  I haven’t had enough time to create more interesting enemy behaviour (such as jumping, flying or running), so they now just try to form a grid around the player.
• Music: Knowing that I had to add a HUD and improve the menu, I only put two hours into the music. It didn’t turn out too bad, but I believe it could have been better.
• Sleep: Due to the complexity of the game and its physics we had almost no time to sleep, so we ended up with around 14 hours of sleep in total each, but I think that’s kinda normal.

What I have learned:

• Creating a physics engine like that surely was a difficult task, but I managed to create something pretty impressive, which gives me more motivation to do more stuff in that direction.
• The graphics of this game are basically nice, but I somehow felt a need to improve them, so I decided to add some post-processing effects into this game afterwards, which made me learn a lot about post-processing.

In total, this game has become a lot better than last time and I’m really happy with our result. If you have ignored the link on the picture, heres another one: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=12046

It took a far amount of time but I’ve finally gotten down to posting this.

I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time for this one due to museums that needed seeing and other stuff I won’t be getting into, so I decided to cut corners and go for a unity game. The second bigger-than-a-test attempt at it as well, it didn’t turn out too bad.

The good:

 I decided to go for a simple graphic style since I was neither inclined nor had the time to learn how to properly make 3d models, so I’ve made everything 2d, stuck them on panels and duct taped them together. It made for a nice explosion effect on death as well.

I think the enemies and weapons have a nice variety: cats which are fast weak and have shotguns, raptors which are slower stronger and have rocket launchers, sharks which are even slower have more health than you can shake a stick at and have m0ar rokkitz! and turtles which lob grenades at you.

I also managed to squeeze in an attempt at a gui and structure which is always nice considering I tend to leave those out.

The bad:

The graphics took more fiddling than I had anticipated since everything has so many parts, and some colors got messed up for reasons unknown.

The weapons aren’t as balanced as they could be.

And worst of all the various creatures have a tendency to blow themselves to pieces, which I fixed for the kongregate version.

The ugly:

Not good, not bad, but unsightly are the sounds, courtesy of sfxr and aviary music creator. Oh randomize beats button you are my hero. Music and sounds are two things I keep struggling with with no obvious resolution in sight.

PLAY/RATE by clicking this text here which you are now reading with your eyes.

We are half way through the rating phase and so far – from the comments – I think the idea is good enought to build on. For this I need a graphician and a musician – and I take the part of the programmer. The application is simple. Send me concept art and some music ideas. Full details are below…

Basically the game mechanics will be the same as now but there will be improvements and I try to describe them below.

Graphic:

• seamless tiles needed
• forests will be animated to simulate wind (not real time wind but maybe there will be several animations to play)
• I consider having transitions between the different land types within the tile, so transition is not a separate tile (but this is a tremendous amount of work so we will see)
• character and vehicle will be animated  (vehicle will be a jeep)
• there will be 2 guy and a girl character (at least and maybe they will have different special abilities)
• I don’t want to go with 3D rendered gfx

Music & sfx:

• absolutely NO Dubstep!!!
• I plan to have different genres of music in the game (I don’t know yet if it will be mission or character specific)
• mood will be the most important aspect
• yes, there will be a lot of sfx and I don’t want to go with simple bleeps and blops

What do you need to do?

Just send me concept arts, sketches, mock ups and samples of your music ideas – or anything that shows enought – so I can decide who I want to work with. You can send any amount and please do. We will go with the best one, thats all. My contacts are in my about box here in the blog. Oh, and I don’t care about your CV, I want tangible things only.

What do you need to consider before sending application

I need exactly 1 graphic and 1 music mage in the team. Ones who willing to work on the project continuously. So if working together not going well or if it turns out that someone can’t make the quality stuff the project needs then he will be replaced with someone else – I hope this thing never happens though. We will discuss business and other things in private.

To start this project I thought we can go with the October Challange. I can’t work on this before the 1st of October but keep sending stuff to me until then. Naturally we will not finish this game in 1 month – so count on that too!

I hope I was clear. Thanks for the interest!

Tags: artist, GotEL, graphic, music, needed

Hey guys! This is Cake, the artist of the Cake&Code. Now that voting has begun to wind down, I thought I would chirp in with my own personal art and usability tips so that YOU guys might be able to use them for the next Ludum Dare! (Because you guys are totally in, right? RIGHT?! I know we are. :D)

Visual Design Tips
- Gather your inspiration early on! You waste time by trying to decide how to make your game look during the jam, so take the time a week or so beforehand to just go around the internet and collect things you think are visually pleasing. Not just images from games you think are nice. Anything! You like the colors on that one website? Save it! You like the way the colors complement each other in that magazine ad? Save that too! Anything can be inspiration, and it helps to keep your mind in gear when the jam starts. (Note: Pinterest is GREAT for keeping your inspirations together.) Below is a mashup of the different inspiration sources I used for AvRvE. Some have more obvious components than others, but I’ve picked and pulled through bits and pieces of all of these.

- In terms of colors, pair something Bold with Neutral, or Neutral with Neutral. NEVER Bold on Bold. In this case, neutral colors are generally grey, white, off-white, and SOMETIMES light soft colors. So if you have a button that’s Teal, DON’T put Red or Yellow on it. It’s harsh on the eyes.

- Make sure your colors and those “touches” help tell the story of your game. I know, vague and weird tip, but it’s something that I think is really essential. If your game has that sort of dappper-man-victorian feel, do your research and see what other games, books, and works of art execute in order to pull of that same feel. It seems like extra work, but it REALLY helps draw players in.

Usability Tips
- Always ALWAYS ALWAYS add these in to your game if you’re able to: A pause screen and a skip button during cutscenes. Everyone and their mothers will thank you and love you. Nothing is more irritating to your users than the inability to pause or having to sit through cut scenes that they really don’t care about.
- Do your users a favor and provide feedback mechanisms for different parts of your interface. Buttons? Add hover and active states. (See diagram if you’re not sure what that means.) Provide sound blips to let players know that what they’re doing is right and that it’s happening at all.

- Don’t forget your players who are coorblind! Although AvRvE is slightly guilty of this, if your game is dependent on colors…be sure to provide a feature that helps those who are colorblind to make it through the game.

- Keep in mind the keys you make available for players to use! If they can use WASD, it might help to also map the same keys to the arrow keys. Also, some international keyboards have placed keys in a different location than you may expect. ie; the German keyboard has placed the “z” key where the US “y” key is.

That’s it for now! Feel free to add in your other tips and tricks for art and usability.

Helpful Resources

- http://colororacle.org/ (For color blindness testing)

- http://www.colourlovers.com/ (Colour palettes and combinations for you to take inspiration from)

And if you can, please do play and rate our game, AvRvE!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=10976

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2012 at 11:14 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I planned on waiting till i had 100 rates before doing this to wait for alot of feedback, but it looks like its not gonna happen. So, im gonna do this now 😛 .

I’d say my game was a successful first LD! People kept saying how the intro was a bit too long, and i cant help but agree. Other than that, they said it was fun…I couldn’t believe it when my game was one someones list of “Most Fun Games on LD”. I am definitely joining the next dare!

The good

1)Game-play was what i had worked on first, and it looks to be a very good decision because some other first timers said they concentrated on everything else and couldn’t get good game-play (but very awesome graphics) which i think is the core to every good game.
2)Graphics were okay. Considering the fact that i have never animated anything in my whole life (always had a friend to do this for me) the graphics were…okay

The bad

1)Intro too long . I might have gone overboard with this…
2)Intro text was hard to read. This one was weird since it looked fine on the PC i developed on but not on any other PC.

I might be working on a post-compo but i might also not

Well, i guess that’s it for this post! Thanks for taking the time to read this!

This is our second time entering Ludum Dare! Our previous game was Macro Marines, and you can read about how we got on. We’ve learned from some of our mistakes, and we think that this time our game is better! Please play and rate it!

See how we made it:

Good

Unity is brilliant, and easy to use! We had great fun learning to use it in LD23, so we used it again this time and had a better idea of how to use it properly. It does everything for you and lets you get on with making the game, we love it!

We got plenty of sleep and decent food!The Jam started at 2AM UK time, so we decided to get an early night and wake up bright and early to discover the theme in the morning and think of ideas over breakfast.Each night we slept enough to be refreshed the next day.This is in contrast to how we’d do things at university, where some of us would try and go the whole weekend without sleep! (it didn’t end well)

Nice graphics!There are still some rough areas in the GUI, but overall the game looks good and the bacteria shaders look like proper scanning electron micrograph images.

You can only tell this isn’t a real blood vessel because of the health bar

Catchy music!Just listen to the groove on that DNA upgrade screen, yeah!

Good time management!Although we didn’t get a “basic but finished” version of the game uploaded and submitted 4 hours before the deadline like last time, Ricky did drive us to finish before the deadline and concentrate on the important features.

Decent gameplay in a short amount of time!We programmed the basic flight and shooting controls in an hour or two, allowing us to spend time tweaking and making sure they felt good. The bacteria AI took longer, but was working well by the end of Day 2. This left us with a day to implement the DNA upgrade screen – the key to the “Evolution” theme (although the bacteria do mutate and exhibit natural selection) and something which makes the game more complex and interesting than a simple shooter. But does that make it more fun?

The cubes are supposed to be segments of DNA

Title screen – pwnz deus ex

Bad

Spent too much time on procedural environment generation. We thought that generating the “tunnels” in code and having junctions or “rooms” between them would allow us to either create a large level for the player to explore, or allow the computer to generate the level for us. In the end, neither happened, we just created a small level with three joined tunnels. For the work we put into it, we could have created an equivalent level in Blender in half the time, but when we extend the game beyond the competition it will come in very handy…

Mmm, splines

No jokes or silly voice acting, the bacterial theme didn’t really lend itself to that although I suspect we just weren’t trying hard enough to fit them in. Also we were running out of time and this was low on the priority list.

Upgrades aren’t balanced, it’s too easy to become too powerful too quickly. We need to learn how to pace a game properly.

These bacteria were busy dividing behind my back while I cleared out another infection

Conclusion

We had great fun making a game with Unity, and I think we’ve learned from our previous Ludum Dare and made a better game this time!

