So, after a good 3 hours I’m finally posting this.

We’re done with the game. It came out great. AND HERE IT IS!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=19282

As you may know, I was sick on day 2 and day 3, so I didn’t have enough time to finish.
I do believe that with one more day I could have made something much nicer. I could have added sound, added the missing functionality, possibly even made more levels.
If you insist on playing the game, you can find the entry page here.
I might write more tomorrow, but for now, I’ll just give you the timelapse:

So, you see, I’ve never…well…

…

…what I’m trying to say is that this is my first time.  In a game jam, anyway.  I guess technically this other time might count.  Er, actually, disregard that.  No seriously, it’s nothing.

Anyway – I made a game called “Spot Colony.”  Maybe you’d enjoy it!  It’s exploratory and intentionally terse in its instructions, so read them carefully and do some fiddling.

If you’re planning on playing the game, you might want to go ahead and do it before you read the rest of this.  It’s a brief joke and having it explained before you play it would probably spoil things.

—————————

Certified Spoiler Safety Buffer Zone™

—————————

The point of Spot Colony is that it’s supposed to feel villainous without using text or images to do so – at least until it’s already over.  The instructions tell you enough to get you started, but in order to “win” you have to experiment a little, and eventually decide to see what happens if you destroy the whole colony.  Since there’s no prompt to tell you this, it feels more like it was your own idea (though really it’s just the only gameplay option available, so whatever).  Also, the colony is pretty resilient, so winning through luck seems pretty rare.

Once you’re done, you get a dry remark regarding your moral character, which (hopefully!) feels particularly relevant given what has just happened.  HO – HO, art!

There’s a neat emergent behavior with the fire-spreading mechanic (which is based on a simple grid) where it’s an effective strategy to let the colony grow large enough to create thick “fuses” stretching from a food source to the hive.  Also, if you hold fastforward, the colony can overpopulate and chew through resources faster than they spawn.  Spots who do not eat for more than 20 seconds starve, causing colonies to grow and collapse periodically.

As one out of a very small number of game mechanics, the red safety ring has a few important jobs.  it makes it so you can’t just burn everyone by waggling the mouse, but more importantly, since the first two food sources always spawn inside of it, the colony can start out extremely small (to make the later swarms more impressive by comparison) and safely grow for a bit while the player reads the instructions.

Some stuff that I don’t like very much:

– The game isn’t quite as good at guiding people to this conclusion as it should be, so a bunch of players don’t pick up on the overall goal.  Obviously this is a major problem.  Teehee; oops.

– It seems really common for people to try to click on the food instead of the Spots, but since the Spots are congregating on the food anyway it often appears to work correctly.  Confusing feedback means it’s the teacher’s fault, not the class!

– It looks weird.

– I was going to include several ways to interact with the colony, but I didn’t spend enough time working on this to achieve all that, so we just get the fire propagation.

– Other stuff too.

You are a crazy taxicab driver racing against the clock! You drive a traditional yellow taxicab. There are three lanes of traffic with other cars blocking your way and you must meet your deadline. Drive as fast as you can and swerve to avoid hitting the other cars… or even jump right over them!

For this game you will use your space bar and your arrow keys. The mouse is not used during the actual game play. Press the up arrow key to go faster. Press the down arrow key to slow down. Press the left and right arrow keys to change lanes. Use your space bar to jump.

Your objective is to cover the required distance, shown in meters near the upper left corner of the game screen, before the clock reaches zero. If you are successful in covering the required distance before the clock expires you immediately go on to the next level and repeat the same process. There are no breaks between levels. This is just one big continuous thrill ride. You just have to keep going! Each level gets more difficult because the traffic from the other cars increases as you progress through the levels. If, on any level, should you fail to cover the required distance and allow the clock to get all the way down to zero… it is game over!

There are three game options available. Each game option has its own separate control. The game sounds may be adjusted. The music volume may be adjusted. There is also an option to play the game in full screen. The full screen option may be turned on or off at any time.

