I’m pleased with how my game MISSILE RIDER turned out. I was going for a challenging control scheme with lots of room to experiment and improve, and I think that plan worked out pretty well. It does seem slightly more challenging than I expected… which I’d say is a good thing… though I haven’t been able to beat that Yir guy yet…

I used Unity and the free 2D pixel framework RagePixel, which I highly recommend for jams. It does feel a bit janky sometimes, but the speed at which you can create and animate art is fantastic. I ran into one major problem with it during the jam, which is that moving the camera around messes with the way the pixels are displayed. I wanted to be able to ride rockets in an area larger than the screen, so I spent a large portion of saturday making the world move around the player to simulate a moving camera.

I had a bad bug (might still have it, but haven’t been able to reproduce any longer) for awhile that was caused by clicking the PLAY button on the main menu screen (since removed). It called the exact same function as hitting spacebar did, but for some reason starting the game with the button messed up my camera system. Probably gonna try to stay away from Unity GUI buttons in the future… I would have discovered the cause of the issue sooner in the jam if I myself was actually using the PLAY button, but I was just hitting spacebar to start every time. Guess the lesson is to make sure to… test things… that players will do…

Not sure what’s up with the frog guy… I wanted someone to yell tips and instructions at you instead of a boring real tutorial… a frog just seemed right at the time…

Since my biggest regret is that I didn’t get time to make the clouds not look like big white turds… overall: good jam.

Oops, too big !

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2012 at 3:11 pm and is filed under LD #25. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

So, I’m done and dusted – first LD is completed, and I’ve built my first game in the process.  I’m immensely proud, but also a little sad – I made some real rookie mistakes, and I think I could have produced a far, far more polished game with ten or so more hours and a little more motivation.  So instead of the traditional post-mortem, here are what I’d tell my pre-LD me, if I had the good fortune to send him an inter-dimensional time-travelling message.

1. Learn your weak areas, and focus on them

I did this mostly right – prior to LD, I read a few tutorials on creating good programmer art, and those were invaluable.  Sadly, I didn’t also realise that I didn’t know the first thing about making music, so had to figure it out as I went along.  I lost a fair few hours figuring out whether I wanted to use SunVox or not.

2.  Define your mood early, and stick to it

I knew pretty early on what I wanted from The Fix – the feel of 1940s New York underground boxing, with black and white pictures, quiet piano music, and a small crowd.  What I hadn’t really figured is that I really don’t have  the skill for that.  I can’t draw boxers for crap, let alone make good piano music.   Had I taken that into account, and gone for a more cutesy aesthetic, I would probably have ended up with a far more coherent game with fewer stick figures.

3. Think of which features you’re willing to lose

Early on, think about what’s core to your game, and what’s superfluous faffing around.  Think about what you can lose, and what you need to implement – and get that done early.  My game would have been massively improved with a rudimentary betting system, but I was just so out of motivation 2 days in that I didn’t get it done.  That’s a huge shame, in hindsight.

4. 48 hours is actually  damn long time

I assumed, like most people do, that I might fail LD because due to running out of time.  I was nowhere near that happening – 48 hours is a huge amount of time for a basic game.  What’s far more likely to kill you is burning out and running out of motivation.   So take some time off: go outside and enjoy life.  I spent all of Sunday morning outside with my girlfriend, and had a really, really productive afternoon.

I think that’s all for now.  If you’re reading this and considering jumping into LD, then the most important tip of all is this – don’t worry too much.  Enjoy yourself, build something that works, and finish it off.  There are plenty more jams in the future.  I’ll definitely be back for another

Tags: pygame, tips

I’m surprised with the sheer amount of .NET entries. Me likey

Overall, i think it went pretty well.

The game is complete, although it’s lacking a lot of features i planned, the music begins to grind on you after a while and the sound effects are simple. The art however is pretty good, and considering for the first 5-10 hours i had no idea at all and restarted 3 times. I think I did pretty well, I wanted to add more features to the boss battle, but that didn’t end up happening. The game can be found here. It’s quite hard to beat as you have to conserve and collect ammo. This is my second Ludum Dare, but i think my first one probably went better. You can play my first one here.

Hello, this is my first blog post during #LD 25. We had a lot of rush and not time for reading the blog or post something. Sorry
The game is finished! It’s a classic game, nothing revolutionary but I think very fun to play. We have finished the game yesterday and today I have added a global score board (!!) and added more fun!

The game is: Destroy everything  before they kill you! Very simple with some humor like Goats.

There isn’t to say so much about the game, just try it and have fun!

SERVER

This was my first time in trying to make an online score board and I don’t know how but it works! I have used XML-RPC and I managed to compile it under Debian and Windows. So the server is running on my little Raspberry PI and the game on your machine Windows.

This is the server, where all your scores are located

We are really happy on how the game turned out. Some screenshots here:

You can download the game from here

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2012 at 3:35 pm and is filed under LD #25. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Never make sequels of previous entries. This never turns out well. And I’m not even finished right now. -.-

Well with my game CORRUPTIONEXE (or CORRUPTEXE whatever you prefer) done for this I guess it’s time for a postmortem.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18652

I decided to work with Game maker: Studio for this, I’ve used Game Maker 8.1 quite a lot before this and I decided to try Studio because I assumed it was pretty much the same, but those small differences kinda affected the time it took longer time to do some stuff because of the differences.

I started out with no idea at all what to do, I expected “The End of the World” as a theme but because it was the theme I really didn’t want I was caught unprepared idea wise and it took a half hour to start and 4 hour later I changed completely direction on it all.

I succeeded in making a decent tune for it and even if I haven’t used sfxr I got some ok sounds from it.

In the first day I got the title screens done and I was ready to make some levels

However after finishing a level I pretty much burned out, I got sick of the idea and hated working on it and couldn’t come up with much more to do with it so I added the stuff I scrapped at the start in the game and a goat and called it a ending.

The Good:

Creative Idea, I haven’t seen any other with the same/similar idea at this ludum dare (yet)

Visuals are pretty good considering how bad I am at

The bad:

The ending, It’s just plain weird….

No real gameplay, I couldn’t get an idea what to do to challenge the player and still make sense with the game logic so I just let the player go nuts instead

Well, next Ludum dare I make sure to start with the gameplay first because that’s what I really find fun to work on in games.

Tags: ld25, post-mortem, postmortem

Hi Ludumers and Readers!