Please play our game, leave some feedback and help us see what we can do better next time!

Tags: ld24, post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse, unity3d

Mh, building up a Top 5 list is hard. Especially when I barely saw 3% of all the games yet.

But I do have one game I definitely liked most. Gene Jumble boy I liked that game.

I sure want this to be finished and polished. I loved the concept it was hugely fun. Go play that game.

So I just played 401 of the 1406 games this LD (How? I’m a wizard). Here are some that stood out in one or more categories / are particularly interesting / are horribly underrated and deserve more plays.

(links to the LD-entries are in the headers/titles)

Cuboid Sandbox – cominu

I have no idea what’s going on. Some kind of cube-simulation, I fathom. But it is quite pretty.

One Day To Breed – Hazel

You are a cat. Find a partner, breed, and continue as the offspring until you have reached the peak of cat-dom. Quite cute. Also, the second game to feature boxcats

Happy Vegan Birthday – Huitre

Ridiculously good-looking point+click full of nice little gags.

EvoRide – inakrinat

It’s essentially Rainbow Road, but with a self-creating dna-path.

Species – mappum

I’m stil amazed by how this game manages to pull off what it does in 2d. More information would spoil the experience

FOR THE darWIN – TravisChen

You are Darwin. Dig out fossils to prove evolution, all whilst avoiding the church! Also, this game has the most sensible use of the NumPad ever. Top that!

Where am I? – AgentParsec

Play this game blind. Do not read the description. Do not read the comments. Every bit of information will cloud your playthrough. Just do it.

My Time – GamesByZed

1-day-extra-game by Zed, which is quite focussed. You are the Ludum-Dare-Theme “Evolution”. Show the other themes who’s boss!

-Matthew

Tags: picks

Evolution of a monster

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3145

The things that went right

Using Unity
was one of those things that helped out this time around as well, it made it possible to get the basics going and have the results be playable in the browser, it meshes well together with blender and assets were easily made with that kind of pipeline in place.

A simple artstyle
was put in place once again as is typical with how I usually go about my ld48 entries, it makes it possible to make high-end looking looking visuals without actually not putting in any more time than I would’ve with a 2d game, the textures are all simple and reused, the ambient occlusion and detailing is just overlays, the objects in the world are pixeled sprites that always faces the camera and made it possible and easy to make new items without having to push for 3d objects, which would’ve been devastating for the time-budget.

Sfxr and Musagi!
easy effects and environmental ambience as well as an ending song I made in the last two hours of the compo. drpetter is awesome!

Hanging in there
The worst enemy is usually the moment where you realize that the theme is the worst theme, (They’re all the worst theme, every time!) and that moment the second day when you wake up and realize that you’re never going to be able to finish the entry, these moments happen every time, and working through them to the end and really pushing for having something done for the deadline.

And the things that went wrong

“I think I’ll do this instead!”
I had a completely different story planned out for the thing to begin with but as I progressed I stopped following my notes I had written on my idea, and went far too much into “do it as I go”-land, this is most likely something I should handle better in the future.

Joining in one day late
ended up slicing what I wanted to do in half, and made the game itself very short, I already had much of the gameplay elements I needed in place, but those extra ~24h would’ve given me that time to actually add game-extending content.

The technical side
of the game was put together fairly quickly, but chosing to leave some things less than stellar ended up hurting quite a lot in the end, the carrying-physics being one example, it works quite well but ended up with one big downside: people can carry items out of the geometry, which turned out happening more often than not.

No playtesting.
All of the playtesting was pretty much being done by myself, and that was bad. One of the things I noticed in the end was that people took a scenario as being given a key and a closed gate as being given one obvious outcome, combine this with people then ending up trying to use the key on the gate that it doesn’t work on and they’ll end up pushing the key outside the world and breaking the game progress completely, having them miss out on the short bit that is most of the game, and the ending!

For the future

I really enjoyed the aesthetics of something like ultima undeworld and that ended up affecting how the project ended up looking like, the physics were also something that I took from UW, I really love those cobbly old dungeons with water and small monsters nests and the things they’ve gathered, with junk just cluttering corners and the player scavenging to find something that is useful.

My plan is to create a bunch of stuff inside unity to make it easy to make puzzles and connect things like levers and doors, a weighted plate to a trap, or a keyhole usable with any defined key. This with a bunch of new art-assets and a longer worked-through game could end up being a fun and less buggy adventure to go through, something in the length of an hour or two and then release that as an extended version.

Thanks everyone for yet another fun competition!, now I need to take the time to play some entries!

So after my first experience in a LD and looking at all the amazing entries, I realised I needed more practice.

I still had an idea left for when ‘Abandoned’ was still the nr 1 voted theme, so this weekend I made another game.
It’s called Abandoned (as you can see below).

you can try it here:
http://www.goerp.nl/flash/ld/abandoned.swf

the development proces was smoother, and the games looks better than my LD entry (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=14225), but the graphics still take too much time. Maybe the next game will be with pixels or hand drawn pictures (those I do fast).
And next time I will invest some time to work on more interesting gameplay.

This idea was meant for a device with an accelerometer, but for now you have to use the mouse (maybe I’ll port it to Android later).

And now back to trying those other games!

For this LD, team RADMARS attempted to make a puzzle platformer where you have to die in order to progress. It was a big challenge, but I think we managed to make something pretty awesome. Check it out here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7860

We have postmortems for 3 out of the 4 members of RADMARS for you today (and timelapse videos for two of those). Up first is roushey, who decided to write a very lot for some reason:

This Ludum Dare went surprisingly smooth. We started off Friday night cooking up a bunch of good ideas and finally settled on the concept that every time you die, you gain a new ability based on how you died. We then spent the rest of the night fleshing out all the abilities you would have, flagging them as necessary, nice to have, and eventually cutting some. After that we had a pretty solid plan to always tab back into and check where we were at. We also put TODOs for art, programming, levels, etc on the doc as well so we could quickly see what the other team members were doing without pestering them.

What went well:

Particles, explosions, and effects: Directly pixeled in graphics-gale, no real sketches or anything like that.

Up next is emarcotte, for whom brevity is the soul of wit:

Indeed. Last is me, who falls somewhere inbetween:

What went right

-Well-defined roles: It was great to have brendo as the designated level designer, which freed the rest of us to work on our respective tasks. On the coding side, even though there were two of us we were able to switch off on what we were working on so there weren’t any weird merge issues that might take up time.

-Time to polish code: I was lucky to have all of Monday free to pretty much only do playtesting and fix small bugs, which was great. I also had some time to do some subtle sound tweaks (like the running sound) which I think really helped as well.

-melonJS: a very good game framework which has even had some specific bugfixes related to issues we found when doing our previous game. Not quite perfect yet, but the few issues I had this time were not showstoppers by any means and I was able to work around them relatively easily.

What went wrong

-Feature creep: Our concept, awesome as it is, lent itself to a sprawling amount of features. A good number of deaths->abilities got cut as we realized we would have no time to actually implement them. Cutting these was difficult but we decided we’d rather have something polished and more focused rather than something very ambitious that fell short.

-Time management (to an extent, again): I felt like I ended up spending more time on music & sound as I did last time, but came out with about the same amount/level of quality. Majorly subjective though. Also, again it was a bit hard to get going on Friday/early Saturday but once we got the core features set in stone and some art assets done my coding gained a lot of steam.

Overall this Ludum Dare was hugely satisfying, and we made an even better game than last time. Look out LD25!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2012 at 9:27 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

What went right:

Overall I am really happy with how my 48 hours went, and with how my final game turned out. It was a great experience, which I will definitely be doing again next time.

Got off to a calm start. Ludum Dare start at 1pm Saturday my local time (New Zealand), and I think that worked out really well. I spent the first 3 hours having a nice casual lunch, and just started thinking, letting the theme absorb into my brain. I think this is the way to do it. Food helps me think, and since I went out, there was no way of rushing to the computer and starting before my idea was set in my own head.

Using Haxe, NME and the awe6 game framework. I am really happy with my technology choices. I have been using Haxe and NME for a while now for random things, never really use awe6 for anything other that simple hello world style games. I know everyone warns against it, and I knew it was a bit of a risk, but I made the decision to run awe6 anyway, as it seemed like the kind of framework that would not get in my way. I was lucky that I actually picked it up quite quickly, and was able to draw on the strengths of the framework to help me out.

XML based levels. Spent a little bit of time making a way to load levels as XML. This made making the levels really fast during the middle of the final night.

Simple game concept. Choosing a simple concept, and mechanic was a great decision. This meant I could concentration on making the game fun, and actually getting it finished.

What went average:

Needed more play testing. I really should have got a few more people to play the game. A lot of the things that did not turn out so well, could have easily been fixed it I got more people to play the game earlier on. That being said, I was tweaking the mechanics right up until the last minute, so not sure when I would have had the time to implement any feedback.

Maybe made it a bit too hard. I wanted to make a challenging game that would take full advantage of the mechanics. Unfortunately I think the difficulty curve was quite steep. There were a few levels that I probably should have made easier, or removed all together, but a number of people were actually able to play all the way through, so I think it is really up to if you “get” the mechanics or not.

Unusual jump mechanic. The jump mechanic that I was playing with, relied to much on knowing how it worked under the hood. I can now ace almost every level on the first try, but others seem to struggle. This was the main issue that the people who commented on my game post had. I should have worked a little more on making the jumping more intuitive. I have even started to tweak this for a post-compo build. A few people wanted to be able to move in mid-air. I purposely did not want to include this, as I thought it would change the game-play too much, and make it too easy.

Sound. Sound was average, as this is one aspect I am inexperienced in. I will definitely be trying to improve these skills for next time.

