If you were to go back through my posts you would see that not long ago I was making a completely different game. There were a lot of problems with that game. First, it wasn’t fun to make it. Second, it probably wasn’t going to be fun to play. And third it required too much art, and seeing as I’m not an artist that was a bad thing. But I’m glad that happened, because I’m really happy with the game I have now. Luckily I’d always planned on entering the jam so losing a dayish of work wasn’t too bad.

So here’s a screenshot of “Artificial Incompetence”. You have to control a race of incompetent AI beings to try and stop the Good Guy Alliance from destroying you. It’s really simple but also really fast paced, which I tend to like. Now I’m off to sleep, then polish polish polish tomorrow.

What went Right?

• I enjoyed building the game, I did this LD because I wanted to have fun with a small game and I did have a lot of fun dropping cows and watching big waves of zombies run into machine guns.
• Focused on design, not graphics. Because I did not pay as much attention to the graphics as usual I could spend more time on adding a tutorial and some extra gameplay.
• I like the design, I think it has familiar elements, but it is different, maybe I can port it to tablet or something.
• It is a complete game, every feature I planned is in.

What went Wrong?

• Was busy until 3am,  that was not how I planned it :).
• Underestimated how long it would take to build the levels.
• Need to work on my Sound Fx/Music skills, the game really needed some zombie sounds and fun music.
• It needed more levels, probably about 10 levels or so. This way I would have been able to have a better difficulty curve. The game has enough content to build 10 levels.

So what I will do different next time? I will start earlier on the levels. So the first day is just implementation of ideas and features and the biggest part of the second day is building levels.

If you want to play my game, here is the link:

Play it !

This, is what we’ve got so far… maybe we won’t finish it on time :(, good luck to all and good night

Fighting Safari in the jungle:

And the Mozilla boss:

Damn Unity.

For some reason, whenever we make a build (no matter what platform), old scripts are used. So we keep building the same build, and none of the changes are added.

Due to this, we’re pulling out of LD25

Geko

1. Added a bonus system, which works pretty nicely.

Tags: Bad Puppy, Chris Sanyk, csanyk, enhancement, post-compo

Kitten fo’ life!

Also, check out some footage of our  jam entry here:

Or wait less than a day to play it 😉

Each Ludum Dare usually has different things that go badly and things that go well, but there is one dilemma that’s always the same for me.

Do I make something simple that I can polish and test properly? Or do I challenge myself to do the impossible?

Each option has its own pro’s and cons:

Something simple that I can polish and test properly

• I can make a finished product that works, looks good and sounds good, almost guaranteed.
• It’s more fun to read comments after LD has ended.
• Will likely end up higher in the rankings.

Challenge myself to do the impossible.

• More fun during ludum dare, more exciting.
• Less limiting
• It would be awesome if I actually managed to finish the game.
• Likely results in something incomplete/ buggy.

The first 2 times I entered I tried to make something ambitious, the last two times I tried to make something simpler. This time, I tried doing the impossible again.

I guess what it comes down to is who you think you are competing against. Am I competing against everyone who is also entering LD, then I should probably go for option one. Am I competing against myself, then I should go for option two.

Anyway, what I ended up with is more than I actually expected. My game is playable and I find it fun to experiment with it. But while there is a lot to try out, the game does not feel complete.

My game: Critter Criminal

In critter criminal you fight, catch, breed and butcher friendly critters for your own personal gain. In the ludum dare version fighting, catching, breeding and butchering all works, but once you’ve caught or bred the ultimate critter, there is not a whole lot to do with it.

If you’re into breeding type games, I think you can have fun with this entry but you’ll mostly have to set your own challenges.

You can play my entry here

Sleepy time.

Almost all the gameplay is working. After that, polish!

Here’s a new screenshot. The environment needs work still to make the characters stand out etc.

And here are some sprites :

With just over 19 hours left until the Jam ends, we’ve been frantically getting all our heroes in a row, so that our villain gave vaporize them in one fell swoop.

Here’s the effect for the disintegration ray:

And here is what you look like after you have been hit by the disintegration ray (our in-game term for this is “puddle of goo”):

And here’s the level design mock-up for the final level—Dear Leader’s palace.

Tags: ReturnDearLeader

I had to see my mother to the emergency department. I spent the whole day there, so I couldn’t work on my game for the Compo, and I don’t have the time to finish it for the Jam.
Guess there won’t be an entry from me again!

I previously thought I would not be able to participate in LD25 because I wanted to spend time with my girlfriend before she flew off for the holidays. However, I now have found some extra time and realized that there are still 19 hours left in the compo. Yay!

I’m going to attempt to learn and make a game with Quest, which is an interactive fiction engine. See you guys at the finish line!

Tags: interactive fiction, last minute, quest

Due to being away and stuff I was highly limited in my actual working time. I only found out the theme 7 hours after it had been annouced, and didn’t have time to work on it. BUT I STILL MADE AN AWESOME GAME!!

PLUS GOATS!!

Click to play!

It has goats!

My only regret is not including enough exclamation marks in the title.

The basic premise is to rebound lasers from other ships in order to get massive combos

Cool things about this game:

• I used as3sfxr and generated the sound in-game for the first time.
• I used box2d for the reflection angles, making this the first game I’ve used box2d in.
• This is the first game I’ve used a restricted colour palette for, and the graphics went well.
• Didn’t use any silly flash engines like flash punk because I’m cool like that.
• GOATS

Tags: as3, firin ma laser, flash, goat, goat thief, goats, goats in space, king goat, screenshot, space, space goats, thief of goats

Super excited to have completed my first LD. A lot of things went right, and several went quite wrong but I managed to get a game out that I can be proud of.

In the interest of improving, I’ll do a quick self-review.

Concept:

While the idea of a mad scientist who’s been overthrown by his robots initially seemed clever, I may have inadvertently come up with something that has a portal-like atmosphere. A little more originality next time is in order I think, but I do really like the atmosphere of this game.

Controls:

This will probably stop a few people from being able to play my game. I forgot to include IN the game that the “Q” key closes menus. :\

Mechanics:

I wish I had added more uses for the shrink-ray. The idea of having alternate cartridges for the raygun turned out to be pretty cool. If I could do it again with a bit better time management, I think adding other gadgets would have been fantastic.

Mood/Lighting:

This game is kind of dark. While intentional, I’m not sure whether it adds or detracts from the game.

Graphics:

I’m not a very good 3D artist, so the choice to go 3D for this one may have been a little ambitious. I scraped by with some square-paneled lab-like environment, but I’ll be going a different route in the (hopefully more practiced) future.

Humour:

While I happen to think that your chipper, sarcastic AI tour guide is funny…The dialogue can be really hard to hear. That was a bad choice of filter.

Overall:

It was a cool experience. Definitely worth the sleep deprivation! I’ll definitely be trying to participate in the next LD.

So it looks like on-top of not having a great start or finish to the competition, now the lack of web entries makes it impossible for me to gain any ‘coolness’. What can a guy do?

