Just looking at all of the entries into Ludum Dare is amazing. We can’t wait to start playing some of these games. However, we need to finish our game first.

I’m the last person on my team still awake, but I will be going to bed soon. School seems to be a major problem. To be precise, an eight hour problem. After I get home from school, I’ll be rushing to finish a level editor and both of our artists will be hurriedly finishing additional levels. As far as I can tell, we have all of the major mechanics finished and we just have to finish the art, levels, and a few finer details of the gameplay experience. Unfortunately, with the time being taken up by school, tomorrow will be a mad dash to get everything finished. Still, all things considered, I’m very happy with how far along we are.

Our working (and possibly final) title sums up our game pretty well: “Dr. Ludum’s Exploding Goats”. Our game is a 2D platformer style game where you play as the evil Dr. Ludum. Your job is to plant goat bombs and blow up innocent bystanders. Points are awarded based on the length of the fuse on the bomb- er, goat. When the fuse runs out, the goat explodes. You had better make sure you are nowhere near the goat when the timer hits zero. It would hurt, I kid you not.

I certainly don’t believe our game is as good as some of the others I’ve seen out there, but I’m still very impressed with what we’ve accomplished so far. This has definitely been a fun and worthwhile experience.

Bit of a development diary: I ran into a roadblock today when I moved from a static map to one loaded from a configuration file. The problem with my setup is that it’s basic C++ with SFML without all of the useful utilities you come to expect from other things. Java has been pampering me far too long with Tokenizers. In the end, I found a useful snippet on Stack Overflow that I added to my code. I know it isn’t exactly good practice, but it’s working for now, which is all that matters for the moment.

Also, just a friendly reminder that all of our code is available on my Github page.

Anyways, I think I’m going to head to bed. I have a physics test tomorrow that I haven’t studied for in the slightest. Hopefully I won’t be tired and clueless tomorrow. After that, we’ll be making a mad dash to finish the game for the jam.

I replaced all the colored boxes with final art, thanks to my artistically inclined collaborators. The game is feeling a lot more fun and gets our idea across to some extent, but there’s still a ton of stuff to add.

Fortunately, I’ll have a lot of time tomorrow to work on this. I’m hoping to add multiple enemy types, player upgrades, health, scoring, particle effects, a scrolling background, sound effects, a title screen, a lose screen, a win screen, a tutorial…

Game done, submitted and slept the night. It was an intensive weekend, even though I only put in about 22 hours of work into the game. I really enjoyed creating a game in this timeframe. I also learnt a lot of things

I read the theme right when it was announced. It was 4 in the morning for me. I wanted to sleep a few hours after that, but the first hour I just could not get any sleep as my mind was working on ideas Once I got up after a few hours of sleep, I did about 1.5 hours of idea  generation, the result of which was the rough idea of my puzzle game. There were no goats or gnomes in there at this point.

I also wanted to interpret the theme in some way that would not be obvious right away. That is how I ended up in the farming world after reading the Wikipedia article on Villain

Here is the game page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18720

What I ended up using:

• Visual Studio 2012 for editing the HTML, Javascript and CSS
• Paint.net for drawing all the visuals
• Audacity for editing the sound effects
• iPolysix to compose the music
• Lame and oggenc2 to encode the music and sounds

What I will have to improve:

• Need to have a framework ready. One that would manage loading resources for example. Or manage my tiles better. The current framework I put together during the competition needs some rework.
• I did the tilemap composition by hand. I know there are tools to handle this, will need to look those up.
• Music. I created and added some music at the end, but I am not 100% satisfied. Will need to improve on that.

Tags: postmortem

What Went Right

• Having the best artist/roommate ever.
• Flixel – I’d never used it before, but I knew it by reputation.  It’s definitely a Game-Jam Tool – not a tight, cogent application framework, but a giant box of features thrown together and made as available as possible.
• Tight concept.  As soon as the idea of a reverse-schmup was well-articulated every design decision was easy.
• Boids/Flocking-Based AI.  It creates a natural motion that’s still very easy to control and constrain.

What Went Wrong

• FlxGroup Object Pools.  I was constantly leaking and spent too many cycles trying to puzzle it out.  I yanked it and replaced it with a linked-list solution in less time that I spent pointlessly poking variables in the debugger.
• Alpha-Beta-Pruning-Based AI.  Before flocking, my first attempt was to create a “perfect” AI that would only get hit when cornered, never by mistake.  The code was very complex and didn’t work very well, and the motion was jerky and unaesthetic.
• No threads or coroutines in ActionScript – lots of switches and ad hoc state variables.  What is this, the 90s???

Thanks for reading – now go play it!

Special thanks to my roommate Freddie “blob” T for the opportunity to make a sexy-looking game!

Tags: Flixel, postmortem

I’m now back from celebrating another shipped title! 😀

‘Bret’ is a fixed-view shooter where you crush the adorable poon in the vicinity of your home. Game Here

Now I will celebrate further by playing & rating some SWEET games! Happy LD everyone!

We finished our game, and I can’t be more proud. I admit, it’s not the most amazing game, but darn it was fun to work on it and finish it in such a short time.

