Hi guys, I’m thinking of doing a “SuperCollier for Game Jams” tutorial, which would be an introduction to the open source SuperCollider programming language focused on the creation of sounds for games. It’s a very powerful system and well suited for game jams, as you can create a lot of sound effects very quickly. SuperCollider is open source and available for Mac, Linux and Windows.

For some examples of SuperCollider, the music for my LD24 game Wormelution was done with SuperCollider (Video) and you might also enjoy this chip tunesy live coding improvisation I did a while ago.

Leave a comment if you’re interested!

This post is just a collection of snippets copied from the “Rules and Guidelines”-Section of Ludum Dare ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/rules/ ) which all of the participants should have read:

4. All publicly available libraries and middleware are allowed.

6. Source code must be included.

…
This does not mean open source, just included source.  You retain all rights to it.  If you do not wish to provide source, consider entering the Jam instead.

…

Base code and personal code libraries are allowed, but should be declared and shared with the community prior to beginning your entry. To do this, make a blog post.

HA! Collision issues fixed…I think…

The theme:
My idea was that a big ugly spider is a classical villain in games (Limbo, Minecraft and many more) and the cute fireflies were the source of lights in a dark cave (finally not so dark, but that was the plan). A bloody eating animation was also supposed to highlight that, but not enough time.

The engine:
I took a risky bet to improvise some basic physics engine with per-pixel collision and it turned OK. I initially planned to use a library again, but LD is also to quickly experiment new things. However, I constantly modified the gameplay around it. The jumping mechanic exists mainly because walking was a bit clunky. Similarly, the rolling and sticking behavior solved the same stability problem. My first idea was to use some ninja rope possibility, but jumping was already fun enough. The second reason to use per-pixel collision was to quickly create levels simply with an image editor, thus skipping the need to code some custom map editor. This also allowed to easily add many graphical details.

The levels:
Making the first level was really fun (almost too much fun). I wanted to make more of them but drawing take more time that I expected (the price to pay for its flexibility I guess). I also added water a bit late, and it’s probably a bit too hard. Plus, a last minute typo made it even harder. I had more gameplay situations possible with the current terrain types, but again, levels were done too late. I also coded some compression tricks to handle these big megapixels bitmaps but it was probably not needed because the final game is only 180kb.

The controls:
I think the look and feel is good. Tried a lot of control variants and lost some time on the sprite and animation, but it really helped to make it more natural. Simple things like the spider orienting its legs towards the wall, or the difference between the rotating open/closed states made a big impact on the resulting impression.

The result:
Pretty happy about the final game. I really like the mechanic and wish to explore it more. Also, less ashamed than usual by my sprite skills. I really need to improve my level creation timing, though. But in the end and as always, I greatly enjoyed the Ludum Dare challenge

My brother sort-of did a post mortem, but I don’t think it fully covered this Ludum Dare and our game Double DeConstruction.

Going into this Ludum Dare, this was my team’s fourth time attempting the Ludum Dare, after failing to create a full game 3 other times. Our spirits were high, although understandably weakened. We came up with, 9-days before the Ludum Dare, a pre-Ludum Dare mini game idea where you’d play some sort of construction vehicle, like a bulldozer, and would run over things as the screen moved, much like the game Robot Unicorn Attack. I decided to not do it to try and save energy for the Ludum Dare. A day or two before the Ludum Dare came, I thought that people might choose End of the World. So we started pondering at the mini game idea, saying that the reason for this vehicle running over things would be because the world is ending and the person operating it doesn’t care what they do anymore.

Come the day of the Ludum Dare, “You are the Villian” is announced. Funny enough, this still fit into the game scenario in a sense. The thing is, I didn’t want to make a Robot Unicorn Attack type game, so I opted in for a top-down shooter. We discussed how to set it up, and while one member was reluctant to do this idea, because they didn’t like the genre, we still did it.

The Ludum Dare jam for us starts at 6PM on Friday and ends at 6PM Monday.

On Friday, we managed to get test objects up and running along with setting up the game states.
On Saturday, we had the player and enemy shooting wrenches out. The battlegroud image was completed and the official sprites were prepared.
On Sunday, we put in the title, character selection, and good/bad ending game states. The AI was also made during this day.
On Monday, in the very early morning I put in the sounds and music, as well as the amount of points you get for the kill to pop up (aka polish).

What went right?

• Organized steady development in a timely manner
• We had the game up and running just hours after the announcement
• Accomplished the retro look we were aiming for
• Multiple, separate, battle songs for each player and just overall awesomeness handling the music
• Both characters were fairly balanced during gameplay
• Got to polish things, like adding points flying in the air when you kill something

What went wrong?

• Body and arms were supposed to be separate, but due to miscommunication ended up as one piece.
• The good ending text did not look how I thought it did when I was tired. Being very awake made that very apparent.
• Didn’t get to improve the character selection screen, which was meant to have stuff moving behind the characters and marque the selected character name.
• Shipped it out with a game breaking bug that I just fixed a few hours ago. It was that hard to find.
• Noises were too loud and obnoxious if too many were being sent out. This definitely wasn’t intentional.

In conclusion, we are very happy. I wouldn’t say just happy, it felt more like a sigh of relief that we finally were able to complete the Ludum Dare. I want to do it again, but I honestly don’t know if my team wants to do it again. I think they want to stop doing the Ludum Dare on a good note. Who knows, maybe I might compete in the compo by myself and not the jam with my team next time around. Back on topic, all-in-all, it was a great experience and really taught me some things, namely how good it feels to complete a project. So, until next time…

Tags: jam, ld25, post morem, post-mortem, postmortem

Evil Chopper is a 3D shoot’em up made with three.js/webgl.

What went right

• Knew my libraries and tools pretty well (three.js, soundmanager2, tiled). Three.js was a bit tricky to use during LD #24 since the abstraction leaks when you want to use dynamic scenes and especially lights.
• Productivity. I am getting used to this kind of challenge now since this is my fourth LD. The brain knows what to expect by now
• My music generator delivered. It was not the greates pieces of music in the world but when I was to tired to compose anything manually, it was a saver.

What went wrong

• Time management. I spent a lot of time on tweaking graphics settings when I should have focused more on level construction and gameplay. Also, the adaption to the theme(s) was a failure mainly due to this error.
• Sleep. I should have spent more time sleeping

Overall, I think that this LD was the most fun one so far
Also, I joined the Jam because of schedule collisions. I worked alone and almost behaved like it was the 48 hour compo, but I admit that I stole some code from my previous projects to accelerate 😉

Play and rate the game here!

It’s been about a week now, and the dust has settled a bit to reflect over Grim’s Christmas List.

This was the first game we’ve done together, the first time I’ve done any serious JavaScript, the first time Octopi has done any game art like this, and the first time I’ve done any coding whatsoever since having to leave my job in August due to ill health. And, I think we did pretty well!

A lot of things went right.
We both clicked with the theme right away, and Octopi started sketching out characters and an idea. I gave some input into it as well, and we ended up with a hybrid mix of Bomb Jack, Rainbow Islands and Bubble Bobble. Sadly, the Bomb Jack elements got dropped due to time constraints, but we love the concept enough that we’ll likely continue with Grim and make it to the original idea.
The workload was split pretty evenly – with Octopi on sprite work and general design, and myself on coding, audio, and piecing together the sprite sheets. And being a Jam game, we got an extra day to work on it, so I wasn’t too stressed out my noggin.
Impact was a joy to use.. although I very likely made some bugger ups here and there as a few people have pointed out the slightly weird collision detection at times, but overall I had no problems with it – short of not really learning much about it beforehand.
Our game actually worked out pretty well, and is probably the best entry I’ve done so far.

A few things went a bit pear-shaped, however.
Most of Saturday was taken up with us travelling down to see my family to do the great Christmas gift exchange of the year… but we worked out some of the game on notepads during the journey.
We didn’t get the third aspect of the game in – collecting presents/reaping enemies in order for bonuses – from Bomb Jack, so you just get one measly point per present.
The level changes are a bit abrupt – we need to add some transitions, or at least a READY? GO! style thing.
No music ( bar the couple of seconds on the title screen ) as I couldn’t think of anything to do, and sound was workable at best ( though the boss/mini boss explosion sound works really well, with the presents flying everywhere! )
The end is a bit anticlimactic… probably could’ve done something a bit better than a black screen with text on it!

All in all, we think it went well, and we enjoyed ourselves
We’ll definitely be thinking of expanding upon it later on.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you can find it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=267

Now for us to start rating some games!

Tags: arcade badgers, Grim's Christmas List, octopi, post-mortem, stuckie

Here’s a video of me playing & talking about my entry:

Also, if there’s no comment on your entry from me yet, it means I haven’t come across it. I’m rating like mad, so if you want me to drop some wisdom/pain on you feel free to link me your entry & I’ll git right on that.

Tags: commentary, playthrough, walkthrough

My first Android game in my live! Thanks Ludume Dare for this!

You can download game on game page HERE

Thanks!

Tags: android, apk, first, ld25, ld48

So for example, my game’s rating numbers, right now…

D = 47 =

R = 22

–

C = 24.

Except not quite that simple.  I mean, I guess not.  22-24 = -2, not 47.  What do these number mean?  R = Ratings, C = Coolness, what is “Default”?

I take this to mean that I’ve been rated 22 times, and I have rated 24 games.  But I don’t get what the “default” number 47 is, or how a slightly more complicated subtraction of R – C somehow equals 47.

The last Ludum Dare gave me the occasion to jump to 10 years back in my life.

I started making “games” at the age of 14 and since then I hardly finished one, or at least a decent one. I was young and unexperienced with programming. As I started studying computer engineering I didn’t have much time to spend on game-making but the desire still remained in me, waiting to be fulfilled.

The small time given in this competition forced me to focus on the game and give 100% to make the best I could, starting from scratch. I coded until 4 A.M. (the deadline in Italy’s timezone) and even if my game is not great as I expected (ok, it’s not great from many points of view :P) I was completely satisfied. I could have made tons of games till now, maybe now I found the perfect balance between free-time and motivation to go on and do some more.

Ok, that was a little boring.

The best part of this post is the announce that I updated the version of my competition entry “A Pigeon’s Life” fixing some bugs that made the game crash:

I also added sounds and music that unfortunately I wasn’t able to add before the deadline

You can also download the Bundle: Game + Sounds together. Remember that the sounds and music are NOT to be judged for the Ludum Dare compo.

Here’s the link to my entry and DOWNLOAD page -> http://buff.ly/TqADDD <-

That said, enjoy!

So here it is, i wanted to have a few reviews before writing anything.
link to the game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=16143

( Warning : the two next lines contain spoiler about Braid )

The guideline
First of all, i did not like this theme, that i thought was probably too basic. I just sticked to the concept of the villain’s feeling about the outer world and putted it into a survival game i had the idea a week before. I choosed to focus on the loneliness of the villain and his destructive response, and made it in a survival game where you shoot heroes trying to get your princesses, like an action game based on Braid’s storyline.

\/  No more Braid spoiler down there  \/

How it happenned
I have nothing really exiting to say about the way i made the game except I remember waking up the next day after a 2h night completely demoralized about the game, i thought it was a boring, bugged (if there’s no collision with the borders, it’s not, at the start, an intention, but an inability to fix it because of the collisions programming), and ugly.
I just took a long pause, adding funny things like a music, and drawing some more art i could implement if i had the courage. The around 6pm, i tried playing the game and i realize i could try add some really really minor thing. I first made as much feedbacks as I could, then i added the explosive and healing princesses that restarted my interest playing the game. The last part, around 10pm was about tweaking, a lot of tweaking trying to balance all the characters. It was probably the coolest part of this Jam, and the one I learned the most from. At the deadline, i was still not convinced by my game but it still looks better than the morning. Now the reviews are absolutely great and it makes me want to restart this game with a nice and polished gameplay, more characters and feedbacks.

What went wrong
– Stoopid collisions coding blocked me for so much time now fucking hate it
– Time & sleep management was awful, like the last one, i got awfully tired the second day and finished really too early
– My game was maybe a bit overambitious for a “second game ever”, i wasn’t able to add as much content as i wanted

What went right
– making art : as usual i’m really comfortable with making little funny assets and animating them- coding with GM is friggin great !
– tweaking got great too
– fight demotivation

What to do next
– Continue with GM I suppose
– more tweaking
– beeing stupidely overambitious is awesome if you have a simple game with tons of content to add

So this is probably the first time I’ve gotten something fun in a few years. 😛 I usually end up with playable prototypes, but slowly stop working on the project for one reason or another.

Theme

This theme was probably the worst one there could be. I don’t like playing as the bad guy. 😛 I did think of a cheesy workaround, but I never put it in the game, as the “” implies.

This is also a problem for voting… A lot of the games seem to involve killing people, and also seem to have blood. I don’t exactly like those a lot. 😛

What went right

• Graphics. When I was playing around with my prototype Friday night, I just started with a circle. Until I added the trail, it was hard to see what direction the player was going in. so, I changed the point count of the “circle” to 5 to make a pentagon. After adding a small pentagon in the front, I had a little “car” to move around. (See progress/0.png)
• Gameplay. Although I was planning on adding a few more things to the gameplay, the game itself was pretty much finished on Saturday. I also had been polishing things as I went along. Both of these were important considering the last point of “What went wrong“.
• No organization. Seriously, if you look at that code, your eyes might fall out. I specifically tried NOT organizing my code (and not using good practices… :P) to see if I would make more progress, and it seemed to work. Eventually I need to organize this though…
• Difficulty + “AI”. Implementing difficulty levels was really simple. I have some base values for Easy, and then some multipliers used for harder difficulties. The “AI” is really just some random numbers for distances the cars should follow you, when they should speed up or slow down, etc.

What went wrong

I pretty much was just low on time. I was only able to work on this a few hours on Friday, and then most of Saturday. Sunday… not so much. 😛

What’s new

• Sounds. Already done.
• Better levels. The levels that generate are stillterrible, but I’ve tweaked it some to make it slightly better.
• Finished the intro screen. Already done.
• Highscore screen. Already implemented.

The entry is here, with downloads for both the compo and post-compo version.

This is the second time I have finished a game for Ludum Dare, and I think I’ve learned lessons from my previous entry. I didn’t have most of Saturday or Sunday available, but I made a big push on Monday to get something playable out.

