I feel like I had a strong idea, but a packed weekend of can’t-miss events (e.g. friend’s Christmas party, son’s birthday party) made it impossible to hit the Compo deadline. Now I’m gunning for Jam, even though I’m going solo. But enough whining! Here are some screens as I do my best to thrash this out in the time remaining. The game is called “This Is How It Ends”. You are a villain who has effectively ended life on the planet. To understand how a person could get to that point, your story plays out in reverse, on a single stage that changes to reflect your latest calamity. Below is Stage 7 (the beginning) and next is Stage 5:

One of the more fun bits has been describing these heinous acts of pseudo-science, and putting your finger on the trigger. Such as the world-ender right here:

*wipes brow* *chugs energy* OK, let’s go.

We have a playable game on our hands!

http://1337.pro/Shared/LudumDare/LairDefense.apk

I played pretty fast and loose with memory allocation (since it’s Java, you never have to think about memory allocation, right??) and the code has comments such as this:

//This is what we in the industry call “Big ‘O’ of N squared

but it should work on just about any Android phone from the last year and a half (has it really been that long since my first finished Ludum Dare attempt?  For that one, the same exact engine required a top of the line Nexus One)

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

Going to add in the rest of the basic gameplay elements and try to balance it a little, then update my submission

Beast!!

Want to test you, eh? Do you need some money? Cause, you know,  you can win some real cash in Greed.

Post mortem coming in the next few days.

…so I started the competition with the question: who is the greatest villain of all time? I mean, the one that exists from the beginning of earth and managed to survive till now?

The answer, as you can see, was quite simple.

It’s your only chance to play the part of the most powerful race on earth. But watch out, because humans will make a strong resistance.

Battle with shit against fire to survive as much as you can!

What I did successfully:

1. Code in 48 hours an engine that allows me to add weapons and enemies very easily (sprites are the only problem :P)
2. Create a vintage coin-up screen blur and noise effect
3. Think about different kind of shits
4. Make pigeons actually funny

What I couldn’t do:

Music, unfortunately :// But an Atari-style soundtrack is about to be included soon.

NOW, take a look at it yourself:

Contest entry link -> http://buff.ly/TqADDD 

and, please, give me feedback if you want to.

Love you all.

It only took me half an hour to come up with the idea for my game – “Not Space Invaders”. Basically, it’s the good old space invaders but you play on the aliens side. Use the arrow keys to select an alien and shoot to the humans defending on the bottom of the screen.

The theme was “You Are The Villain” and I immediately thought of making the opposite of a game where you are the hero, and Space Invaders just seemed like the most achievable one. So achievable it is, that I finished the entry very quickly. Thus, I used most of the second day for polishing (title screen, little tutorial, music, etc).

I used Lua and LÖVE. I planned on using HTML5 with my own framework, but then I just decided LÖVE was easier.

You can get links and rate my game here. Here’s a screenshot:

So, Level 1 took a VERY VERY long time. But it was well worth it. Still working on Level 2 and I hope I get all the features done before the deadline. Even better yet, I hope we start on Level 3. Here is some pictures and link to the game

The game is cross-platform! (HTML5)

Eco Terroist

I had no idea what the goat was about, but because of all the mentions I assumed it was an inside joke, so I ended up putting one in my game. Now I’ve read that it’s a bonus theme?

Ho yes, thats right, we are that far behind on planning but the flash coder is confident of having a simple working version this evening !

A small screen for the road :

As a reminder : this game is “online” so to speak and the map is created by the players.
So You attack your “socalled” Friends 😉 (and they you ^^ … never trust friends ^^)

Hi All,

I ran into some snags with my project (I ended up really not liking it). So, I’m going to throw in the towel and walk away with what I’ve learned.