Game Strategy: You must race as fast as you can in order to beat the clock. So, you will need to keep the up arrow pressed down for almost the entire game while using your left and right arrow keys and your space bar at the same time to avoid the other cars. You do not have to jump over every single car. In fact, you can usually save time if you can swerve around another car instead of jumping over it. Many times you will encounter a situation where there are three cars driving side by side, blocking all of the three lanes. Your only option here is to jump over one of these cars. However, if you do not approach these cars at a fast enough speed you will be unsuccessful with your jump and you will end up stuck behind this row of cars. The best thing you can do then is to use your down arrow key to slow up and put some distance between your cab and the other cars. Then, speed up and try again.

Play Now: http://www.kizid.com/game/wild-wild-taxi.html and much more “BEST GAMES” on Kizid!

Tags: kizd, kizi, kizi games, kizid games, online games, wild wild taxi

Link to Post Mortem

Link to Dig-Dug Dungeon

Congratulations on everyone who finished their games. I very much enjoyed making a game this weekend with all of you. Seeing your progress posts is the second best part of LD!

Play Royal Reptile Rampage Here!

needs a dash more evil…

Hate elves?  Sure we all do.  Now is your chance for revenge!

The Evil Lair Construction Set

Design your very own Evil Lair.  Layout the rooms and hallways and set some treasure as bait.  Curious adventurers can’t resist those shiny baubles.  Raise their hopes and then have your minions close in for the kill.   As if the look of terror on their little faces is not precious enough, they often carry a few coins in their pockets as a bonus.

More treasure will lure more and stronger adventurers such as:

• the curious naive – not very filling
• the quick elf – the minions are always fighting over the chewy ears, the little scamps
• the hearty dwarf – delicious spread on warm toast
• the mighty knight – err… he looks kind of tough

Set traps, raise the dead and generally be awful.

Hello online games lovers and welcome in the FrivFan.com !

Find your favorite game browsing our categories,because we have selected all kinds of great and cool games for everybody!

For boys which love cars, we have the best racing online games. Girls can have fun playing cool dressing games. Adults can relax after a hard day at the office with their favorite old Friv games, like well known Mario, Action, Shooting, Arcade and more. Maybe one of the most played game in the world-and they can choose from a lot of Mario games.

In the www.frivfan.com are online games for every visitor! You need just an internet connection and free time to relax and refresh your mind. Without download or long registration forms, easy to play-just one click and you are in the middle of the game. Our games will cheer you up every day! Enjoy!

Tags: fan friv, friv, friv fan, friv games, online games

As you may have guessed, I didn’t have a submission this time. My son woke up from his nap with a fever, Alex barely ever got to his tileset on account of his interruption. Sometimes the hardest part is just making time to participate, I finished a submission for LD24, but never had more than 6 hours to actually work in.

In the meantime, we’ve got a great starting point for a tower defense game, and an idea for a bizarre twist.

Hey all,

I participated in this Ludum Dare, but until now I haven’t wrote a thing. On other LD’s I’d find time to post pictures of my food and show early builds of my game. This time however I had such a weird idea for a game! And it took me far longer than I’d expected to make everything work. In the end I wasn’t even in time for the Compo so I decided to join the Jam. Here’s what my game turned out to be: The Villain Complex

And some screenshot’s ya’ll ^^

Have fun playing!

Cheer,

Maxim

The Timelapse for my Town simulation “game” is up:

Sorta bland, but it’s all that I could manage.

Click here to play Rhythm Apocalypse

Rhythm Apocalypse is my third ludum dare entry, except it’s a bit different from my previous two. They were singleplayer games, both made with Stencyl. I wanted to make a fun multiplayer game using HTML5 canvas (no back ends, all custom), and when the theme came up, I had the idea of a rhythm game where you collaborate with friends to destroy the earth using the power of harmonies!

Originally I had planned 3 sections with three 4 bar segments which would be played in a random order, and the sections would advance when you did enough damage to the boss. As you can tell – I didn’t quite make it. The final game only has 2 sections with a fixed path that goes 1, 2, 1, and the planet doesn’t even blow up at the end.