What went right:

• Polish. My previous entry lacked a lot of polish, and it showed in a lot of places. This time, participating in the jam, I had plenty of time to add little bits to my game to make it more presentable.
• Testing. My previous game had many bugs remaining, as I rushed it out for the 48 hour competition. This game is relatively bug free (besides a hi-score saving bug in the original upload, which was swiftly fixed).
• Aiming for jam release instead of compo. I was rather busy with work commitments during LD weekend, so I didn’t want to push myself too hard, especially after being pushed hard at work.

What went wrong:

• Work commitments. I’m usually very busy with work during the festive season, and LD weekend was no exception.
• Tiredness. Because I’ve been working all day Saturday and most of Sunday, this has left me physically tired, and with little motive to code.
• Coming up with a game idea. I really liked the idea of the theme, but I just couldn’t decide what I could actually make from it. It took me about 12 hours to come up with a simple pickpocketing game.
• A little too easy. Especially running from the police. The reason behind this is that I reduced the time limit from 5 minutes down to 3  towards the end of development. I didn’t adjust the sprinting speed (which slows down based on the amount of pockets you picked) to compensate.

What was cut:

• Music. I tried algorithmic music generators, but nothing I could find could produce a suitable 8-bit style sound.
• Road / Police car. I was originally going to put a road at the bottom of the screen, where police cars could drive past, and catch you in the act of pickpocketing, but I dropped that feature, as I was running short of time.

Well, it’s been a fun Ludum Dare. I’m looking forward to playing a load of entries (I’m aiming for gold coolness this time). In the meantime, you can play my game HERE

INTRO
My game, PsyGoat, is a platformer about an evil Goat who can control weapons with his mind.  As the Goat, you must escape from a maximum security prison and use your evil superpowers to generally cause chaos.  Overall I’m really happy with it, I think shooting a giant laser out of your eyes and controlling machine guns with your mind is fairly fun, but there were definitely some problems that meant the challenge level and variety really suffered.  If you like to vapourise guards with a giant laser beam, play the game here: PsyGoat Game

WHAT WENT WRONG

Time / Priorities
So imagine you decide to make a platform game, you get the collisions and gravity working and you have to make a decision regarding your game design, do you:
a) Stick to pure platforming; just running, jumping and maybe bouncing.
b) Add a single combat or manipulation mechanic to complement the platforming.
c) Add 5 complicated superpowers that involve slowing time, creating objects, projectiles, controlling defences and changing gravity.

So the correct answer is “run as far away from option c) as possible.  Guess what I did.
This bizarre decision was supposed to lead down the route of having a multitude of awesome powers that would complement each other perfectly.  Then the levels would offer interesting ways to use these powers.  An ambitious goal, but it was mind-blowingly obvious that it wasn’t going to work in 48hrs.  So I got all the powers done, which I’m really happy about, but they were all either over-powered or totally useless.  There was no requirement to even use them at all.  This leads to the 2nd problem:

Level Design
In summary, I spent 46.5 hours getting the game working, getting the powers working, writing & recording some music, setting up pause menus, writing tutorials, creating title screens and generally making sure everything would function together as a game.  Great, I was very happy with this; it was my plan all along.  Now to duplicate my empty level 20 times and set about design a series of challenging and interesting levels… just get a coffee first… BLARG THERE IS 1 HOUR LEFT!  Yes people this actually happened.  It also happened in an identical way during LD24.  Level design is very important, you can’t do it in an hour.  The levels just weren’t engaging, and I have received some entirely justified criticism in this regard.  So next time I’ll go for slightly simpler mechanics and allow more time for level design.  Well I’ll try.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Music!
This was a main goal of mine, I play and write a little bit of music in my spare time, so I felt this was an area I should try to perform well in.  I set about writing & recording a simple synth soundtrack on GarageBand, and I succeeded.  No auto-play or samples, just me play virtual synths with my actual fingers.  I’m really pleased about this, if you want to check out the soundtrack it is online here: Soundtrack

Super-Stuff
As much as most of the powers weren’t that inspiring, I felt that the main power of telekinetic guns was solid, and fairly fun to control.  Even more so with the laser; I like games that do bug stupid stuff you can’t do in real life, and I’d like to think that giant laser made a few people say “whoa!”

Sprites
I’m not an artist and really struggle in this regard, but I am professional developer of Excel reports & systems…  so I found using Excel to create auto-shapes as body parts really helped me!  It meant animating was easier and more consistent, and I was able to re-created some scribbled character drawings quickly.  I think I got the scale wrong, everything looks a little lost in amongst the platforms, but overall I think this went well considering my lack of artistic flair.

CONCLUSION
Ultimately I finished a platform game and created some music I’m happy with, so all my goals were achieved.  I call that a win!  I also learned more during the 48hrs of this LD than I have in the whole 3 months since the last one.  It is an amazing way to learn what you are good at, and how to prioritise the important stuff.  This time I also spent a lot more time reading the community blogs, so I had 40 interesting games bookmarked already when the voting started.  Overall, a great experience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2012 at 6:29 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.

Let me sum up how this Ludum Dare went for us this time. We wanted to work together, so we did jam this time — Makdaam did music, sounds and level design, and I made the simple engine and graphics. The things that I’m mostly happy about and think that we got right:

• I used love2d, having only about two weeks of learning it (and of learning lua). This seems like a sure way to fail, but it was actually fine.
• The AdvTiledLoader library saved me a lot of time, and Tiled let us design levels relatively painlessly.
• Using music as a part of the level design seems like a viable strategy.
• The workflow for my graphics is the same that I used in previous Ludum Dares, and it seems to work well, except for tiles, about that later.
• Making the distributions for all the platforms was very easy with love2d.
• I had an emergency plan of adding shooting to the game and turning it into a shooter if anything went wrong, but that didn’t happen.

What went wrong:

• If you are setting out to make an adventure game, make sure you at least have some outline of the plot. We left the plot for last, and it was a huge mistake — we only did very basic and rudimentary things so it can barely be called a game (you can’t even win). Another person taking care of the characters, plot and levels would be fantastic.
• The freehand style doesn’t work too well with tiles. It was hard to make them tile and still retain their rough looks. I also didn’t make all the necessary tiles, so you can see some gaps and inconsistencies if you look carefully.
• Collisions are hard, but fortunately getting them perfectly right is not necessary for the game to be playable.
• Sound support of different libraries varies greatly between different platforms, even with a multi-platform framework like love2d. The game crashed on Windows just because we pre-loaded the sound files into memory.
• An overlay layer is not enough to make top-down levels look right in respect to obscuring sprites.
• Defining the dialogues and quests directly in the map files is a mistake — makes it too hard to see everything at a glance and make improvements. I think that I should have only defined named locations, and have all the plot and text in a separate file that refers to them.
• We didn’t have the free time and any energy left to work on it for the third day of the jam. We could have come up with a real plot and polished it all much more, but we were so completely tired, that we haven’t.

You can play it here.

Some input from Makdaam:

• There’s not enough time
• Learning milky tracker proved to be more difficult than expected
• Sounds and music are not implemented right anywhere
• 1 out of 50 melody ideas can be rendered almost instantly in a tracker without any training
• 1 out of 10 melodies are usable
• sfxer FTW
• Audacity is enough to make your own synth samples with distortions
• none of those samples will be used in the final LD product, so don’t waste your time in Audacity
• prepare for your neighbor getting a new hifi during LD

Tags: postmortem

At first I wasn’t very inspired by the theme. I had voted it down. At first just because I wasn’t inspired by it, but with the recent school shooting, anything where you would play a villain with guns was unthinkable. Not that I’m afraid of a controversial subject. In my opinion, games as a cultural expression has every right to bring up sensitive subjects, just like books and movies can. But this time we had gathered over 10 people at our office for a Ludum Dare gathering. It wouldn’t be appropriate to cry by the computer, I thought.

My first ideas not involving crazy people with handguns were pretty boring: just reversing classic game ideas like Pacman or Donkey Kong. The funniest idea I had was one where you would play one of the aliens in Space Invaders. (“Keep the formation, soldier!”) But that’s more fun as an idea than when executed.

In the end I came up with a concept  that was controversial, but perhaps a bit more subtle. It seems nobody that has played the game hasn’t even noticed. Was I too subtle, or have we gotten so numb that we don’t even react when men, women, children and goats are slaughtered in a way similar to what’s been happening recently in the real world?

Play My First Ping Pong Massacre

I had a blast with this Ludum Dare, mainly because my tools were in such good shape.  All the work I had done on my libraries beforehand let me focus on content creation for the most part.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=5649

What went right:

Helper classes – I made a bunch of helpers before the compo to automagically handle sounds and particles and static objects in the map.  Saved tons of time.

Update entities – Really saved the day.  Allows you to change entity objects in the map without rebuilding.

Acoustic guitar for music.  I couldn’t remember how to play, but just tried random stuff and fixed it all in audacity

What went wrong:

On map building I only had one major mistake, and that was losing an hour or two to leaks and map errors on the third level attempting to create a windy branchy maze by duplicating and rotating.  Brush maps tend to break when you do that.

I also had a bug where a switchable light set to on wouldn’t be on if you built the map with update entities.  I chased that one for awhile.

Sleeping in small chunks.  Didn’t really work that well.  I usually set the alarm for 4 hours, but only once was actually awakened by it.  Usually I just woke up on my own and got back to work.  I’d always awaken feeling refreshed, but I’d be tired again after just a few hours.

My “full build” button doesn’t actually save the final product.  You have to “Save Zone” after.  Several times I forgot, and couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

My alpha sorting broke!  I was so mad.  I spent a lot of time on that and even tested it in my warmup!

Story – I might have left too much unexplained.  Is the apprentice the lover?  Is the prisoner a man or a woman?  What happens at the end?  Also if the power is out, how did the first door and the elevator work?  Also if you don’t hit the triggers in the right order it can tell you stuff you already figured out, or reference stuff you might not have seen if you missed picking something up or hitting a journal trigger.

Stuff I want for next time:

I’m planning on making a game specific entity class creation tool.  This would allow you to specify what fields and default values an entity would have in a gui, then at the press of a button it would automagically edit quark’s entity file, and maybe even generate some C# code as well.

Pathfinding – I have some basic A* code but it isn’t integrated with anything.

Terrain integration, working on this in another project.  BModel style mini bsps for landscape objects like rocks or ruin chunks, or full buildings with portals that look out and in.

Doom3 style gui screen surfaces.  These would be great for making interesting puzzles.

Tags: ld25, postmortem, xna

You can download the 48-hour edition here or the post compo version here [exe] [zip] [rar].

 ——————————————————

What went well?

This was my first Ludum Dare and my first finished game. I’m pretty happy with the game and very pleased with how things went.

 ——————————————————

I Finished!

The deadline kept me right on track and by hour 48  my game was finished, I didn’t manage to get everything in I wanted and the code was a little sloppy but there’s plenty of room for me to build on if I wanted to work on the game in the future.

The Art

I’m not a very good artist so I decided to go for as simple a style as possible. I ended up trying to go for a style similar to the game Realm of the Mad God. which worked out pretty well. I focused on trying to create  a lot of variation in the backgrounds to try to break the grid which meant I spent a lot more time on art than I’d have liked.

Keep it Simple

The game needed to be simple to pick up for players so they wouldn’t lose interest and simple for me to design so I’d be able to finish it before the deadline. Thankfully sticking to this idea meant that the majority of people managed to finish the game but it also lead to the game being a little too easy.

 ——————————————————

What went wrong?

I’m generally very happy with how everything turned out but there were a few major problems largely caused by lack of planning. I’ve got a lot of them fixed now, but there’s still one or two I’m working on.

 ——————————————————

Lots of Bugs

Annoyingly there were some major gameplay and graphics bugs still present when I released the game. Some of them I’d spotted but simply didn’t have time to fix, others such as the tile scaling bug I didn’t spot til after I’d uploaded.

I’ve fixed the majority of them in the post-compo version.

Music!

It may be partly because I’ve listened to the tracks in the game for hours during testing but I felt the music was probably it’s weakest point. Before the compo I didn’t plan on how I was going to create my music which led to a frantic search at hour 46 for a way to quickly generate it. I eventually settled on Otomata thanks to the post by caranha on music generators. The music it generates is pretty good, I then ran it through GXSCC to give it a nice 8-bit feel.

For the post-compo release I’m planning on redoing most, if not all of the music using Famitracker.

Over-scoped, under-delivered

When I originally sat down to start sketching out game ideas the first thing I thought was “Think Small” and despite this I still managed to over-scope.  I’d planned to have around 6 puzzles but ultimately ended up with 3 at most. This was mainly due to lack of time and poor planning. Thankfully the brevity of the game seems to be something a lot people liked so I plan to keep the game short but add a lot more depth.

Post-compo Version

I’ve fixed up all the bugs and improved the graphics a litle for the post-compo version, you can download it here [exe] [zip] [rar]. If you find any bugs please post them below and I’ll try to get them fixed asap.

Thanks for reading

Tags: antihero, post-compo, post-mortem, unsave the princess

It’s time for a postmortem of The Hunt. It wasn’t the usual, great LD experience for me, as I had to enter the Jam just to finish my entry, but I’m happy I did manage to finish something… Well, let’s start…

The Good

• I did finish a game. I think last time I was so happy that I managed to do this was during my first LD.
• I like the graphical effect I managed to achieve with backgrounds. This is definitely something to explore further in different projects.
• I left polishing the code for later/never: no component object models, no fancy object-oriented techniques, just plain simple entities. And I DIDN’T CARE.
• I used the additional time to test my levels, and now I think that the difficulty curve is quite fine. The game can be beaten, but does get a little harder with each level. Even my mom can play it!

The Bad

• I hated the theme. I couldn’t think of anything that I would really like, which resulted in me starting to work around 13 hours after the compo started.
• The original idea to use Twine over AS3 was better, especially considering my time constraints (RL stuff).
• I was late for the compo and had to enter jam instead, and didn’t really gain that much out of it (I managed to add only 4 more levels)…
• I didn’t have time for anything. I didn’t implement anything interesting, and my weekend consisted of switching between LD and other things. I didn’t even add Kongregate API.
• Waited with creating assets too long: in the end I had to look for some pictures on the web and use combination of rotoscopy, palette reduction, recoloring and similar techniques just to have something. It turned out fine, but I wish I had a better plan.

