Hi everybody !

I’m the one who created Tripe Traps  and I would like to talk about the score system.

At the begginning, all traps were 80 pixels width and each “Crushing the hero” gave 100 points. But later, as the hero became faster and faster, give only 100 points wasn’t rewarding. That’s why, players win more points depending on its speed.

Another point is when the hero is superfast, crush him is difficult because he suddently appear from the left. So I decided to reward players who manage to anticipate the activation of the trap according to the speed hero by giving them more points.

And finally, I thought if players put on a competition for the best, the three traps gave the same amount of points, but it wasn’t interesting, and besides, players will use less often the first trap. In order to give a more interesting challenge, I decreased the width of the first trap (and give more points), and In order to not discourage beginners, I increased the witdh of the last trap (but it gives less points).

With this system, it is very difficult to get the same score.

We finishedon time!

Play it here

The theme was great this time and i think we made some good designs around it.

Video:
Footage

timelapse code

timelapse leveldesign + audio

timelapse art and level design

What went great was alot, what went bad was the tool we used for level creation.

This was a tough weekend!

And yep, I did it again ,I made a game in 48 hours 😀 ( And the whole LudumDare community too of course :P)

As always I had a really great time making this game and I’m really proud of it. I think that my “graphic skills” really improved from the last LudumDare and that’s some great news for me. If I had some more time I would spend it on the “fine-tuning” part of the game to make it more balanced, not too easy, not too hard.

I was streaming the whole game creation process on Twitch and it was fun to talk with some other devs from times to times.

Thanks for reading! If you want me to play and rate your game too, don’t be shy

Tags: as3, final, flash, timelapse

What Went Right

1. Previous knowledge of using Unity3D and its various 3rd party libraries.
2. Able to get plenty of experience from a previous Game-Jam (GitHub Game-Off 2012)
3. Game Idea was not overly ambitious.  I started brainstorming with the potential 12 themes, this helped me pin down certain game mechanics that will work on multiple categories.  I was able to start the project right away.  On the downside, I was still at work when the compo began…got stuck in traffic, then finally got home.
4. Did not encounter major bugs.
5. Planned out the entire technical design before starting, really helped gage my progress.
6. Ready-made palettes for making pixel sprites.  Prior experience helped me make semi-decent art faster.
7. Ready-made food, snacks, beverages, energy drinks.  I literally spent the entire weekend indoors.

What Went Wrong

1. Took too many breaks.  Day-job habbit
2. Did not sleep on the first day.  Even though this made it possible for me to get the game ‘complete’, I consider it a bad thing.
3. My first time trying out the tile system in 2D Toolkit.  I had this grand idea of making a large map for the game…For some reason I was having trouble getting something to work nicely.  Plus, editing the map was a bit difficult for me.  I spent too much time fooling around with this feature.
4. Some game mechanics just didn’t work.  The “guard” is suppose to deflect projectiles but never got to making projectiles.
5. Game pacing and balance.  This is the kind of thing I never get a chance to do every time I make a game for a short time.  It’s a designer experience I need to hone more.
6. No audio.  Always the one thing that I put aside until the last minute.  Also, robots don’t make good music (cgmusic).

Other Notes

• I need to be more active with posting and public stuff.  As you can see, this is my second post for the entirety of LD 25
• Did not have time to add a boss…It is incomplete as you encounter it in the game 😛
• The game originally is suppose to be in a city where you go on a rampage as you grow.  I suck at drawing modern things, so I decided on “heaven”.  Also, since I ran into some technical issues, I had to make the bounds smaller.
• Next time I’ll make sure to add some sort of intro and ending.
• The “guard” mechanic is dumb.  I should have just made it automatic or do something sinister.
• I drank 12 energy drinks for the span of 2 days.
• Listened to: mr-explorer from La-Mulana a lot as a motivation.

You know the idea is golden when there’s no features listed below!

Some Art Assets

Gameover

Victory

Tags: 2D, compo, ld25, post-mortem, postmortem, unity, unity3d

Even though I haven’t really been all that into this LD’s Jam (I’ve barely even playtested our own game!), I still feel like the general buzz is keeping me hyped up. I can’t wait to see the results.

AND I SPENT THE MOST EFFORT ON THE TITLE SCREEN MUSIC. LISTEN TO THAT BEFORE YOU START PLAYING, WOULDJA?

Well, I wasn’t able to complete my game, and don’t have much to show for my work either.

What went right:

• I quickly came up with several ideas and started.
• I learned a lot about the Android SDK

What went wrong:

• I ended up running into the same brick wall — even though I knew objects were moving around on the screen, they weren’t being drawn. I spent all of Saturday tracking down the bug and trying to find the problem. It took me a long time to find a hack to fix it, but it only worked for the first few frames.
• I scrapped several of my ideas and started over because of the drawing bug.

POST-MORTEM-TIME!

See the butcher!

Annoying all the vegetarians a bit, this game is about killing innocent chicken :D! Fruit Ninja style!