It’s unfinished and will therefore end up looping you back around. It ended up being a real downer. You can see the game in progress here:

Incident: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/64097284/Incident/index.html

First and foremost i had a lot of fun this weekend. Learning while you are doing an actual Game or Project is still the best way. I’m a Designer by profession and always wanted to make Games, but had no possibility to get around the coding part of Game-Developement. A year ago i discovered Stencyl. Stencyl’s brilliant visual Programming-Enviroment sucked me in the day i discovered it. I have to admit that without this brilliant Tool i wouldn’t be here making Games. I encourage everyone who is afraid of coding to look into this Tool, even though you won’t avoid digging into Game-Logic and stuff, you will be able to create Games without knowing an actual Coding-Language!

What went well

• i’ve manage to complete my Game (Yay!)
• my goal was to learn something about 2D-Arrays, which i did
• i encountered only minor bugs
• i made a nice music track with iNudge, even though i’m not into music-making at all
• i worked with Stencyl 3.0 for the first time
• fun fun fun

What could have been better

• my Game-Concept isn’t the best around, i would love to do more prototyping on the idea of moving Tokens trough the Game-Grid
• juiciness of the Game – due to time, i only made 3 real Sprite animations and would love to work on more fun animations
• Interface – the interface of the Game don’t tell you much about the game, Gameplay help, Tutorial and few more Text-Floater or Feedback would be nice
• Game-Ballancing: Cells spawn totally random right now, which leads to an unpredictable difficulty curve. Some type of Level-Design would be nice, to have a cool exponential difficulty curve.
• Interaction: Because i intended the Game to be on a Mobile-Device, the drag an drop system could need some improvement. It’s not always easy to see which bacteria is selected and ready to match.
• i liked the theme “Fortress” the most 😉

Summary

Making games is the best thing in the world and i will definitely join the next Ludum Dare.

Cheers Arnold

www.tinytouchtales.com

Tags: post-mortem

So the plan was to write the entire game in using the MOAI windows host, submit that, and then port over to the Chrome host, resolving any issues along the way.

Unfortunately this is more difficult than I had expected (due to unidentified errors) and so i’ll have to give up on this. Next time I really need to test all platforms at frequent intervals during development.

My first idea was to make a game about the dark lord who is trying to save himself from a prophesy of death brought by a hero by kidnapping and impregnating the princess so he can be reborn again.

I tried to prototype it as a board game but felt like it didn’t work. The idea was good but I couldn’t make a core gameplay from it. When I tried to mix it with additional mechanics of territorial conquest and resource management things got too complicated for a board game.

It pissed me off a lot and I’ve jumped to another idea in a different genre of platformer. It should be a dark knight running by a castle wall breaking through gates and slashing through guards to grab the princess. I was under a false impression that I have all the tools ready for it but alas my javascript code base lacked several important features:
– frame-based sprite animations switchable by name
– tween-based objects animations switchable by name
– collision detection with collision groups and easy to setup results processing
– simple audio API

So it’s ended in a whole lot of procrastination, waste of energy and lack of self confidence.

In the end of the first day I’ve jumped back to the original idea and started to prototype it as a simple adventure/strategy game where you as the dark lord talk to your servant imp who asks different questions about your actions for the day. Then next day comes, you listen to reports, give new commands and so on.

The goal is to live a long and evil life conquering the realm in the process.

In the beginning you own nothing but your lair and a gang of goblins. You can send your troops to siege, raze and pillow. Your evil actions makes you more popular among the monsters and from time to time they ask to join your cause. If you don’t act much your villainy fades, the monsters run off, and in the end you can even fall into slumber which is a game over.

Your acts of agression against villages and towns break the patience of the people and the king. So at some moment heroes begin their assasination attempts and your territorial conquest meets resistance from the king’s army.

The problem with heroes is everyone of those pesky bastards has a small chance to kill you. The more power you have the more the chance. There is a prophesy after all. To get around this problem you need to kidnap a princess and impregnate her using some special game mechanics. Of course when you kidnap the lady all kinds of heroes try to save her and you should be sure you can manage the situation. But if you have done your darkest deed you can die ’cause you will be reborn after several turns.