The Result

• I think it’s probably the most non-innovative game I’ve ever created, but I also think that it was a worthwhile experience. Maybe it’s even not that horribly bad in terms of gameplay (it’s simple & casual), but kinda mindless, not very innovative and lacking theme-wise.
• I feel it’s kinda time to change the technology I work with (AS3), just to see something new. Haxe, HTML5, maybe even try something 3D… I must think about it some more, but it’s the right thing to try for me.

Either way, I’m looking forward to the next LD.

Tags: hunt, postmortem

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=17874

Ludum Dare 25 (48 hour Compo)was my first Ludum Dare, and only really my second attempt at starting and finishing a large game. Of course I had tinkered making variants of Snake and such beforehand but other than Neutron Craft I hadn’t much experience going start to finish on a big project.

As such, I kept my scope small and aimed to make sure I had a finished game. I’m happy to say I completed that goal, but of course there’s always more you wish you could have done:

What went right:

1. I finished the game.
   Really happy about this one. But pretty much mentioned this above.
2. The aesthetic.
   I am not an artist. Heck, I can barely draw a straight line. But I feel by taking advantage of a minimalist theme, and making use of effects like particle emitters I was able to get a lot more mileage out of my bad art. Heck, people have even been saying the art looks great in the comments!
3. It doesn’t break (mostly).
   Luckily, I haven’t had anyone complaining my game is downright broken (yet – touch wood). As far as I can tell it shouldn’t actually crash (at least not my work). There is a slight issue but that’s for the next section…

What went wrong:

1. It’s not that clear how the scoring works.
   I probably should’ve listened to my peers earlier on about getting a much stronger game aspect into this, as for at least most of the first day it was just an interactive weather simulator/toy. I spent so long in the first day implementing the three weather features that day 2 became making a scoring system out of it, and left no room for anything else. I’ve had criticism that the scoring method isn’t clear (which I agree with), however I also didn’t want to just spell it out so people knew the exact formula. But also, I was distracted more by my “cool idea” for the theme, than actually how I was going to make it a game.
2. The format isn’t that accessible.
   I used XNA, as it’s something I’ve been messing around with a lot recently. I wanted to keep practising with it so I stuck with it, but next time I’d like to make my game easier to play for more people.
3. Something crazy happened with the compiled executable…
   So, the weirdest thing occurred in the dying hours of the compo. I (stupidly) only ran the compiled executable of the game, outside of the debug mode in Visual Studio, for the first time, and found if you clicked off the window, and left it so it wasn’t the “active window” for more than about 5 seconds, the game crashes. For no reason at all.
   It’s funny too, that the game logic and audio still runs in the background (I can hear it get to the game over screen). And yet the window is unresponsive, due to some AppHangB1 error. I’m certain it’s not my code (at least directly). I tried so hard to fix it but just had no time. Thankfully it’s not a game breaker – just don’t click off the window while playing! (Which I assume most people wouldn’t do anyway :P)

Lastly, I leave you with my timelapse! Thanks for reading

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SsaEmsWmUw

Short gameplay video of my entry
Play and Rate here!

The Most EVIL Breakfast post mortem.

Aww yeah! This was a really fun theme, I admittedly spent the first few hours after I woke up trying to figure out what to do, I’d had thoughts of making vertical shoot-em-ups where you place enemies strategically in-order to destroy the hero plane , some ideas based around towers and tower defense but in my crazy brain they seemed concepts which I thought a lot of people would do and I wanted to try and challenge myself with coming up with something different (at least different to what I’ve done before)

So, I wrote down a list of all the cool things that villains have / do, including:

• Make awesome evil laughs
• Sound like Skeletor
• Own Underground / Moon Bases
• Have hoardes of minions / robots / henchmen to do their bidding.
• Own pets (think the claw from inspector gadget)

Next I thought, what would be a suitably evil task for the villain to perform. Whilst there were the thoughts involving destroying/ taking over the world I wanted my villain to be somewhat more odd, so I thought, what would be really unpleasant and how could it be worked into a game?

Now, mincing up things is a pretty nasty process and kittens are so cute. What could be more evil then sending out robot henchmen to mince up kittens into breakfast? Not much, so I went with that as the idea.

Next I had to think up a look, by now I’d already decided that I wanted to create a 3d world, erring on the low polygon side of things as much as possible with a minimal amount of effort.

The Evil Minion Robot takes form. Mwahahahaa!

Having recently played around with shaders inside unity I chose a simple, colour scheme of red, white and black and let myself run though designing a simple robot, basically from a collection of spheres and then some appropriately scaled world objects.

A Simple GUI

I started playing with animation in unity and was looking into ranged attacks for the robot minion to perform but kept my eyes on the time left and decided to cut that out and reduce it down to a simple cat and mouse affair.

Keeping everything (with the exception of the robot) as low-poly as I could meant for much faster modelling and by the end of the first day I’d got my 3d models all set-up, the beginnings of the world, some movement, and some crazy voices.

But there was one problem which I had to fix and it was important.

What would a kitten sound like being minced up?

Thankfully I had a hand blender in the kitchen so that was an obvious choice for the blades whirring up but it didn’t feel err meaty enough?

Luckily I was snacking on some hula hoops later on and they’re pretty crunchy, so I tried crunching some up with my fingers on the desk, pointed the microphone, overlaid the sounds and eurghh, it really sounded like what I imagined would be kitten bones breaking. Fairly scary sounds!

A while later I found myself not satisfied with just the noise so added some bloody particle effects and a camera shake for extra effect. You don’t ever see what happens to the kittens just the err….end result.

By this time I was feeling like quite a monster for making something like this so it was the best time to do some more voices for the evil villain and give him some level of radio interaction with the menial robot.

After the final sound effects had been made and cut and testing the packaging for the web went fairly smoothly and I managed to spare time to add an android version with some pretty basic controls. I was worried that despite going low-polygon It wouldn’t run well but it seems to run fairly smoothly, even on mid-power devices which is a relief.

In summary. I had a lot more fun then I expected this time around. I’m a little scared it may have brought out an evil side to me but hey, I can live with that,ha!

I honestly love kittens, sadly the wife is allergic to them but that’s probably for the best otherwise the RSPCA /PETA may be on the phone at me, eep!

Oh yes, the entry is playable here–> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=6823

Been a bit ill the last couple of days, possibly from not getting enough sleep this weekend!

Just realised that the musaks from my last post didnt come through, so here they are.

https://soundcloud.com/#stevy-1/bit-metally

https://soundcloud.com/#stevy-1/horror-of-the-mountain-king

Here be Dragn: A Postmortem:

What went right:

The Dragon:

The Dragon looked and moved exactly how I wanted it to.. There are a couple of niggles when it coils around but otherwise its fun to move about and sinuous. It could have been a bit faster.

The AI:

I managed to put in some distinct AI units. The first makes the Dragon stick together in a follow pattern. The swordsman class makes the warrior cling closely to the dragon and attack with melee (though the actual melee wasnt finished!). I also added ability timeouts so the warrior could charge in when at close range. The archer class has three different range controls. At long range it closes to shooting range. At shooting range it shoots. At short range it runs away.

The Gamestate:

I managed to seperate the game entities into a seperate class and share this about, which was pretty good as I usually dont keep a MVC pattern and dump everything into one class.

The music:

Although the mountain king song went wrong and cost me time, the other song makes the game a bit better.

What went wrong:

Resources = time!

For a short game, I should have created rough resources and patched them up later.. Colours and special effects should only be added when you’re ahead on time! That dragon could have had lasers!

Art:

I drew more drawings than I actually got to use, which was a bit of a shame.. Though makes me wonder why I was spending time drawing horses anyway? The pipeline I was using to import the resources was also far too complicated as it involved a lot of manual work. On top of this, the warrior was cell shaded, and the dragon and ground were pseudo-realistic, leading to a bit of a jarring effect and making it non thematic.

Sound effects:

I rushed these at the last minute but making them all by voice changes the artistic direction of the game. I’m also aware that some of them were far too quiet or appeared at the wrong times, partly because of repeated conditions in the AI loop.

Do I want to work any more on it?

I’ve got some resources ready to animate and colour in.

I had a couple of interesting ideas while I was doing the compo which I would like to explore such as:

• Adding enemies and powerups to points in the music and adding different waves of enemies to show progress.
• Adding the storyline I had before, where your dragon wakes up to find it’s favorite gem gone and goes on a quest to get it back.

I think it would be a great testbed to try out some other concepts and refine my object handling in java (so it doesnt GC).

Well, this was long overdue. We have been very lazy with the posts this ludum dare, but we are going to catch up, promise 😀

So, our game for the jam is Kill Ville. If you haven’t played it yet, please do and leave a comment so we can try yours too.

Find the villain!

We are very happy with the reception the game got the first few hours, a lot of positive feedback, which feels great because we put our best effort on making the game.

Well, that’s it for now, we promise a Post Mortem in the coming days.

With love,

ConflictiveLabs

AnteChristmas (compo)
TimeLaps

It was my 2nd participation to LD, and I’m very proud of it.
I dont see LD as a competition, but a personal challenge. Comunity helps to give motivation, and get feedback, and interesting discovery about creativity.

Here are my memories of that weekend.
Cet article ecrit en français

That I didn’t have time to implement:

• During the take-off sequence of the sleigh, reindeer should be harnessed just before Santa Claus boarded.
• An animated sprite to be held in the left sled (top screen) to capture packets and load them in the back of the sled.

Contents abandoned along the way :
Game-play:

• Failure condition / game over, life counter / failures
• Rhythm variation

Visual:

• Sequence where Santa blame the troll (caught breaking a packet)
• Making a background for top screen, and redesign the bottom screen (printed appearance, slight depth compared to sprites, reflections …)
• Give few semi-transparent to sprites, even a light shade (plan sets the offset.)
• Review design packages (details)

Skin:

• intro (cover G&W opening) getting to click to give focus
• instruction manual (controls)

Course of these 48h :

One false start
Rather late, I started writing several ideas in my sketch book. None of these ideas did not suit me perfectly. I could not think of anything other than the last idea that I found, so I left it there. It was a RPG reversing the roles, to adopt the perspective of blobs lv1. Aware that task was disproportionate to time I left, but mostly my skills, on head shots, I just closed without saving. At that time I was thinking really quit.

Saving break
While there were only 35 hours on 48, I followed the advice of “LD Survival Guide”, and I went out for a walk in the city (something I never do). I still wonder which way the theme « you are the Villain » Playing a villain in a video game, would take me to program a game type existing in sophisticated versions, and I felt not up to it (no experience). Consider the villain in a broader context, the difference between good and evil is in part to individual interpretation, I didn’t have time to dig into the issue to find a topic where priori to be unilateral.
It is by ceasing to think that I noticed decorations of the city. Christmas became obvious.
What’s worse to go against good feelings and pleasure rot naive children discover their gifts for Christmas morning. It is both cruel and superficial. A bit like Gremlins are on the wrong side, but in the end, is that they just do materials damages.

Development of game-play
As soon as I found this synopsis (ruin Christmas), I considered this aspect of Game & Watch. As solution that I had envisioned for its various advantages: smart graphics and relatively simple programming. At the same time, I am quite a fan and collector of these old-school games.

The idea of ​​the conveyor belt come from G&W Mario Bros., where Mario and Luigi are working on packaging wine bottles. Thus at the end of line either load the sleigh. But the device (several treadmills in reverse direction) did not seem appropriate, for lack of space. At that moment, I imagined instead of hitting packets disturb the elves on an assembly line.
I really wanted two phases of the game, and therefore the action in each split screens. As Zelda, where alternating phase platform and fight against a boss.
For controls, I’m inspired by Green House, where the character had to make round trips from one screen to another. But mostly the game Fire Attack (one of my favorites) for the breaking-packets phase (watch several locations at the same time).
The idea of ​​Santa Claus watching packets came to me during coding, because it had to something to annoy the player. I don’t know what inspired me for this feature. That may explain why it’s not entirely successful in the game that I posted.

Realization
I started by setting up the global visual to define the dimensions of both screens. I got the design of the Game & Watch from this website npes.free.fr thing I did not mention in the credits, since I’m the author (released last year).
Positioning of the elements is a crucial thing, I realized that I had fixed faster final visual elements. I like hard work, and in this context I made it a point of honor that the sprite frame is consistent with the LCD technology of the time. This involves not overlap sprites, which earned me some feedback reporting missing packets broken on the conveyor belt. In fact, these places were already occupied by the sprite of hammer. A broken package having no impact on the game play, I took the part that they can seem to disappear in some places.
I worked on the bottom screen until Sunday noon. Lack of time, with everything to make the top screen, I try to list all the essential things that remained. Then I start to make sprites for the top screen. It took me much longer than expected. Each hours, I was reviewing my list for setting priorities, ie, which seemed essential to game play.

Term
There remained just one hour to complete, and two things needed to be done. Most visuals for the top screen were ready. I had to choose between the top screen code, and code a failures counter witch implement game-over. The top screen seemed a priority. Without it the game would have seemed incomplete. While I recognize that without a game-over, there is no issue, I put so much energy to draw sprites on the screen at the top, I didn’t want to waste these feature. Now, I think that at this moment I overestimated necessary work to develop a game-over condition. Also I was really tired, and I decided to devote my energy to code top screen, rather than estimate the time needed to develop each parts.

Sheets of my sketch-book

The Cards Never Lie was Li’l’s first game project ever and my first Jam, second LD.

What went right:
We were able to incorporate most of our basic ideas (using the phone, having visitors). Li’l composed all the music in about 48 hours, somehow. (There are 7 original tracks plus a few variant tracks.)

Three days is A LOT longer than two days, and in our case the difference between a mess and an entry. By the 48-hour compo deadline the game was technically submittable, but the extra hours on Monday made a huge difference.

What went wrong:
Mysteries are hard. I wanted to compromise between game play features and storyline so the game wouldn’t be too kinetic. I tried to find a good middle-ground, but it still feels light on both ends.

We had a lot of ideas during the brainstorm phase we weren’t able to implement. We talked about timed events and day/night scenarios, and I wanted to have a mini-game where you could guess if a person was lying based on their facial expressions/tics. L’il came up with all this elaborate tarot card stuff that I didn’t even get close to squeezing in. AND I FORGOT TO INCLUDE A GOAT. I have no idea where I would have put one, probably in the park eating delicious trash.

What we’d do different:
Should have bribed/charmed/stolen an artist, for sure.

The future:
I’d like to continue working on this. There are a lot of features I still want to try and I feel like the basic story has legs and could be expanded into 3 to 5 interlinked mysteries.