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I really enjoyed it although, it was hard to stay awake after a 18 h session :P.

Before the start, I precisely examined all of the themes, and after seeing the results of the earlier voting rounds’, I expected the ‘End of the World’ to be the theme for LD25. I successfully missed the start with 1 h, but when I saw the theme, I was a bit confused. No idea came into my mind. I have written down something for this theme, and started to build something on it. After the first session, which was 12 hours long, I wrote code that made no sense.

After sleeping, and having dinner, my motivation was over 9000 (YES! NINE THOUSAND!), and did a 18 hour session. It was my first game, that I finished, and I am really proud of myself for achieving this. It is a really good feeling…

My only problem was with the sounds. I could get some nice effects from bfxr, but I wanted a nice music, but I didn’t have time for it.

I wanted to achieve some kind of pixel graphics, so I just scaled up the smaller sprites, and got some nice characters 😛 I’m not a good pixel artist, and animator, but I made my best with the knights. I know, the gameplay scene should be much better, but I wanted to focus on the gameplay..

Maybe it is a bit boring to play, but when I play with it, I feel that it’s MY game, and it makes me feel good. I think if I ever need motivation to make games, I’ll just start Knight Wrecker and play thru it. Only if I can 😛 After the 20th wave, it is really hard 😛

I really feel that I learned a lot, and it made be a better programmer, even if the code is very ugly, and using variables like a, or sss, or I don’t know what I wrote

I have implemented the food finder (little triangles on the screen) to show you where the people are.

Music reacts to game by jumping to exciting chorus when a man is close.

The shark now eats and animates.  The food goes down over time.  The score goes up and you get 50 for eating a man.

Not sure where to take it now.  Was thinking levels, and a bit of strategy to make sure you don’t run out of food (or you die).

Here’s a pic.

Well this was my first ludum dare, and suffice to say, things have not gone well, at all.

Firstly i was busy all day Saturday, and only came to the theme late in the evening,

which then took a few hours for me to think of something not particularly inspired.

(I was actually suprised to see the next day how many people had thought of similar ideas to me.)

I drew some really rubbish gfx to get started, and then started to program with SFML 1.6 which i’ve never used before.

A few hours later i had switched to SFML 2.0 because it looked like it had better input handling.

So i had to change quite a bit of code because all the functions had changed.

Then when i started adding sound effects i was dismayed that you have to include a 2mb+ dll just to play sound with SFML 2.0.

So then i downloaded BASS lib, and spent a while figuring out how to use that.

Then by the end of the night i was feeling drained and was starting to develop a killer sore throat.

Cue the next day and i am feeling like cr*p, with the worst cold of the year, so i spent most of the day in bed feeling sorry for myself.

Anyway, i did a couple more hours programming, then threw in the towel feeling really lousey.

Realising that i’m not going to finish in time, and actually making games in a really short time is not actually that much fun, especially when you are feeling ill.

Here is the results of my few hours work… for what it’s worth.

I wanted to write a post-mortem today for my compo entry, but I am still very tired so I’ll do it another day

I’ll just present the game instead. So let me introduce you to…

Crime in the City

Crime in the City lets you play a villain whose dream is to control the city. Hire a team of baddies and send them sow chaos in the city !

The game plays like an asymetrical card game, it works like Netrunner. You build a deck of bad guys, launch raids and the other side will try to stop you. The other side is mainly cops and a super hero, “The Dark Cape”.

This was a big project, probably too big. I didn’t have time to work on the graphics at all, so the art stayed prototype art. I only had 20 minutes to do the music. And no goats ! I had a nice idea on how to add one though… I’ll tell you about it on the post-mortem.

The bright side of things is that the game is fully functional and actually quite fun once you get it I hope you’ll like it anyway !

As for me, I’m going to get some more sleep, so that I’ll be in good shape to play your games tomorrow !

Here’s my postmortem of DinoBurgers:

TIMELAPSE: http://youtu.be/mg7LQC7Z0P0

What went well?

• Gameplay: some friend playtested/gave feedback
• Making music with Famitracker and FL Studio
• Not using content generation! (sfxr etc.)

What went not so well?

• I had to study for my finals this weekend!
• Time: I really ran out of time, so there is not much extra content…
• NO GOATS

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18984

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse

media=”screen”

h1, h1 a, h1 a:hover, h1 a:visited, #headerimg .description {

1. text-decoration: none;
2. color: white;

Tags: css, h1, heading, hidden text, white-on-white text

You can see the timelapse of making “Mr. Cylinder”

Built the video! Here it is!

First time actually seeing a timelapse of me working, pretty sureal O.o

Thanks for the fun guys!

Because there are many doubts about BGE, Blender Game Engine, I decided to make a “review” about. Please understand that I just made one game with it, and made it without directly working with python, so it may be a lot better using it.

So, “Is it worth work with BGE?” to answer this question, first we have to understand how programming in Blender works. Blender has a system called Logic Bricks and their functionality is simple.

We have the sensors, that say what will trigger the action. The Controllers that are the condition that will say if the action will happen, and the Actuators that are the action itself. Beginning, middle and end, looks pretty straight forward doesn’t? And well, they are indeed very simple to understand, so I can say that anyone, knowing or not how program, can use Logic Bricks, being maybe, the simpler to “program” 3D engine currently available.

But this simplicity comes with a price. One of the biggest problems with Logic Bricks is that they are too simplistic. Because they are design with the logic “beginning, middle, end”, you can’t continue the logic after the end without make some tricks, making your logic much larger and complex.

Another problem is that you can’t use native variables, like object position, nor manipulate them directly, having to use python or tricks for that, making simple common tasks like make an property equal to another, overly complex.

One good thing that I have to mention is how smooth everything looks. The graphics are nice, the movements are fluid, everything looks and feels good. Because Blender is free, maybe be a cheaper option if you want project shadows in your game. Also, Blender have a truly awesome shader editor, enabling pure artists to make their own shaders.

A big issue when you finished your game is how you going to distribute, because, even with Blender Player, the people who will play your game will still have to have Blender installed. * There are alternatives to this, even making a functional web-player, but they are still being develop.

So, the main question is, it is worth making a game with BGE? And my answer is: it depends. First, I must say that is very simple to represent what you thinking with it, making a great prototype tool, but going beyond and make something that is suppose to work in some way is hard. Therefore, what I recommend is, watch a tutorial, try it out, with some hours you will already get it how to make a game with it, and if you don’t liked it, just wait a little more, there are many developers working and improving it, it will be better someday.