I’ve been trying since the end of the competition to play and rate entries, but so far I have only found 2 web entries. Perhaps there should be a way to sort entries by platform.

Just had to upload this little turntable of our lumberjack character!

OK! Back to work..

Guess a post-mortem is in order.

So I didn’t finish. This was my first LD, and in general I don’t have a good track record of finishing things. I was using tools that I’m not very familiar with, but that wasn’t the main problem. My idea wasn’t, perhaps, as self-contained and unambitious as it should have been, but I should have been able to get something playable out of it given where things were when I gave up.

I’m going to drop most of the blame for this one on a lack of sleep. There’s really no good reason to stay up all night on the first day, but I worked from 11am-4:45am. It was pretty productive work – even towards the end, while things had slowed considerably, progress was still plodding along.

I got to bed at 5:30 and woke up around 11:30. Made a todo list and then failed to get through a quarter of it. The way the code fit together was fine in my head when I went to sleep, but the next day getting a grip on how the various things related and communicated to each other was far too much to cope with after not enough sleep on a disrupted sleep schedule.

And, of course, my game architecture deserves some of the blame for that. Lots of the blame actually, but it’s not so bad. I tried something I hadn’t done much before (components) – it was a good learning experience, certainly. The main idea was pretty good, but the glue holding it all together wasn’t. I’m planning to start a new game and scavenge this game for code – it should hopefully amount to something more stable and useful.

Anyway, that’s that. No grand reason for failure, just far too much enthusiasm for being hardcore on the first day. Being hardcore is for the day it’s due and not before – anything before that is wasted effort.

Tags: post-mortem

Ludum Dare 25

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=3040

What went right:

Simple reference game:  Friday at 6pm, Dave Alleca showed me Spike: A Love Story.  Press a space bar to drop a spiked ceiling onto a passerby.  It was simple to play, and the animation, sound, and writing was polished.   I managed my scope.

Simple reference art:  There’s many illustrations of dragons, peasants and knights to borrow from.  I enjoyed referring to these and composing some cartoon characters.  Cartoons are easy to make in Flash.  Most everything was morphed from an oval.  I felt relaxed on Saturday evening as I illustrated and animated.

Pace:  Almost every hour I committed to git.  I logged each hour.  I was aware of the time left and the goal for the hour.  The log motivated me and balanced my perspective for the next time I make a game quickly.  I took a break most hours; that was part of the rhythm.  I slept eight hours each night.  I was never exhausted, even though I did work 10 hours on Friday before starting the Ludum Dare at 6pm.

What went wrong:

Over invested in infrastructure.  I used Flixel.  For such a simple game, next time I might go with native Flash.  I was concerned about performance, yet the walking animations still had a little bit of stutter in them in Flixel.  I used a scene movieclip to compose the elements and to sync the sound with the visuals, and to dynamically generate sprite sheets from the animations.

Nice to have polishing before essential requirements.  I had planned to add fireball since the beginning, but I did not start programming it until about 2 or 3 hours before the end.  Until that moment I could not consider the difficulty.  Afterward, I made the fire and bite more deadly, but enabled a dominant strategy to pace fireballs.

Indecision.  I over-invested and polished because I was not sure about how much time I would need and wanted to have a well-rounded game.  I put off adding more features because I wanted to polish what was already there.  I was not too clear about my goals.  I was not sure about blitting or vector art, about using particles or custom animation.  So I made both.

Altogether I enjoyed the experience and have been encouraged by the positive comments that imagine a potential follow-up for Sleeping Dragon.

Somethings went right, some things went wrong, but they came together in the end to make my entry. For example, in the middle of the dare (Saturday at 7pm GMT) the game I was working on glitched and the tiles loaded from the TMX level file were incorrect – in this case it was a good idea to restart the game with a different concept.

Concept:

Whilst the idea of running over cats is an original one, it needs a story.

Controls:

Shown at the main menu, but some other keys like ‘p’ and ‘enter’ for pause and ‘space’ for jump exist.

Mechanics:

I wish I had added in a few more kinds of cats and animals, but I probably would have ran out of time.

Mood/Lighting:

The game itself, is very upbeat, but I suppose it’s got a dark undertone considering you just run over cats.

Graphics:

I did the lazy thing and used mtPaint to make pixel art, but they turned out alright.

Humour:

Did pretty well here considering the game consists of running over cats.

Overall:

It was a good experience that benefited me in management of time etc in game developing. I look forward to the next Ludum Dare.

Tags: haXe, haxenme, haxepunk

Ended up running out of time. But here is the build for Dragon flight a 3D based flight shooter.
+

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41198125/Dragon_webbuild/Web_build.html

I’ll update this post with more details after I catch up on some rest. Happy jamming!

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)

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

I could have titled this post “Flawless victory!”

Or at least something along those lines (let us not get cocky here…).

First thing first, this post is going to be a pretty big one, so if you would rather see the game and play it, you can find it at the link below (Source, Windows and Linux64 at the moment, more platforms to come).

Play (and rate :p) Raoul V. in Your Are Ze Villain!

With that out of the way let us get down to business, shall we?

The title card of the best silent film since The Artist, or something!

Post-mortem

What went right

Most of the Ludum Dare, for a change. But in more or less chronological order…

• Theme & Idea : At first, as usual, the theme did leave me scratching my head. Most probably because I had started formulating a very cool idea for “End of the World”, which I thought would be picked because of the date. But it was not to be, and I had to find something else. I did not want to shoehorn my idea into the theme somehow, so I started by scouring the Internet for ideas. I wanted something a little more original than casting the player as an archetypal video game villain. The answer came from Wikipedia and its disambiguation page for “villain”. A game idea fell right into place as soon as I had read a particular page. You can either play the game and beat it to find out what it is about, or I will give you the link at the bottom of this post if you want to spoil yourself. But nevertheless, it was really a good find, and really fit the theme (guess what the V. in Raoul V. actually stands for?).
• A roguelike! : I have wanted to make a roguelike(-ish) game for quite a while now, so I was thrilled to see that my idea actually could be implemented as one. And it was the right way to go. I could have done it as a first-person 3D game, but I am pretty sure I would not have finished in time. So not only did I have the opportunity to code a small roguelike, it was very much instrumental in achieving the next point…
• Proper scoping : This is what I always did wrong in my previous attempts. Except maybe for OUT OF HERE, but I had the idea for that one way before the LD, and even then I completely shoehorned the theme via an ugly wall of text. Here, I managed to implement all the core features of my initial design. Except for one thing, which is handling a restart after the game is over. But more on that particular point later. The point is that my idea was very much doable in the time frame of 48 hours, without really skimping on anything.
• Letting features drop like flies : This sounds at odd with the preceding point, but what I mean is that, as usual, I continued to came up with new features and refinements as I progressed. One such thing was a minimap. I implemented one, but turns out that the particular way I went about it slowed the game down to a crawl. So, instead of trying to push forward and lose a big chunk of time, I simply dropped the feature. Same thing for my level generation, I ended up leaving the first, somewhat “buggy” version in the final game. By buggy I do not mean that it crashes, but simply that it gave different results than I had planned. So be it, it was playable, and actually doing what I had in mind would have been really too much work. Several things like that didn’t make the cut, but I never mourned them for long. And that meant I got a game done.
• Procedural everything : The map, but also the combination of elements that make up the NPCs, and the notes revealing information on your target are all procedurally generated. It does tend to feel a bit same-ey, but it was a great way to keep the game interesting for multiple playthroughs.