Tags: needs more goat, postmortem

for ludum dare i made a game called ‘Illegal Crime Game‘. it’s a silly little game in which you commit juvenile crimes in a small town. after finishing the game i submitted it here and also to my blog here, where i post all my game stuff. i used the same dumb description i used for the ludum dare page:

ILLEGAL CRIME GAME.

THIS GAME IS HIGHLY ILLEGAL.

DOWNLOADING AND OPENING THIS APPLICATION MAY LEAD TO ARRIVAL OF COPS AND LATER ARREST.

PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

after i few days, i try to check my blog, to find this message:

my blog is now suspended for unknown reasons. i’ve been using the blog and wordpress for about 2 years now, and never had anything like this. after checking the terms of service i can’t really see anything that i’ve breached so i can only assume this is an automated flagging or something. it’s pretty funny, i think! i’ve contacted wordpress about it and hopefully it gets cleared up.

let this be a warning though. Illegal Crime Game really IS illegal, and those who download it might find themselves at the mercy of the Blog Police.

you have been warned.

Play Illegal Crime Game Here

(Cross-posted from my blog)

What’s this? I’ve made a postmortem less than a week after finishing a game?! This has never happened before!

Mr Wizard was several steps forward and several steps backward for me. First, the steps forward (aka, what went right):

My art has never been great, but looking back over the games I’ve made in my life, I’ve seen some definite improvements. I think the art in Mr Wizard is some of the best I’ve ever done (and a friend agrees with me)! The same goes for music. Normally when making a game for a jam, I’ll leave music until last, or almost last. My reasoning behind that is this: A fun game that looks bad and has no music is better than a boring/bug-filled game that looks and sounds good. My skill with music has never been that good, so I felt that by including music the overall quality of the game would decrease. This time however, I sat down with a tool I had never before used (FL Studio), and managed to get some decent music finished.

Now for the bad (what went wrong). The user-friendliness is not as good as in some of my previous games. Look at this image: Can you tell what is happening? Probably not. I would have liked to give so much more information, hints, etc in the game, but ran out of time.

I do have some plans for a post-compo version. First, more information about what is happening needs to be displayed. Second, there needs to be an indication of which key spawns which monster, and what the cost of each monster is. After that, who knows? I’m planning to do some simple animation, tweak a couple of things, and maybe even what every game needs: an endless mode! If all goes well, I might even try to sell it!

To finish up, I’d just like to say thank you to everyone who took part in Ludum Dare 25. I hope to see you all next time!

Tags: mr wizard

Big thanks to everyone who thought Valkyrie had lots of atmosphere and whatnot — it wouldn’t have been remotely so without the awesome soundtrack by Deceased Superior Technician, which is now available for listening on the Valkyrie page over at Gamejolt.

He has other cool-ass free tunes at his webpage.

Hello to all

We wanted to do a litle Post compo version with a bit more content.
Not enough time to get this version correct and well balanced, but added more content, corrected many bugs and learned alot !

After this first attempt at a ludum dare, we now understand that a multiplayer game is pretty much to big for this type of contest

I do have to say one last thing : We used Starling API and Feather but without trying them before hand …
Great tools … but not done for this type of applications… games for mobiles yes, game for computers : not much good.

Anyway, please give this new version a try and i hope we will be able to find some time on next LD !

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=19058

Well everyone, I did it, I created an authentic dance simulator.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=11072

It was only half the game I wanted it to be. My initial ambition for campaign mode was to have the screen zoom out to reveal the person playing the game while still dancing to the beats. I ran out of time. Thus, I do not rank Dance Man as high as my previous LD entry, Baby Farm. I chose play testing over features. I wanted to make this game fun to play. I’m not sure if it was worth it. I regret not taking the theme more seriously. My original Villain idea had to do with unwanted sexual touching, but I felt I had too little time to implement that within respectable boundaries. So I decided to make the sex fun and normal. Oh it was such an underdeveloped game. Next LD I have something much more powerful planned.

Until then,

MrEvilGuy

The Jam is the all-inclusive version of Ludum Dare where we relax the rules so newbies and teams can enjoy the experience along-side the hard-core competitors. I like that, a lot.

What I don’t like is how relaxed the 48 hour competition rules are. Now I know these suggestion might be heckled as ‘not in the spirit of the competition’, but really, with over 1,000 entries, it’s about time we tighten up the rules so serious competitors can sink their teeth into a real challenge.

Here are a list of things that bother me about the competition rules:

#1. Anyone can change their submission after-the-fact.
This is the biggest hole in the competition my friends tell me about.   It sits very uncomfortably with me too.   There should be a single submission server with a cut-off at the dead-line. This would ensure people don’t make updates after-the-fact. Even presentation upgrades after-the-fact can give an entry a big boost, so I would like to petition to remove updating the entries at all. Challenge is all part of the spirit of competition.

#2. Theme is too vague.
You could make any game with these themes and slightly modify them, or their titles, to include the theme.  This is the number 2 flaw my non-coder friends point out.   There needs to be technical and artistic limitations – more tough rules- otherwise entries could be almost completely finished before the competition even starts, minus a few theme-inspired assets.

#3. No file-size or other technical limitations.
Back in the day we had Speedhack and there was a file size limitations of 512Kb compressed. This limitation is important for many reasons. #1 it separates those who know how to code efficiently from those who use sloppy techniques.  It also makes it much harder to pre-make a massive game/game engine and plop in some theme-related content during the competition.

#4 The worst rule of them all: Base code
Base code should be strictly FORBIDDEN. Much like the last three, this one is about being able to extend your ability to work on your game before or after-the-fact. One could literally write an entire game before-hand with lots of flashy sprite animation helpers and things, then come competition time simply make new graphics and sound for the engine. This ruins the spirit of competition.

My non-coder friends hate these rule flaws. They realize that the competition means virtually nothing if people could very simply, and very obviously cheat. Making the rules more strict would add to the intensity of the competition and help solidify the status of the winners.

I also have a personal gripe with the rating system. Having competitors rate games is a great way to ball-park the greatest entries; it’s unlikely really good entries will be underneath the top 100. Having said that, the top 100 games should be properly rated and sorted by industry veterans, or at least by competition organizers. Often times entries that, to outside observers, clearly don’t belong on the leader-board make it, and even sometimes make it to #1.   Past winners made a lot of my friends, who realize that I take game competitions very seriously, very sour about Ludum Dare.  The validity of the competition is constantly being questioned when I make mention of my participation.

I remember one Ludum Dare where a celebrity competitor had to opt-out because his entry would be so unfairly rated in his favour. If we really want a competition, we should have a place for such elite celebrity competitors.

Despite the common Laissez-faire attitude most people have towards  ‘the spirit of Ludum Dare’, I feel strongly that tightening the rules and pushing things harder is important not only to making better games, but in creating a better perception from the general public. It pushes us harder, it validates what we do, and it validates the winners. Without that validation the grand prize of notoriety falls upon the apathy of the greater public audience and damages the perceived importance of the competition winners.

To rectify some of these things,  I would like to suggest some extra rules for the competition. Note that I am not speaking of the Jam, which is fine the way it is.

#1 No base code – All code and assets must be written during the competition.

#2 Announce technical and artistic limitation alongside the theme.  See The Rule-O-Matic for the very best example of this http://speedhack.allegro.cc/rule-o-matic/spin

#3 Add ‘replay value’ and remove ‘mood’ from the ratings system.   Just a personal suggestion.

#4 Add a submission server – no updates after the deadline, not even spelling mistakes or presentation fixes. It is what it is. This will require a ‘line-up’ system so the submission server doesn’t get bogged down. Perhaps checksum entries prior to upload so this system cannot be cheated.

#5 Add a file-size limitation to source code and assets of 2mb. This is for the sake of the submission server as well as to add an extra degree of difficulty to serious competitors. Obviously, this doesn’t include engine over-head like included library files needed for execution.  Back in the day, 512kb was enough!  2mb is more than enough for the efficient programmer.

#6 Pre-approved, competition certified libraries only.  This again, is to prevent pre-completed base-code. Libraries must be approved by competition organizers.

#7 Remove names from entries during rating. – Popular entrants get too much notoriety and are unfairly judged in their favour. I know a big tradition is promoting your game after-the-fact, but really we all know that popular entrants get unfairly high ratings based on past performance and celebrity status.

I know I will get flamed for these suggestions, but I feel they are important. Why? Because when I explain the competition rules to my friends who do not code, they immediately poke these very same holes in it. They dismiss the competition and don’t give it the credit it deserves. I would like to see Ludum Dare actually mean something to people outside the competition one day.  I would like to see people gain the greater recognition they deserve.   Having better rules adds to the importance of the competition,  it adds to the tension,  and it pushes us even farther. More importantly, it attracts the worlds truly elite game developers and validates their performance to the general public.    I would like to see the winners go on to become not only credited by industry brethren, but by the populace of potential general public fans, eager to know who really is the best of the best. Until the rules are tightened, I don’t see that happening.

Please discuss, and thank you.

I wanted to devote just 8 hours to LD25, but eventually I ended up with just 2-3 hours, thus not finishing my concept and not submitting the game.

However, I really liked the theme, so I finished the game later.

Goatzilla vs Nuclear war:

The story: nuclear war is raging, goatzilla appears. Various nations are firing missiles at each other, while still building and improving their settlements.

As a goatzilla, you have three options:

• let the humanity perish (stomp all the houses)
• force the humanity to unite, then let them destroy you (stomp near houses to make them shift sides and unite)
• get killed early, keeping the nations separated

Tags: post-compo

Just a quick update to say that I’ve uploaded a bugfixed post-compo version of my mini-RTS “Knights of Uruk”, which you can play here!

A few people were confused about which units were which (My fault – one of the units was displaying the wrong sprite when idle). But to clarify things I added a little visual guide to the game page:

I had fun! This was the most important thing for me.

I used my own framework called ‘essence‘. It was good to have an excuse to use it. I’ve learned that I need to update a few bits to make it more user friendly and useful. The framework is far from finished, but it’s constantly being updated on github.

My focus for this will be creating a proper drawing library, as I had to write in sprite code especially for the weekend.

I also want to improve the audio module so that multiple instances of  sound clips can be played at the same time. If you listen out in my game you can only head one bullet sound at a time, even if two or three shots have been fired.

HTML5 and JavaScript are a great choice for Ludum Dare, because you can create code so quickly. It’s not without it’s pitfalls (supporting multiple browsers etc).

Lessons for the future:

The movement is tied to the frame-rate, so next time I would separate that out. It was running okay on my old machine, but when I uploaded the game and tested it on another machine, it ran so fast it was unbelievable! It’s the first time I’ve had to limit the frame-rate.

I would like to also include some touch / tilt controls so that you can play the game on mobiles. I’m looking into supporting FirefoxOS as the OS is written in standard HMTL.

The feedback so far has been great. I love the fact that the community is very supportive, and criticism is constructive.

I’m considering entering my game into <game_on>, the mozilla games competition. If anyone else has a browser based game that doesn’t require a plug-in you can too!

It’s been nearly a week now, so I figured I’d post a post-mortem about Fry Fleshlings Fast, my Ludum Dare #25 entry for the theme “You Are The Villain”.

The game is an ActionScript 3-game compiled in Flash. It runs online, or as Android AIR installs (I guess it could work as iOS installs too, but, you know, it’s a pain in the ass to create all certificates for that and only people with jailbroken phones would be able to install it since it’s not an App Store release, so why bother).

The original idea I came up with was a game where the player acted as an invading Alien overlord. You’d have a top-down view of a map and your task was to kill everyone below. For this, I envisioned a mechanic where you would have actors – the fleshlings – roaming around a map, going from checkpoint to checkpoint. The player would have the ability to cut their paths short (by using lasers) with the objective of getting everyone to move to the same general area, where you could then drop a meteor attack on top of them, killing everyone. The challenge would be in using as few lasers as possible.

Although the systems were different (using point- and line-based roaming paths, rather than a two-dimensional plane), the whole idea was heavily inspired by Jezzball, a very simple yet addicting game for Windows 95.

Early screenshot showing the internal map/waypoint editor I had to build for the game

What went right

Reusing code: although I failed to do a post about it prior to starting the project, in this project I reused much of the code I developed for my previous Ludum Dare game attempt, Survival of the Tastiest. While much of the code is, of course, garbage – many shortcuts were taken – a lot of the support code and more abstract frameworks for handling objects and Starling entities came out very handy for this new project.

I now feel like, for a Ludum Dare project, you can’t plan on working on a new engine and a new game at the same time. Unless it’s a very unique but simple mechanic, it’s just a lot of effort that means you can’t get both really right. It’s better to develop an engine with a simple game layer on top of it, or to work on a cool game idea based off a well established engine. Of course, this is not something I did right this time around – I was developing both again – but having somewhat of a starting point helped.

Over time, it’s likely that my own entity engine – which doesn’t have a name – could shape up pretty well. There are many well known, polished engines for games in Flash out there, of course, but having one of your own is a great learning tool and, with time, allow you greater freedom since you can tweak and change it to fit your needs better.

Programming a system I enjoyed: I never get to spend my (full-time) programming job on game-like systems anymore, and while creating this game I was dead set on creating a point-based pathfinding and routing system that allowed for routes to be created and cut dynamically during gameplay. I love the code I produced for that – one where I didn’t take any shortcut on – and it makes me happy knowing that no I have this additional library to carry with me whenever I need it. I believe challenging systems like that are what I do best – rather that repetitive tasks – and I was a great joy to get this working from the group up. This made this Ludum Dare effort really worth it.

Not worrying too much about the idea: truth be told, until Saturday at noon, I didn’t even know if I was going to participate in Ludum Dare at all (because, like I said, I had other work to do). So I decided not to fret over it. I was thinking of ideas and discussing them with my girlfriend and friends, but not going crazy over it. Maybe because of that, the idea came naturally and I started implementing a few hours later.

Screenshot showing a debug view of the game, including map waypoints as I tested the path cutting mechanic. Roaming Fleshlings are also visible

What went so-so

Scope: with my previous game attempt, I had a very audacious plan that failed to materialize in a game; it took so much effort to get something playable done, that by the time it was ready, I didn’t have enough time to make it easier, more approachable, or just fun. It was an engine, but not a real game. With this entry, I made sure to think smaller – creating something that could be accomplished without a lot of effort. This was also made more important because I actually had Emergency Real Work to do that same weekend, so I wanted to spend just a few hours with the Ludum Dare entry.