There were quite a few things that culminated to cause this:

• I woke up late on the first day, so I lost 3 hours to start.
• Went out for dinner on the first day, though this was really pre-planned and I couldn’t really say no. -4 hours (it was a long dinner)
• On the second day I got really, really bored, so development slowed a ton.
• Most of the reason it got boring was because of the constant onslaught of blocking bugs, since I wasn’t too experienced with javascript + canvas and it was my first multiplayer game using websockets.
• Dropbox is the worst prototyping service ever if you have low internet speed.
• I haven’t made many songs in Pxtone (really, just my ludum dare music) or even made music at all, so I was having trouble finding inspiration or a common style.
• Didn’t actually draw any graphics. At all. And this is meant to be my strong point!

Despite this, I did pretty well on:

• Some effects. I really like the sparks, shiny curved note line, laser and starfield flatten when you start the game. I wasn’t able to create anything like those in Stencyl.
• Works really well for my first multiplayer game. Movement interpolation could be improved.
• The song in the waiting room is pretty cool.
• The game was of really good quality for a javascript app that wasn’t an engine, test or general purpose program.
• It’s fun! That’s probably all that matters, even if it’s really short fun.

Another thing is that at submission time a few horrible bugs popped up,  such as the collision for the beams emitted from the earth being totally broken, and various bugs breaking multiplayer entirely (players not disconnecting, not displaying, names missing). This left the game unplayable over submission night. But all of that is fixed now, so no worries!

So you should totally give it a wee cheeky try, and invite some friends to play with you! It’s sorta way too hard too, so you can see which one of you dies last. 😛

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=5794

My entry

Hey everyone! It’s time for another Post Mortem.

It’s my second time participating, and I couldn’t be happier that I finished a game again!
I felt a bit more pressure this time, because I really wanted to get something out, and also improve over last time. But I’m very satisfied with the result, and I hope you enjoy it too

Play the game

The good parts:

• The theme. Although it came kinda unexpected, it opened a lot of possibilities for both setting and gameplay. So many in fact, that I was really concerned to find something that wasn’t too big in scale. So I did some scribbles on my two best ideas, and then decided. Turned out great!
• The graphics. I felt really inspired and I knew what I was going for: Even though it’s about being evil, I wanted to keep the representation rather cute than dark and sinister. And I had a lot of fun creating it too!
• The people. Once again it was such a blast to hang out on irc, discuss game mechanics, playing prototypes, helping people out, watching streams – just having fun. Motivation++

The bad parts:

• I had a lot more in mind for the gameplay, but time was working against me. Damn you, time!
  But on the other hand, I wanted to make the things I’ve got a solid experience, rather than having some features that just don’t feel right.
• No audio. Despite the fact that it’s still a pain to get sound right in HTML5, I’m also very bad at creating it. Like very, VERY bad. Forgive me
• I ran out of M&Ms.

Conclusion:

• It doesn’t matter what you start with, be it gameplay, graphics or whatever, as long as it inspires you and keeps the flow going.
• If you need a break, grab some snacks and hang out in #ludumdare.

So thanks everyone for the great time, I hope you enjoy, and have a nice day!

Tags: html5, postmortem

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could click on a randomise button on the ratings screen and it swaps out all the choices?

And blacklist/whitelist popular tags, so you can say you aren’t interested in those that have “windows” (and “source”), but are interested in those that have “web”… and so the ratings screen will be full of games you actually stand an outside chance of playing…

I expect this has all been said a thousand times before…

We need a mod-ludum-dare-itself mini weekend

(And thanks to everyone who has rated my game, what a great turnout yet again for LD

What went right

We came up with a theme and gameplay that we loved but it took us a while to sort out what we wanted which meant we lost some time at the beginning. We even started working on an idea we didn’t like so much and the result was we were too demotivated to continue. It is important to really love the idea you are doing to be able to give it your all.
In the end the graphics were much better than we expected to be as neither of us are real artists and the designer managed to learn much through doing this.

What went wrong

In terms of the final product there is not enough feedback for actions made by the character. Some more animations and a real sense of impact to the world and characters would have been better. Eventually it would be nice to expand the world with more interactions.