At this point it was a *tad* too procedural.

• Mixing known and unknown tools : I went partly against common sense, and decided at the very last minute (meaning after I had actually started writing code) to use Cocos2D instead of pure Pyglet. I had never used Cocos2D, but as it was based on something I was quite familiar with, it went rather well. The only downside of Cocos2D is that while it is a Python library, almost all the documentation you can find on the net is aimed at its mobile ports, and more specifically the iOS one. That made the learning experience quite a bit harder, but as I was able to fall back on Pyglet for things like sound (which I never got Cocos2D to play…), it never became a showstopper. And in the process, I have become proficient with a new API. Success!
• Pixel art : I suck at art. No, really. But I am still happy of the graphics for my game. The neat thing is that I was able to work the setting of my theme into a constraint that eased the creation of a coherent art style. And I am quite pleased of my characters. With more time, I would refine the aesthetics, and improve the readability of the graphics, but for my skill level I really think I did quite ok. That I even had time to revisit my initial tile set was just icing on the cake.

First version of the art. Very programmer-like.

Improvements, with shadings(c) and gradients(tm)!

• Music and sound : After my attempts at playing a sound effect with Cocos2D fell through, I shelved the idea of putting sound into the game (and it would have been more or less justified by the “silent film” motif of the game), but I went back later and succeeded. I quickly whipped up a couple of music tracks and went along with it. I would have loved to make a piano-based score, but my MIDI keyboard was having troubles and so I fell back on my trusty guitar and my drums (for the sound effect), which I filtered to have an “old telephone” sound to them. All in all I do not think I have spent more than 15 minutes on actually creating the sound, and as everyone will tell you : sound ties a game together.
• Coherence : I think the game fits together nicely. Everything plays off the same theme, and the game mechanics relate to the historical facts (albeit loosely). I worked a goat or two in there (in the written text), there is some flavor text on some of the notes, and all in all nothing seems too out of place. Even the dialogues improve (or their presentation at least) the impression of you playing in a silent movie. So there, very happy with that.

French accent included in some parts.

• Blogging, Twitter, etc. : While I did not post as much as I would have loved to (not to mention I did not have someone dedicated to documenting the process as I had for my last participation in the jam), I still managed to post some screens, check out the IRC, Twitter, and even record a timelapse! This last one is a first for me, and both days are actually uploaded on Youtube, and embedded at the bottom of this post. I also commented and “hearted” here and there, and there are now a bunch of entries I really look forward to playing!
• Packaging the goods : PyInstaller has become pure awesomeness.  If you are using Python and have access to your target platforms, use it, it is really great, and version 2.0 really makes things a breeze.

…That is a lot. To conclude, the most important point : I submitted a game, not a half-broken prototype!

…except when he does not. Sneaky guy.

What went wrong

All is not sunshine and rainbows though, and there are definitely things I could have handled better.

• Awful code architecture : As if that was not a given in Ludum Dare games? Still, because of my inexperience with Cocos2D, I ended up digging myself into a design hole, and had to spend several hours at the end of saturday and sunday morning cleaning up the mess. At the end it turned out ok, but I could have polished the game a little bit more if I had that time left.
• Not having everything ready : I almost failed at creating music because of problems with my MIDI keyboard. I should have tested all my things prior to the compo, and not leave anything untested until the last quarter of the time. At least I managed to record my guitar and my drums without any problem.
• A couple of bugs : Unfortunately, there is, to my knowledge, a single bug that could potentially prevent you for playing or winning the game. Sometimes, the level generator will create a room sealed off from the rest of the level, and if you or your target end up being put there, you might as well restart the game. Speaking of which…
• The missing features : I really wanted to get the restart working, but thanks to my crappy code architecture, it was almost impossible without yet another rewrite, for which I had no time. This means that the game will exit rather unceremoniously after the end screen. And you have to relaunch it if you want to have another go. The game also should have provided a way to look back at the notes you collected. Right now, you will need to use paper or your memory to keep track of the information. It should also have warned you when you killed the wrong guy. At least it will be evident when you have shot the good one. Lastly, the full screen mode (which is provided by default by Cocos2D) does not work correctly in regard to aiming. That is quite the bummer.

So, there you have it. I think the only way to improve on these is to continue practicing making games, and probably to collect some kind of base code which enforces a sane structure rather than throwing code around and see if it sticks together.

Timelapse

I think you have had enough to read, right? So instead, here are the two parts of my timelapse. The image quality is poor, I need to improve my timelapse-fu. I had also planned to make an “IRL” timelapse synced with the screenshots, but that did not work out. Enjoy!

Day 1

Day 2

Conclusion

This weekend was a blast. With everything going smoothly, it managed to be a very interesting learning experience, while being incredibly rewarding. For now, I will leave the game be while I rate other entries, and I will also provide an OSX version, as well as one for 32 bits Linux. Thank you for reading, and have fun playing…

Raoul V. in Your Are Ze Villain!

Spoiler : You can check the Wikipedia article from which my idea came. Meet the real Raoul V.

Over and out!

– Bastien ‘Grungi Ankhfire’ Gorissen [@b_gorissen]

One last screenshot to see you off :)

Tags: final, postmortem, python, screenshot, timelapse

Ok, here is a rundown of what I think went well, and what could be improved, and what i thought of the whole experience, but first my goat:

“I hate Jug Band! BAAaahhh!!”

Plan
Before LD started I was not sure I wanted to join. It would become my first time, but I already knew I was not able to spend the whole weekend on it. But friday night I was getting excited and decided to check if I had al my tools ready, and decided to go block my saturday from other stuff. I am mostly a programmer and sound/music guy and not much of an artist. Processing seemed the easiest way for me to create a game playable on different platforms. So after making a test game including images and sound on friday night I decided to join.

What went well
-I did not have to spend too much time on technical stuff because I knew my tools
-Included sound which should be a strong point of mine
-Had a quite original but not too big concept very early on.
-It is playable and even a bit emerging.
-Drawing the characters was quite fun
-all this in less then 13 hours(including dinner and lunch break)

What could be improved
-Free more time
-More graphic skills
-More diverse gameplay
-Nice title screens etc
-Tutorial/high score and other thing for more usability

But all in all I had a nice time, have created a nice little game, and I will definately do this again

You can play it here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=13020

PS a timelapse is coming but uploading takes ages

Tags: LD 25, post-mortem

So I should make a post mortem over my game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=5952

What went right?