Not enough content. I thought I did quite a good job of keeping a reasonable scope, but the one thing that got away from me was the amount of levels/episodes I planned to create. My interpretation on the theme was that each level you would advance through the ages. Following the evolution of the wheel. You would start out jumping over prehistoric style stone wheels, then up to roman wooden wheels, then wagon wheels, and eventually to the future where everyone knows they use wheels made out of lasers. I only managed to get three different wheel types by the end, but I was not actually too worried about this. I think the point still came across. I will also add more wheel types and more levels in the post-compo builds.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Now that I’ve rated over 100 entries, I wanted to compile a list of some of my favorite underplayed (under 50 ratings) games from that list. Here they are, in no particular order (click the titles or images to go to the entry page) …

Influenza – Miltage – Jam Entry

A flu virus tries to take over an office building, and must contend with managers, doctors .. and the dreaded janitor.

Eggplant farm – mokujin – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Brother amoebas fight for control of their inheritance, an eggplant farm.

Quantum Seed – motionbit – Jam Entry

A thoroughly appealing game both visually and aurally.

FronSkratx – muh_h – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A game I wish I was much better at so I could experience the later parts. See if you can get farther than me (you probably can).

@#$% Life! I’m the god damn SUN. – Phobos001 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

It may have little to do with the theme, but it’s fun to play and has a great title.

FLOWERBOT – Zccc – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A robot befriends a flower and has to protect it from danger.

Psychiatric Evaluation – ConflictiveLabs – Jam Entry

A mental patient has to keep his sanity up in order to escape.

The Evolution of Flight – AaronYip – 48 Hour Compo Entry

The Wright Brothers take on aliens as they perfect their aerial technology.

That’s all for now; I hope you enjoy playing these games as much as I did!

Tags: LD #24, picks

I’ve now published my 7th enhancement revision to Karyote.

A lot of bugs have been squashed, not much in the way of new features, but the game is starting to take the shape that I had wanted it to have all along.  Now that I have the code I’ve written so far more or less bug-free, I am getting close to being ready to add the final features that I wanted the game to have.  This makes me happy, because it’ll mean I can put down this project and work on some other ideas that I’ve been wanting to play with.  It’s been interesting toying around with different mathematical models controling the game mechanics and figuring out what works best.  I’m not entirely sure that I’d call my game successful, it feels like it needs something more, still.  But I do feel like it’s been a worthwhile experiment at this point.

Original post is here.

I’m back with some (good?) news!

This time I’m going to talk about a little experimental game made for the 24th Ludum Dare. The game is called Cuboid Sandbox and the description in the contest page is something like this:

Wait. Whaaat?

Well…this 3 days long experiment ended up being more like a simulation than a game. But, what is really a game? When I was a child I always found entertaining to watch ants movements and this game probably have been influenced by that experience

So, what happened during the development? Here’s a video timelapse (3 development days compressed to 3 minutes) and little postmortem:

Cuboid Sandbox Timelapse video (youtube)

What went right

• Familiarity with the tools
• No time-consuming graphics and 3d models. Almost everything was made with a combination of cubes and simple texturing
• Everything is procedural, no time wasted on making levels or story
• Side effects are good: the “heatmap” can be used to create abstract paintings 😀
• Making a very small warmup game the days before the competition helped me to focus more on tangible things and less on “under the hood” geeky stuff
• The unity integrated profiler rulez: sometimes you have to optimize and it’s better if you know what part of the code is really slow. I can’t live without it…
• Coroutines! I used extensively coroutines to spread the workload across different frames avoiding cpu load spikes.
• The still-in-beta Linux exporter of unity4 worked without a single problem.

What went wrong

• Too many hours of work. For the next Ludum Dare I’ll try making something smaller or reusing code libraries from other projects.
• Unfortunately Marco had some problems and I worked almost solo for the 2nd and 3rd day
• We didn’t really like the theme and we wasted 8 precious hours deciding what kind of game to do.
• Handling a large numbers of dynamic objects is hard and need time to optimize the code.
• Too many hours wasted tweaking values to balance the simulation.
• Lack of interaction with the simulated world.

Conclusion

This was the first time I entered a similar competition and I learned a lot about the time needed to complete something playable and the disastrous side-effect of sleep deprivation.

I really had a good time stepping out of my comfort zone for a while and making something completely different from Blackreef Pirates and I think this little experiment will receive some extra work in the future with more emergent behaviours spawning from different cuboid AI rules and more ways to influence the simulation.

Still awake? What are you waiting? Go play and rate the game! 😀

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse

No strings attached.

I want more practice writing music for video games. And having just enjoyed entering LD#24  myself, I could think of no community I would rather help in my great and mighty quest to get some more practice!

Yay!

So if any of you want me to compose a piece of music for your LD entry, or ask a question or something, just email me at:

[email protected] /* */

(Just make sure you let me know a bit about what you want for your game. What style of music and whatnot)

If you want an idea of my level at composing, and what you can expect from me, check out the music I wrote for my LD entry HERE.

A good day for an adventure!

I guess it’s not too late for writing a postmortem of my game with seriously too long title.

What went right:

Finishing a game. It speaks for itself. It was a lot of fun, too!

Shooting mechanics. It’s an entirely complete, ray-based weapon system. Weapons shoot with random deviation (0.1° step), and there’s support for multiple bullets shot at once.

“Art” style. I guess calling this stuff “art” is an exaggeration, but i really like how it turned out. Two-color menus look really nice in my opinion.

What went wrong:

Idea. My game doesn’t really follow the theme closely, people left some ideas in the comments. Why i haven’t thought of them earlier? 😉

Sounds. Not really wrong, but there’s exactly one gunshot sound for all of weapons in game.

Laziness. I should’ve added more species of zombies. This would make the game really more diverse.

Lack of polish. People complained about too long delay between waves and crappy controls.

Check out my game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=11033

Tags: postmortem

I had a lot of fun doing the jam entry for this years LD. It always seems that I can nail down a good technical demo of my concept. But, I am usually missing gameplay elements. Also my link to the theme would have been much greater having a few final mechanics. I think my games “achievements”  is something I’m still trying to find as a designer. Or maybe how to integrate them in properly, but I’m working on developing that skill.

I have been rating games like crazy and love seeing everyone’s entries. Also refreshing my game page to check for new comments.

I have been continuing the development for Growth, and would like to link to a post-compo version. I think this revision is much cleaner and has better controls as well. I hope you all enjoy, and think it will be one I continue to work on in the future.

Web 

In lieu of a postmortem, I’m going to try an experiment.

You’ve played and rated a bunch of other games by this point.  You’re probably curious how you’re going to do in the final tallies, even if your game didn’t turn out to be what you wanted.  You like making and playing games, and you like competition — you’re here, after all.  Well, here’s a bonus competition.  Rate your own game, post your scores, and see how close you get to the final ratings you receive.

Try to forget everything you know about your game.  It’s completely impossible (given you’re the only one who knows all of it), but do it anyway.  Now, go back and play it.  If you’ve done any work on it since, play the original.  Give it the same chance you gave any other game you played.  Ignore any insider information you might have, put aside your biases, and write down your scores in that comment field down there.  You know the one.

Be honest.  I’m usually very sparing with 5’s, to save them for really spectacular entries…  and I’m judging myself on the same scale I used for everyone else.  Keep the same criteria you’ve used in the past in mind when you’re rating your own game.  Remember, this isn’t your game anymore, you’ve never seen it before today.  If you cheat and write all 5’s, you’re only cheating yourself.

Just as important as all the other skills needed to create a game is the ability to judge your own work with a critical eye, and be able to picture how others are going to see it.  Playtesting, as often as possible, is awesome for this (we did one last weekend), but you can’t playtest all the time, and getting stuck on a bad idea can kill you.  It’s too easy to come up with an idea that doesn’t work but convince yourself that it’s fun, and ignore what others have to say.  If you always try to put aside your own preconceptions when looking at your own work, it’s easier to stay focused on creating a good game.  This experiment will help us all see how capable we are of doing this.

If enough people are interested and post their scores, I’ll throw them all in a spreadsheet with the actual scores once they’re out, and figure out how close everyone came to their real scores.  If this idea sounds interesting to you, rate your game, and like this post so more people see it.

I’ll go first, but I’ll save it for a comment.

Hey everyone,

Some friends and I are streaming random ludum dare 24 playthroughs.  Join the channel and link your game if you want it played!

http://www.twitch.tv/minism

Hey!
We have made a post competition entry of our LD#24 game The House which you can rate and play here!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=8389

We have fixed a lots of bugs but it still needs more levels and gameplay elements!

Feel free to try it out here :

http://dalsgames.dalsit.se/games/thehouse/post <—APPLET (Tested on W7 and MAC OSX 10.6.8)
http://dalsgames.dalsit.se/games/thehouse/post/TheHousePost.jar <- DOWNLOAD the .jar (not tested but should work!)

See you all next LD 😀

It was a hetic weekend, but I managed to wrap something up for the Ludum Dare 24. And the result? Golden Eggs.

When the theme of Evolution was announced, I wasn’t exactly sure of what to do. Truth be told, Evolution was one of the themes I had voted down. I just didn’t have that many ideas to go along with it. But I was bent on carrying it through. Doing something you like while within a theme you aren’t especially lukewarm about is a challenge, but you can learn to like it all the same. At least I did!

At first, I didn’t know what to do. The only things that went trough my head were the immediate, overdone things: dinosaurs, DNA manipulation, all that jazz. But then, it hit me! The most prominent game I’ve played around the subject was the chocobo breeding mini game in Final Fantasy VII. Normal chocobo could breed and, using foods and other items, breed higher tiers of chocobos that could then be used in several tasks. I remember it being so complex that I looked up a guide online and was absolutely dismayed by how big and detailed it was back in the day.

With that little thought in place, I wanted to root the player in a more mundane setting (and also not incur in copyright infringement). Since the original mini game takes place in a farm, I decided to use it as a base for my game. And instead of chocobos, chickens and roosters took their place! And of course, everyone knows that the chicken who lays golden eggs is the best! After that, I needed to have a growth mechanism, some way to make them progressively better, and so the idea of feeding them better crops was born!

At the time I didn’t even realize how similar it could be to other games out there. People pointed out Farmville and Harvest Moon in the comments after I submitted the game, but since I never played any of them, I wouldn’t know. Thing is, I was so excited with the idea at the time I didn’t even look back and started creating the game!