In the end, while the scope of the game was much better aligned with a Ludum Dare project, it still failed to materialize into a fun game. I only spent 6 or so hours with it, and I feel the results were more or less the same: there’s a game engine in there, but it’s not that challenging, or fun. It’s a gimmick.

Still, I think that, given enough time, it could be pivoted to something more fun.

Testing the final assets and the laser animation and smoke particle system (heavily inspired by Faster Than Light, I must add)

What went wrong

Assets: Even if I decided to use simple assets this time around, I ended up spending too much time creating graphics, animation frames, and map textures for the game. Sometimes, it’s better to have extremely simple assets and concentrate on everything else.I’m convinced my next game will have circles, triangles, squares and lines first and foremost, and no animation frames. But then maybe it’ll finally have audio.

Not giving enough time for testing: the gameplay concept was something kind of unclear, and my problem was assuming it would just work. It’s only later in the development process that I realized it wasn’t the case. The mechanic was there – you cut paths down, limiting fleshlings to a given area – but it wasn’t fun. For one thing, their behavior was too unpredictable (they would take random paths once they reached a path connection) so the idea of funneling them into a common area never worked out. It would be better if they had clear rules – for example, when reaching a connection point, if there’s a clear path ahead of them, take that instead of turning the corner randomly – or if the map had additional mechanics, like one-way routes (maybe by deploying signs of some sort).

I feel like the need for those changes would have came out earlier in development if I was focused on getting a prototype working, rather than on getting a game working. I heard this is how World of Goo has come to exist: they developed a simple prototype over a week to see if the mechanic would work (as a part of a large, a-game-a-week effort), tweaked that as necessary, and only then decided to create a full game with its unique but fun mechanic.

Much was dropped: once again, I had to drop a few features that made the game less cool than I thought it could be. The end-game meteor attack was removed – the new objective was just to kill everyone with lasers themselves – and potential new weapons were never seriously considered. In way, this made the game interface better – I didn’t need a HUD for weapon switching, so the map could take the whole screen – but it also meant it was a bit repetitive.

Roaming Fleshlings and their bounding boxes (or their blood) when testing the killing mechanic

Conclusion

This game was great in that it taught me one thing: I normally plan a system and then try to develop a game out of it. Maybe, given enough time, this can be a solution; but it means you need to give time to work on the gameplay after the system is complete, because at first, it’ll only be an engine of possibilities.

Many lessons learned for the next Ludum Dare. I like to believe I’m getting better. Code-wise, it has been a lot of fun, but maybe one day it’ll also be fun gameplay-wise!

Ideas and Theme

I’ve known for a while now that I’m pretty insensitive to some subjects that other people feel strongly about. So when I heard about last week’s shootings I felt pretty much nothing and just read a reddit thread about it (that’s how cool I am, yeah!). As expected, some people were angry and saying how terrible the shooter was for shooting children (because shooting adults is totally okay!); others were going on about how 24/7 media coverage encourages more shootings, which is probably true; most people were just terrified and sad that something like that happened.

Very few people, though, talked about why someone would do such a thing or tried to imagine a situation in which that kind of act would’ve been sort of justified (it will never be justified, but putting yourself in the shooters shoes, can you imagine how you would’ve gotten to that point?). So that stayed in my head for the day… Later the compo started and the theme was released: “You are the Villain”. I knew right away that I wanted to make a game about the shootings and explore the reasons why someone would do that. I also knew that, in those cases, people usually do have their own reasons, mostly because I had read a very interesting blog post (sorry I can’t find it anymore) some years ago about the Virginia Tech shootings explaining in detail the events that occurred that led the shooter to do what he did. According to that blog post, from what I remember, a lot of stuff that is said in that Wikipedia page I just linked are only half truths. For instance:

Several former professors of Cho reported that his writing as well as his classroom behavior was disturbing, and he was encouraged to seek counseling.

Written by Cho’s classmate, the post says that some teachers would just not accept Cho’s writing because they deemed it too disturbing, while the student who wrote the post thought it wasn’t a big deal. Also, some teachers would “force” Cho to speak out loud and express himself better in class when they knew he had issues with that… Anyway, it’s a lot of stuff and I don’t really remember the details. What I’m trying to say, though, is that those types of massacres are usually not without any type of reasoning behind them. It’s very easy to say someone is crazy and get it over with, but analyzing the whole situation regarding someone’s mental health, social status and whatnot is considerably harder, trickier, and may even make us feel bad about ourselves. I mean, who wants to feel like they are directly responsible for someone’s eventual mental breakdown and indirectly responsible for the death of others?

With all that in mind I decided that the game would be about a boy/girl/person who keeps going from interactions inside video games and interactions in real life (and by real life I mean the environment outside the game, but inside it… !). Their interactions in real life should be as terrible as possible, in an attempt to justify the ending (killing everyone) and their interactions inside the game should be also pretty violent, in an attempt to justify the game’s title. But this is more of a joke than anything. I don’t actually believe video games cause mass shootings! I had a bunch of ideas on how the real life interactions would be: you get to speak to your mom who hates you and resents having you around; you get excluded from a group of friends for some reason; your girlfriend breaks up with you; you get humiliated, ridiculed, bullied by a group of people in school (there’s a variation of this one when this happens as you’re confessing your love or whatever to some girl you like (and there’s a variation of this one too where the girl is in on it and she makes you believe she likes you only to get you to confess to her so that others can make fun of you (kids these days…))). I had very few ideas on how the games would be but they didn’t really matter. This was a more story focused game and if the games (the ones inside the game) themselves were fun that would’ve been great, but it was definitely not necessary.

What Went Wrong

The game itself was not fun at all. In fact, some people felt bad while playing it. While I feel pretty great that I made other people actually feel bad with something I created, I wasn’t aiming for that completely. I thought I had made the little children that you get to kill inside the games pretty funny and entertaining, but not cute and relatable to the point where players would feel horrible killing them, after all, they were just squares! My goal was to get the player to feel bad in the ending when you have to kill children in the game’s real life… I guess I’m just bad at emotions. ;_;

I should have thought way more about what I wanted the game to be. Instead of spending 20/30 minutes fixed on the idea of making the game about the shootings, I could have spent some hours trying to really nail down a creative and interesting idea before jumping to code.

I didn’t scope it properly. While I managed to finish the game, I had no time to see if it was fun, to add music or to just playtest it with other people. I spent the first day building the basic systems (platforming, enemies, guns, speech bubbles) and the second day creating content. I realized I do not enjoy creating content (compared to building systems), so it took me a lot longer to get stuff done on the second day. I also had no time left to polish the game as much as I wanted. There were no particles, music or just overall juicyness. Those are pretty simple features that really make a big difference…

The game looks terrible. I’m not an artist at all so I have to rely on primitive shapes, mainly squares. But I’m not at the point where I’m familiar enough with shader magic so that I can throw a bunch of squares at the screen and they’ll look amazing.

I was terribly unprepared. Like I said, I spent the first day getting the basic systems to work when I could have done that in less than ~6 hours had I prepared beforehand. There were many common patterns that arose as I wrote the game that I should have noticed, too. I also went in without any clue as to how I was gonna get music in. I play the piano, so I know how to compose decent (or so I think) music, but I’m not familiar enough with any tools to create a song in such a short amount of time.

What Went Right

I actually finished it in 48 hours. I created a list of things that I needed to implement and kept a pretty steady pace on day one. On day two I was sort of tired and the work wasn’t that interesting to me anymore, so I took a bit longer to get things done, but I managed to keep on keeping on (however slowly) and finished it. Also, my original idea and what the game actually turned out to be were pretty close to each other. Some details were different, but overall I didn’t compromise anything like I usually do (i.e. if something is harder to implement than I originally thought I’ll change the feature a bit so it’s easier to code).

Given that people said they felt bad while playing it, I’d say that the theme was handled pretty well. I also really liked using the sepia shader to differentiate between game and real life. It created a decent mood whenever you’re in-game. If I had a bit more experience I could have tried a more video-gamey shader, but the one I used did the work pretty well, so I guess it’s fine.

Conclusion

This was definitely a really good experience. I wanna continue participating as long as I’m ALIVE! Just the fact that there are so many games there are super duper a lot better than what I could possibly hope to create one day gives me enough motivation to keep trying to improve myself. It also reminded me how much deadlines help with getting stuff done!

For the platform game go HERE

Autopsy of the graphics/level design guy. Big thanks to all the graphics/level design feedback we’ve had, really useful!

Gripe: don’t knock the Jam as easy or Soft 😉

• Less elitism of 48hr Compo please. There are a lot of reasons to do the Jam and yes it has relaxed rules and longer, but it’s a TEAM event. That in itself is the reason Will (the dev) and I enter the Jam rather than two separate entries (my solo effort would be crap I admit).

Good

• Teamwork
• Atmosphere – very much what we were after
• Large level
• Sound track choice (not composed specifically for this project – royalty-free from http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/
• Parallax (scrolling backgrounds). Very pleased with them.

Sad

• Controls: Could be better! Not being tile-based made the coding more tedious, and in the end we didn’t have time to fine-tune it at all.
• Level design: There’s one place where you get stuck, and it’s not always obvious which platforms can be stood on

Different if done again/more time

• Better shading
• Particles to make Treasure more obvious and cooler
• More obvious where you can stand – maybe add another layer to the engine so that platform highlights can be overlaid on the ‘scene’ layer
• More hand-shaded graphics.
• Add a music composer to the team

1. fluffy stuff 

I love the theme, it conjures up ideas of James Bond/Despicable Me/the Incredibles mega-villains. My creativity raced. But then we had to tone it down as we wanted the game to be playable by kids (the Dev is a particularly protective Victorian father!!!).

I don’t regret, but it definitely made the artwork more challenging for me as my natural style is a bit darker and grimier. We’d decided the day before to do a 2d platformer, but using 3d graphics and without tiling. We took a huge amount of inspiration from this cartoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neXDENKnC7A <jump 2 mins in. Maybe you can see it, maybe not.

Deliberate game-play choices included:

1. No death. When you run out of lives (the 9 cats at the bottom), the end splash shows you going to gaol not dead
2. No attack. The player has to avoid all the enemies, and they do not noticeable ‘attack’ the player. This also reduced the feature list.

2. Tools

Will developed the level editor over the first two days. Of course it took longer than we’d expected but for me this was an excellent feature and made the overall game much faster to deliver. It definitely was goal-orientated – it has quirks and missing features but was more than adequate for me to test artwork and build the level. The final level composition only took about an hour(!). Also, it allowed me to save to GitHub, thus eliminating the endless emailing of artwork for consolidation that was a bottleneck last time. I’ll let Will do the post-mortem on the tools but for me this was a massive plus.

3. graphics

the most obvious feature is that it’s not tile based. By the final build we had 6 layers (counting player, enemy and treasure as a single layer). The majority of the platform graphics were G3D format models built in Blender and all using the same texture. I had difficulties with getting the depth right to not cut off or draw in front of the objects.

The level builder including an auto-normals function but we forgot to use it before submitting. :C

The reason we used 3D graphics was because we’d planned to use better lighting effects but like so much these got de-scoped due to time.

The background Parallax uses large PNG files with hand-drawn shading. 2d graphics made using bog-standard MS Paint, GIMP , plus a Bamboo graphics tablet.

SOOO much LD gamey goodness…. HOORAH!…..  I’ve just reviewed my 100th game!

Tags: 100, hundred

The gameplay video for the first level of Doctor Spandex. I did it with alarm on and off.

You can play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10554

It’s been almost a week since we started Ludum Dare, and have had a bit of a time to cool off since then.  Our team of three were able to put out a reasonably fun game for the Jam.  Some things went wrong, but I think we made a fun little game and the whole thing was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

What Went Wrong

Thematic Squabbling – We spent a lot of time on this. The theme was weird, we wanted to take ‘villain’ to mean ‘antagonist’, but we couldn’t really make it into something that worked or would have been fun. Eventually we just ran with the ‘badguy’ idea, but it would have been better to have something that was a little more clear cut.

Lack of Practice and Setup – Before this Ludum Dare, I was very rusty with unity, I hadn’t worked in it in almost a year now. Our other programmer had only a passing familiarity with it, and our artist wasn’t so much an artist as he was simply the most artistic of our group. We also didn’t set up any of our tools prior, which lost us a bunch of time.

The maths – We got stuck for a good while to make the angles work. The game relies heavily on knowing the angle between the player and other actors, in relation to their current heading, but we spent and unreasonable amount of time just figuring out how to make it all work.

What Went Right

Simple Setting – We chose to have the game take place in space. Space is a great setting, since there’s absolutely nothing there. It saves us the time from having to do pathfinding, collisions, or obstacles. The trick is to keep it looking empty and to make it feel like you’re moving, but I think we handled those well. It might feel like a bit of a cop-out, but

Build and Refine – Our primary goal was to have a working game as early as possible. I think we had a semi-working game with a player (an untextured cube at the time) and an enemy by the end of the first night (about 5 hours after start). At each step we would play it, think of what we could do to improve it, and work from there. While such a lack of direction might be considered a detriment to a bigger project, the fact that we had something working so early on meant that it was less directionless and more of a non-stop polishing process. If a feature looked complicated, we wouldn’t add it.

Relaxed – We never felt rushed by our pace, we took regular breaks, slept normal hours, and even took time to watch some anime.  We also ended our jam after 48 hours, so it wouldn’t cut into our Monday. The fact that we had a fairly solid, playable game without suffering from burnout when we went in to work on Monday was a good thing, and probably resulted in a better game.

Randomly Interesting Technical Bits

– The background is just a plane that faces the camera, that is movement locked with the player. There are two materials applied to it, which have their texture offset adjusted to a multiple of it’s x/y coordinates, to give the impression that you’re moving through space, with the stars move slowly, and the dust moves much faster.

– All the ships are actually cubes, because we had pains making the planes face the camera properly, and never went back to fix it.

– If you look at the above picture, you’ll see lines pointing from the police ships to a point near the player. What’s actually happening is the police ships actually lead the player by a random amount. It’s not really obvious in the final game because the shots are way too random to see it, which is a shame. When I first started testing, the enemy ships would all clump up when chasing you since they all had the same parameters and target, so I made the actual target random as well as randomized speed and turning rate.

– The message box was originally going to be used for communications, as we were going to have both civilian and police ships send messages, but as the game pace increased, it ended up being difficult to follow while things were going on. Originally, we had messages simply flash at the top of the screen, but it became fairly annoying as a new message would appear every 5-10 seconds.