It was a fantastic experience, and I’m so happy I accomplished it. I really look forward to using this steam to work on my personal game, and to compete in future LDs.

Here’s the final game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18425

I would also like to give a huge shout out and thanks to the people that posted their progress and awesome games. You played a vital role in motivating me to know it IS possible to pull it off, and to do it on a level I’m not even close to. I look forward to one day being on that level.

Cheers, and until the next LD.

Every Ludum Dare the factor that troubles us the most is: “How do we feed ourselves”.

And seeing the posts by other jammers of their food has led us to believe that this issue troubles many others as well.

So in response we’ve compiled a guide to being correctly nutritious (and alert) during your game jam challenge. It utilizes a four part solution. Just check out the video.

We are at the moment still working on getting out a game that can be played and thats fun according to the theme, but not 100% sur its going to happen !

I have seen many very nice projects out there all you 48h ludum dares !

Going back to coding the server side… (ill never do a server in a ludumdare again :))

http://ludum.atrodo.org/

I’ve worked for several hours now on the AI for white, and the results are not spectacular.  He’s not as stupid, but I’m just not getting him smart effort to be much of a challenge.  I figured this was going to be my hardest point.  But, the game is playable, and I’m quite proud of it.

Expect a postmortem later, but I doubt I’ll be able to polish it much before time’s up.

1. Get the engine setup
2. Make a black and white boxes for the two characters
3. Setup terrain generation to have a playing field
4. Create sprites for sword attacks
5. Give white a stupid ai
6. Give white and black health and health bars
7. Setup multiple rounds
8. Create guns with the physics system
9. Create special weapons
10. Add gaining and losing guns
11. Make white not completly stupid
12. Polish

I wasn’t enough lively yesterday to post anything, so I’m announcing only today my first entry for the Ludun Dare.  The game is co-produced with Tyu as a graphist and Lapinou as a  programmer, I was a graphist on it.

I’m glad it’s finished and well finished. I’m really pleased by the outcoming of it. Play race against the machine here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15327

Oh My that was fun!

There was a portion of time where I didn’t think I was going to finish this one.  I originally started off with an idea about being the villian in a scooby doo episode – scaring away people from real estate so as to lower the price.  (of course, it was going to be called “And I would have got away with it”), but after a day or so of development, my heart just wasn’t in it.  I took some time off, had a night to chill, and then came up with the idea for ‘The Twist’, my Moustache Twirling game.  And I couldn’t be happier I switched.

Sure, there are problems with my finished product

– Moustaches bug out sometime
– I constantly misspelt ‘Moustache’ as ‘MousEstache’
– Multitouch goes weird on tablets sometimes
– For some reason my perfectly timed audio is no longer perfectly timed

And there’s a bunch of features that I never got time to implement

– ‘Angry’ lines when you get hit
– ‘Chains’ of combos ( ie, plans + damsels + money + getaway = super combo ).

But Im really happy with what I accomplished in the time I spent.  I hope you all had as much fun as I had working on your own games. Im now going to enjoy playing each and every one of them!

You can play my entry here, or – here’s a video of a round in action!

Epic Rampage screenshot

Personal Goals

For this solo jam I had basically decided on two goals beforehand which I would work towards in any case.

My first goal was to make game making fun again. Recently I’ve been very busy developing a sequel to this thing, but development has been kinda slow so I’ve been feeling in rut. Entering jams like this one helps to feel that thrill again. There’s just nothing like pumping out a game under pressure to get the blood flowing. (pun intended)

My second goal was to develop my artistic side. As I consider myself primarily a coder, I have noticed my lack of artistic skills often limits me in various ways. I wanted to remedy that, so I practised Aseprite and created some fine pixel art this time.

What Went Wrong

• Sprites: Player character. Way too much time was spent perfecting these sprites. If I had instead spent more time on the code and on different enemies and buildings, the overall game might have been much better. Good thing that time was still useful as I have developed a bit of a feel for process. The player now looks a lot better than he looked at the beginning. (don’t laugh, check the time lapse)
• Balance: This is a game design issue that I still need to grapple. What”s the best approach to designing systems that make sure NPCs behave in fun ways, levels look interesting, and enemies spawn in sensible amounts as the game progresses? I think only experience will solve this one, and maybe more thinking ahead of time.
• Bugs: Some annoying Unity bug I had not encountered before. Somehow importing audio files ceased to work properly, meaning I could no longer mark them as 2d sounds. It is the reason some sound effects are barely audible.

What Went Okay

• Choice of engine: Unity3
  I had anticipated making a game in a style similar to Minecraft or Fex (pixel art on 3d geometry) which would suit Unity, my engine of preference. However, when I got my actual game idea, I dropped that in favor of going all-in 2d. Installing a different DE did not seem like a fun way to waste time, so I decided to keep using Unity. In retrospect it might have been slightly easier to work in a native 2d engine or something like Flash, but once you know the tricks, it’s not all that different or hard to use a 3d engine for pure 2d.