Since I’ve been using Unity3D, I decided to try my hand at it in a different context than I’m used to: pixel art. The game took a while to make not because it was incredibly complex but, as I came to realize, it’s tricky to do pixel art in Unity. But when you know what to do and what to avoid, it gets simpler to do it, and that was the main reason for doing this blog post.

So, what went well?

1. I managed to nail a decent art style fairly quickly.

I never did pixel art for a game before, and wasn’t sure of how it would turn out. After two tries, I finally got a simple style I could create art quickly. Lowering the number of pixels from my initial try also helped in this regard. Considering the comments I got for the game, the art was the best thing about my entry (not that I had much else going for it, truth be told), and people really liked it.

 ->       -> 

2. The core of the game was done by the first day.

By the end of the first day, I already had the systems for animating the characters and other props already done. The animals wandered around and the player could be controlled. The second day was to be used to get the gameplay flowing.

And what didn’t go so well?

1. I used sprite sheets.

From the get go, I wanted to use sprite sheets to increase the game’s performance and to learn how to do it, since I’m making another game that could use the technology. I have never used sprite sheets in Unity3D before and, little did I know, turns out that they’re not the best things to use, according to its developers. Even worse, the slight errors in calculation during the texture mapping ended up being even more glaring due to the size of the textures (16 x 16 pixels). This wasn’t a big problem for full blocks, but became very visible in partially or almost completely transparent blocks, such as the fences and the grass:

But the change to single textures for every sprite and animation frame ended up being too complex to do in time, since the code was already done for sprite sheets. I’ve fixed the problem since then, but in the end, I ended up having to submit the game with the glitches because of this.

Even worse, I couldn’t get over this glitch and tried many things to fix it without changing the system I had coded to no avail. I lost precious time and ended up not finishing the core gameplay, which I might have finished if I had given up after the first or second try to fix it in the first place. Thing is, it was really hard to stop trying to fix it, even tough I knew I was loosing precious time. Human nature, I guess.

2. I didn’t prepare enough.

Despite the fact I thought of the game idea right at the beginning, I could have saved some time by thinking of some ideas for each theme and gameplay to go along with them. I had some ideas for the themes I liked, and didn’t think too hard on the ones I disliked, which ended up being a problem since it was one of the themes I disliked that ended up winning.

Also, I was very reluctant on choosing a tool to make the game. I knew I wanted it to be pixel friendly, but ultimately decided to use Unity3D over Gamemaker in order to test its capabilities. Also, according to the many tips on the Ludum Dare site, the web is a preferred platform and Unity3D, having web publishing available in the free version (unlike GameMaker), ended up pushing me towards it even more.

I also could have probably saved a lot of time by creating the animation system before hand, but I wanted to see what I could get done from scratch.

In the end

Being my first go at a gamejam, and a Ludum Dare, I really enjoyed the experience. Most importantly, I learned quite a lot of what to do and avoid when using pixel art in Unity3D. Despite everything, I liked my entry enough to continue working on it until I get it to the state I wanted it to have from the beginning. After that, I’ll continue with my usual game development woes. But, before that, time to reply to the comments on my game and rate some other games!

Tags: compo, ld24, post-mortem, postmortem, unity, unity3d

I think I’m having more fun rating and playing games in this contest than I did making mine – and I have to admit, it was pretty fun to make! There are a lot of very talented developers out there, I was quite surprised by the number of high quality entries into this contest. It has made me start thinking of the rating system though, and how it could be improved. As it stands, I think that the rating system is in need of some work – although I’m by no means claiming to be an authority about “the way things should be”.

First off, I think that there are too many categories. My thoughts on each one:

Overall: This rating is of course important. I think that it is the most important rating, and it should be visibly separated from the others. I also think that it should be described on the page as not being an average, rather being representative of the overall opinion of the game. When I’m rating games, I rate games on this based on my experience playing them, trying to separate the other parts.

Innovation: I also like this category – it rewards outside of the box thinkers. I’m not sure that innovation is the correct word, I think that uniqueness or something might better serve the purpose.

Fun: I think that this fits in with overall, although I do like this category, I found it hard to consistently rate games with it.

Theme: This one is really important for the spirit of the contest. I think that it should be listed beside Overall, as the two core ratings for a game.

Graphics: I don’t like this rating as it stands, since it seems to reward visual complexity rather than aesthetics, which I think is a mistake. One of my favorite games in terms of aesthetics is Collect by Amidos. Graphically it’s simple – most people in the contest have the skill to implement graphics as Amidos did – but aesthetically it’s incredibly well put together I think, subtle and tasteful. Yet this category seems that it would not reward that. Perhaps “visual style” would be a better name for it than aesthetics, although maybe we can come up with something better.

Audio: Another staple, I found this category the easiest to rate. More on this later.

Humor: I’m not sure about this category. I only gave a few games a rating within this category. I think that the problem with it is that it covers too few games – of the 70 games I’ve rated, I’ve given a humor score to maybe 5 of them. The other problem that I see with it is that it’s too exclusive to one style of game. While funny games get their own category, serious ones don’t. Scary ones don’t. I think that this category might be worth dropping altogether.

Mood: I didn’t rate any games in this category. I don’t know what its purpose is, and I don’t see how it captures something different than innovation, fun and overall. In this case, it seems too vague in its intent. Looking back at Ludum Dare 23 winners, it seems to be about some emotional response – which would be too specialized (and perhaps better labelled as “Emotion” than “Mood”).

So those are my thoughts on the rating system – nix Humor and Mood, rename Graphics to something that encompasses style instead of just graphics, and rearrange the order and emphasis on the page.

The other issue that I see is that there’s no guideline for ratings. I came up with my own system beforehand so I could be more consistent across games, but it might be nice to have a guideline beforehand to normalize things, so that people are more consistent with their ratings, but more to guide them. My system (not saying that this is the correct way, but just how I tried to stay fair in rating other peoples games). Going below three stars usually meant something wasn’t implemented:

Overall: Usually three stars. Four stars if an interesting twist, or good implementation. Five stars if particularly clever. Independent of other ratings.

Innovation: Three stars for a well implemented take on an old game. Four if there’s a twist – lots of that in this contest, with people taking interesting views on evolution. Five if it’s something I hadn’t seen before.

Fun: General feeling – I couldn’t really find a way to objectify “fun” (thankfully!), so if I enjoyed the game, I gave it a three. If I found myself hoping that it got developed post compo, 4. If I played it again, 5.

Graphics: I treated this in two ways – artistic skill – if you made something that obviously took a lot of technical skill, but also if you made something that was well put together, even if not graphically complex.

Audio: I think I had the best system for this. Baseline is 1 (N/A if no sound). +1 if you have sound effects. +1 if you have music. +1 if your sound is complete – most actions have an associated sound effect with them. +1 if the sound was really clever in some way. -1 if sound was abrasive for some

Humor/Mood: N/A if I liked your game. N/A otherwise.

Now, I’m not saying that my system is the correct one, but I think that it accomplishes my goal pretty well – namely to be as consistent as possible across rating games. Newgrounds has a system similar to this, if you hover over a rating, you get a guide:

0: Blam this piece of crap!

1:  This makes poop look good.

2: Nothing too new or interesting.

3: Not bad. In fact… I like it!

4: This Flash is crunk, fo shizzle!

5: Woot!!! All my 5 R belong to this!

Which seems pretty good, if maybe a bit immature – it encourages a score of 2-3 as the baseline, 4’s should be reasonably common while 5’s should be rare, which I think is healthy. I think that a similar guide to this could work well for the contest in keeping ratings consistent, per reviewer, across multiple games.

Alright, essay over! Agree? Disagree? What are your thoughts on the matter?

This is actually a response to mdkess, but I felt that it should be it’s own post. You may want to read mdkess’ post which can be found here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/09/11/on-the-rating-system/

> The other issue that I see is that there’s no guideline for ratings.
There is indeed a guideline. It can be found here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/rules/ (scroll down to “Judging”)

When I’m rating, I don’t think too much. Players don’t think too much when they are playing a game. They either enjoy certain aspects, or not, so I try to reflect this in the way I rate games, in the hopes that the ratings are more authentic. I don’t think too hard about the categories or try to split it up too much in my mind. What you will now read, is merely me trying to analyse the way I think about categories, but when I actually rate them, it’s pretty much by impulse.

Here is how I think/feel about the different categories:

-Theme-
I agree with Codexus on the “Theme” category being weak. The only person really able to know how well they did in Theme, is the person who made the game. In the Judging guidelines, for Theme, it says “How well an entry suits the theme. Do they perhaps do something creative or unexpected with the theme?”. The problem is, if a game is creative and unexpected in it’s use of the theme, people rate it low because it doesn’t seem to follow the theme, or it seems to have used the developer’s warped (when actually potentially creative) view of the theme as an excuse for their implementation of it. In other words, it’s impossible to know if a theme is creative or used as an excuse unless you are the developer, and as a player you can only rate the Theme category with how unoriginal and close to the literal theme as possible, so this is what people do. I personally have a lot of trouble rating Theme, because if it isn’t creative, then I should rate it low according to the Judging guidelines, and if it is creative, I don’t know weather it actually is, or if the theme is just used as an excuse for their game. Perhaps Theme should be rated according to how genuinely it feels like it follows the theme, while on the surface seeming completely unrelated to the theme. Otherwise I just can’t see someone’s Theme rating being helpful to them at all.

So I know I’m talking a lot about the theme category… Here, have some more:
I think themes are a big part of what makes Ludum Dare, so I don’t think the theme category should be taken away necessarily, but maybe something to just keep in mind, is that I don’t think Ludum Dare is here to get people to make sure their game follows the theme. Ludum Dare is here to get people excited about making games, and to actually make one. For some, the theme can be very off-putting because they can’t think of something to make under it. I know people who had an idea for another theme in the voting period, and were excited for it, but just didn’t participate because the winning theme discouraged their idea. While I like there being a focused theme, I think something needs to happen to compensate for people like that. I don’t know what… Perhaps it only needs to be as simple as a small message in the post that announces the theme. I dunno.

-Innovation-
I think this is fine, and too unlike theme to be merged. “Have you experienced this before? No? That’s what I thought.”