*I have been informed of people who got Blender Games to work even without Blender installed, but also, I have been informed of people that couldn’t play the game until they installed the newest version of Blender. I had searched for an answer but nothing definitive. Maybe it work with just python installed, if I find something more about, I will update this.

Tags: BGE, blender

After 3 LD’s submitting nothing of my own, contributing only to group submissions, I finally got my own game in. However, given the quality of the game it really should have been done in compo time. I just didn’t sleep well and was frustrated for hours by tiny problems. The persistence of these problems was largely due to a lack of architecture in the code. If everything had been separated nicely with systems communicating via events, that being the approach I favour, I might have been able to construct a robust game without errors. With the limited duration of the compo in mind I rushed in, and made an absolute spaghetti of it that I could only begin to untangle in Jam time. The tools were all well known to me, so I could have used them much better.

I am however happy with the  effort I put in, even if it could have been better directed. I was pleased with my initial concept, which was supported by what I feel is the best LD theme ever, once you discount the moral, narrative element and consider role reversal of existing game designs. That is at least where I saw potential in the theme.

I look forward to trying again next LD and doing better. This has rekindled my enthusiasm for rapid development.  I also hope to rewrite this at some point and extend it with ship AI as an exercise.

Yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t have time to livestream during programming, but now I’m about to stream whilst playing video games made during Ludum Dare. So if you want me to (try) to play your game live, be sure to say something in the chat! (Be kind, its my first stream…)

http://www.twitch.tv/gravity_games_interactive

I’ve held off on writing this because I was waiting for reviews and issues to come in so I’d have something to post-mortemise about.

I have been sat here most of the afternoon playing and rating games, whilst reading the ratings on my own game in case things were broken.

Actually, nothing is broken apart from Audio – which is the usual story with HTML5 games even in these days (sadface), so I uploaded a fix that on platforms where it wasn’t going to work, that audio could at least be disabled (it was only generated fuzzy noise anyway).

Lesson learned there, TEST ALL THE BROWSERS

What else have I learned? Well, I actually finished my entire game by the end of Saturday, by doing the following things

• Using an engine so I didn’t even once have to worry about collision, pixels, rendering, etc
• Focusing on the game, rather than art or sounds
• Keeping my features to the bare minimum and making sure there was an end-to-end experience in place

Following that, I spent a few hours when I was tired

• Making some art
• Generating some sounds
• Playing and noting the things that annoyed me
• Getting other people to play it and noting things that annoyed them

The next day was solely spent just making the game fun to play

Yes indeed, after spending about 8 hours building the game, I then spent about 8 hours in the following loop

1. Play the game
2. Note down what wasn’t fun
3. Think of a way to fix the problem raised by #2
4. Implement the fix for the problem raised by #2
5. Goto 1

It seems to have paid off, as the reviews being written are favourable indeed, my favourite being

“Easily gets into my top 3 of LD25! Keep it up!”

I am strongly encouraged by this as a note of the things I have learned at past Ludum Dares and now cannot wait until the next one where I might try to be a bit more ambitious but still try to “finish the game by the end of day #1” as that really seems to be the best way forward.

Well, still having problems tweaking networking issues … i remember some people telling me on IRC : carefull with multiplayer games, its hard to finish in time … they are correct !

But still, things are getting along.

Build your star base, chose a opponent, attack him !!!!

I didn’t finish this time and I also used some of my old (unpublished) code so I couldn’t submit it anyway. I’m pretty happy with the result though as a proof of concept.

Although it looks similar to my previous Android game Breakin, the code I used is actually from Swipe n Roll, since I wanted to use Libgdx.

It’s mainly made for Android and you can install it by downloading the apk on your phone. I haven’t published it on Google Play yet. You can also try the desktop version (Java).

Random thoughts about the game:

• People seem to like the basic idea so far.
• It’s too difficult when there are only a few tiles left. This could be solved by letting the last ones explode by themselves or just provide more balls.
• Perhaps gain one point for each tile removed and loose one point for each ball you loose.
• It’s a good start but I’m not sure I’m going to finish it.
• No goats

Anyway, I had a good time developing it and enjoyed the competition together with the other developers who gathered at Goo Technologies in Stockholm.

The Cropduster is a 2d puzzle game built in HTML5+Javascipt; the player must direct a stream of ass-gas onto the target within a crowded church and escape before the victim wretches.  Fans scattered around the church allow the player to maneuver their attacks as the Cropduster ruins baptisms, weddings, funerals and a bonus event.    Click here to play it in your browser!

Team Cropduster consisted of:

• Dan Cromer
• Larry James
•  EdgarVerona
• double051
• Robocognito
• Charlie Helman
• Aquatarkus

And yes, we know we’re going to hell for this.

Mini post-mortem:

Pro’s:  

• Great team, lots of multi-talented folks to pick up tasks on the fly.
• Lots of great ideas for the jam
• Starting at an LAN party was a fun way to get the ball rolling

Con’s:

• Went with an untested engine and tech.
• Distributed team meant harder coordination
• NEVER ENOUGH TIME!

Congrats to anyone that finished a game!  I put up a video of my game on youtube, but if you are planning on judging please play it before watching the video.  I also already have an enhanced version up for those who aren’t judging because there were a few annoying things I really had to fix.  Here’s a link to my entry.

I have a game!

Conquest Of The Mayans has been submitted, and can be found behind this elegant and finely-crafted link. I’m still not entirely sure whether it’s *winnable* yet, but it’s definitely playable.

Maybe some time in the next few days, I’ll throw together a Slightly More Polished Edition, with a main menu and some sound effects. Maybe I’ll even continue with my stretch-goal plans and put together a multiplayer version, who knows.

Hahaha … the game is funny as hell!

we did some really good job!

we will upload the game soon (Inshallah)!

Added some rocks to have things to avoid. Still needs loads of work but I’m going to submit it anyway.

It blocks you from getting outside the world, and respawns humans when eaten.  It’s a survival game.  I’m just working on the game over screen.

Thought I world post this again, updated for Ludum Dare 25.
It shows the distribution of votes and coolness for all entrants.

The graph is automatically generated so it is always up to date.

Put your username at the end of the url to mark where your entry is on the graph.

I feel really good, I managed to get an entry in.  I am going to be SO in next time, although this being my first, I don’t know how often ludum dare comes around.  Could somebody tell me?