What Went Right

• Infrastructure: Implementing sprite animations was much easier than I thought it would be. As long as you think it out in advance, and don’t need too much optimization, it can be done in a very short time frame.
• Sprites: Lots and lots of enemies. Each of them with his own 16×16 sprites.
• Sprites: Player character. That climbing animation looks good!

Time lapse

Recorded with Chronolapse at 1 frame per minute, over ~35 working hours. processed by VirtualDub and Hybrid.

 Conclusion

This has turned out to be a great little game, with a lot of potential. I can’t wait to develop it further and see what else I can do with it. But first some optimization. Some of that haste-induced code is ugly! Then we’ll start the actual 99% the work on any game, namely of polish… polish… and more polish.

Regardless of reception or overall success of this game, I’ve had a blast participating in this Ludum Dare for the first time. I think this is not the last time you’ll hear of me.

Tags: compo, motivation, postmortem, timelapse, unity3d

Airship Infiltration is a steampunky game where you have to generically break into a base of some sort (in this case, an airship) and wreak havoc.

You can play the game here!

What went right:

• Engine: Impact JS is a fantastic engine. Really easy to use, powerful and had everything I needed. It’s also really easy to extend if you want to add or change a bit of functionality. The level editor isn’t. perfect but it’s still really useful. So glad I used this instead of Flixel.
• Gameplay: The gameplay is what I wanted… Nothing more to say. I’m sure there’s more scope for interesting puzzles though, as opposed to just running/hacking/shooting (but it could easily just turn into a Stealth Bastard clone if I’m not careful).
• Sprites: The sprites look pretty good I think. Admittedly I did have to do some tracing to get the player and guard animations looking nice, but if I didn’t then… Well, they would be terrible 😛
• Intro/Outro sequences: They’re basic but it’s exactly what I had in my head!

What went wrong:

• Levels: I didn’t have enough time for levels. The three that are in the game now are very basic.
• Sprites: They took a long time. The player and guard sprites took nearly an hour each to do. I don’t know how. Also, my tilemaps barely got used. I didn’t have time to flesh out the levels with decent scenery, which is a shame because Impact has a nice parallax background system for backgrounds.
• Music: When I fired up FL Studio I found out that my chiptune VSTs weren’t there. They were on my old laptop (long gone) instead of my new PC, so I had to find and download them again. Also, I’m not good at making villainous chiptune music (unless it’s disco villainous chiptune music, but that didn’t fit).
• Pointless features: There’s a ‘Gold’ entity that I coded that you can collect, and then when you die you drop it all. I don’t know why it’s there, and it isn’t even in any of the levels… It’s just dead code.
• Testing: I didn’t do any testing on other computers. The game is HTML5/Javascript, so it’ll work on all decent browsers, but I don’t know how well it will run… Testing on a high end Macbook isn’t particularly informative.
• Timing: I wasn’t able to get started until the mid afternoon I had to work right up til the deadline (which was 2AM for me).

I might work on it some more this week – make more levels, fix bugs, polish, etc. Then I’ll post it up for you all to have a look at (but not to rate, obviously!)

I also hope to rate and comment on as many games as possible! The last few times I’ve been slacking – but this time I really want to put in the effort.

This is my second Ludum Dare, and this time I have managed to actually finish a game, not just abandon one. The game is called Pineapple Dreams—it is my first fast-paced action game. The theme was “You Are the Villain,” so I made something as a tribute to the good old ultra-violence. That said, malchiki and devochki, I give you Pineapple Dreams—go kill yourself some humans now!

I have also discovered that (at least for me) the key to a successful LD48 is no level design and/or artwork/animation, because those things take all the time. Having those time-consuming things out of the way, I managed to compose a tune for this game that I’m rather happy with. I even recorded a couple of sounds and integrated them properly. And I slept two full nights during this LD, which is completely unthinkable.

Tags: Ludum Dare, music, screenshots, sounds, violence, You are the villain

Our build is up! We are now working on a post-Jam build, and bugfixing on the beta. Level 1 took WAY too long, but we finished it.

And yes.

I finished my game on time! In the end I’m quite happy with it, even though I wish I had more time to improve the graphics and add a few more gameplay elements. But still, there’s plenty to do and enough variety to make you want to murder all the evil scientists beat all the levels (I hope!). You can find it here

Man, I wish I’d blown off going to work on Saturday and not played WoW afterward.  I totally would have finished this rockin tower/formation defense type game on time

I guess that in retrospect I bent the rules a little by not explicitly posting the source for the game engine code I was planning to use ahead of time, though, so if I had somehow managed to win the contest I could have been disqualified.

Then again, anyone who completes a game is pretty much a winner!

Remaining:
– Actual projectile functionality

– Building units (about a third done already)

– Displaying unit HP (Feature Cut)

– Displaying attack notification text that fades away

– Showing that a unit was attacked by flashing it or something (Feature Cut)

– Pathing/collision (Feature Cut, clipping disabled)

– End game conditions

– Detecting unit death

+ Game Balance

My Jam entry
Robogoat

Can I submit a Jam entry & LD48 entry? The submit page just takes me to edit my LD48 entry…

This was a fun experience! It was my first LD and game jam, luckily I was well prepared

I hope you like my game: (play on web here)