-Mood and Humour-
I don’t think these should be taken out or merged. A serious or emotion-provoking game can have funny parts or well placed humour. Furthermore, I think Mood is more like “How well did the game make you feel (negative or positive) the way that the game was trying to make you feel?” I think this is completely different to Humour. To me, Mood is a game-long thing, whereas Humour isn’t necessarily so. Humour to me is more like “The parts that were trying (or perhaps not necessarily trying) to be funny, were they funny?”

-Fun-
Fun is… Well, I’ve been rating “Fun” the way that I would rate “Addictive” (but still sort of keeping “Fun” in mind, the same way that with “Audio” you think of music and sound effects separately), if it existed, because in the Judging guidelines it says something like “Did you look up at the clock and realise it was hours later?”. I think addictive, and fun, are two different things. You can be playing a game that is hard to put down (maybe you want to see the ending, so you trudge on), but it isn’t very fun to play. I’ve played many games like this. I think “Fun” is how great it feels to play. Sort of like the mood category, but not directed at how well the feeling of the game manifests within you, instead, how fun the mechanics are. With these thoughts, I believe an “Addictive” category should be added, which is how engaging the game was, and “Fun”, being how good the mechanics felt to play with. Surely Fun can affect Addictive, but a game can be addictive without being fun.

-Graphics and Audio-
I think these are fine as is. I don’t think these should be elaborated on or split up or anything.

————————————————-

-Conclusion-
So I think I would have the categories presented something like this (perhaps questions should actually be given alongside the category as you are rating them, so that everyone is on the same page?):
-Overall: Generally, how much did you like the experience?
-Theme: How creative, and authentic did the creativeness of, the theme implementation feel?
-Fun: How fun were the gameplay mechanics?
-Addictive: How compelled were you to continue playing?
-Mood: How close did you feel to the way the game was intending (or not so intending) to make you feel?
-Humour: How humourous were the intended (or not so intended) parts or aspects of the game?
-Graphics: How well did you feel the graphics enhanced your experience?
-Audio: How well did you feel the audio enhanced your experience?

How do you create theses insect/plant like critters

from these basic shapes?

That was the question I posed myself for the Ludum Dare 24 compo. The theme was evolution and I wanted to create some little critters which could change there appearance smoothly.

The basic shapes you see above can be easily described using polar coordinates.

Polar coordinates express a 2D curve in the form r(t). For each angle t the function r(t) gives the radius at this angle. Here are the definitions of the simple shapes above:

• Sphere: r(t) = 1 (a circle has constant radius)
• Star: r(t) = r0 + (1-r0)*(1-abs((n*t mod 2 pi)/pi-1))^p. This is a bit complicated – I could not find an easier definition. n is the number of star corners and r0 and p are additinal parameters.
• Rose: r(t) = cos(n*t), where n is the number of rose petals.
• Cardioid: r(t) = 1 + cos(t + pi). This is a funny mathematical object.

Now how do we get the complex shapes? Easy: they are formed buy just using a linear combination of the simple shapes.

For example we use the two simple shape functions r_star(t) and r_cardioid(t) and form the linear combination r(t) = a*r_star(t) + b*r_cardioid(t). Using a and b equal to 0.5 yields the third shape you can see above.

You can use my critter generator to create your own critters.

Also, play and rate my compo entry!

Tags: compo, post-mortem, postmortem, techniques, unity3d

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 at 9:00 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

In order for there to be a genuine winning theme, agree or not, I don’t think the previous round’s winners should be public.

A game made of stop-motion animations ? That was a “risky” bet!

So…there are only 5 days left to rate the game, maybe it’s time for us to write a small post-mortem [EDIT: not that small eventually] in order to explain how we made the BIGGEST GAME in Ludum Dare history! 1,14GigaBytes! Shi*! That’s more than Minecraft!

Size does matter

By the way, you can play and rate the game here!

Post-mortem below! (because it’s big too)

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Pooling talents (and extra constraint)

Before this LD, I was used to make games, but didn’t know anything about stop-motion animation.

On the other end, Felix was used to make stop-motion animations but didn’t know anything about game making. So, naturally, we thought we should make a stop-motion animated game, whatever the theme, and that’s the main reason we worked together on this LD.

I think that was a pretty good idea cause we both learned some new things, and because the more constraints you have, the more creative you get.

Felix working on the “Agricola’ scene

Getting prepared

Since we had no idea how to make a stop-motion game, we took an afternoon before LD to experiment things and sharpen our tools. That way, we discovered some problems like files incompatibility, scaling, cut out and could avoid them during the competition. Unfortunately, one big problem managed to slip through…What was it ? Suspense! Read further.

Hot Chocolate

Hot Chocolate is part of my own LD ritual. Every Ludum Dare, I wake up at 8, I look at the theme, and then I go out to order a hot chocolate and croissants in my favourite café (in France, the theme is announced at 3-4am so…it seems wiser to have a good sleep and discover it on the morning). I think going out is a good way to find inspiration, even if I can’t scientifically explain it. It always worked for me, and this LD was no exception. Of course, this time, we ordered two hot chocolates.

Fan

Since it’s pretty hot in Marseille, and since we spent two days together in a small flat with the curtains closed and the lights on (for the shootings), buying a fan was a DAMN GOOD idea.

It’s getting hot in here…

Time management

We didn’t use any time-management technique or whatever, but we managed to be extraordinary synchronized. While Felix was building his studio, I was coding the basics, while he was shooting an animation, I was writhing its dialogs. That way, we always could know precisely what was done, what was left and how much time we needed. Eventually, everything was made in time

Funny breaks

We didn’t take many breaks (except for eating and sleeping) but kept finding new ways to make the work funnier : drinking real rum for the Red November animation, inviting some friends fo the tarot animation, finding funny way to destroy the Monopoly…In the end, the game making was fun all along, and I can’t think of any better way to make games.

Cheers!

WHAT WENT WRONG

The theme

When the theme was announced, we were really happy. This theme was the one we were expecting. It was a big relief, and at this moment, we knew theme won’t be a problem for us! How ironic, here are some comments about Coin-Operated Afternoon :

I don’t understand how it correlate with evolution theme

I didn’t really get how it involved evolution

I don’t see the relationship with the theme

I have to say I don’t see the theme clearly either.

And so on…

So, obviously we failed!

We wanted to make a game about evolution of game mechanics through boardgames and to show boardgames evolving through the animations, but it looks we had so much fun making this game that we forgot a bit our initial idee

The flat was a bit messy

Sounds and Music

We never planed to have any sounds in our game, but we planed to have some music. Jay, the third man of the team, which is a great musician, was supposed to be in charge of this aspect. Unfortunately, during this week end Jay

– wasn’t in the same city

– was quite busy

– had no internet connection

– and didn’t even have a windows computer to play what we were making! ^^
So, even if we thought it was still possible to make something with him, it obviously didn’t happen. This is a shame because Coin-Operated Afternoon REALLY NEEDS music, so I hope we’ll make a post-post-compo version to complete the game!

HUGENESS (no shit ?)

Ok, we were aware that making a game in stop-motion will lead to a big .exe file…but 1,14GB ? Seriously ?! Well…it looks like Adventure Game Studio wasn’t made to build stop-motion animated games. The good news is that it allowed us to break a new record! I really think we’re the first ones to reach the 1GB limit in Ludum Dare History ^^ (but I might be wrong)

-Hey I got an idea! What if we turn the game in 8bit colors to lighten it ?
Oops…bad idea

And that’s it

Yeah, that’s it. Except for these “little” problems , Coin-Operated Afternoon went RIGHT! We made the game we wanted to make, we had a very good time, and we’re very proud! So once again, thanks Ludum Dare for making people happy!

Multi-player games need YOU!

We ought to get together a list of multi-player games and, on say the last few hours of voting or some time we can all agree on – rendezvous in-game.

Because for the poor soles rating games when they are alone in the game-would, it must be hard to appreciate them.

I’ll be sitting in my multi-player game hoping you’ll come and appreciate it!

FOR THE darWIN – Jam Entry

The Idea

Before starting to come up with ideas, we sat down and wrote a list of what we were NOT going to do. By determining early on, what we were not going to do, it greatly helped narrow the scope of the idea. The biggest things we decided was that we would not do anything related to character evolution (leveling up, gaining powers, etc). That threw out a ton of ideas we were spitballing. Over a bowl of ramen, Nolan and I started brainstorming a game where you played Darwin, and had to discover evidence of evolution. As soon as we connected this idea to fast paced Match-3 style mechanics, we were set.

Code, Travis Chen (@TravisChen)

Most important thing here is to use what you’re comfortable with. For me, that’s Flixel. When I’m making game jam games, I dedicate more than half of my time to tuning and polishing the gameplay and user experience. Being comfortable is key so you can get to polishing and refining the experience as quickly as possible. Below is the code and also a game jam template I’ve created for future games:

The code for the project can be found here: Github: FOR THE darWIN!

Template project, I’ll continue to refine this: Github: Flixel Game Jam Template

Art, Nolan Fabricius (@ShiftlessHobo)

I’d like to point out a couple of things that may not be obvious upon one’s first play through. Firstly, the preist has Gout, That’s why he winces when he walks. He spends every waking moment in total misery. Secondly, Darwin’s jumping ability is historically accurate and not exaggerated at all. In sumation, I  regret the lack of weather effects, I feel like setting the game during a hurricane would’ve “totally flipped the script” so to speak.

User Learning

I wish we made the skull sequences for the game more clear and gave a little more instruction on what the player is supposed to do. While people seem to love the game, I think a number of people are missing some of the experience because of not understanding the sequences. So here’s a hint!

Play and rate FOR THE darWIN here!

And play our other jame games here!

Hope you all enjoyed playing our game as much as we’ve enjoyed playing all of yours! We’ve played over 100 games and are continueing to play more each day. 

Until Next Ludum!

Travis & Nolan

Well, now that Ludum Dare 48 #24 is done and the voting is almost over, I figured I would go over how I felt it went. First I’d say I was happy that I was able to produce a finished game, even though it lacked a lot of what I wanted in it as a final product.  I started the event by getting sick right off the bat and fighting an illness the entire time, this set me back a lot.