– Collision detection doesn’t work at all if the player or target ship isn’t moving at all. I have no idea why this is, and it drove me insane while working on it, but since there’s no way to actually come to a stop after you start it’s not actually huge issue. Maybe it has to do with the way unity handles triggers. If you have any idea, I’d love to know.

– The arrows that point to each entity, probably one of my favorite features, was one of the easiest to code, taking maybe 30 minutes to do. Unity is kind of sexy that way, that it’s so easy to make such a thing. Check out that code.

– The AI on the swat cruiser tries to fly along beside you and shoot at you from the side. It also cheats a lot, if it’s off screen it’s speed and turning ability is greatly increased, and if it can’t get to the player for long enough it basically is launched high speed towards the player. I had thought the arrows would make it obvious it’s cheating, but it seems fairly natural from your point of view aside from the odd “wtf how did he get there”. Or maybe you don’t notice cause you’re trying too hard to not explode.

– I’m especially proud of the taxi behavior. The taxi groups all start parented to a group object that moves on its own with the taxi’s inside. When the group object detects a projectile nearby, it transfers the current direction and velocity to each of it’s children and removes itself as the parent, at which point each of the ships starts moving independently.

Timelapse

A timelapse video from my computer perspective. 1 frame every 5 seconds, at 30fps. I should have used a dark theme for visual studio, don’t watch if you dislike flashing images.

The game

Give our game a shot!

Thanks for reading!

Tags: ld25, postmortem, unity

I have been putting off writing this because I don’t really want to think about this game anymore, but I guess It has to happen some time.

Tiny sprites 😛

I started out the compo with 3 hours away from the computer. On one hand, this was good for coming up with ideas, but in the end I switched again about 6 hours in. My first programming sesh was good, I got a lot done as far as player movement went, and I really solidified what I wanted the gameplay to look like in my mind.

I really hit a speed bump at about hour 16. Even after getting some sleep, I was struggling to concentrate. I started coding boss combat, which was fine, but everything began to fall apart when I did enemy combat. This is where I really began to regret having such sloppy code. Usually, I am meticulous about storing variables in the right place and such, but at this point I was just creating new ones instead of trying to deal with the ones I already made.

After a whole day of code, around hour 28, I decided to go to bed again, and promptly forgot to set my alarm. 10 hours later, I was well rested, but in a very bad place as far as time went. I finished enemy combat, and worked on unit placement, which became another big pain. I simply didn’t have enough time to test my game much, and by the time hour 48 rolled around, I was only able to submit a terrible game, that honestly did not work.

But I did not give up! I took on the challenge, and kept working on the game. Long story short, by the time the Jam competition was ending, I was able to submit a working version of the game (more or less). It had different hero types, different enemy upgrades, and sound! Much better than what I had for the compo, though still kind of buggy. In the end, I was happy that I had a working game at all! This was the first game that I had ever finished, and I am so glad I had the opportunity to participate in Ludum Dare.

10/10 Would do again.

What went right:

Interesting idea, pretty good art, sound, distribution.

What went wrong:

Sloppy code, BUGS, cut features, slow combat, stress.
Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=18930

Guardian Angel Devil is a solo jam game Play it here

The original game idea popped in my head when I saw the theme “Guardian” during voting, and when “You are the Villain” ended up the winner it came up again with a nice twist at the end. The idea is a take on the “chosen one” trope, as in the hero, Blake, is a young farm boy and he is the only one who can retrieve this evil artifact from the dungeon. Since you, a small demon,  are the villain, of course, you pretend to help him since he’s clueless, because you want to take the artifact for yourself after he retrieves it. You have cards you can play to provide various effects on the battlefield and Blake does all the dirty work of fighting.

The Good

JSIL:

I wanted to make a web game, and was about to use silverlight again when I heard about JSIL. It meant I could code in XNA but then export it to Javascript. I spent some time porting my silverlight tile engine to XNA that played nice with JSIL, which wasn’t too hard as long as I found workarounds for the methods that JSIL hadn’t implemented yet (Particularly having to read xml tile maps with an xmlReader because XDocument and XmlDocument weren’t implemented.)

Juicyness:

This came from a video that someone posted before the compo. Even though I didn’t manage to animate combat attacks, a simple particle effect and sound effect worked pretty well to make the game feel more finished, and took far less time than animating each frame.

Gameplay:

There are three different ways to finish, and all are possible. Plus it plays out a bit differently each time depending on which cards you get.

The Bad

Use of time:

By the end of the compo I only had a fairly generic RPG with the villain walking around and the hero equipping items and attacking, so I ended up entering the jam. I think I may have been able to squeak by on compo time  if I had planned a little more efficiently. I plotted my time out fairly in depth to see where I was using it and this is what happened:

Ideas: 2 hours  compo

Art: 4.5 hours  compo (about 2 hours thrown out)

UI Programming: 4 hours compo

Level Design and programming: 7 hours compo/1 hour jam (Some of this was unused)

Programming walking around the map: 2 hours compo/ 1 hour jam due to JSIL issue

Programming combat: 4.5 hours compo/ 1 hour jam

Programming items and equipment: 2 hours compo

Programming/Drawing cards: 4.5 hours jam

Sound: 1.5 hours compo (very good bang for the buck)

Conversations: .5 hour jam

If I could do it again I could have saved some time on art by deciding my style better in the planning stage. I also could have shaved some time off level design by only implementing things in the maps as I went. There was a bunch of tile flags in the final room that went unused because I didn’t have enough time to implement the cutscene I was planning. I also wouldn’t have bothered making JSIL builds until after the compo ended because it was really just a port. I lost a bit of time implementing something and then finding out I’d have to do it a different way to appease JSIL.

Bugs:

There are a pile of gameplay bugs (Not breaking and most of them work in the player’s favor) mostly due to the rush at the end to get 23 different card types working.  I think some of them might only be in the JSIL port but I haven’t had a chance to look into them.

GUI:

This game had quite a bit of GUI work and not very good base code for it (I intend to rectify that in my library before the next LD). And I didn’t have time to code proper window backgrounds so the text is a bit hard to read at times.

If you haven’t done so yet, Play it here

Today I had a go at some more features and bug fixes on a post-LD variant:

• Tried reducing memory usage by using CopyOnWriteArrayList. I had been copying the gamestate object array to avoid concurrentmodificationexceptions. I’m going to try modify this to reuse objects instead, but it needs to be threadsafe anyway.
• Made the arrows into an arrow shape and rendered with gradient fills that dont show up at that pixel depth.. For kicks, I made the arrows enlarge as they go up into the air, maybe it looks odd?
• Increased volume of dragon screams. (Why? Why was I created to feel pain?)
• Reduced space between joints to make the dragon less jointy. Neck segment 2 needs scaling slightly.
• Made dragon faster.. This makes the game ridiculously hard at the moment.
• Experimented with tail takes no damage. This lets you hide behind tail to deflect damage then bust through and kill some dudes. Slightly overpowered, but wouldnt be if you were surrounded on all sides.. Needs more art peices and a redone title screen for that though.

Things that are really bugging me:

• Archers need to have bows, though now I’ve got an idea to draw the bows pointing in different directions! When I do this, I will probably change the warrior cloak to be red, and keep the archer in ranger colours, though add some random texturing.

Ideas:

• I had the idea that multi-hits could result in a powerup drop, so two hits within 2 seconds gives you something good.
• Thinking about rendering spent arrows and scene damage into the ground. I created some decent scorchmarks at one time.
• Thinking about making the dragon dart and open its mouth to feed.
• Thinking about making guys explode into gibs you can eat later (maybe).
• Had some Hobbit related ideas about Grandelf and his glitched mare shadowhaxx. Also thought of having a cutscene of the dwarves, with Hobblin’, Dabblin’, Tiffin, and Dave (who comes from a semi-detached house in the suburbs) “What do you mean your name doesnt rhyme with your second cousin’s auntie’s goat?”.

I’ve just finished uploading a new build of my LD25 compo entry, “The Hubris of the Bone Lord”. Features/changes include:

-Pause/Unpause now makes sound

-Menu navigation now makes sound

-There’s actual menus for selecting difficulty etc instead of just pressing the corresponding key on the keyboard

-XBox 360 gamepad support added

-The intro story crawl can be skipped with the pause button

-The quit button will always return to the title screen if in-game, and quit the game otherwise

-On Game Over, the player has the option to retry from the current stage instead of getting completely kicked to the title screen

To avoid any confusion, I’ve uploaded the updated build exclusively to my website. It is nowhere to be seen on the LD website so that it won’t accidentally be judged as part of the compo entry.

Post-poning making it into a fully realized game until later.

The new version can be found on my website here: http://beardedpixel.net/hotbl/ (re-iterating: do not judge this as part of the compo)

1. New “fear” animation for person running away from Bad Puppy if you bark at them enough.
2. Fixed bug in highscore detection so that tweet prompt only happens when you really do have the local highscore.

I’m still looking forward to seeing my first high score tweet from a player.  It will make me feel really happy when I finally see that

Tags: Bad Puppy, csanyk, ld25, post-compo

Well, I think I did okay this time around. Better than LD24 (my first LD)

This time I made a game called Lord of Corruption

Play it here

Anyway:

What went right

I was more experienced. I have now been programming for almost 1 year. Which means I have 1.5 times as much experience as LD24.
No school. Last time school got in the way and I lost all Monday morning (timezone offset means I finish the compo on moday afternoon).
Had a simple GUI framework. Last time I tried implementing my own GUI system and wasted half of Sunday morning.
Focused on fun even if my interpretation of the theme was just… simple. Result: It’s fun, so no-one cares about the theme.
I did so well that I submitted 1 hour before the end because I was done that early.
I had just started developing a platformer engine a few days before the compo, so I was able to rewrite that, and as a result, I now have an even better engine to use for bigger projects.

What went not-so-right

No music/sound. I should try to get this going next LD.
It was too hard for some people to win.
There were a few problems with enemies bunching up at the side of the world and insta-killing you whenever you respawned.

Overall, I think it went well. ;D

I had a lot of fun this Ludum Dare, and I think that of all of my submissions the one I submitted this time is the best.

Here is a link to my submission: Link
There is also a post-compo version available, with more items and levels (as well as a smarter AI).

When I first saw the theme, I wasn’t sure if I should participate. But, I came up with an idea that tied in with some AI research I was doing. The game uses neural networks, which is pretty uncommon. But, it really is the only way to do it in this case. Path-finding and other methods are far too rigid to be able to adapt to arbitrary environments. Also, it is difficult to create a character control system that can predict how to move in the air in order to land on a platform. Path-finding can be complementary to the neural network, but I left it out since it is too processing intensive. I instead just made all levels pretty linear (the AI always moves to the right).

When I started out writing the game, I was pretty sure that the AI would fail miserably. But I at least wanted to try it out. To my surprise, however, it almost immediately (usually in less than 10 generations) was able to comprehend how to jump from platform to platform. However, by the time I got it working, I squandered too much time on YouTube to be able to submit it for the 48 hour compo. So I submitted it for the Jam.

I started out the AI with 25 inputs, arranged in a rectangular grid around the hero. These inputs were set to the corresponding tile values. This acts as vision.
I later added the signed x and y distances of the player from the goal (princess), so it could learn the map better and not be fooled by structures that look the same from its point of view in different locations.

In the post-compo version, I also added the x and y velocities, which improved the behavior significantly.

The outputs of the network are arrow-key controls (left, right, up). To test the physics, I started by having the controls respond to keys, and I then later let the AI control it. If a output is greater than 0.5, then the key was activated. Otherwise, it was left inactive.

The neural network is recurrent, and is evolved using the NEAT (Neuro-Evolution of Augmenting Topologies) technique to evolve connection weights as well as network structure simultaneously. I had the NEAT algorithm coded prior to the competition. It comes with a visualizer, which uses another genetic algorithm to produce images of the networks. Check it out here: Link

The NEAT algorithm itself is very generic, feel free to use it in any of your own projects. The visualizer uses SFML, but you can leave it out if you don’t want it.

Here is an example of what the NEAT visualizer shows. In this image, it learned a XOR gate.

Other than the AI, the game is nothing special.

What went right:

– AI was able to beat levels as intended.
– The training process ran at an acceptable rate.
– The map editing interface was relatively easy to use.
– Sounds were indicative of events (thanks to BFXR).

What went wrong:

– The menu system (there is none).
– The graphics. It was an ugly grid with rectangles with legs as characters. Also, some people got black screens. This was fixed, but perhaps too late.
– The items. There were only 3, which made puzzles repetitive.
– The levels. They were mostly too easy, I ran out of time when making them. Also, there were not enough of them.
– No music.

I might make a post-post-compo version. I kind of like designing puzzles for this game.

So I decided to take upon myself a challenge today: make my old Warmup game, Castle-Castle, multiplayer co-op.

Download it here

Play the original here

type yolo or oompa in the chat

This is my first Ludum Dare and I’m glad to know I’ve been able to finish a game, strange, but at least, a game.

To be honest I was uncomfortable with the winner theme. I think I was not the only one that thought: “omg!” I have preferred other, probably more simple or more conceptual. After all I think that this issue isn’t important. Instead I think it’s a challenge that forces us to be more creative to find a nice idea to start to develop the game.

The first important choice I took was to do a remake. In fact, I think that’s all we do when we’re trying to make a game: we search for a clue or inspiration from the lots of games we played before. I decided to do something similar to Terry Cavanagh’s “Don’t look back”. I thought this will be a good starting point to, after a while, modify the characters, the game plot and graphics. But it was no possible in the end and I feel like I was haunted by the feel of DLB.

Ok, I’m also stuck with the no-end of the game :)

Play and rate it

What went right:

• Incredibly funny experience.
• Working with Game Studio Pro is ok. I have a six months experience with it and I feel I improved my skills in GML. I think that Game Studio is a good tool for developing games in a fast way. This makes me to think that GM is a right tool for make prototypes, sketches or mockups and platform games as well.
• The ambience and the atmosphere of the game.
• The rain effect.

What went wrong:

• There’s no a clear plot. Well, in fact I love games without a plot and left the player to imagine a plot by himself while he’s playing the game.
• There’s no ending. This is the big fail of the game. I was in a mess trying to work out a perfect end but I failed miserably. This is the first issue I want to fix this holidays
• No audio effects like footsteps. Only the rain sound as background.
•  No enemies to kill/avoid or puzzles to solve.
• No web port of the game. This question I think it’s crucial. As a player while I was rating games I find myself more comfortable playing the web port than Windows/OSX/Linux version. This issue makes me think that I need to learn HTML5 or Haxe + NME soon

It’s been a week already. Time flies! So I suppose it’s time for my game’s post mortem.