• I figured out how to work with the physics engine Box2D, and how to combine it with my game library, CinderLib.


• I sorta-finished everything I wanted to finish, and I technically had time to spare.
  
• I have a functional, albeit simple, level editor.


• The gameplay idea was pretty ok

What went wrong?

• Motivation. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy making the game, but I can’t seem to keep myself loaded up for the entire weekend.


• I couldn’t be bothered to polish much due to motivation. The game is too easy because of that, it’s more of a physics sandbox than an actual game.


• No sound, little variation, all because of motivational issues.


• The excecution of the game isn’t very good

Hi All – Something it doesn’t say on the box – if you leave off the http:// in your links on the submission page they don’t show up on the final page. It’s not a bug I was just very tired when I submitted so missed it. Good luck with the Jam to all those still doing it and I look forward to playing all the games

After the pros, I’m discovering the cons of the jam, especially about voting.

I do understand the problem about several people working on the same game and voting one after the other on it, because that’s totally unfair, but why do I have to log on the account used to submit our game, even if it’s not a group account but just my friend’s account, to vote on someone else’s game?  What if my opinion about a game isn’t the same as my friend’s? What if my friend wanted to vote but finds out he can’t because I already voted for him?

Do I really have to create a new account for each team I’m working with? Isn’t that a bit annoying, or not very useful?

Isn’t it possible to just link the accounts of the other people who worked on the game in the entry, and thus forbid them to vote on the game, but allow them to vote on other games?

Because there’s also that big problem about “property”. You’re linked in the description but what if people don’t read it? And what if people just want to check your profile, and you’ve written nothing about the game you’ve been working on? They don’t know you’ve been part of this jam. And thus they don’t know how you work, what you’ve done.  Most of the time people remember games more than people (in fact they remember people when they know their games are really great, and then they follow their entries, their tweets, their profiles). It’s the first thing you check on people’s profile, the games they made, and then you think “So it’s HIM who made THAT game I liked so much”.

So yeah, I’m a bit annoyed about that. And (even though I don’t know how the website is working and maybe it’s really freaking hard) I think it would be easy to just allow people to link the accounts of the people they worked with on the entry, and thus show the game on everybody’s profile, and forbid everybody to vote on this game, but allow them to vote on the other games made by other people.

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong or there’s something I didn’t understand, but I find it really frustrating.

Sad goat is sad

So this was my first LD and I was really excited about it. I got up pretty early on the Saturday (around 6AM GMT (4-hours in)) and made some good progress. I didn’t want to get too tired because that’s when I make mistakes – particularly the pulling your hair out type coding mistakes.

I hit a real low point just after lunch on the Sunday. I started to get down about it and thought I wouldn’t finish. My original idea had been HUGE and I had been forced to scale it down to the point it was unrecognisable from the original concept. I was struggling to get a suitable end point and I hadn’t made enough rooms or even any enemies – the idea of adding sound to the project was so far away that I just thought I’d be submitting a silent game.

Well I can say that come 1AM (1 hour left – the time I submitted) I was elated. I did make a finish point where the player can actually achieve something – I had recorded and added sound (such as it was) and even made a thumbing synth driven 24-bar sound track (ok well I didn’t say it was perfect).

I would have liked to have applied the polish that the game so severely needs like a menu – the ability to save progress – differnt music – the full compliment of rooms – sounds that line up better with, for instance the footstep noise. But then the more I think about it the more I begin to realise that I made a game in 48 hours. I find it startling really. In just one weekend I have created something which someone could play and go from the start to the finish and could even fail at.

Thank you Ludum Dare (by which I mean the people who run it and the community behind it) for showing me that 48 hours is actually quite a long time and for showing me how much can be achieved. I’m a little exhausted but wow, what a ride it’s been – filtoid

Post Mortem

This was my first Ludum Dare and my first video game, so I’m pretty proud that it all came together in time.

What went right:

• preparation – I spent the week leading up to the competition working out common game mechanics from different kinds of games. I made boxes that shoot at other boxes, boxes that walk through side scrollers, and boxes that follow paths. It gave me some great algorithms I can reuse, and helped me learn the limitations and advantages of the game engine.
• whiteboarding – video game math can be really hard. Not only did it help to clearly define my problem and see it pictorally, but my kids drew smiley faces all over them which made it all seem less intimidating.
• Living across the street from a convenience store – seriously, if soda and candy weren’t less than a block away I don’t think I would have made it through this.

What went wrong:

• don’t guess the theme — It seemed like a lot of people thought it was going to be “end of the world” so I came up with this GREAT idea. And then, for the next few days I kept thinking about how to make this great idea even better. Then, when it wasn’t “end of the world” I felt like I couldn’t come up with an idea as good as the first one in such a short time, and I was really disappointed. In the end the game I made turned out to be just as much fun to make – but I wasted a few demoralized hours comparing it to the game I *thought* I was going to make and feeling like I fell short. 
• math – I was NOT prepared for how hard the math was going to be. If I do this again, there will be algebra, trig, and calculus textbook references on my desk. And possibly a math professor on standby. Actually, my first idea was to create a game where you ruin a fresca of Jesus by lobbing facial features at it and getting points if they remotely hit the right area, but they needed to travel in an arc that changed depending on your force and location. I spent all of Friday night trying to work out the math before I scrapped the idea and started over with a tower defense.
•  browsers and servers – So I’ve got less than 10 minutes to go, I get the final touches on the game, upload it to the website and viol-la! My boyfriends computer can’t play the sound, my kids’s clowns don’t shoot anything, and no one can load it in IE at all. As it turns out, IE will fail javascript that has extra commas on arrays when other browsers read it fine,  and firefox and IE will only play ogg sound files, and the hosting service I used CACHED the javascript for 4 hours!! So the changes I made didn’t reflect on any of our computers, and I had no idea at the time I submitted it what any of you would actually be seeing if you loaded it. If you’re making a browser-based game – leave 1 to 2 hours to work out server/browser cross compatibility issues.

All in all, I’m REALLY glad I did this. This really challenged me, and now I know what I’m made of

I am realizing that my main difficulty is coming from lack of focus. I’ve determined that this must be a result of my underlying, animal, base instincts which plague all modern men. There exist dark urges which served us in ages past but have no place in modern society.

I think, however, I have found a cure.

I believe I can separate and remove the darkness from myself. This will leave me as a pure, focused individual, allowing me to progress rapidly on my Jam game.

I believe the formula is perfect but there is no time for clinical trials. If I succeed, the implication for all mankind will be immeasurable. I am willing to face the consequences of personal injury if I fail.

The tincture is ready. It is time.

-Dr. J

So my first Ludum Dare is over, I successfully created a game that you can finish, within 48 hours. Initially I was disappointed with my game, its nowhere near as finished as In would like, lots of the features I would have liked to have added were cut due to lack of time, It’s not as polished as it could of been and the collision detection is a little iffy.But it functions as a game, the map is challenging and the 3D works quite well, especially for my first real attempt at using 3D.