Here is what I did accomplish:
Completed the story for the game.
Completed the code and multiple paths and ways to lose.

Here is what I wanted in the game, that didn’t make it in the initial release:
Background Music — I had tools to do it, but didn’t know how to properly use them.
Sound Effects — Once again I had the tools, but lacked the knowledge.
Background Art — This was a big one. I had planned to hand draw all the backgrounds and scan them in.
Saturday morning the scanner fell and broke, leaving me at an impasse as I didn’t know how to draw well enough directly in Paint.Net

What I learned from the experience:
1. Expect the unexpected. Be prepared for illness, The loss of a type of toolset and any number of other things that could and probably will disrupt you.
2. Know your tools, having them available isn’t enough, if you have to fumble around with them to figure them out. With only a short time span you just don’t have that sort of time.
3. Have a back-up plan for any set of tools/hardware. If you plan on using a scanner for hand drawn art, plan on the possibility that you will need to go another route and be prepared for that outcome.

How I feel about the experience in general, is great. I managed to produce something instead of just thinking about it. I am sure in the future I can make much better games without the time constraint. So I plan to do just that, LD48 was the kick in the pants I needed to start developing myself.

Where does B M S go from here:
Well, I enjoyed the project and decided that I would add the things that I wanted in and release a 2.0 version.
I have added the music, as well as one of the many backgrounds.  I also have begun fixing grammer and spelling errors within the original story.
I plan to add a few extra scenes and lengthen the game, beyond what it is currently.

My LD24 48-hour entry Darwin Award was an infectious disease simulation with some population genetics thrown in.

A new post-compo version is available that allows the user to tweak all the various simulation parameters and adds some visual indicators to make the game play less opaque.

Hello Everyone,

First let me apologize for the delay. Thank all of you who played the game, left comments and feedback.

Now on to the Post Mortem:

Things that went well:

• Unity Is a great engine. Simple to pick up and work with. Curtis, our lead programmer, happens to actually be an artist first, and over the course of a couple of months was able to gain enough knowledge to make a solid game loop.
• Using Google hangout to coordinate everyone.
• Blender, My Paint and Gimp provided all of us a smooth pipeline for rapid asset generation.
• The Aesthetics, the team managed to keep a consistent look throughout the game.
• Spanking Boars was strangely addictive.
• Misfit Chris awesome music.

Things to improve:

• Camera System, It’s hard to see around corners and you could be attacked without warning.
• High level of difficulty, with high level criteria and no health pick ups, the boars can easily destroy you. Maybe that’s a plus thematically. (Survival of the fittest.)
• Death bug. It’s a very minimal bug that doesn’t break the game but can be annoying.
• Add Particles!
• Improve Animations speeds.
• Story elements.

The only bad thing that happened during the jam was when we opened the Pixel Oaks hangout to the public, we had a random ‘visitor’ show us his ‘metapod’s’ harden ability. We immediately reconsidered and switched our hangout to private.

Most of the things on the improve list are being worked on as we speak and most have been fixed, but we are also heavily considering making a full game based on the characters of the game.

If you have not done so please play our game and tell us what you think. You can view our entry here. Or click the picture.

Make sure to follow PixelOaks.com for any future indie projects from us.

Hello, fellow jammers!

we’ve had a bunch of family appointments lately, but finally managed to write a proper post mortem! This time, we experimented with procedural level generation – this is at the core of Singularity’s design and was where we spent the most time during that crazy weekend of sleep deprivation and an unhealthy peanut based diet. We wrote a post in our blog explaining in details how the procedural level generator works, take a look!

In our postmortem we do talk a little about how we spent our time, but the main focus is on what we learned about procedural level generation. But there are dev screenshots too, for we love those things, don’t we?

Placeholder graphics being replaced through the weekend

Yep, that awful head was the avatar in our first tests! For the close observers, you’ll notice that the bizarre archer enemy that starts spawning at about Difficulty 5 is actually the silhouette of a placeholder enemy that we didn’t have time to replace! 😉

Anyway, several hours putting background graphics together and programming particles everywhere, the game got a substantial visual overhaul mostly during the last day. Here’s another screenshot of how it looked by the end of the day:

So, to cut to the chase:

What worked

*The level generation technology works well, and is fun to create and to play!
*The brainless gameplay summed with infinite levels gave the game a good replay factor, despite its very limited development time.
*The open, non-content-based design enables us to expand the game more easily, if we want.
*The ease to test game balancing and incorporate new mechanics in the middle of real levels makes it much easier to balance and prototype new ideas. A new jump height can be tested in an infinite amount of situations, a new kind of cannon can be easily tested in all sorts of level topographies and in the middle of other obstacles.

What could have been different

*Specifically in the context of Ludum Dare, most players don’t play the same game more than once, due to the need of playing many other games. The levels being different at each playthrough isn’t something that makes a difference for those particular players.
*The enormous amount of time spent with technology and playtest left us with a short time for aesthetic polishing. The silhouette based graphics is interesting and easy to create, but we’d need more particles, shaders and color balancing to reach the level of quality that we originally aimed for.
*The possibility that the level generator could create impassable levels led us to create ‘conservative’ level chunks and less randomization than we’d like.

Take a look in our blog to see how the level generator works, to know more about us, or our main project The Journey of Eko, for which both Singularity and Tiny Shard are some sort of prototype. Or just find us in Twitter (@pixel_cows) and say hello!

And for you hardcore platformer fans who missed it, you can get Singularity HERE!

This is our second time in Ludum Dare, and once again it was a lot of fun! It is a true honor to be part of this great community. You guys ROCK!

Cheers from Brazil

Gabriel and JP
(@pixel_cows)

Ahoy all!
Here is quick post-mortem about my LD24 entry called Deep Sea Fish Loves You Forever. The game is about piloting an underwater exploration robot and analyzing oceanic wildlife with a pink sonar.

What went well

Tech & Engine
I used the same technologies as I did during my other 2 Ludum Dare and this is really paying off. I am now very fast when it comes to prototyping and testing things in Bacchus (my custom game framework written in Haxe). The only tech problem I had was due to a recent rewrite the audio part of my framework, more about this below.
I don’t think I fixed a single engine bug during the whole weekend.

Timing
My schedule was similar to last time.
1. Do graphics on Friday night (I hate using programmer art so I start with gfx)
2. Write the core game mechanics on Saturday
3. Make a title screen and winning/losing conditions on Saturday night
4. Add audio, polish gfx and playtest on Sunday

I think it worked quite well, except that my (few) testers did not find too many bugs so I ended up submitting early. I could have added more species to the game but I was afraid to break the balance (which I thought was good (it’s not)).

Iterations
Testers were very useful not for finding bugs but for highlighting usability issues. It is thanks to them that there is a species counter in the GUI. This feature makes the game’s objective a lot more explicit, I’m really happy someone came up with it (thanks Phil!).

I also used them to improve the opening tutorial. My first testers didn’t understand much about the game because the tutorial had too much text and some of it was not explicit enough. I had enough time to redesign it and then to improve its texts later on. It went from this to this:

Assets creation
During LD#22 I wasted a lot of time doing pixel art (and an 8-frames long walk-cycle!). This time I painted things with basic Photoshop brushes and scaled them down. I think it looks quite good and it took a lot less time. The only thing where I worked on the pixel level is the GUI but it didn’t take too long because it’s very geometric.

Audio was a pleasure to make using Reason and my Akai MPK Mini. I had not done anything audio-related in 6 months so I spent a few hours reading and watching Reason tutorials the day before to get back in the mood. It was my first time writing some Electro-ish music and that was a lot of fun. I used a morse signal sound for the main the track intro (just for fun) and I was inspired by The Future Sound of London for claves’ sounds on top of the beat.

I didn’t have a microphone this time around so I made all the sound effects using synths, but this was ok because most of them are mechanical anyway.

What went not-so-well

Theme & Concept
Evolution is not one of the themes I was looking forward to and I had a hard time coming up with something. As always, I was very stressed at the beginning and settled for a vague idea quickly. I thought I would make a game where you play as a bacteria and evolve from species to species by consuming radioactive pills in order to solve environment puzzle (think Space Station: Sillicon Valley on the N64). Of course there was no time for that so I scaled it down from top-down to underwater and side-scrolling. Then I started doing art, without any other ideas in mind. By the end of the night I had drawn all the fishes that are in the game (and a radioactive barrel which isn’t) but I didn’t have any puzzle or gameplay ideas to accompany them. It was supposed to look like the following picture. I think this scale looks a LOT better than the one I ended up using but I didn’t want the player ship to be 5 pixels big. Maybe I was wrong.

The next morning I realized this was not going to work because I would never have the time to do environment puzzles, animations and gameplay programming for all the species. The challenge became to find another game concept where I could use all this art while keeping the evolution theme. After half an hour of panicking, I came up with the final concept. As a result, it doesn’t fit the theme too well (esp. in its gameplay).

Computer
My computer did shut down without a warning twice during the weekend. The second time it did, it decided not to turn on again so I went to bed. The next morning I had to open it and replug the hard drives, I think the SATA cables were twisted too hard or something. That was very scary and I thought I might have to go finish my game at the office (it was under version control so I wasn’t afraid of losing any work).

Food
I put some barbecue sauce in my sandwiches and omitted the eggs. BAD BAD mistakes.

Performance
I heard the game was very very slow on some computers =(
I didn’t pay any attention to performance because everything was running at a solid 60FPS on my machine. Some obvious optimizations could have been done to improve that. Not drawing a 2000 pixels tall half-transparent gradient on top of the screen would have been a good start.
Also, I found out that the new audio work I had done in my engine was painfully slow so I added a dirty one line hack to bypass it.

All in all, I had a lot of fun and I’m very happy (and proud!) I made this game, even though it’s far from perfect. Thanks a lot for reading and for being such a friendly community!