What went right

• The theme. While I didn’t have any pre-planned ideas, coming up with an idea was pretty easy. An AI that decides people should die. While the end product differed a little from the ideas I had initially, I think it made the game more enjoyable by making you actively involved in the brutal murders of death.
• The tools. By now I know pretty much all I need to know to make a game in 48 hours with Visual Studio and XNA. I ran into zero problems related to my tools or knowledge of them, making the development easy and smooth. I only ran into a few small roadblocks regarding implementing some features, but they were nothing no dirty hack couldn’t fix in a few minutes. While I really should move away from XNA at some point in the future, I just can’t yet as it’s so easy to work with. 😀
• A built-in level editor. It was the first thing I made, and while it’s a horrible thing for any purpose other than LD, it got the job done and made it possible to create complete levels in minutes. I will seriously consider making this the #1 task for any future LD game I’m gonna work on.
• The AI. I’m very happy with what ended up being AI controlled. The humans react to doors closing on them and other shenanigans you might be doing to them, resulting in some sort of realism. Of course, they look like shit, so it’s not that realistic, but still!
• The features. I almost completed all the things I wanted done before the deadline. The only things that didn’t make it are in the post-compo version, which took a few additional hours to create. While I’m sad they didn’t make it in, it doesn’t change the fact that there are many ways to kill people, lots of achievements, and a bunch of playable levels. Probably the most I’ve ever done in 48 hours so far.

What went wrong

• The graphics. There’s no way around that fact. My game looks like shit. It’s 3D, which is the only positive point, but the walls are ugly and exactly the same, the entities are ugly boxes that don’t rotate and have a single texture for all 6 sides, and there are no animations at all. I really wanted to add better graphics, but my main focus was on gameplay elements, and halfway through day 2 my code was so ugly that it was pretty much impossible to replace the cubes or the single-texture geometry.
• No goat. I wanted to add a killer goat that was locked up somewhere inside the base, and it would seek out humans and eat their face etc. But adding that would be too much work. My pathfinding was slow and static (very inefficient BFS, or at least I think that’s what I ended up with) making it hard to find humans, and I could only make a cube goat anyway.
• Collision detection. Mostly a problem when you have a human grabbed and you want to make a turn in a small corridor. So frustrating! 😀
• The controls. Always make the controls as smooth and easy as possible. I didn’t do that. I imagined that if you are an AI and you control all those things, then you do that indirectly. So I made the indirect button panel, which works, but it’s pretty crap. The first-person view added movement keys, which was a huge improvement already, but I did not make a ‘move backwards’ option. I should have, but I ignored that as I learned to deal with it while devving. But it’s horrible, unintuitive, and it makes the game much less enjoyable imo. But that’s just hindsight, so it’s a lesson learned for next time: If something doesn’t feel right during development, don’t learn to deal with it, but fix it immediately.

Overall I’m very happy with what I ended up with. It’s pretty much a complete prototype. If you have the chance, give the post-compo version a try as well for the super fun camera features. I recommend playing the two dark maps then, as you have to rely on the cameras for your human awareness. The second dark map is especially hard to not screw up on.

I won’t continue working on my entry, though. While the concept is nice, the code isn’t. A massive refactoring is needed before adding anything non-trivial or related to graphics, it would be much easier to start over from scratch and to do things right instead of quickly. It would be interesting to see an implementation of this in UDK or something, with realistic graphics. Imagine the scientists discussing things with each other while they are at work, and then you shut down the doors, grab them with robots, and force them into incinerators while they are pleading for their life, only to throw their crispy remains against their co-workers as they are banging on the doors and screaming for help. Horrible! 😀

You can view my entry here

Tags: post-mortem

Hello, I’m a person and this is my second Ludum Dare.

Things that can seem right by a certain point of view:

-My game has graphics! Fantastic graphics made with a broken pen! Yeah, I’m a great artist, I know…

-I managed to make a lot of contents in little time and this is important.

Things that can seem wrong by a certain point of view:

-Stencyl did random things that I’m still not able to understand, it made me lose 2-3 hours.

-I had to see “The Hobbit”. This was a huge nerd duty that I couldn’t avoid.

-Many other random things that made me lose time.

-In the end I made my entry in 9 hours but it’s ok because I managed to partecipate.

Here it is the link to my entry:http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=16077

P.S.: My game can be frustrating but, hey, it’s not my fault. It’s yours, you are the villain!

P.P.S.: Merry Christmas to you all!

Click to go to the game page

 What went right

» Tools: I was familiar with all tools I was using

» Art: I’m addicted to working with the NES style graphics, so this was no problem. From the sprites to the font and title screen, it was all fun to work on.

» Sound is my weak point. Luckily a day before someone suggested me a website with free music, and there I got all music I needed. I also used sounds from freesound.or instead of the usual bfxr

What went wrong

» Time: Couldn’t join the compo because I wasn’t going to be home on sunday, but this is hardly a problem, as I still had 2 whole days to work.

» Planning: I didn’t plan the game properly. I never got to that point where you say “ok, the game is about this“. It was all over the place, and because of that near the end I had to spend a great deal of time just to figure out if the concept actually worked.

» Had to cut many features off, like a more in-depth interface with more helpful information, and a loot system that was supposed to add more depth to the game.

And then

After submitting the game, I added a statistics system to it, and submitted it to Kongregate. It’s pretty fun to see how many people are playing it.

Not my best game by far, but this is what Ludum Dare is all about: learning. Next time I will plan things better and actually have a fixed idea of what the game will be.

Tags: ld25, postmortem, timelapse

LD #25 was significant for me.  Not only did I submit my first entry to the compo, it is the first time that I have created a game and put it up for anyone in the world to play.  The feedback in the comments has been fantastic, and I’m kicking myself for not having participated sooner.

Take a minute and try Goombah! here.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the theme announcement was to focus on a grand villain – Darth Vader, Genghis Khan, Kane, etc.  The second thing I thought of was stupid and funny.  I went with that.

It’s hard out there for a goomba.  He sits on a little platform, waiting patiently for the plumber to show up, at which time mr. goomba either gets stepped on or walks off a ledge.  I didn’t want to make the game quite that boring, so I took out the ledges and provided an endless stream of jumping men to avoid.  The goomba’s chances of survival are still slim, but at least it is interesting!

What went well

• Kept it simple – I had a simple design that was not too difficult to implement in a few hours.  I considered adding game play features, but focused instead on making everything look nice and by the time I could have come back to changing game play it was time to submit.
• Flashpunk – The only exposure I had to flash development before the compo was running through the flashpunk tutorial.  For me it was a great place to start, and that engine is a snap to use!
• Draw first – I am not what you would call an artistically gifted man.  I spent the first hour or two in GIMP drawing out the sprites for the game, so that I knew they were done and did not have to worry about the art while I was working on the code.  If I had done it the other way around, I’m not sure my placeholder art (colored squares) would have ever been replaced.
• Submit early – I submitted the game early on Sunday because I had other obligations, and at that time only a few dozen games total had been submitted.  I know they don’t count for scoring, but almost 50 people had played my game before the end of the day.  That’s just cool.

What could be better

• Levels – One thing I would have liked would be to add some variety to the game by having different platform configurations to mix up the game play.  The game works, but does get boring pretty quickly.
• Interface – An actual menu, instructions screen, and game over screen would be nice to have in there.  The text elements up top were a last minute addition, and while I think they do the job it could be better.
• Frame based motion – I would much rather have implemented motion based on actual elapsed time, but started the game by implementing motion based on number of frames passed.  Around hour 5 I realized that this could be an issue, but never managed to go back and rework it.  Next time, I’ll start the right way.

Having actually made a game in a weekend, and then having so many people play and comment on that game has been a great experience.  And to everyone who has played and commented on my entry, thank you!

Tags: compo, flashpunk, ld25, postmortem

I’ve been a big fan of Ludum Dare for a few years, but this is only my 2nd time entering.  Here’s what I ended up with:

Play/Rate it

What went right:

• The Tool – I used Construct2, just like my first entry.  Both times, I considered using GameMaker/GML, but I wanted an easy way to post to the web, and more so, Construct2 lets you rapidly produce something that’s playable.
• The Story – I thought the “you are the villain” theme could really make an interesting story arc in the game.  I spent a good amount of time the first day just thinking of how to implement the theme into the story.  I’m happy with how it turned out.
• The Music – With only about 45 minutes left, I finally turned my attention to sounds/music.  There wasn’t enough time for me to create anything that wouldn’t have been boring or repetitive, so I turned to the Wolfram Tones to generate some background music for me.  Out of the 60 or so tracks I listened to, I had found 3 that I thought would add to the ambiance of the game.
• The Gameplay – It ended up being a simplified zelda dungeon.  You acquire 4 powers along the way, and use them to open doors to get farther into the dungeon.  The powers were fun to create, and worked reasonably well.  Unfortunately, there were also a number of problems with the gameplay (see what went wrong).
• The game felt complete – By “complete”, I  mean there is a definitive beginning and end, assuming you could make it to the end (see “bugs”).

What went wrong:

• I tried to do WAY too much – I chose a relatively complex game to make in 48 hours.  A number of  gameplay aspects suffered to have something complete by the deadline.  Also, virtually nothing felt polished, and there are a number of bugs.  Fortunately, there was only 1 bug that stopped the player from finishing the game, and that’s been fixed.
• The text speed – There are a few “cut scenes” in the game where all controls are suspended to show dialog important to the controls or story.  This wouldn’t be so bad, but I made this dialog unskippable, which left the player frustrated, having to wait for the dialog to finish before they could resume playing.  I had planned to add the ability to move through the dialog via a keyboard button, but ran out of time.
• Lack of planning – I had a conceptual idea, and just went with it, making many things up as I went along.  This ended up being a very poor choice.  If I had planned things out a bit more in the beginning, I would have had more time in the end to polish the game.

For next time:

• Plan as much as possible before creating.
• Start with a simple gameplay mechanic, and expand if there is time.
• Wrap it up with a definitive beginning and end.

See you all in LD26.

Hi everyone! I’m glad to say that I’m constantly visiting the web over and over, and I’m trying to play all of the games that I think that are good of the last LD.

I’ve met with Ludum Dare at the page of Evoland (a game of LD24) at Shio Games. I really liked the game at that moment and in the info said something about the site, and when I got in the first time, there was 1 week ’till this LD started!

I’m living in Argentina, and I talk Spanish here, so sorry if I mistake some letters 😛

I’m 14 years old, and I currently know nothing of programming, but I’m looking forward to learn something and make some useful program/game/whatever in any language. I was interested since last year (I think) and I wanted to learn BASIC first, but as long as I get some progress I’ll be happy about it.

If anyone is can/wants to teach me something, I’ll be glad.

See ya everyone!

Tags: hello, presentation

Get Your Goat – Game

I entered into this compo very nearly at the last minute. I lucked out with five days remaining before the event and was able to get the time off of work. As I missed LD#22 due to life, #23 due to work, and dropped out of #24 due to a six hour power outage on Saturday, I was extremely excited to be able to participate in this one.

My goal of this jam was simple: Improve upon my LD#21 entry. For LD#21, I started with zero base code, used Flash CS4 as an IDE, did not have any sprite or sound tools set up or had any knowledge on how to use them prior to the jam. I was not well prepared, but still managed to finish. My entry was very unpolished and was not really play tested. Thus, the goal of my LD#25 entry was create a more polished and fine tuned game that I considered better than my first.

Unfortunately, I do not believe I fully succeeded in my goal. Time-wise, I was ahead of where my previous entry was and some parts of the game were better polished. However, I still ended up performing the 3 hour-remaining crunch to knock out all my art and sound assets. This game uses about two to three times the amount of art and sound over my LD#21 entry. As a result, my art assets were half-done, sound is half-done and one major bug and game balance issues were present in my submission.

This Ludum Dare was a great learning experience, even better than my previous one. I now know exactly what skills I need to improve on in between jams and what I need to focus more on while jamming.

What went right

• My pipeline– Much improved over LD#21. I was able to produce more assets at a much quicker rate.
• Adaptation– Midway through the compo, I discovered that my path finding had a non-trivial bug on top of generating paths too slowly. I was faced with the choice: Stop all development to fix the bug and optimize the code, or redesign the game so I would never encounter the bug or have to generate more than one path. I chose the latter. I feel that if I had tried to debug and optimize, I may not have finished the compo on time.
• Fixed some things from my first jam– Trying to not be too hard on myself, I did end up fixing some of the problems and issues I encountered in my first jam.
  

What went wrong

• Scope– Once again, scope popped up to bite me in the butt. This time it wasn’t gameplay related but it was simply that I shouldn’t have attempted a rts style game. Although, I now have some code I can clean up and port to the next Ludum Dare for another rts game.
• Dealing with distractions– On Saturday, I had some work distractions pop up. I wasn’t able to concentrate fully for a few hours and lost some of my most productive time.
• I’m awful at making sprites– Put simply, I am incredibly bad at making quality sprites in a decent amount of time. This is something I will need to practice between now and the next Ludum Dare if I hope to produce a better quality game. I sort of know what I want things to look like in a general sense. For the life of me, I cannot translate that onto a sprite.

I’ve added some more levels. Along with some more elements to play with. Enjoy

Here

Tags: post-compo

Play / Rate | Timelapse | Demo | Postcompo version (progression)

LD#25 was my second participation, and the second game I created. Before participating at the 24th Ludum Dare, I couldn’t just go and make a game. I am terrible at drawing, and always wanted to find a graphist before starting to code any game.

Ludum Dare forced me to be a graphist, and even a compositor. I learned that I was in fact capable of creating my own games without any help. And now that I have my new computer, I’ll be able to start making more games soon, with Haxe instead of HTML5 (the only thing my previous computer could run..).

You can find the timelapse here:

What went right

Time management.
Unlike LD#24, this time I was able to have a finished game before the compo deadline. I spent way less time procrastinating, something like < 5% (40% for LD#24). I avoided spending too much time on a bug, by fixing it the easy/quick way.

Playable at any time.
I rushed over a playable version the 4 first hours of this LD, so that I had a game to submit at any time after that. Using git gave me that opportunity. I could then add content without worries, even 1 hour before the deadline.