However, after the initial disappointment, I realised in reality anyone and everyone who entered a game, myself included had done something amazing, we have all created games in 48 hours. No mean feat.

Where did I go wrong?

First and foremost I spent a huge proportion of my time messing around trying to get a feature to work which was mostly for aesthetic purposes. In hindsight I should of used placeholder graphics and gotten the actual mechanics working before wasting around 5 hours on aesthetics which didn’t even make it in the game because of the time I had spent on them.

Secondly, after about 6ish on the Sunday I began to feel really awful, I hadn’t eaten enough and I hadn’t eaten good stuff. This was a stupid error, but I felt infinitely better after eating.

What went well? I FINISHED!!!! I have an enormous feeling of pride that I could create a working game however simple in 48 hours in fact it showed me how much time 48 hours really is!

The 3D graphics worked as intended and  I added some elements of polish, like the depth fog.

It was a long weekend, but I enjoyed every moment of it and would like to thank everyone involved in making Ludum Dare possible and especially everyone who was on the Irc channel, who were all supportive and .

Anyway I’m off to try and get through the rest of my day at college without falling asleep.

For the 48 hours I did this jam in, I only had 11 hours sleep.

Now I can lay my head down to rest for a little, and play more awesome LD games tomorrow.

Seriously you guys took an average sounding theme and made it awesome. A lot of the games I’ve played are great stuff.

Sleep time now. Goodnight.

Zzz…

Tags: sleep

Our capsule alien’s space capsule has landed on Earth.

In a pasture.

Full of chickens.

And one really big chicken.

Because what’s a villain game without a giant chicken, right?

Take a look for yourself.

It’s night time of course, so the image is a little dark (we’re tweaking that as well).

And here’s what a giant chicken looks like when it’s been zapped with a disintegration ray.

Oh, and our villain has a basic tutorial to follow as well. (Those glowing red bits are our villain’s space craft.)

In addition to the chickens, the farmers are in. If they see you they will run to the payphone and call the Police. But at this early level, they are little more challenge than the giant chicken.

So, the run down looks like this: basic systems are in. The levels are designed, and being built. The script for overhead text is being written right now, and the music and sound effects are being created.

At the end of the tutorial level, our villain discovers that his Dear Leader was here on Earth 21 years ago–scouting locations to shoot his next big feature film.

Among the photographs of Dear Leader giving the humans the intergalactic sign for “surrender or you will all die” (his right arm extended as if he wanted to clasp his hand with the human’s), there is also this clue as to the missing alien leader’s whereabouts.

Tags: ReturnDearLeader

Heres our progress:

• 2D Character movement with animation
• Village level graphics
• Vehicle
• Steal presents
• Unload present to vehicle
• Unload vehicle to lair
• Police patrols
• Santa deliver presents(half done)
• House level graphics
• Lair level graphics
• SFX and theme music
• Menu system
• Polish(fun stuff like more xmas decor and snow)

As promised:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8OsWswJVzE

play/rate it here!
Goat Hate Jug Band

Submitted my entry for the compo exactly on the deadline twelve hours ago, thats 3AM here! Had only four hours of sleep before having to catch an early lecture. Anyway, finally got some time to place a post here, something I couldn’t do during this entire stressful weekend. Hey everyone, this is my first time participating in Ludum Dare and the first game I actually finished! I’m quite happy with the results.

Meet Archie

In my game Skeletal Archer Archie you play as Archie, a peace loving undead archer who happily spends his days in a dark cave. Ocassionally humans from a nearby village stroll into the cave. Archie wants nothing more than to make new friends, but things always get quite awkward between humans and monsters, and yes, quite violent. Archie can be regarded as the boss at the end of the dungeon. In this way he is a villain the heroes have to face. But from the villain’s eyes, is he really a villain?

Post mortem

I knew I was being overambitious by wanting to make many types of characters in this game. I wanted the player to control standard RPG monsters (skeletons, goblins, ghosts) and he would have to face standard RPG hero classes (warrior, rogues, priest). Both the heroes and the monsters required AI, combine this with spells and you have a load of work on your hands. I never got to animations and sound effects.

What went well

• I really liked how my sprites turned out! I’m not an artist, so I was surprised that my little sprites turned out pretty well.
• The AI took a lot of time to get working, but I’m satisfied with the result. All behavior, such as the priest running in to heal his ally, is hardcoded in if-then-else trees, but still it gives some cute effects in this short game

What are my regrets

• I never got to animating the sprites. First of all, please don’t ask me where I got the idea that I could find time to animate 14 characters (5 archetypes). But the result is, I have no animations and that makes combat look quite stale. For example you don’t actually see melee attacks, you just see characters standing next to each other.
• No sound effects. I was really rushing things in the end and never got to sound effects.
• With all these different classes finally working in the end, its a shame that some of them only appear in one level! I feel I got a nice basis for fun gameplay, but I didn’t have any time for class balancing or more level design. I would have wanted to include a simple random level generator in the game for some replay value, but alas deadline.
• Had trouble getting a nicely executable JAR. Next LD, I should find these things out beforehand.

I hope you check the game out and enjoy it!

It’s this beatiful time when I should list my achievements and mistakes

So… overall I’m proud of my new child. Being evil is more fun that I thought. I got a decent number of ideas and stories.

What about idea I chose? Hmm, it was a bit awesomer (more awesome?) while in planning phase, thought I personally can get joy from it (I’ve done level 2 – the new, bug free one –  in 3 different ways, can You? ). The worst thing is that I ran out of time. Again. I couldn’t focus on important things because of small details. Again. I do make the same mistakes all and all again, despite experience. What a shame! Well, third time’s a charm, let’s hope

But still: I learned Box2d, made a decent sprite and level managers, made my first bitmap font and I have my first love2d game I really love it and i will definitely make some more stuff in Lua. So… I’m also pretty proud of things I achieved

Oh, and the post-compo version is coming! For real now! See You ingame! Bon appetit and till the next time!

Yeah, I’m a little too late for a new game idea based on the theme, so I thought I’d share it anyway for your reading pleasure.

My idea is as follows:

The player creates a level based on certain elements. These could include simple platforms, ground, but also pitfalls and traps.

Then a hero goes and runs through the level with some basic AI. At first he is a weak simpleton, but he can upgrade.

The trick is for the player to balance the level, so the hero does die due to lack of skill, but isn’t actually unable to complete the level.

Because if the hero is unable to complete the level, the upgrade mechanic kicks in. If there is a jump which is simply too far to ever get across, the hero gets a jetpack. If the hero finds himself stuck in a cave, he gets a drill, stuff like that.

Blah, idea.

Wow. I still can’t believe I pulled it off. This is my first Jam, my first “racing” game, the first time I worked with Game Maker and the first time I had to design and code something quickly. So, without further ado:

What went wrong.