Tags: post-mortem

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 at 3:08 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Finally I found some time to make a post-mortem for “Watercolor Wheel Evolution“:

What went well:

• Letting my daughter with her now 3 years doing the art. She did incredibly well, had fun doing this (as every time she can make some watercolor pictures), and was really impressed with the result in the game. Seeing her self painted creatures move along the screen put a really big smile on her face. Is there a better way to give your child some insight into your game-making hobby?

My daughter at work doing the game sprites.

• Being in the jam – not only due to the teamwork but to have this extra day. This is quite valuable with wife and two children at home.
• Fixing late bugs. Wow, it is quite scary everytime what strange bugs will appear if your game is almost finished and the deadline approaching. But I could fix them.
• Noticing the progress I’ve made since my first LD one year ago. This is one of the greatest aspects of this time restricted jams. You really get a hang on efficient techniques for creating and developing and also improve in code structuring even if it’s still quite a mess compared with a project in a more extended time frame. The sound/music recording, which cost me some time last LD, was merely a routine this time.

Like last LD: totally professional recording equipment.

What went wrong:

• The game mechanics. I totally missed the point with giving the player a good incentive doing the things the player should do to make the mechanics work. I don’t know if that was due to lack of testing the game or a misconception of the whole mechanics.
• Social (real) life. My wife fled with the children on sunday noon as I was too much into game development. Returned in the evening ;).

So if you like to, you can play and rate here.

The result.

Tags: handdrawn, post-mortem, pygame, python

Hi!

I will talk about Moche, a screen splitting game.

First, comments on my game made me pretty happy – insane is probably the most used word to describe the game, so I think I have accomplished what I wanted.

I have made a post-compo version of my game, which correct many problems. The time I spent on post-compo has been really usefull to understand my errors.

What went well

Engine

I have used Unity3D to make a 2D game. Using a 2D engine would have been really benefical for the performances, allowing a better optimisation than the use of multiple Cameras on Unity. However, I think I’m much quicker to create mini-games in Unity. So, even if it would have been much better to create the game with something else, I don’t regret using Unity for the ludum.

Sound

Well, for my first attempt doing sound, I must tell I’m pretty happy with the result. With some tips from friends, procedural music generation with MIDI sounds is quite easy and fast to do, and not so awful.

What was just OK

Bugs & Crashes

Well, I couldn’t fix all the bugs for the ludum. But a huge problem was the game crashing when you were splitting too much – depending of your computer. Many players have crashed the game while testing it, it’s a shame. I knew that, but decided not to spend time on this issue. However, I started investigating this for the post-compo version – I have really improved performance, and you should crash way latter now. This improvement took me 5 or 6 hours, so I think I’m pretty confident with the fact of not having it fixed for the ludum – I prefer a ludum version with more fun, even if it crashes.

What I did really wrong

Graphics

Ok, graphics are bad. Really bad. But I have the talent of a 4 year old child when it comes to drawing – and Moche means ugly in french, after all.So yeah, I would have liked better graphics – the game would deserved them – but I just can’t, sorry.

Comprehensibility

Here is the real problem : game is really hard to understand. You have to split the screen to improve your score – when you split, the two created screens perform different actions. First, there was no border between screens in the ludum version, which made it really hard. I’ve added this in, like, 10 minutes in the post-compo version, and it really adds much to the game. In the same way, the fighting game had absolutely no feedback – nobody understand what happens. Again, in 20 minutes I added feedbacks for the post-compo version. You also are given a bonus (invincibility for the runner, unsplit for the fighting game), but this is not explained, and really not understandable.

So, the real error done was : not having anyone testing my game before the end of the ludum. We were three people in my house, I was discussing with friends on IRC, I could have made them test the game to have clues about this. I will think about that for the next ludum.

Scoring

I think the scoring system is quite funny, but it had no leaderboard, so it wasn’t really usefull. It took an hour to add an online leaderboard for the post-compo version. I should have done that sooner.

Conclusion

Well, I’m pretty happy with this ludum, and definitely want to do the next one. Playing a lot of games is fun too.
Oh, and if you want to play, try the desktop version, I find it less crashing than the web version – and check the post-compo too !

Play

Hi guys, we spent our week to finish “Promoted!”
We are polishing it right now,
Hope you will be able to play it this week-end.

Hello fellow LD people!

I have participated in Ludum Dare 24 with my game, Dissolution. Many of you said that you wanted more of it, so I’m beginning to work on more. An awesome writer is working with me to bring more depth into this project. Together we will explore the subject of life and death and, well, dissolution, as deeply as anyone has ever explored in a game.

But in order for this epic project to succeed, we need your support. I’m sure that you will buy Bundle-In-A-Box (http://bundle-in-a-box.com/) anyway, so when you come to redeem your games, please vote for Dissolution if this is something you think you would like to play as a full game in future. The more votes we can get—the closer we will be to receiving a grant, it’s really that simple.

Thank you!

PS: If there are any troubles with the list, or you have feature request or opinions, let me know in the comments. I really want to make this an easy way to rate low-rating games.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2012 at 1:21 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

We didn’t manage to complete the game on time. That’s why we’ve just finished and released it today. The result is:

Codename E

Codename E
Program the robot’s behavior. Guide him through all the obstacles to the exit. Collect all of the modules to extend its functionality.

How to play
In the command input window (> _) sequentially enter commands to move the robot. The list of available commands appears in the RTFM. All commands have the following form – AAX, AA where two-letter command, X parameter of the function (from 1 to 9. Typically, the number of tiles to move).

For example, to move the robot forward for 5 tiles, enter MF5. Need to type all the commands to complete a level. Limit – 15 commands.

We used:
Programming Language: Monkey
Framework: Flixel for Monkey
Graphics editor: Inkscape
Level Editor: DAME
Sound editor: Bfxr
Music editor: GarageBand for iPad

After the competition the game has changed little. Bugs were fixed, interface was finalized and sounds were added.

You can play flash-version of the game here – http://lab.devolonter.ru/games/ld24/codename-e.html

What went wrong

– We spent a lot of time choosing the plot
– Even longer we were choosing visual style
– We didn’t have enough experience working with tiles
– We were very tired

This was my first foray into the LD compo and my first postmortem, so here goes…

What went right:

I spent about 2 hours thinking about the theme and how I could marry the theme to the game mechanics before I did any asset development.  I did not get started until around noon on Saturday.  Even then, instead of diving right into code or asset creation, I just sat on my back porch for several hours and thought about the theme.  This allowed me to focus on what mechanic I wanted my game to have and how it would be influenced by/reenforce the theme.

I spent the majority of the first day on the mechanic.  I did not worry about art assets, music, sound or quality code during this time.  Instead I just played around with the player movement and the mechanic of shrinking/growing based on what the player was doing.  Once I had the main mechanic nailed down, it was pretty easy to knock out levels utilizing it.

I set a clear scope that was very manageable.  I really wanted to be able to work on my game casually, and spend time tweaking whatever I felt needed work.  So I really tried to set a goal and scope that I felt was easily achievable.  It turned out for the most part I was correct.  This led to a fun weekend with ample time for error correction (aside the physics problems below).

What went wrong:

NO PLAYTESTING! and therefore floaty physics.  I don’t have much experience with platformers.  The physics and movement of the player felt pretty smooth to me, but of course I was developing it.  I did not have anyone play the game until about 3 hours before the deadline.  It was readily apparent when they played that my physics for the player were floaty and slippery.  Unfortunately, because I did not have anyone play it beforehand, it left me little time to fix the issues.

When the rules say you must create your own assets, YOU MUST CREATE YOUR OWN ASSETS!  This was just a stupid oversight from me.  For some reason I did not think about the music in the game on the same level as art and code.  So Saturday evening I picked out a nice song online that was free to use through the creative commons license.  Then, as I was sitting in front of my computer on Sunday, it dawned on me that I had to create my own music.  I have no music making tools, and no knowledge on how to make game music.  Luckily I recorded myself whistling in Audacity and tweaked it enough to make it work.  Had my game not had a minimalist style, I would have been less fortunate.

It is unclear for the player what to do.  Which can be equated to poor level design.  This goes back to playtesting, but in 48 hours there is not a lot of time.  I should be more sensitive to a new players perspective, and build levels in such a way as to lead them where they need to go.  The game should be challenging by design, not by developer oversight.

Thanks for reading.  I had a great time.  Here is a link to the game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=13158

Pjchardt

   I’m 7Soul and I’m the programmer of Dead Pixel Games, a group of 5 brazilian friends with a passion for game design.

   Cosmic Canvas is our second ludum dare game, the first being Biodome.

   I don’t have much to say, other than go play our game, and have fun.

Tags: 7Soul, Dead Pixel Games, postmortem

I was curious to play the Android entries for LD #24 since Android is shaping up to be an awesome gaming platform (Ouya anyone ?) … so I’ve compiled a little list. I think I caught them all …

Click Red, Eat Rest – Beep2Bleep – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| Web

| Android

| Source

Chromasome – Jeremy Nikolai – Jam Entry

Platforms:

| Linux (32/64-bit)

| Android

| Windows (32/64-bit)

| OS/X

Caveman’s Quest for Food – jfroco – Jam Entry

Platforms:

| Web (HTML5)

| Windows

| Android

Survival Of The Tastiest – zeh – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| Web

| Android

| Source

ProtoZoo – raver1975 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| Web 1.1

| Android 1.1

| Java 1.1

| Source 1.0

| Java 1.0

Death Hockey – Toby – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| Windows

| Source

| Android

| OS/X

Clever Blocks – Cthulhu – Jam Entry

Platforms:

| Android (Post Compo)

| Sources

| Windows / Linux / Mac

Dig, Jesus! Dig! – monkeymad2 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| Web

| Web (iOS / Android)

| Source

One Last Chance – dr_soda – Jam Entry

Platforms:

| Web (Unity)

| Android (.apk)

Aggrandize – moomoo112 – Jam Entry

Platforms:

| Source

| Android

Nom’s Evolvathlon – bvanschooten – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| Web

| Android

| Win/Mac/Lin (java)

| Source

Winding of Isaac – TehSkull – Jam Entry

Platforms:

| Source

| Android

| MP3

Temporal Agent – Deykoweec – Jam Entry

Platforms:

| Android

ANT FIGHT CLUB – gamblore – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| Source

| Android

| AndroidPunk

ANT FIGHT CLUB – gamblore – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| Source

| Android

| AndroidPunk

Troll Spirit – zzorn – Jam Entry

Platforms:

| Windows

| Source

| Android

| OS/X

| Linux

Firefly – timtipgames – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| AllOS (Java)

| Sources

| Web (Applet)

| Tutorial

| Android (GooglePlay)

Super Genome: Hyper Evolution Turbo Edition – Raptor85 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Platforms:

| windows

| source

| android

| video

| Linux x86-64

(and one post compo bonus I found: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/09/03/going-mobile-and-also-some-graphs/)

Tags: android

A few things I’ve been up to since…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15315

Pretty new real time Shadows!