What went bad:

– I used Box2D for the first time. In the warmup weekend, I played around with Axel, like Flixel with Stage3D support. But after seeing the theme, I didn’t feel like creating a platformer or similar anymore. And then, it got nasty, because it started to be BUGGY!!!! On the first day, I even refused to go to sleep until I was able to split an image correctly

– I was very demotivated to write lost of code. Don’t know why though, and if you look at my code, it’s hardly 1000 LOC. And if you look at the timelapse, it’s mostly drawing chicken

– The code is still buggy! In Box2D, you can set the debug data to true, and if you do, you can see that the boxes are actually completely off the image that’s drawn :D. That’s why I had to remove multi-cuts, because naturally you couldn’t cut a chicken a second time when it’s cutting area is somewhere else^^. Also, I cheated with the graphics, at some point I gave up doing them correctly and just made all cuttable graphics square

What went well:

– I used Box2D! Wanted to do that for quite a while, like….last year, but I never had the chance or drive ^^

– I created another game! Inbetween, I wanted to give up already, but then I just started drawing more, and like nothing – the game was finished! (though I removed many features)

– THIS IS MY TENTH LD48 ENTRY!!! WOHOOOOO!

TIMELAPSE

PLAY

Starting to come together mechanics wise. Dont think ill have time for the water section. Next Is having the ability to drag and drop cars then I will piece together the actual game part which is very exciting then hopefully Ill have time for graphics and sound.

Alright here’s my entry to LD 25. I’m pretty happy with most of it there are some things I wanna improve so this will be a little post-mortem too.

Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18047

What went right:

Scope – keeping the game small / arcade style really allowed me to cover most of the bases (sound, art, fx). I also didn’t have to worry about code hierarchy stuff so I could just sorta run with it.

Solo – At the beginning I was worried about making a game by myself in a short time period. Now I know I can really do it, but I do like collaborating.

What went wrong:

Sleep – I probably could’ve slept a little less and gotten the game in by the 48 hour mark.

Sound – It always comes down as a last minute thing and I’m going to add better sounds later. I also didn’t have my audio jack to record music / sound from my Gameboy using LSDJ

Overall it was a really cool experience. Reversing Donkey Kong brought up some interesting ideas and I really wanna expand the game a little bit. I’m thinking about adding a 2 Player mode (mario vs dk) which could be really cool! I also plan on polishing a lot of other stuff (art, sound, music, etc).

So you want modern techniques, you want WebGL and HTML5?

I ported this my LÖVE (love2d) game to the famous love2d-webplayer. If anybody needs help in porting his game to webplayer, feel free to ask me :).

Here you go, try: Fisticuffs

I was running along for the main contest but unfortunately I was unable to make it. On Saturday I decided to check out the meet-up in London and the travel cost me 3 hours each way. I did manage some programming during all the moving around but assets-wise it was a nightmare as I couldn’t sprite all that well.

My friend and I spent only like an hour or two at the meet-up before we headed off to check out the Science Museum; it was much more time-consuming than I anticipated! Basically I didn’t achieve a lot during Saturday.

Anyway I haven’t been able to work much again today as I made plans to see The Hobbit and now I have work so the deadline is cut short for me. Overall I finished a game in Java which is my first since moving on from Game Maker since the last jam, so I’m fairly happy and this feels like a nice accomplishment for me.

My game’s located here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=4626

Most of my graphics were rushed (mainly the tileset for the landscape) and I said that I would come back to tidy it up later but my time has ran dry.
The game idea was based on JRPGs and instead of saving the world – you rule it. Keeping your towns happy (low tax) makes population grow faster resulting in faster growth, however, higher the taxes and the villages will start getting unhappy. If the villages are unhappy then they’ll send out ‘heroes’ to overthrow you and this is where you can improve your defences by adding bosses to your castle.

I wanted to work more on the idea but my goal was to get basic functionality and game play done – which I did. The game turned out to be more economical than I planned but I had no choice as I didn’t have time to add in the features I really wanted to add.

I would love to continue working on this game post-jam, but we’ll see.

Play it here

It is a beat-em-up hack-and-slash platformer but with extra Awesome and lots of gameplay.

You play as the new Lord of Corruption, and your mission is to corrupt planet ‘Erth’, by poisoning/killing all living things and blocking out the sun with chaos.

You can even make your own maps from .png files. (up to 16 levels can be played in a row)

Please give me some ratings, as last time I didn’t get enough to have a final placing.

Since a few days have passed I thought I’d write a post mortem before I forget about how I felt, what I did etc.

What went good:

– In the end I had a playable Game

– I finished early and had time to fiddle around with the difficulty

What went bad:

– I did not use my time effectively and thus was not able to include many features I originally wanted

– My Game is probably to Hard and frustrating for the common taste

– In the end I was to lazy to add more content like Graphics/Music/more Enemys etc (Good/Bad? I tend to bad – Someone said he/she liked the graphics style ^^)

All In all I’m happy how stuff turned out and I am already looking forward to participating in the next Ludum Dare 😀

Link to my Game’s Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=16076

Yeah! Here’s the timelapse to my game, which is available here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7477

Huzzah!