-Screen-shots: The graphics turned out pretty bad but the low res screen-shots look horrendous. If you don’t try the game because of this I don’t blame you.
-Graphics: Simply put I suck at drawing. What is more, I didn’t have time to make all the assets I had planned (trees, lampposts, tables, chairs and proper rooftops). The action was supposed to take place in an old city center (thus the cobblestone) but the result doesn’t look like it.
Innovation: I realize a Gta/Carmageddon clone is a very low hanging fruit. I had a couple of really neat ideas but those would have taken much more than 48h to implement.
Game Maker: It appears that the final version has a bug in the sound engine so that it crashes when you quit the game, this is incredibly annoying since I can’t do anything about it bar disabling all audio.Also the HTML5 plug-in is a bit of a joke, each time I added a new feature I realized that it did not work, in the end I gave up on trying to make a web version of the game.

What went right.

The feel of the car: I realize it’s probably a bit hard to control, but I really like the way the car drifts, skids and roars.
Running over goats: Do I need to say more?
Game Maker: Despite the many problems, I’m impressed by how quick and easy it is to get a prototype running. Especially for a person with very little experience like myself.
Fun: It’s really empowering to build something in such a short amount of time and I had a lot of fun working on this project.

You can view the game’s page here.

Tags: LD #25, post-mortem

Hello everyone,

I hope this is the write way to post, so without further delay, my thoughts.

This has been my very first LD and although i entered late, and only in the Jam doing so has certainly sparked my interest in events like this and game development,
my game tinyAdventures was written using pyGame/Python on knowledge i’d acquired not 3 weeks before as part of my Computer Science degree and in my opinion i’ve outdone myself with regards to expectations and simply cannot wait to have another go at a new game in the future.

Please take a moment to check it out, give me your opinions!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=19422

This is a post-mortem for my game, “A Villain By A Chance“.

What went right:

• Plot. I saw dozens of post about games where you play as a villain and do bad things. In this game, however, you are not a villain and you don’t have to do bad things.
• Idea. A great idea for a 48h game, original and challenging.
• Time. I had time to make the game, to test it, to balance it, to polish it, to try new tools and I had some free time left.
• Community. Besides many posts (this post it 13th) and a timelapse, I have a detailed journal of making my game.

What went wrong:

• Fun. I barely managed to make the game interesting, but I think it applies only to people who understood the game. Since it’s a hardcore strategy, I don’t think there will be a plenty of them.
• ……… it can’t be all! I definitely missed something! Let’s just say it’s not one of the best games I’ve made. I would even say it’s a minigame. But is it wrong?

What went average:

• Graphics. I used pixel graphics for a map, vector graphics for a goat, it seems everything is right, but I can’t say I did my best.
• Music. During the second day I was thinking like: “Hey! You can compose music, can’t you? Why won’t you add some more?” Nevertheless, I didn’t add more.

This night I dreamed like there will be 1700 (?) entries. But there is just 988 in compo.

I’m going to write a strategy guide for my game, both for players who want to complete the “Easy” and who want to complete the “Hard” difficulty.

I didn’t have much time in the weekend after all and was planning to do something small today for the jam, but I really don’t like the theme and most ideas I’ve had so far have already been done in some way. Now I should really be spending my time on more important things.

I feel like this time I got much closer to a really fun game. While the game that I made: Dungeon Overlord: Master of the Queue is missing some important balance components, Most of the “must have” features made it into the game.

Submission Page

Tools

• Engine – Game Maker: Studio Professional + HTML5
• Graphics – The GIMP
• Sound – BFXR
• Timelapse – Chronolapse

This was my second LD that I used Game Maker on. While I’m beginning to get comfortable using the engine, there was still a lot of research needed during the whole process to get features working. I’d say I spend 3-5 hours during the compo just fighting with my lack of knowledge with the engine.

Graphics:

I had no real plan for graphics during the development, they just basically evolved from one item to the next.  I wish I had spent the first few hours sketching out artwork and a color palette. That would of course lead to using Inkscape to develop the art and then export to bitmap for final finish in The GIMP.

I also wish I had made time for doing animations as well. My first bit of animation was just manipulation of the x and y offset to reflect stricks and hits by the players; and that was way things were going to be until after 3-4 hours of developing my animation base on those offsets I discovered that the HTML5 runner for GameMaker didn’t like how I used local vars for this. As I didn’t want to try and port all of that into something that worked, I ditched the mechanic and side-tabled animation to be picked up later (frame animation coupled with particles + sound… which didn’t actual happen due to time constraints).

Sound:

I really only had time do the first stab at game sounds; had I made more time for it, I would have had layered sounds so that they didn’t sound so weak.

Music:

My plans were, if I had time, to bang out a tune in Sunvox; that generally takes 1-2 hours, so I had to sacrifice that time to get the game to  a playable state.

Gameplay:

All through development I wanted to get the game to where it was at submission time, then take time out to develop additional content. After that I would have balanced out the gameplay to something enjoyable. I ran out of time there.

What worked:

My toolchain

What didn’t work:

My time management skills

Conclusion:

As has been said time and time again, get a working game in your first 6-8 hours. If it takes longer than that, you will be late. The problem was that I let the bithead in my try to use engine mechanics that I had never used before; so that resulted in inflated development time.

Credits:

• Idea – Squidi’s Tiny Crawl 3.0 – Dungeon Defense
• Timelapse Soundtrack – Isoteric (with permission).

Timelapse:
Youtube

Hello everyone!

OMG … we are to tired after this long journey especially my friend abuzreq ..

we have some bugs and last touches and we will be done.

my college made this project harder because I had to ready up for the college finals while my friend get tired of working a full day alone

I will be helping him now after I went back from college and I will do my best work to make the game better

also I have to miss my nap for this

talk to you later

Hey,

I know the game is classic and there is nothing new in it but hope you like it I added a post compo for enhanced edition of the game so you can go and try it.

LudumDare Page

Here is the timelapse of the compo, the rate of capturing was 1 frame each 15 minutes and the speed of the video is 3 frames per second so that’s why its short

Will write a post-mortem about the game and inspiration in the next days Hope some will find it enjoying to read Hope you enjoy the game and the compo time

Ook, we now have missiles, basic turrets and enemy ship flying arround.

Only tyrrets are gettings destroyed for the moment, but you enemy ships, just wait for your turn

The day after a Ludum Dare compo is one of my favorite days.  I am really looking forward to hearing from players about how they found my game.  I’m looking forward even more to playing other people’s games.

As always, if you play, rate, and comment on my game, I guarantee I will play, rate, and comment your game in return (assuming it’s available on a platform I have access to).

Play Bad Puppy.

Tags: Bad Puppy, judging, ld25, rating

This was my first ever game jam. And surely, it won’t be the last one.

Several months ago I decided to devote the entire weekend to this competition. And I’m glad I did. If you are going to do something, you might as well do it 100%. And I think I did. I hope to be able to do the same thing next time.