If you saw my previous post, you would know that I got sick on day 2. I felt quite a bit better today and I decided to get to work. And I have a slight chance of finishing.

Let’s see how this turns out. Now BACK TO WORK!

Yesterday shortly after submission deadline I was too tired to post more than my post presenting a twisted side-plot about an imaginery goat in a recursive nightmare

Today after some game voting and some nice feedback on my own game I made a video with a walkthrough for easy and normal difficulty for my entry “Makarun”.

There is also a hard-mode. But I only did complete hard-mode a few times myself, and did not record it.

Game description from my entries page:
You are the bad guy, making a run (makarun) for it. On your escape from jail you have to evade the good guys or take them down brutally. It’s a stealth-action-game in 2d that makes extensive use of dynamic lights to visualize and check lines of sight. Also makes things much prettier 😉
So if you are interested, I would be happy to see your comment showing up on my entries page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=15341
I will rate every game showing up in my comments soon or later.

Pheeeew! Finished our first Ludum Dare submission: “Dr. Vile in The Greater Good“! After working on months-long projects, it’s amazing to think that this game didn’t exist – and wasn’t even planned – 72 hours ago!

Congratulations to every Ludum Dare dev and whether you completed what you wanted to complete or not, you have much more now than what you had three days ago! 😀

Enjoy Dr. Vile in The Greater Good and please give us your feedback! We may expand this game further, add more features, and who knows what else!

Since one of us did programming (and music!) and one of us did art, we’re planning on writing two post-mortems! Stay tuned 😀

>> Dr. Vile in The Greater Good – Entry Page <<

Tags: action, evil, genius, scientist, top down

Alright, here goes:

What I did well:

• going with a really simple idea. I managed to barely finish it 30 minutes before the deadline, and I devoted enough time into polishing it.
• stocking my fridge full of food before the compo. Saved me time that would be lost during grocery trips.
• (mostly) choosing tools that I’ve been kind-of familiar with. I’ve dabbled a bit in SFML 2 before, I’m doing all of my other C++ work in VS2012, and I’m able to work efficiently in Photoshop, so I didn’t need to learn much. The only exception is in the BGM category – this was my first time creating music at all (except some prior experience with Audacity and voice recording), and I decided to go with Soundation. An hour of playing around resulted in a four seconds long loop, that – to my surprise – was actually praised in the comments. Yay for that.
• choosing an idea working for the most probable themes. This one could’ve been easily adapted to “Outer Space” (you are an alien, trying to deliver a bomb to the Earth) or “End of the World” (you’re a… actually, there wouldn’t have been any changes!). So that’s good.

(more after the break)

What I did wrong:

• little experience with creating games.  This was actually my very first self-coded and self-released game, so I had to quickly adapt to a lot of new concepts, which has also resulted in:
• messy code. I know it’s Ludum Dare and probably more than a half of submitted projects is a mess when it comes to code, but mine is like a Jenga tower that looked fine until the 36h mark, and after that the earthquake hit, causing the blocks to fly everywhere (actually, this would’ve been a pretty good metaphore if I used Code::Blocks for programming).
• procrastination. Even though I was coding hard, there were those moments of staring at walls, trying to figure out what to do. I need to work on my concentration.
• using C++. I like the language, and it’s the one I’m most fluent in, but Web is the way to go when it comes to Ludum Dare. Next time I’ll try using Unity or Flash.

What could’ve been changed if I had more time:

• mine explosion animation.
• an intro to the game (skippable, of course) that showed your submarine being lowered into the water, as the villain (you) was explaining his grand scheme.
• a satisfactory outro (and not something that was mashed up in Photoshop in five minutes right before the deadline).
• other enemies (I was on throwing in some torpedoes, or horizontal lasers for more variety)
• better enemy randomization (a matter of tweaking).
• making sure that you can’t get blocked by a wall of enemies – you should’ve been able to pass every enemy in every scenario.
• voice acting (a villain shouting “NOOOOOOOO-” during the game over screen; I was actually close to doing that).

Hey everybody, thanks for the comments, I hope to soon release a version with some new features and modifications, in the meanwhile, here it’s the game’s timelapse!

I’m having trouble adding depth to my game. There’s a basic scoring system now (just counts k/d for each team), most of the chaos spells I want are implemented, there’s a timer forcing you to act should the battle not automatically go in your favor (there are no physical differences between the two teams, they have the same amount of soldiers, spawners, and their soldiers do the same damage with the same health.) However, it isn’t very deep. You don’t really feel much motivation to do anything at all.

I’m not sure what to do to make it any more deep though. The entire goal from the start was to just create a game where you are the villain by manipulating a normal battle to work in your favor, regardless of everything that either team stands for.

My concept was created in half an hour in which I was reminded about all those bad guys always trying to destroy the Earth but always lose the game and end up in jail or something. Not this time, this time you’re the villain is the idea and a game without winning is not fun. So, this time, you, the villain, will blow up the Earth starting with the two cities on your TODO list.

I planned to create a second “how did I do it” but I couldn’t find any useful new facts since the previous.

Obviously the heroes try to interrupt your evil plans but you found a way to lock them in the dockingbay where they try to cut the door. This gives you the time to go destroying the Earth. Sadly your station is not fit for such powerful ray and it starts to collapse.

Command your drones to repair the station as you try to blast Earth back to the medieval.

Tools used: Visual studio 2012 (code/c++), Irrlicht (3d), IrrKlang (Audio), Photoshop (2d), Illustrator (2d), Anvil (Audio), Audacity (Audio)

Download and vote for the game

Tags: 2012, 25, 3D, C++, compo, Cpp, dare, december, final, Irrklang, irrlicht, ld25, ld48, ludum, Ludum Dare, ludum dare 25, microsoft, screenshot, visual studio

Alright all I have left is adding some sounds. There won’t be any music because I didn’t wanna come up with something dinky / lame in the last couple of hours.

Here’s a SS of the title screen which is also the tutorial:

Play it here, if you haven’t already.

What went well:

• Using Box2D with libGDX.  It was so easy that I’m almost ashamed I didn’t try it sooner.
• PID controllers.  The thought occurred to me from my engineering courses and I’m still surprised at how well they worked.  Three of them are used in controlling the saucer (tilt, torque, thrust), and each victim goat has one for tractor beam simulation. The camera class uses one, too.
• The little noises from the saucer?  I used my Gollum impression (yes, that’s me) and ran it through GoldWave’s mechanize filter.