Timelapse: http://youtu.be/9_a-Z6ZDKoY

Thanks for all of the ratings so far! 😀

Unfortunately I didn’t recorded my Ludum Dare however I saved a few work in progress screenshots. Here is a selection of them.

Of course you can play and, are encouraged to, rate Big Bad Wolf here.

😉

Tags: postmortem, screenshot, Shameless Plug

Well, I managed to more or less complete an entry for Ludum Dare, my first one! I wanted to recreate the classic villain-hero ending scene a la James Bond  where the bad guy, instead of shooting a bullet right between the good guy’s eyes, decides to explain his whole plan just in case someone in the audience did not understand it.

So you are the bad guy, and you have to talk while keeping an eye on the agent. Because he’s not gonna sit there waiting for you to complete your speech, you know.

The game mechanic is based on a children’s game I played as a kid ^_^

What went right:

The basic mechanic was completed and works properly. I managed to give it some cartoon-like aspect, even when I had to draw it all in a rush. And it’s a short game, great for LD48 – easy to try, easy to play, ease to rate, because you’ll rate it, right?

What went wrong:

I wasted like five hours on Saturday trying to do it all on ProcessingJS – I wanted the game to be playable on browsers without requiring plugins, but at some point I realized I NEEDED coroutines. I have to figure out how to implement something similar in other languages, but LD48 is not the best moment for that. Coroutines are probably the best thing since sliced bread, and great for scripted animations! So I went back to Unity3D, C# and my beloved IEnumerator IAmACoroutine_AbuseMe() coroutines. Unfortunaly time ran up and the game ended up with no sound and lacking a few ideas I wanted to add.

Anyway, it’s done. It was fun. But I can do better. Maybe next time! Meanwhile, enjoy!

Tags: post-mortem

You can now use several weapons

In a hurry, can’t write a lot right now, there’s so much stuff to do!

CRUNCH MOOOODE.

Greetings, programs!

This is the best game I have ever played, for serious.

Bad news: all I have right now is a generated tilemap with A* heap pathing.  I just didn’t have the time to prepare.  My prototype engine was barely a skeleton, so a lot has been written on the fly I hadn’t planned on writing.  Alex has been getting slammed with finals (on LD weekend! D:) which should have been accounted for, but my spontaneous nature got the better of me again.  So that’s pulled a lot of my time away from coding to make programmer art.  I promise, it will be PLAYABLE.  I cannot promise much else.

Of course, I am still having a blast! 😀

Seems like it’s common to write a post mortem here! This was my first LudumDare experience, I know nothing about this community, but I really like the spirit here. You go ludumdare community!

I had theoretically 24 hours, practically 12 hours to work on a game. Saturday afternoon I began sketching an idea in the train home, and shortly after arrival I began coding, line after line. Swearing the bugs away, one by one. Cutting the cool ideas away, implementing the more poor ones just to get SOMETHING finished before the deadline struck.

And there it is, The Plague. A game where your objective is to breed an army of minions as big as you can, and flood the entire land with disease (yes, the purple stuff).

What I did well:

• I really did finish a game within 12 hours!
• Came quickly and on time with alternative solutions for gameplay when I realised my original idea would take too much time.

My pixelart isn’t THAT bad, is it? 😀

• Animations in pixelart are pretty easy.
• I ran against the limitations of the middleware I use, but solved the problems with some creative solutions.

What could have been better:

• My inability to pick proper matching colours without fiddling for hours.
• Run short on time to implement algorithms to check any sort of winning conditions.
• Too few sounds, would have liked to add background music too. But I am far from a musician.

What I learned:

• I learned that sounds can do a LOT to your game.
• It’s hard to not make a sound become annoying due to repetition.
• I can trust my creativity when it comes to technical problem solving.

Now on to play some games from fellow developers! 😀

Yay, I managed to finish my fourth (third finished) Ludum Dare game. It’s called Splonet and you can download it / play in browser here.

In Splonet you observe as a planet is formed around a golden core. Then you have to blast your way through the planet to reach and STEAL THE CORE. Because you’re the villain. As you blast pieces of the planet into the air you have to hurry because they will fall back down and fill the holes you’ve spent so much time digging.

The game is also frustrating if you don’t find a cheap easy winning technique (that’s unintentional, but let’s just say it symbolizes unfair play many villains make use of). And playing with sound on is highly recommended, as it is quite impossible without.

Controls: use mouse to move the camera and mouse1 to shoot in the middle of the screen. You have to shoot the golden core to win, exposing it is not enough (at least in this version).

Made by me in Unity (actually this is my first released Unity game ever). Music and sound effects by Crudelis Diabolus (@Golden_Sin). Name by Dash Zanger (@DashZanger)