So much ideas. I’ve got to the level of ugly prototype where you can talk with your imp, the days pass, the monsters come and you can send them to the villages. The next step was to implement siege, raze and pillow mechanics. But I was already out of time.

Lessons learned:
– stick to one idea
– be good at low level and fast game prototyping
– ready your tools in advance ( again )
– get the core gameplay ready in the first day

Goatlings Poacher now has bombers, an interface and win and lose conditions! Plus a very snazzy in-game use of the +1 goat icon, if I do say so myself. 😀

Story: The Goatlings live in a complex hive-mind-society. You take advantage of their organization to poach them.

Gameplay: If you’ve played Lemmings, you know the drill: Goatlings just walk back and forth until you get them to do otherwise. Bombers don’t yet affect their surroundings.

Here is a Unity web build:

www.magiccarpenters.com/ld25/goatlings/a2

Some Linux users have expressed concern over web builds; I will make platform builds when it’s done!

Introduction
Hello! I’m GameRespect. Currently a student, and this was my first LD attempt.
This is my first post-mortem.

Concept/Story
The theme “You are the Villain” caught me off-guard, so I spend about 30 minutes after the announcement of the theme to come up with an interesting idea I’d like to explore about it. (Being a literature student, ) I thought of using the standard “Hero saves the Girl from the Villain” model and flip it on its head, so that we see what it may be like after, for the villain, and through that see how you were the villain even when you were playing the “hero”. Since I’m getting lost myself, thats all I’m going to say about the concept.

Graphics

Like many other people, I chose to do a very simple and clean aesthetic. I don’t really have much experience working with vector graphics/animation, so I did what I could and moved on. I’m actually  pretty happy with how it turned out, despite everyone being a giant ‘i’.

Sound
Most of the sound effects and all of the music were made by myself, which is quite surprising for me since I’ve never written or recorded any music for anything before, though I have done simple sound effects for a previous game. If the music sounds random and , that’s because I  basically sat at the keyboard and played whatever came into my mind, and after about 3 hours of that, I had 3 simple songs that I was satisfied with.

Gameplay
or the lack thereof.. This is the aspect that I’m most upset with. Within the time constraint and bad planning on my part, this ended up being more like an interactive video than a real “game”. I wanted to add a whole slew of interesting and fun levels after you switch characters, but opted for one extremely simple one in favour of spending more time making the game look and feel right.

Overall
What can I say? I finished a game in 48 hours. It was extremely fun, and very useful. I’ve found myself a community of awesome and kind people, and I’m sure this won’t be the last you’ll see of me.

My mistakes – Note to self

• put more thought and time into the gameplay! don’t do another interactive video!
• get all the files ready earlier than 5 minutes before the deadline
• chill more COFFEH beforehand!
• add goats next time

Tags: happily ever after, post-mortem

I released an early version of this game and have lately ( around 11pm ) added some content and tweaking.
I wana keep the Princess is now completely out ! Control a classic evil guy fighting against the entier mankind trying to steal his princess ! 3 evil guys, 3 weapons, 3 kind of princess to protect and a thousand heroes to murder !!!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=16143

Wooh timelapses are always fun. So here is 18 hours compressed into 3 and a bit minutes.

You play a psychopathic cannibal on a killing spree, just because you’re hungry. Eat as many people as you possibly can, and don’t let them see the corpses, as they will be alerted and you wont be able to kill them or in their direct proximity.

Linky: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=rate&uid=5751

Enjoy your meal 😀

That’s what my entry is all about. Saturday went very smoothly and Sunday wasn’t bad either, but had again some headache with animations. My first game with all models made with Blender instead of Wings3D . Also the first game with rag doll physics. I was surprised how smoothly I got physics and rag doll stuff working. Ran out of time so couldn’t add any visual effects.

Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=11043

So… I’ve finished a game that can’t run on other computer except mine. I have to start learning Unity, because C++ and SFML are… uncertain

So I finally finished one!  Huzzah!