What didn’t:

• An unfinished enemy (fighter jet) that was to chase the saucer around.  The code as it exists now is so hilariously unstable that it made the game nearly unplayable.  With an hour left in the compo, I had to cut it out.
• The beam visual effect.  Again, had the sprite done, didn’t have the time to get it in.
• Way too much time trying to get the terrain shader code to work…when the real problem was in how I was assembling the mesh.
• As mentioned in the comments, it definitely is more of a toy than a game right now.  The timer and score counter were quite literally added in the last minute of development.

What’s next:

• (As requested) Accelerometer-based control for the Android version.
• Better visuals.  Actually winnable gameplay.
• More victims.  And enemies.
• Google Play release…and Ouya, whenever it comes out.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

PC Build: http://www.mediafire.com/?a0g5a9xffe0ut16

Web Build: http://www.mediafire.com/?bd1wjhu9661knya

Resources used: Unity, some old camera code and coroutine tech

What went well:

Pathfinding, quite alot of the fun.
It finds all the squares you can walk to and the shortest path using A* in one search.

Camera Control, It seemed nasty at first but seize control of the camera to move it to characters when their turn started and moving it to follow attacks greatly improved player awareness.

What went horribly horrible wrong:

Time, this jam fell onto two work days!  and I didn’t get alot of features I wanted in. Like win conditions or death :(.

Hey I bundled together my weekend timelapse for my point-and-feel-bad game Harold is an Executioner, see below. Note quite how much time is spent faffing around with art! And any plays and feedback are much appreciated!

Entry page here

Hi everybody !

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

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

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

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

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

We finishedon time!

Play it here

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

Video:
Footage

timelapse code

timelapse leveldesign + audio

timelapse art and level design

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

This was a tough weekend!

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

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

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

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

Tags: as3, final, flash, timelapse

What Went Right

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

What Went Wrong

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

Other Notes

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

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

Some Art Assets

Gameover

Victory

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

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

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

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

What went right:

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

What went wrong:

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

POST-MORTEM-TIME!

See the butcher!

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

What went bad:

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

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

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

What went well:

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

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

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

TIMELAPSE

PLAY

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

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

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

What went right:

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

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

What went wrong:

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

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

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

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

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

Here you go, try: Fisticuffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play it here

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

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

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

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

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

What went good:

– In the end I had a playable Game

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

What went bad:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huzzah!

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

Thanks for all of the ratings so far! 😀

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

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

😉

Tags: postmortem, screenshot, Shameless Plug

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

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

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

What went right:

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

What went wrong:

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

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

Tags: post-mortem

You can now use several weapons

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

CRUNCH MOOOODE.

Greetings, programs!

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

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

Of course, I am still having a blast! 😀

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

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

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

What I did well:

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

My pixelart isn’t THAT bad, is it? 😀

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

What could have been better:

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

What I learned:

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

Now on to play some games from fellow developers! 😀

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

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

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

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

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

So cute!

This was my first entry. I’m 13 years old and I live in Brazil, in october I started learning how to do stuff on Unity 3D.  Well, since I had no cool ideas for games I stopped developing after one or two weeks, but I promised myself I’d participate on the next Ludum Dare.

Well, it was really stressful, but I loved it! It’s really satisfacting to make a game in a compo and playing others. Also, I’m really glad I got 9 comments just today! Anyway, this was a lot harder than I thought. I wanted to add lots and lots of features, like bombs, shops, but I didn’t have time for that.

What went right

Music: it doesn’t fit that well in the game, but I enjoy what I created c:

500 Jellypuffies jumping around innocently: OMG, SO CUTE! Yeah, kill them already

Scary Jellycops: they stare through your soul, you must avoid them at any cost.

What ye think ya doin’ messing up with my bros?

What went wrong:

Simplicity: too simple, I wish I would have had time to add features

500 Jellypuffies jumping around innocently: if your computer is slow, the game won’t run well.

These orange guys are stealthy: almost always they are behind you, you can’t watch them kill you.

No goats: Yeeeeaahhh…

Next LD I’ll do much better than this. But if you want to kill cute stuff….

Hi everyone,

After a marathon 3 days of gamedevelopment we are proud to present:

SUPER Witch Hunter Pro.

Play it here and tell us what you think!

Entry Page

Thanks.

Tags: final, ld25, unity, unity3d

Finally put together the timelapse of my competition entry. Hope you enjoy it – 48 hours condensed into 2 minutes

You can play my entry here.

Tags: timelapse

What to say about Ludum Dare Jam…

Well, I could say that the competition was fun. That is as exciting. That it was a great opportunity to meet new people and to build stronger bonds with the ones I already know. This is all true.

Ludum Dare 25 was amazing. My team made a little game called Holly Jolly Pyromaniac and I’m absolutely in love with it. (Of course, I guess I am a little biased.) It boasts retro pixel art, catchy chiptune tracks, and shockingly addictive gameplay (and a maniacal santa, frantic elves, and GOATS). And before I go any further, I’ll ask you to play a round or two so you can take my word on this. And put in some ratings too. We’d really appreciate that. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7580

The development process was frantic, but I loved every second of it. It took about two hours to come up with our gameplay concept. It would be about a Santa Claus who is pure evil and wants to bomb every house he visits. Of course we eventually decided we’d be bombing elves, rather than kids, so that nobody is offended.

The ideas just kept on coming throughout the entire 72 hours. New houses, panicking elves, snowmen, pine trees, GOATS, reindeer, Rudolph, and so much more. It was great letting everybody get their say in and making a game we all enjoy. And thanks to a little Skype group chat Icreated (with over 20 amazing developers in it) we were also able to get input from other competitors while helping them improve their own games along the way.

In the end, I couldn’t be happier with our game. There were hardly any instances of “man, I wish we had time to add that.” We’ve been getting a lot of good feedback from players, so we’re also happy with the community’s response as well.

I’ll leave you with this. Next time you’re considering Ludum Dare (or the jam, which is what we did), don’t consider it. Just do it. The days spent creating these games will never be forgotten. They’re fun, frantic, and exciting. Everybody should participate at least once. I promise, you won’t regret it.

P.S. Here are some devlogs from our artist. They showcase him at his best: drawing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sRUhJlDZpw

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

P.P.S. In case you haven’t played the game yet, and you still need further convincing, here’s a screenshot.