Also, I’m glad how I managed my sleep. My plan was to get just enough sleep that I’d still be able to think clearly and creatively. For me this was around 6,5 hours.

The result was 48 productive and intense hours. Last night when I submitted my game (with 1,5 hours remaining) I was VERY exhausted. In a good way. I had the feeling that I really pushed the envelope and had given it everyhing I had. I love that feeling.

After around an hour of idea brainstorming I had a favorite idea: A game where you play a hacker who wants to take over the Internet. I imagined the gameplay as a mix of Uplink, Galcon (by Phil Haynes) and another game I’ve made myself, Takeoff.

During the entire period I took screenshots of the game as it developed. In the beginning I focused on getting something playable as fast as possible. Here’s one of the first screenshots:

The first day I ended up spending several hours struggling with a path finding algorithm. I’ve implemented several path finding algorithms before (even the “hard” A* :)) but only with respect to grids/fields. For this game, I had to do it for graphs.

At some point I considered changing the gameplay altogether because I couldn’t get it to work. But I gave it another shot and it paid off.

Then I started working on the graphics. I took inspiration from the dark blue colours from the hacker game Uplink and came up with this:

After implementing it I wasn’t really satisfied with the big numbers. Why use when you can use figures? And the numbers didn’t convey the total capacity of each “mainframe server” (the circles).

So I came up with this:

I made the sounds with my own voice and a couple of Audacity filters. The sounds are OK but I don’t think they fit well with the desired mood of the game. But I figured it was better than nothing.

I made the first draft for the music on the first day. I wasn’t quite satisfied. I blame my tool: GarageBand. It’s just a toy – but it was all I had. I especially struggled with GarageBand’s string instruments and their way to slow attack rate. The next day I listened to what I’d made. With a fresh mind, I suddenly had ideas on how to improve it. I’m satisfied how it turned out.

I also spent some time making special ambient music for the menu screens, but due to the time constraints, I decided to scrap it. It wasn’t important.

Then I wrote the story and implemented the menu system. The latter was rather borring, but I know it had to be done in order to make the game feel complete.

Lastly, I made the splash screen. I decided to throw in a photo of myself to make it a little more personal

Overall, I’m really happy with both the product and the experience. Today I’ve been flattered by the positive feedback I’ve gotten. Thanks!

I’d like to thank all (voters, ludum dare admins, players) very much for making this possible

This Thursday, I’ll be giving a talk in our local Javascript user group about my participation in Ludum Dare and Javascript game loops in general.

Tags: postmortem

My game (Blight on Happy Land) was apparently incredibly and unintentionally difficult for some people, because I wasn’t aware of the importance of Time.deltaTime and so the tiles in the game fell rapidly for some players, instead of at a more relaxed pace, making the game incredibly difficult and/or impossible. Ouch! The code was only even needed in one place! Two lines of code! Aghhhh!

Anyway, I’ve uploaded a fixed version of the game for web and windows, I’ve kept the old versions of course and made it clear that judging should only be done on the non-fixed version, but the fixed versions are up in case anyone wants to play the game as it was intended to run (I hope anyway)

As the game nears completion, I’m working on fixing more and more bugs and polishing it up.

Unfortunately for us, I made an irreversible mistake while writing the engine which resulted in very poor pathfinding for the AIs.

Still, we managed to make a mini-starcraft out of it, and our musician Simonas managed to make the game much more lively.

Also, sorry for not uploading a progress video like I always do!! I’ll make a trailer though

P.S

I did a little update video on the new things.

I have a working UI and you can select from 2 items to place in the maze – ofcourse you have to buy them first. The Traps are stationery, the monsters are simply randomly traversing the paths.

Next thing is to make them interact with each other. This is the last hard part in the project – I hope I’ll have time for some polishing too.

Tags: monsters, traps, UI, video

The team is putting some finishing touches on the game before the Jam submission. In the mean while, here’s the music in the game:

Hi and welcome from the team’s artist,

Since our last (and first) update we’ve managed to advance a little bit further on the game, we’ve got some working gameplay, new spritesheets and new features are being added even as I type this.

Check out the video to find out a little more about the game!

And our spritesheets so far!

Follow us on twitter:

• @tccoxon
• @nerdofgamers (me)
• @fractallambda

Tags: My Little Terrorist

So this is my 6th ludum dare. And the first time I finished with the idea I started with. This time with the game Wrong Love. A game about a guy who’s goal is to steal all the goats on the world.

Tools

• haXe
• FlashDevelop
• Paint.NET
• The GIMP
• BFXR
• autotracker-c (customized)

Programming

I’ve created my game using haXe, a multiplatform open-source programming language for flash. javascript, java, c#, c++ and what not. I used this language because I really like it and I know a lot about it. however there are a lot of library’s to make it more easy to create a game I usually don’t use those because I like to program everything to the last thing, so did I this time. One if the things I worked most on was the lightning and the guards.

I’ve had done the lightning before but how I did it before it wasn’t fast enough. This time I added a little trick to make it a lot faster and make it look even better (it actually isn’t).  First I checked every 3 pixels if there was a wall, this way it showed some sort of spikes of light in the walls. I fixed this by making bigger steps and if it hit the wall do a amount of smaller steps back. this way it looked much smoother and also was faster. The second problem I had was the AI. It doesn’t have much of and AI. It just tries to follow the path. It is still not working very well and while creating levels I need to check if the guards are walking on a walkable spot. The guards also turn in 1 frame, so if a player is at that spot at the moment he will be caught instantly, not very fair.

What went right

• Light
• Keeping my code pretty clean.
• Making it not too heavy for CPU.
• Found out why my maps weren’t working (old version of compiler compiled images 0x010101 darker :S)

What went wrong

• Pathfinding
• Again no music that isn’t generated.
• Drawing a sleeping goat in a 16×16 image.

PLAY: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=4506

I worked hard on day one. I wrote two posts, but then I was gone! What happened?
The answer: I got sick
Day 2 and Day 3 down the drain
I might see if I can finish something up in 9 hours.

Man graduating killed alot more of my time than I had wanted. I may not make it to the dead line but I will definitively finish it after if I dont make it. Hopefully I will at least have a crappy graphics version without the water part of frogger. Here is a screen shot of some green squares hopping to some ugly green-gold goals.

Do you really need anything else?

So after having worked on MiLWaDS for many (As many as 48 even) hours now, I feel like a short post-mortem might be useful.

So MiLWaDS, or as it’s really called; “My Little World Domination Simulator”, don’t ask about the ‘i’ and the ‘a’.
I was in luck about the theme choice because this is a game idea I’ve been wanting to make for a long time, a sort of demake of the world domination part of the RTS Evil Genius. Using the minions you gain through recruiting efforts you’ll slowly but surely complete nefarious acts and villainous deeds on the road to complete global domination.