Conclusion

This was a great experience for both of us and we learnt a great deal. The fact that we managed to finish the game was a real achievement. As a first entry we are both quite proud of what we have done.

Entry Post

The game : Corruption

So, this is it. We did it. First team jam for me, first collaboration with Dziff: Cell 22 is submitted!

Even if I fought late at night without understand how to make a great song with FL Studio, doesn’t matter. Even if we throw up a lot of idea because, you know, it’s how Ludum Dare works. Even if I probably go a bit off theme (but there it is, I swear!). We are pretty statisfied of this little game.

How you decide to play wil impact on the end (there is some of them).

We hope you’ll enjoy it!
And our main reference is the great movie (AWSOME MOVIE!) Old Boy.

Play Cell 22 >>

_______________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________

These are the tunes for my game Trina of the Depths . Only the first two made it into the game. The encounter theme was to be played when you met the crab seller.

Here they are in .ogg format

1. Trina of the Depths – exploration theme

2. Battle theme

3. the Encounter

Made with FLstudio and lots of free soundfonts and my own samples of a gameboy bass

Thank you for a fantastic 3 days! I’m just beginning to scratch the surface of what all you people created. A definite improvement in content, I feel

Tags: ld25, music, soundtrack

When I’m not LudumDaring, I work for Traveller’s Tales. A bunch of my colleagues also entered LD25 and I thought I’d round ’em up here. We’re all professional programmers, but that doesn’t make LD much easier ‘cos we still struggle on the art…and sound…and design…and even the code if I’m honest…

“Earth Beast”

“Escape from Prison Planet”

“Infidel”

“Blue Idiot” (last-minute one-day jam entry)

Any other industry types participating? Yes, I know about Notch

This was my 1st LD and my first entry in any kind of coding competition ever. I had a lot of fun and I was luckily supported by my wonderful girlfriend who made sure I actually took in food at normal times.

First off,  play and rate the game                    –> Play Make It Black <-
Can you ignore this guy? I don’t think so.

What went right

• I heeded the tips given by others here and kept a working, interactive product throughout. This allowed me to quickly try out ideas I had. My “design document” was one sketch of the floor and a hooded dude and 10 bullet points in a text file.
• Crucially, I did not implement some things that one part of my brain said were mandatory. In this case, I wanted to add flying cherubs with ranged arrow attacks. Though good in concept, I knew that I would have difficulty balancing issues, AI issues and more that can add up to hours of tweaking quickly. Instead, I focused on polishing all aspects of the game that were there already.
• Which brings me to polish, I’m quite satisfied with that, there is a difficulty curve, introduction of gameplay elements over the first 2 levels, interactive background elements, a not completely herp-derp AI, and a lot of subtle things like plants dying randomly if their floor tile is corrupted, a cool dying animation, smooth transitions between levels, etc. I like it.
• As for graphics, while thinking of what to do, I discarded all ideas that would hinge on pretty graphics because I Am Not An Artist. “Retro” scaled up 8×8 tiles are really just a way to hide your non-existent drawing skills I compensated in other places by making cheap but good looking effects using code and math (POWAH) like the clouds and the nice and, in retrospect crucial to gameplay, background sky transition.

What could go better next time

• I spent a lot of time on the core platform game code. This was actually a goal. I never made a platform game before and I like to know how stuff works so I was not going to use a library for it. I did get lost for too long on some details I should have postponed until later, like some collision corner cases.
• I had looked at Tiled (the Tile map editor) before but had not made anything with it nor used its data files in anything, so I could have saved about 2 – 3 hours of time just by practicing a bit with it beforehand.
• Sounds were added in at the very end and are rudimentary but functional. Again, a tools thing I had played with cfxr but not with Audacity and had to download that to make a simple change to one of the samples with 30 mins of time left. Not recommended.

In all, I learned exactly what I wanted to learn: the basics and problems of a 2D platform game and I had a great time. I’ve been rating other games and it’s great to see the variety and skill shown in all the entries. See you all next time!