Hey people, I had a great time with LD25 and can’t wait to play some entries.

I spent some time writing a play guide for Horrible Horace, to help players get started. Hope you enjoy the game!

You can get the guide (PDF format) from http://tinyurl.com/boh8wat

And you can play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=11027

Transient team proudly presents you The Witching Game. It’s a sandbox game about a homicidal witch, terrorizing a small village. You will be starting plague or get burnt at the stake. You will look at an awesome scarecrow that does nothing and steal goats for the amazing magic power.
We truly hope that you will have at least an ounce of all the fun we had while making this thing. It was something special, with all the inasnity and a touch of Yoko factor.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7122

Not finished, but almost!

http://atridas87.cat/LD25/

So here’s my first ever released game. You are an evil elevator! Your goal is drop the mans of at the wrong floor so they get stressed out and eventually explode!When the mans realise that they’re on the wrong floor they will be damaged by stress. The more stressed out they are, the more damage they take. This is indicated by the number over their head. The further away from the correct floor they are, the more stress they take. If you drop them at the correct floor though, the will be relieved and lose stress.

Made in C# and XNA. Other programs used were Photoshop, Sonar, Audacity, Paint.net and Visual Studio 2010.

The building

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18957

Yes, our game is finished! There are a lot of things we’d like to add, but 72hrs is waaay to short amount of time

Anyway, you can download our beautiful creation here:

Yup, that’s it!

Have fun!

With a few hours left until the 72-hour jam deadline, here’s what I’ve got so far:

Most notably, there are six different types of enemies, each colored to stand out in its own delicious way. Right now they all behave exactly the same, but I’ll be implementing different enemy behaviors next.

Back to work!

Here’s a test of my jam game: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/69608548/jamgame.zip (requires .net framework 3.5+, temp control scheme listed in tempctrls.txt) If it doesn’t run, report it to me and I’ll see what I can do.

I’m still having trouble coming up with adding depth to the gameplay of my game. You can apply spells onto things, and they have a chance of backfiring (a pretty high chance) meaning things may not go as expected. You can spawn things, or add spells to things (move up to the object and press enter or space to apply the effect). This means that the basic mechanic of controlling the battle is there. It just isn’t fun, though. I’d like some advice for that, because I’m drawing a blank.

For the moment, I’m going to add some polish. Sound, hopefully, at least.

So, I finished up my game in time. I thought it’s be amusing to kill not people or flowers, but to infect the very land itself. And so it was, that Deadland was born. You are a purple sentient blob-thing, who’s made it his/her business to infect all of the land in sight with his disease. Sometimes using missiles.

Alas, I didn’t have enough time or skill to add any decent sounds or music, and it’s missing some animations that I would have liked, but this feels like something I’ll work on again in the future. Why not take the opportunity to try it now, and let me know what you think!

Good day to you!

We’re approaching the target. Command?

Our jam entry is nearly complete. We had to cut a bit from the scenario, and I’m also concerned that I might have the only phone on the planet that won’t choke on all the audio we’re juggling, but we’ll see soon! We’re on target for a successful launch shortly.

Hello!

I competed this LD and in LD22 both times I used XNA. Now I have come to the problem of Windows 8, which does not support XNA. So I will be using java for my next Ludum Dare, may it be 26 or later, I will use Java.

There is more to it than just because of Windows 8. I just don’t like XNA as much as Java. I find Java easier to program in and once I am able to make graphical games, I think I will be able to do more with it than with XNA. Also Java is easier to send out to the public, and can be used on mac. By no means am I saying XNA is bad, it’s just not for me.

So to prepare I will be spending a lot of time here and here.

Thank you for reading, please play and rate my game here

Sadly, due to some very pesky algorithms, we weren’t able to complete out game “Bandits”.

But, we did submit it, all you can really do is walk around and explore villages and things though.

Still on our todo list for the game was:

• Being able to kill people.
• Music / sound
• +1 goat
• make the game winnable

So go and play it, and have a look.

Tags: bandits, not complete

CHECK IT OUT.

Now you can help Internet Explorer fight through six action-packed levels in an epic quest to take back the web!  Go play it!

It was exhausting, but once again I had a ton of fun.  Third LD now, I think.

Here is the game that I made in like 1 hour, my second game is almost finished too!

note: my second game has high scores 😀

https://www.box.com/s/60uz2h9lmh170pbs3tth

next up, a traditional particle avoider…. or not so traditional XD

Tags: timelapse

I found that I couldn’t compile the timelapse as my resolution was too big for mencoder. Going through the images one by one to downscale every one was not going to happen. All the automated softwares I found was either adfilled, couldn’t be installed on a 64-bit windows or crashed with my dataset. So I took a couple of hours out of my freetime and wrote a simple console application to take care of it.

The usage is pretty easy, write a xml file that tells it what to do

<batch>
 <actions>
 <resize width="2048" height="1546" />
 <save/>
 </actions>
 </batch>

And the just call it:

ImBatch.exe <input pattern> commands.xml <output folder>

and it will do all the work.

So with that said, here it is in all it’s glory: https://github.com/sirGustav/ImBatch

Tags: timelapse, tool

First thing, here’s the source https://github.com/babebridou/maythebase

and here’s a link to download the game itself http://www.fairyteller.com/files/MayTheBaseBeBelongToYou.zip (unzip to folder of your choice, double click on the MyGame.jar.

This game isn’t an official entry for the competition since I couldn’t build it last night (computer crashed).

The game is basically a manic shmup where you can choose between 5 different types of waves to send to the hero, using keys 1-5. There are no other control.

Of course a true overlord would mash buttons like a psychotic madman to try to swarm the enemy (and sometimes crash the jvm in the process).

Dodge this, hero!

The bulk of the trial was spent coding, coding, more coding. I wanted it to be extensible because, you know, there’s nothing wrong with having a fully parametered ballistic system and an engine to produce cannons of various size, firing rate, damage or bullet trajectory, nothing wrong with having homing missiles, homing sinusoidal streams of death/doom and eventually being able to summon a wave with a new trajectory by swiping a touch screen. That was the goal, anyway.

It was late yesterday night when I had to add at least something interesting, so I quickly set a scoring system (with totally awesome numbers) and said what the hell and dropped in a boss fight.

OH SHI-

You don’t see from that screen but the boss player has 5 cannons including two that streams homing spiral lasers of pink doom (only if you squint; in reality it’s more like a straw of bubblegum)

I called it a night and a compo, my first time 3 hours before the limit. JMonkeyEngine SDK had totally crashed and wouldn’t let me run or build anything, whining about a missing jdk on my computer.