Decided to again make my game in C++, because I figure that using a tool I’m comfortable with is better than using a simple tool that I’ve never used before. Plus, with building it in C++ I was able to use the Yarn engine I’ve been working on for university projects, which also lead to some interesting features being available that I had absolutely no use for. Full angelscript based script engine support and google breakpad exception handling among them, I did use other parts of it though. And SFML, let’s not forget SFML.

Just like last time I was in my tools are;

• Visual Studio 2010, for writing my C++ code.
• GIMP, for all my art.
• Blender, for 3d-modeling, even though I haven’t really needed them.
• Spotify, because music helps creativity for me.

So some thoughts afterwards;

What went well?

• I love the simple but still stylish color scheme I managed to create early on in the development process, simple dark-grey with cyan borders worked well and gave the game a sort of hollywood-hacking feel.
• Loading the data from basic csv style formats worked much better than I expected it to, at point I was hoping to instead save them with JSON but decided against that to save the time need to implement something like that.

What went less well?

• The agency system ended up having far too many parts that never got used, I delegated too much work to them in the design phase.
• I never got my minions fininshed completely, each minion was supposed to gain in strength when levling up them as well as being able to specialize in different abilities.
• I ended up breaking Kunlaboro (An entity system I’ve been working a bit on) enough that I had to add triply redundant error checking to most messages. Since I was low on time I didn’t really want to try to get a clean clone done of it either.

Play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10247

Tags: C++, compo, final, ld25, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, sfml, Windows

CYBERQUEEN

visceral twine game

play online

spread like virus

remember: integration necessitates evisceration

uses publically available javascript code by Stefano Russo

Sometimes, games are as fun to write as they are to play.

What follows is an hour by hour breakdown of why writing this game was awesome.

[stextbox id=”warning” caption=”TL;DR”]

Box2D.

Go play the game. Do a lot of barrel rolls.

[/stextbox]

T -4:00

I am pretty discouraged. Lately I code in C++ and C, but my sound library wouldn’t link and the source won’t build. I need an alternative.

T -3:30

I take a break and write an “I’m In” post that rambles into reminiscing about how convenient my LD23 project skeleton was. I decide to use it.

T -3:00

I discover that (1) the skeleton only builds applets and (2) LWJGL applets no longer work in OSX. I write a new Application entry point and wonder if the math classes are missing as much as I remember.

T -2:00

The math classes are missing more than I remember. If I want an orthographic camera matrix, I’ll be rolling my own. I could just go back to GL 1.2, but I’m not sure I remember how. I try replacing my Kenji math classes with OpenMALI.

T -1:00

This sucks. C++ has spoiled me. I start looking for something like GLM.

T +0:00

The competition has started. I don’t know what programming language or tools I’m using. I’m screwed.

T +1:00

My searches are hitting the online libgdx javadoc. The API looks pretty good. I start reading tutorials.

T +2:00

I successfully glClear(). I draw a UFO sprite and rotate in 15 degree increments. At 60 degrees I decide that this sucks. I write a basic Entity System for the comfort of the routine. I go to bed.

T +11:00

Morning. I’m adding TrueType support to my GDX workspace. I’m going render something, even if it’s just an FPS counter. I stumble across the Box2D classes. I still don’t have a game idea, so I might as well build a sandbox. I find this tutorial and create a ground box in my own game.

T +12:00

Inevitably, I add a spaceship. This Box2D debug renderer is an awesome time saver for prototyping.

T +13:00

I’m ustreaming a flying UFO with rotate/thrust controls. I add cubes because physics. I crash the UFO into the cubes, which fly everywhere. I am laughing a lot. I decide that this game really needs flying cubes.

T +15:00

The cubes are arranged in a way that approximates buildings, in stacked rows. At first.

My UFO has a tractor beam that pulls objects up. Then they hit the UFO. I learn about collision masks.

30% of the way through the competition, I have some idea of what I’m doing. I throw away all the game object classes and move everything into the entity system.

T +19:00

The tractor beam logic is done. It opens doors if there’s something “edible” in the beam; otherwise the beam releases at the UFO and the object continues upwards. I can’t see the doors opening, because the graphics still consist of (1) FPS counter and (2) the Box2D debug renderer.

T +21:00

I add a stats component and render stats in the ground. They’re boring. I have no idea what the instruments in a UFO would look like, but A: 320 N: 16 isn’t cutting it. On the plus side, I now have a command-queue based renderer.

T +22:00

My body feels like crap because all my windows were on the wrong monitors for livestreaming, and it screwed up my posture. I have shooting pains down my arms and my left forearm has an egg-shaped welt on it from leaning against the desk. I call it a night.

T +36:00

Good morning! I fly the UFO again. This needs to be a side-scroller.

T +36:15

This is a side-scroller.

T +37:00

The humans are smaller boxes that keep the bigger boxes company. The humans need an AI that makes them run away from the UFO. The rules for when certain things collide with other things are getting complicated.

T +41:00

I have spent the last two hours throwing humans. There is a callback that fires when they hit the ground, but the impact force is always registering as zero, so the humans aren’t killed by the impact. I tamper with the FixtureDefs involved and eventually see some improvement.

T +43:00

I recreate some old music and copy the .ogg file into my assets. It plays with zero hassle. It’s also six minutes long. I won’t need any other music. I will probably get sick of this. I disable the music.

This game needs sound effects. I fire up CFXR and create a couple of wub-wub-wub-type sounds.

Unless I am serious about my game using only the Box2D debug renderer, I’d better start drawing sprites.

I write a collision damage processor for the UFO instead.

T +44:15

I start drawing sprites.

T +44:35

That will do for now.

T +45:30

I have spent too much time looking for a monospaced pixel font. On the other hand, the stats on the results screen now line up. I feel like these aliens are probably not on a plum assignment with top of the line gear. I add PONG burn-in to their briefing monitor.

The humans aren’t getting a flee AI.

T +46:00

I sprite the crap out of the main game screen. I don’t think I’ll have time for backgrounds.

T +47:00

I don’t have time to draw a proper title screen. I recreate the briefing screen with a sort of title/instructions thing.

T +47:30

I tune the levels. I feel like this isn’t really a game, except for the fact that there’s a goal and you can die. It’s still fun though. Wait, what’s a game?

T +47:45

I create sound effects for humans and buildings tearing loose and UFO damage. I scream twice and scare the crap out of my wife. I drop a dinner plate and fork on my desk while I stomp my feet. The cat runs away. I realize I missed my chance to add a cat sound effect.

T +48:00

Deep breaths. I play the game. It…well, somehow, it’s a game. I upload it and try it again. And again.

It’s not much, but it’s the game I want to play right now.

I am so excited I forget to have my victory beer.

Tags: 1000 words, box2d, java, ld25, libgdx, post-mortem

Hey guys,

So I made a game. It’s about taking over the world.

There also is a timelapse!

Play | Entry-Page

-Matthias

Tags: 3ds max, max, timelapse, unity, unity3d