This time around, I decided to shoot low and add on if I had time.  I didn’t like the theme (again) so I had trouble coming up with anything I could do.  I ended up with a pretty generic sidescroll shooter that was way too hard.  Since ‘way too hard’ was the only thing it had going for it, I let that stay rather than ‘fix’ it.

It worked out really well to get the firing working first, and then work on movement.  Then hitpoints and death.  Mock up a couple levels and the game works…  This was done by about the end of the first day.

I didn’t spend as much time on it the second day as I could have.  I was already feeling a bit burnt out, and I had to work today.  So I added health bars and finished out the level design, and designated 2 enemies as bosses and gave them more health and a different color.  Then I fleshed out the menu systems and level changes, and the ending screen.

Then I went to Disney World.  No, literally.  lol  I needed to get out of the house and regain some sanity.  Had this step not been necessary, I would have added pickups for upgrading the gun, and possibly some kind of rocket launcher for some of the enemies, to give them a different weapon.

The graphics bothered me the whole time, but I simply haven’t got the skill to have done anything worthwhile in the time allotted, so I didn’t even try.

My tools let me down a bit.  I was trying to use the beta version of a Unity asset, and it screwed up.  I was originally going to use it to make the characters, levels, etc, instead of just generic boxes.  Would have looked somewhat better, and given me more options for the levels.  I tried to remove it and go back to an old version, but I couldn’t remember how to *use* the old version.  lol  Oh well.

Other than that, the tools were great.  Unity was obviously used for the game, NGUI for the menus and healthbars, and I used Photoshop for the art for the menus/healthbars.  I also used SFXR for the gunshot sound.  And BMFont with a free font.  Since I had used all of those before, there were no surprises and it all went smoothly.

Next time, I think I’ll shoot a bit higher.  I’m going to spend more time thinking about the theme and designing the game, and then more time programming as well.  I’ll be taking a day off work to make sure I’m not crowded there, either.  I think I’ll spend some time these 4 months working on a few things that I didn’t know enough about to implement, like cutscenes and pop-up conversations during the game.  I think I’ll also spend time with Blender and Substance Designer and learn to make basic models quickly, and animate them.  I think that would have improved the look and feel significantly.

So, i finished this game at 1:30 . afterwards i barely remember how much effort i put on the legs to go to bed.

This was fun! it was my first entry to Ludum Dare, and i didn’ t know it was this much fun!

These 2 days let me think a lot about the effort i can put in things i enjoy.

Well, i don’ t mean saying that these 48 hours were idilliac. aou contraire!

I spent a lot of time wondering why some basic functions of the game weren’ t working. An example is the collision system. At the end i had to compromise, and use the full sprite as a collision box, so good bye depth and perspective.  But the time consumption was done, so i couldn’ t make sounds, music, animations or improve the art a bit ( i am not really horrible with drawing, but i need a lot of time for that :S).

on the last hours, i was attacked by sleepines, and i had to make the starting title screen and the gameOver screen. you can see the result

they have some charm , i guess….

also

there were times when i wanted to just give up , thinking i could do it the next Ludum dare  with a greater preparation.

Today i am really happy to have resisted the temptation to do so.  even with the compromises, and the absence of polishing, i am really satisfied by what i’ ve done. And i learned a lot of useful things, like:

-Know better your tools. i had an hard time with the jaws library because i didn’ t practice in depth with it ( an example is the collision system). Also, you should be sure that the library you choose has a fair amount of documentation. Jaws library at the moment doesn’ t have a huge community support, so it was difficult to find a solution to my problems. createJS could have been a better choice, but at the moment i am not very fond of it ( i found about createJS a day before LD, too much late :S)

-Make your code REUSABLE. Even if it’ s something obvious, i understimated this tip a bit too much.  i could have written a lot less code, but oh well..

-make a a fair amount of breaks. they help you organize your thoughts.

that said, i hope you will have fun with my submission. good Ludum dare to everyone, 😀

————

play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18332