Of all things I need to keep in mind for the next one:

1. Trust the libraries. No need to reinvent the wheel like I did all week-end, YES collision engines for manic shooters exist and NO they weren’t made in a hurry by some random newbie like I just did.
2. Don’t build something too complex. Don’t make an editor or an engine, make a Game! Who will produce the content your game can theoretically handle?
3. Have even more fun! Make some sounds, make some music!

Overall I had a fantastic time over this week-end and I’m super happy to have at least tried to do what everyone else did. My admiration goes to every single one of you who didn’t give up until the end, whether they finished or came up short, you guys are awesome!

So, it would probably be easy to get a lot more done from here. If I’d had more time, I would have implemented a bunch of levels using just the mechanics we completed, but I didn’t, so we only have one playable level. I made a video to show off what we completed here. I forgot to mention in the video that the little guy is a “minion” or “henchmen”, and you’ll basically get a set number to “use” to get to the goal (currently just gold bars to fund world domination) and complete the level.

The video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHV6KIb8kZI

I still have few hours left… but I decided to just release it anyway since the last few hours won’t change much…

Anyway, me and my teammates’ game, ‘Memories From Darkness’ is done…

Go and download the game here 😀

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18619

Holy cow we actually finished!  That was fun

The game is available for all platforms here, if you like it make sure to say so

Thanks everyone, and good luck!

I just now learned my game isn’t working, and I have no Idea how to fix it…

… while the programmer is doing some serious work, to at least present the game before going back to the drawing board ^^

If you’ve seen Scream, Cabin in the woods or enough horror movies to figure out how they work, you know there are strict rules to follow if you want to survive a horror movie. The most famous one being: “don’t wander alone, stay with the group!”

But why is this one so effective when you have quasi  invincible villains who could kill a dozen puny humans without breaking a sweat ?
Well… because VILLAINS HAVE RULES TOO !
And  “You can kill them only if they’re alone” is one of them.

That’s the premise for our game: a bunch of highschool clichés entered your workplace and your delectable duty as a villain is to slaughter them all, but you must always abide by…

Also…   !

See you soon with a finished game 😀

It was my first compo but it wont be the last :p.

PLAY IT HERE!

Ludum dare is amazing, wonder why I didn’t submit befor :p .

Tags: entry, journal, old_school_pixel_art

With a day spend away from the making of the game, feedback, and a clear mind, I can share some thoughts about Cube Infection.

On the one hand, the gameplay is a bit hard to understand. That can make the whole game boring ’cause you don’t “get it”. Rules not clear enough, timing-based gameplay, with flashy lights everywhere, make the game a bit tricky at first.

This is the result of two bad moves :

As I was aware of my lacks in graphics and audio, I may have focus too much on them. I never made a game before, even a tiny one. I was quite disappointed when I saw the theme, thinking -“Oh no, being a villain usually is good for monsters or humans. Meaning I’m gonna have to draw…”. A bit simplistic, but when you only have 48h, I think you need to quickly pick a global guideline. In my case, instead of thinking “I want a cute little entity to eat all its siblings and evolve into a big badaboom badass monster”, I was more like “You know…I can draw squares and circles !”. And we’ll see later what can be done with it. -Meep-, bad idea. Some talented people can combine good visuals and creative mind, not me !

The second follows the first. With no global guidelines in mind, I was switching ideas almost every 15 minutes. Writing some a function for an idea, a class for another, etc..I ended up with a randomly generated grid, some squares, some links between them, money, explosions. Cool stuff for sure, but that does not make a game. The gameplay you have now is a sum of some ideas that came in my mind across the whol week-end, not a real gameplay thought from the beginning, as a whole one.

From the other hand, this leads me to what I consider to be cool visuals and music. And I was pleasantly surprised of that. Because of my gameplay problem, I have not been able to give alphas and betas on IRC. I began only with colored squares, then found a cool Photoshop tuto to make space backgrounds (Here, french). I was then able to give the game an identity. Flashy lights would give a great combo, along with a punchy music. (To be honnest, I now found the music to be a bit too fast !)

To sum up, I’d like to say that I was facing a situation were my strengths and weaknesses were just reverted

Of course, some little (huge ?) other mistakes were done during these two days, like beginning without testing my environnement (I lost one hour recompiling SFML from scratch…), or not testing the game on other PCs until the very end. But everything went really well, and I’m proud of my first Ludum Dare. I hope to be here next time.

The IRC channel was really motivating, and I want to thanks everyone that was there for the great mood !

See you.

My post-mortem on #LD25 Diabolical Genius… ( Play it now or rate it! )

What Went Right:

• Inspiration – I was extremely enthusiastic the entire time! I credit this mainly to the wonderful community around Ludum Dare. Although my energy was helped greatly by the fact that the time crunch kept me on my toes and that this was my first Dare.
• Focus – I was able to set aside the entire weekend with no obligations, which was very helpful. My girlfriend was kind enough to keep me fed and provide a tiny bit of social interaction when my eyes left the monitor for a few minutes.
• Time Management – I originally planned to spend 25% on design, 25% on core mechanics programming, 25% on other programming, and 25% on graphics, sound and other final polish. Although I did stick to this timing a bit, it was definitely not so organized or linear.
• Game Design – luckily I already had the premise of the game in my pile of “game ideas I’d love to make someday”, and it fit the theme perfectly. I considered a few other ideas and variations once the “You are the Villain” theme was announced, but I think that the design I chose was the best of the bunch because it didn’t have a massive scope. I learned from reading LD posts that being overly ambitious is the worst mistake you can make.
• HTML5/JavaScript/jQuery – no problems, but I did learn a few things (see below).
• Sound – adding sound was almost an after-thought. It was definitely one of the features I had no experience with and was on the chopping block if time got tight. I was surprised with was how easy sound was to deal with in JavaScript (good article on HTML5 audio), and I was lucky to find a few nice free .WAV files on freesound.org.
• Mobile-Friendly – I decided early on that I wanted my game to be mobile friendly, so I spent a lot of time trying to get this to work right. The function I ended up making (portalResize.js) wasn’t too difficult and worked very well at re-sizing the game area (the “portal”) for various 3:4 screen resolutions. Also luckily I knew of the viewport meta tag already, and I was able to quickly determine the best setup after some reading at MDN and this MSDN article, and testing on a phone, iPad and computer. I decided on using this: <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, user-scalable=no, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0″ />
• SketchBook Pro (iPad) – This was a god-send for the cartoon artwork. It was a last-minute decision to use it, but once I got re-acquainted with the controls, it was a joy to use. (I originally planned on using Gimp with a drawing tablet, but misplaced it at the last minute).
• Notepad++ – worked great, although I spent precious time trying to get my global styles in order, something I should have had setup already.
• Dropbox – absolutely essential for moving files quickly between iPad and computer!
• FireFTP – works great and is super easy to use
• Chrome / Developer Tools – essential and works great