People seemed to think that the game was a good idea and that they wanted to see where it would go. Well let me tell you; I’m planning on taking the game to completion, hopefully releasing it on Steam or something.

I’ve been up to a bunch of stuff, new graphics (more to come), better collision, more levels, analytics (playtomic right now but probably going to change that) I’m currently working on adding a scripting language into the game engine I’m writing. I want to be able to script from within the Level Editor (Tiled) that I’m using.

My first thought was to use Lua. There’s a nice java lua project out there (here) however I wasn’t really super sold on the idea since I’ve used Groovy at work and I know it pretty solidly I leaned more towards using it.  Using Groovy meant though that porting to Android will most likely not be an option anymore. I’m guess I’m  not super concerned with that though, maybe if Ouya is any good I’ll regret that decision, but as for an Android version I don’t think that the game would work at all with crappy touch screen controls. Anyways, I ended up going with groovy; so we’ll see how that turns out.

Ultimately I’d like to release a level editor that would let people create their own levels for the game, so I think having a custom scripting language inside the game would really help.

As for the controls…

People seemed to be confused by the controls in the game; which I would have to agree weren’t the best. My original idea was to use the mouse to drag a square over the Blocks you wanted to mate. However due to the fact that it wasn’t working and the deadline was approaching I bailed on that solution. Now that I have more time I can get that to work, although I have to say I’ve grown attached to the way it is. I’m hoping there’s a way to have the best of both worlds; any suggestions are welcome 😀

People also noted that switching between the blocks was confusing so I’ve changed that around a bit, instead of pressing “e” or “q” to switch between the blocks I’ve made it so each block will have a number that is displayed above it, which will correspond to the 1-0 keys on the keyboard. If you press that number you switch to that block. It also means that the total number of blocks you can have on the screen is 10 at any point in time, but I think that this is a little easier to understand/ know where you’re going to switch to.

Anyhoo so concludes this update 😀

Unnatural selection (my LD24 entry) was originally only a Unity webplayer game, but now has Windows and Mac standalone builds available – which may or may not mean that Linux users can get it to run under emulation.

Looking at comments left on a lot of the games I’ve been rating, I’m a little bit perplexed by the number of Linux users who post on games that don’t profess to support Linux, just to say that they can’t run the game under emulation on Linux – because it’s running on a framework/engine that is known not to work on Linux.

Well what did they expect?

Did they expect a solo indie dev in 48 hours to not only have written a complete game but also figured out how to overcome the limitations of XNA or the Unity web plugin? Or do Linux users just have a chip on their shoulders when it comes to games? 😉

Rift of Time was made by a team of four people from France:

– Laetitia Meyerfeld: graphics
– Matthieu Bonneau: sound design
– Mélanie Grosmangin: game design
– Martin Bussy-Pâris: programming, sound implementation, sound design

Mélanie will introduce you to the Concept and the Gameplay, and Martin will deal with Programming and Sound Implementation.

Concept

The theme of evolution was developed through the meeting between an ingenious modern scientist, whose name is Sapiette, and a prehistoric man, Australo. Both characters possess their own gameplay, directly influenced by their level of evolution. Sapiette makes use of advanced technology while Australo stuns the enemies by yelling at them.

Rift of time is a two players game. The goal is to escape a laboratory full of zombie scientists.

The idea is to create a collaborative gameplay between the two players: the game can’t be beat without this collaboration. Australo must protect Sapiette by stunning the enemies before they kill him, while Sapiette must open the different doors and unlock elevators in order to escape the scientific complex with Australo.

Gameplay

The two players use the same keyboard. Sapiette plays with the keys A and D to move left and right and the Space key to activate different mechanisms. To move, Australo plays with the arrow keys. What makes Rift of Time different is that the player must yell in his microphone to stun the enemies.

The game mechanics are quite simple. Other features would have provided more challenge and difficulty, but we didn’t have the time to design and program them!

To skirt the problem, I tried to design a level progression that benefits from the main feature.

About level design, the only way for me to control the difficulty was the number of monsters in the place. I created a trap too, at the end of the level: a vicious door with lots of monsters when you activate a button!

I organized the level around 4 different areas. In order to break the monotony, I tried to give each area a different structure, which you’ll notice by the number of floors and doors in the area and by the different ways to open these doors.

The principal difficulty to build the level design was to test it, which meant repeatedly yelling in the microphone… Picture me at 4am, in the room with the rest of the team, working hard to finish the game… Near the end, I started to hyperventilate!

Some players have asked us to implement an alternative control for Australo’s shout. While being fully aware that some people are shy, have children in bed or don’t have microphones, we decided against it: we feel that would kill the gameplay, which would then become unoriginal and far less fun.

Programming

Considering I am a sound designer with limited programming skills, I decided to use Game Maker, a 2D game engine that I know pretty well. Moreover, GMWwise, a Game Maker plugin made by Cédric Liaudet, allowed me to easily integrate Wwise (the sound engine) into the game. You’ll understand why I needed Wwise so badly in the Sound Implementation part.

So, through programming in Game Maker, the main issue I encountered was the elevators system: I think I spent about 15 hours coding the lifts and fixing their bugs. And yet they’re still not perfect: some players have reported in the comments that they’ve had a critical collision issue activating the lift that freezes both characters. It requires to restart the level (in this case, the checkpoints don’t work, unfortunately).

However, through the playtests we’ve made, both during and after the jam, this bug only appeared one time, so it‘d be pretty difficult for me to find the source of the problem.

Sound Implementation

The main gameplay mechanic is based on the audio input and Wwise is the simplest way to implement it into our game. In fact, Wwise’s authoring tool allows the sound designer to set the audio input like any ordinary audio source. It’s then possible to use it in the tool as if it had been an audio sample.

[SPOIL]

Okay, so there’s a big revelation for you: Rift ot Time does not actually measure how cavernous, terrifying or prehistorical your voice is. Wwise only conveys to the game the volume of the audio input, via a Real-Time Parameter Control (a RTPC). So it turns out you really only have to blow in your microphone, and it will work almost as well as if you shout. But admit it: it’s just far less fun to blow at the zombies than to yell at them.

[/SPOIL]

By default, in Wwise, once the audio input is activated, you hear it through the master bus. Yet in this case, we didn’t want the players to hear it: it’s useless, unaesthetic as part of the whole soundtrack, and audio feedback can occur. I couldn’t just mute it though, because I needed Wwise to send its RTPC value to the game. So I put the RTPC on the audio bus containing the audio input and I routed this bus to another muted bus. The audio input is then muted to the players, but the game gets the RTPC value.

Audiokinetic, the studio which develops the Wwise audio engine, really liked our game and presented it at the Summer School on Game Audio on September 5th, in Ankara, Turkey. We have been told that the PhDs there loved to yell at zombies during the lecture.

Link to the Summer School on Game Audio:
http://s3p-gameaudio.ii.metu.edu.tr/~s3p-gameaudio/index.html

We hope that you’ll enjoy the game as much as we enjoyed creating it!

Link to the Rift of Time’s entry:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=12981

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

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

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

What went right?

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

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

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

What went wrong?

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

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

In conclusion.

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

 /SteelRaven7

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

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

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

Here are my favorites (no particular order) :

Darwinphony – philosophistry – 48 Hour Compo Entry

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

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

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

Parental Guidance – Maple – 48 Hour Compo Entry

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

life, undeath – Zillix – 48 Hour Compo Entry

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

Super Clew Land – Team Clew – Jam Entry

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

Coin-Operated Afternoon – Pierrec – Jam Entry

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

Dawn – SteelRaven7 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

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

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

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

Martha Z. – Sachka – 48 Hour Compo Entry

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

Death Death Evolution – Adhesion – Jam Entry

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

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

Sidescroller Evolution – Kassoon – Jam Entry

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

Psychiatric Evaluation – ConflictiveLabs – Jam Entry

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

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

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

***

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

Lucas’s Quest Backwards – Volute – Jam Entry

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

Thanks for reading

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

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

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

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

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

Lesterpig.

Hello everybody!

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

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Micro Post Mortem

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

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

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

Timelapse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What went wrong:

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

What went right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From new things:

– Title screen

– scores, lives, instructions on screen

– bananas

– third level with new mechanics!

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

– end screen

– high score system

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

Tags: poland, renegades

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

And finally, this came in the mail:

Tags: final, shirt

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

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

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

Here’s how that went…

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the support and the awesome games! 

Time to wrap it up with a little summary!

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward to the next LD!

– The Highbred Pixel entry page –

 – Website –

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2012 at 11:26 am and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks NG anywhere!

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will compile a list as well.

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

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

How did I do?

You can view your results here:

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

The individual category results are just above your comments.

Top 50 Games

Check out winning competition and jam games here:

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

Winners are decided by the Overall category.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Categorical Top 25s

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

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

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

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

October Challenge 2012

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

Ludum Dare 25 – December 2012

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

September Mini LD, hosted by Ratking

December not soon enough?

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

Suggestions

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

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

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

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

* * *

- Announcement
- Real World Gatherings
- Warmup Games

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

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2012 at 7:15 pm and is filed under LD #24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Hi there !

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

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

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

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

Enjoy !

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

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

What Went Well

Analytics

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

PlayN

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

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

GUI

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

Evolution

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

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

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

Music

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

What Went… Less Well

PlayN

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

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

AI

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

The Name

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

Testing and Balance

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

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

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

Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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