• Game Design – this was the biggest flaw of my game. I neglected to make the core gameplay fun from the beginning. A lot of the game is waiting; in part, this is intentional – based off of my love for Game Dev Story – but it ended up being too boring. I tried to add in some interaction (you need to mouse-over the random events as they pop up), but it was too little, too late. I should have put more effort into either thinking through the journey and game loops (things I learned from Amy Jo Kim), or by making a working prototype so I could try it out and refine it earlier on.
• Mobile-Friendly – I spent far too much time trying to get things to re-size nicely within the game area. The main div sizes well, but the elements inside, were explicitly defined in pixels, so they ended up not always looking good. In the future I think I’ll either need to have a solution for this built into a framework, or just go with a fixed size.
• Mustache.js – Early on I decided to try including Mustache.js, if only for the experience. Although it did leave my HTML looking like an organized template, it led to some big problems with dynamic updates. I had to create a function (called walrusRender in dg.js) so I could easily maintain the template’s original data while doing constant updating. Of course, because I was constantly updating data, I ended up overwriting some buttons and links that I had added important events to, leading to a lot of unnecessary bug chasing. Lastly, it seems to be slow. I’m not sure if it’s something else in my code, but the refresh rate is noticeable in a few areas. If you’re going to use Mustache.js, I’d recommend you only target granular elements, rather than updating a whole page or section. Of course, if you’re getting granular, you might just be better off with jQuery’s .html(), .text(), and .attr() anyway.
• HTML5 Boilerplate – I decided at the last minute to copy a few things from the HTML5 boilerplate. I should have had an HTML template ready to go from the beginning.
• Focus – my brain was coding and designing in my sleep, so I found it hard to get a good rest. Also I should have called it quits earlier in the evening on Saturday (sleep is important!)
• Gimp – it works well enough I suppose, but having a Photoshop background and no experience with Gimp, this ended up being a handicap for me.
• Sublime Text 2 – I attempted to try this at the beginning, but gave up quickly because of the ‘buy now’ pop-ups.
• WinSCP – I started with this for FTP, a new program to me, but it had some stability issues and was very slow, so I went back to reliable FireFTP.
• Windows 8 – I’m new to this version of the OS and have several complaints better left for another blog.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue to work on this game (I already have a lot more improvement ideas), but the experience was amazing! Follow me on twitter or tumblr for updates.

Sky Pirates Logo

Sky Pirates has been entered into the long list of jam games! Bactopiad and I have finally decided it’s ready to be entered. The game is by no means done – we plan to continue development in the weeks and months ahead – but it is play able, and you can enjoy it right now!

Sky Pirates

I am proud to say that I am more proud of this game than any other I’ve made in the last 4 years. It needs much more work, but I think the framework is in place for an amazing game to take shape.

(God, I have a big ego, don’t I?)

Expect a post mortem at some point!

MY ENTRY! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=11210

Vote for it! 😀

New in Version 0.04

• New Sound Effects.
• Fixed Ground blocks not placing on certain circumstances.
• Improved Performance.
• Fixed Pixel Bleeding.
• Fixed GUI wasn’t resolution independent.
• Items hold now don’t interact with the level until placed.

Tags: bosslevel

Not much time left but we’re getting there!

Sleight of Hand Progress

You need to steal from the guy on the left by distracting him with your right hand (with the diamond) and typing the words on top with the left hand. Get as much money as you can, before the arrival of the chivalry!

I completely changed game ideas almost 24 hours in, but I still finished! I’m honestly somewhat surprised I did finish anything, especially since this is my first ever game jam. But it was a lot of fun, so I’ll definitely do it again.

So I ended up making a game where you control a fleet of AI ships that don’t exactly do what they’re supposed to do. You have to fix their malfunctions and make sure they kill the “Good Guy Alliance” ship before it gets across the screen. It’s a short little game, but it’s filled with a lot of frantic fun.

Here’s the entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18155

I was making good headway and now I cant seem to get slick to print text and I cant figure it out. This truly sucks.

Two hours left before sending the prototype of our jam, we decided to make a little post about it.

Our game is about being a video game that spread violence. Filled with irony, we hope to bring loads of fun with both assets and gameplay.

For the assets, we inserted a lot of blood, ironic graphics and bloody sounds.

For the gameplay, we brought the basics of hide & seek. The player must seek children to make them violent, and avoid the SERB and PIG (No relationship with ESRB & PEGI evidently !)

We wanted to take stereotypes of violent video games, like weapons, blood, destruction and put them into the game. We hope this video game would be that weird and unbelievable that the relationship game/violence is kind of ridiculous.

Did you hide a goat in your source? I most certainly did! And it’s even possible to find it yourself!

If you didn’t hide one, you are dead to me.

Game submited !

It whas a hard run for us, we started a far to greater project and also had to any problems with network.
But… its out there and working !

Please check out : Play Space GREED !

Tags: ld25

So the game won’t be finished tonight, but we are still standing to fight for a release – hopefully this week.

Here is the shop, where you can see the result of your selling with the adventurers.
Currently I’m drawing some objects – rusted sword, devilish goat, Perfume of Deadly Cheese…

Congrats to all the fine people who submitted their game, and some love for the ones who tried ! :p

Yeah! Finished lol the goal of me participating was to teach a friend how top make a game in 72 hours and we did just that!

Check out our game: Grand Theft Crimbo

Heres our final 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(scrapped for demo)
• House level graphics
• Lair level graphics(scrapped for demo)
• SFX and theme music
• Menu system
• Polish(fun stuff like more xmas decor and snow)(not complete)

Post Mortem to come in the morning, sleep is calling

Here’s my timelapse for Amongst Shadows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNZa1fHItpA.

Enjoy!

Tags: time-laspe, timelapse