Kept it simple.
I am no graphist nor compositor, so I kept both simple to be able to have a fair amount of content in the end. The background took me a few minutes (The Gimp), vectorial shapes were made easily with Inkscape, and sfx + music took me less than 15 minutes in total (besides the two computer crashes). And in the end, I’m quite satisfied with the result =)

Focus & Health.
Although I have headaches every day lately, I haven’t had any problem during this Ludum Dare. I was able to focus the whole weekend, without starving (couldn’t buy snacks for LD#24), with no exhaustion while not sleeping much, with sugar (candies *o*) and with cigarettes to help me fight my hyperactivity (didn’t have any for LD#24). Those helped a lot against procrastination.

What went wrong

Theme.
Less catastrophic than LD#24, but I had no good ideas. I had some, but too risky (involving good IAs) or not that great (the one I chose). I needed some drawings and more story telling to make this one really fit the theme, but couldn’t do it.

Chronolapse.
I forgot to launch chronolapse for the first hours, lost some more hours of screenshots with ffmpeg later, and forgot again to launch it after sleeping.. My timelapse could have been exhaustive, but well.. I’ll be more cautious next time x)

Computer performances.
My computer gave me a hard time again. Poor performances implied creating a game without knowing how it would really run on a decent computer, and resulted in a game a little speedy. I had a crash while trying to make the music (when my timelapse ends), and a second one while trying again. I ended up with only my test music (I was trying the instruments), and I used it in the submitted game. It was funny to see that it pleased some players xD

Play / Rate game:

Demo (first 5 levels):

Tags: ld25, ld48, postmortem

1. Added girl petters.

Tags: Bad Puppy, csanyk, ld25, post-compo

Last weekend i created a game called “Villainous Dungeons” for the 48h compo. You can play/rate the game here.

What went right:

• Tools. I used FlashPunk to make the game. This turned out to be much more useful than i first thought it would be. I have been jamming a lot with FlashPunk over the last few months and I have become very familiar with it. This made coding stuff much faster than i first thought it would be.
• Idea. This is the first LD (that i have finished) where I had an idea for a game, where the gameplay really fit the theme. It wasn’t very hard to code either (this was why i failed the last LD). It was also an idea that i could pull off in the time that i had.
• Sound. Even though the sounds are just SFXR sounds, I think that i used sound the sound really well. A sound is played when you select a guard. Different sound play depending on weather the hero or one of the guards were hit.
• Time. I did spend the time i had quite efficiently. I didn’t spend too much time on animation or drawing. I had a train trip on Sunday where I also got a bit done.

What went wrong:

• Time. I had a few Christmasy things to attend over the weekend, so i barely had time to make games.
• Playtesting. The game wasn’t really playable until the very end of the compo. This meant that i couldn’t tweak the gameplay as I was making the game.
• Controls. The thing most people seem to dislike about the game is that the controls are kinda tricky. I am not really happy with them either. Even I have a hard time playing some of the levels.
• Level design. The levels were designed in the middle of the night on the last day of the compo. I was so tired that i started to feel sick this is why there are only 4 levels in the game.
• Graphics. The graphics is are really ugly pieces of programmer art. This is especially terrible because  I know i can do better than that.

What i learned:

• Sound. As i mentioned before I think that i used sound really well in the game. I have never really used sound as part of the game design before, but i think it worked really well.
• moveBy(). This is such a useful function and I never knew it existed until last weekend. The function moves the entity by whatever you set it to and does all of the wall-collisions for you. Before this i used a really clumsy set of for loops to do my moving/wall-collision.
• Get it playable. Next time I do a game  jam I will focus on getting it playable fast, rather than spending a long time programming the  individual parts of the game.

Overall I am pretty happy with the game. With the amount of time I had, I am pretty amazed that i could even finish the game in time.

Bye!

I did it! Last week I was finally able to finish a game for Ludum Dare. I’m really happy, it was my major goal this time. I have participated previously but couldn’t finish for different reasons. The first time, my project was too ambitious. Next time, I had other urgent things to do. This time, I decided to go for something very very simple. I decided to write something between Space Invaders and Galaxian, where you actually played the aliens. This was part of the “you are the enemy” theme. I really loved the theme, by the way.

What went right:

• I finished! That’s the best thing!
• I made something simple.
• I started using very simple graphics and decided to improve them later only if there was time.
• I could come up with a design pretty quickly, this allowed me to spend more time on coding and creating graphics.
• I created a simple plan and was able to follow it on time.

What went wrong

• Game mechanics and controls. The controls didn’t fit quite right with the game. The game mechanics could have been improved.
• No sound I didn’t have time for it.
• Final game had some bugs, because I tweaked the controls at the last minute.
• I had bugs with other browsers that I didn’t detect until the last minute.
• Sunday was significantly less productive than Saturday and Friday night. I was really tired and took a lot of breaks. Probably because I had a lot of work the previous week. I will try to take a rest before the compo next time.
• I’m not an expert with the tools I used (Dart + HTML5). That slowed me down with the code. And the engine I wrote is still very immature.

What I learned

• Playing and rating games is equally or even more fun than writing the game. I love to see such explosion of creativity!
• The community rocks! Thanks for everything.

But first, have some evil holiday wishes !

Development notes

-The villain’s rules was our first game together (and Zimra’s first game ever), and as a couple we thought it might be tricky. But it turned out to be a brilliant experiment, we had fun… and learned what we should NOT say to each other when we’re working XD

–Our concept: 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 one of them is… “You can kill them only if they’re alone”).
(* if you haven’t yet, you should, it’s a brilliant movie !)

–The tools of the trade: Unity and Photoshop.

==> Play the game <==

What went right

• spending time on developing one of our first idea… and giving it up.
  The “victims” (3 for a start, each of them with different strength/weaknesses: a strong man, a brainiac, and a lucky one) entered a room with 3 doors. As the villain, you place traps in the 3 adjacent rooms. You have 5 cards at your disposal featuring various traps, each coming with different characteristic (some would require strength to survive, other brain, with the addition of poison trap, neutral card, etc…), and visibility (the trap can be visible to the victims, invisible, or seen as the opposite kind of trap).
  Depending on what they can see by opening all 3 doors, the victim would send one of them check the room/defeat the trap (and lose some HP in the process).
  Then you get 3 new cards to replace those you played, etc… The point being to get rid of all victims before they stumble upon the exit.
  It took us more than a couple hours to refine it, think of all the parameters, fake a game on paper, and realized it was dull as is. We still think it had potential, but we didn’t see how to make it an exciting video game, so we moved on.
• concept:
  analyzing what wasn’t fun about the first idea helped shaping the next one, and we quickly knew this one was the one.
  
  
• managing ideas and time:
  we had tons of ideas for “The villain’s rules” but we made a shorter list of what had to be and could be done within 72h to get a first complete draft, and we managed to stick to it, which saved us a lot of time
• graphics:
  we decided to KISS (keep it silly and simple), which was perfect for the mood we wanted and allowed us to do small animations, so a win-win.
  
• IA:
  all the “victims” have their own personality which is pretty cool. For instance, the jock is the most popular and fastest of the team, so everyone follows his lead, unless he gets drunk, then he’s left alone (and slower). And don’t get me started on the dog !

What went wrong

• no in game tutorial
  definitly our main and stupidest mistake… lesson well learned, always leave some time for beta testing purpose !
• snap box on the smaller side, which can be extremely frustrating when you have to drop and drag the same item several times for it to “stick”
• virgin not virginal enough
  which is understandbly confusing for players (should have made her wear a white dress, it seemed so obvious afterwards)
• the goat/disappearing T-rex mini bug
  we still haven’t found what is wrong (which is annoying because we had a nice idea, but at least it doesn’t affect the game)

Post compo

Correct what went wrong, add a few items, polish everything. Also try expanding the gameplay a bit (we have different option, but we have no idea yet which one will be the funniest to play).  And if we gather enough interest, make other levels (we have tons of kooky, spooky ideas !).

BTW, if anyone is willing to beta-test the edited version let us know, it’d be nice to have someone who’s not a friend or a relative giving us his/her opinion ^^

 That’s about it, we hope you enjoyed our entry ^^

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

What went wrong:

• Computer Crash – Had to install a foreign OS before-hand, had to install a new dev toolchain.
• No warm-up – due to my crash I had to scramble to get a dev environment working.
• Over-Scoped for Preparedness Level – Since I wasn’t prepared, the scope was a bit too large. I think I could have done those extra awesome things
• Sound Levels – My speakers are junk so I didn’t realize the sound was so loud.
• Wasn’t fun - Really,  I don’t think my game was fun.

What went right:

• Quick Coding – I coded briskly, though not as brisk as I know I can.
• No interruptions – I didn’t get interrupted or procrastinate at all.
• Quick Idea – I had an idea quickly.
• Consistency – The graphics and game play were at least consistent.

Things I wanted to add really badly:

• Street Names, Addresses & Random Apartment Names – I thought this would be important to adding depth of gameplay, much like it was in Tiny Civilization.
• An informant – There’s a ‘convict’ sprite still embedded in the SWF.
• More enemies – I wanted to make it so you couldn’t go inside buildings when enemies were nearby.
• Cars – I wanted to add cars as obstacles. I even had for a glimpse of a second the idea that bobbies would come out of cars, but I was already 24 hours in at that point.
• Other Obstacles – I imagined a few simple obstacles such as potholes. Never got there though.
• Tweaked bobby AI – Bobbys were dumb and didn’t properly follow the playing character. I wanted them to move about the map in a pac-man like fashion.
• Tweaked balance – I wanted to have more time to tweak the balance of power, how fast bobbies went, how often they appeared, and what kinds of deals you got.

Shorty & The Big Deal 2600

 Click here to play Shorty & The Big Deal 2600

What’s Next? – Retrocard Alpha

Retrocard is one of those things that’s really hard to explain.  It’s a game where every area is designed and programmed by the users themselves, in-game.

It’s far from finished, but there’s a working prototype online.  Click here to see it in action.

There is enough scripting available to keep a programmer busy.  If you know a bit of LUA you will be right at home editing scripts.   You can play musical melodies,  pop-up dialogs, and soon add networking and chat capabilities too.

A user-programmed location in the Retrocard world.

Players themselves create and expand the Retrocard universe by making custom paintings, buttons, and scripts.

There are plenty of missing features still of coarse,  as should be expected in an Alpha release. If you have thoughts and suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Click here to try Retrocard Alpha Release

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2012 at 12:31 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.

Hi,

I just published a Christmas android game powered by http://citrusengine.com/

Santa Rush is a classical “Monster truck” game.

I hope santa will make my dream come true and that a lot of people will play for christmas eve.

 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.studio3wg.SantaRush

Santa Rush For android free Monster truck game

Because apparently my game died? I don’t know. Anyways, here’s a synopsis of my game, and how I made it. If you haven’t already, you can go get a Windows (sorry Mac users!) download here. While not needed, it might help to play the game before reading.

A screenshot of the current version of the game.

My timezone is pretty nicely situated for LudumDare, and my ‘routine’ of sorts is based around that. The theme is announced at 8PM, giving me time to design a game before I go to bed. Then, the next day, I begin making the game, having gone over many of the details of how the game will work the night before. It’s a really nice system for myself, and it’s worked for me very well in contests previous.

However, this year, I didn’t do that, because I completely forgot LudumDare was happening. The next day, around 1PM, somebody on Steam showed me a screenshot of a game he was working on. I happened to notice that he put the image in a folder named ‘LD25.’ I quickly navigated to the LudumDare website, and lo and behold: There’s a contest going on! So I scrambled together a quick design document that basically said “make that one game with the dungeon and the heroes but with more puzzle” and got to work.

My first challenge was to make a text parser. You see, GameMaker’s room editor, while pretty nifty, didn’t suit my needs in making coordinate-based paths. So, I set to work on making code to read text.

At the time, I didn’t really know about XML at all, and since (to my knowledge) GameMaker doesn’t have any built-in XML reading, I’m not sure if it would’ve helped. Instead, I based my file structure off of Valve’s “keyvalue” format, in which different objects store different facets of data in curly brackets. Here’s what my file structure ended up looking like.

It ended up a bit different in the final version, but you can pretty much infer how it works. I also discovered that, while writing my text parser, GameMaker doesn’t like tabs. Not one bit. When I tried to filter out tabs from the file to get the raw data, it didn’t work, since GameMaker’s code editor interprets a tab as a series of spaces. Consequently, I had to limit myself from using tabs while writing my level files. Lots of fun (NOT), for someone who’s used to writing code!

After getting the text parser up and running, I worked on the basic, boring stuff: Placing and removing towers, making heroes follow paths, etc. Defining which regions the hero would get hurt in ended up being harder than I expected, and I ended up having to do all the base work that you might have to in regular coding. Good practice, I suppose. Consequently, however, the game will give errors if a tower tries to make a hurtful area off the screen. Oops!

A screenshot that shows the first time I got multiple heroes in the same level. It was really exciting at the time! Also shown is a checkerboard background that seems simple, but I couldn’t have made the game without.

Eventually I got everything to a working stage, to where you could play a single level. It was at this point that I had the idea of a “campaign” system. Instead of having a predefined series of levels that the game would play in order, it instead would read a single file that had a list of all the levels that the game would then play in order. This not only meant that I could reorder levels without recompiling, but it also meant that custom level integration would be a helluva lot easier.

Then I made lots of levels. The level making process was actually fairly streamlined. I would use GameMaker’s room editor to map out how the different paths would go and intertwine, and then I would make a text file using the coordinates from that level. I considered making a rudimentary level editor for my own purposes, but I decided that the time spent making a level editor would probably be longer than just typing everything in by hand.

After that, it was polish time. I always try and keep the graphics in my games very simple. I ended up using the hero placeholder sprite as the final thing, just because it easily conveyed direction, and I can’t draw people (turns out that was a bad idea). I used SFXR to create some simple sound effects, and then used Sonar Home Studio to create a nice jazzy song for the main menu. I thought both turned out nicely, and others especially liked the music loop (one even asked why I didn’t keep the loop going during the game).

But enough about making the game, let’s talk about how it turned out.

The Good

• Education! I always try and learn something new with each LudumDare. In years previous, I learned about surfaces, primitives, and vector math. This year, I learned about text parsing, and some nice methods involving paths.
• Music! I write and play music a lot, so I always try and showboat every LudumDare. I ended up chickening out a bit this year though, as I used a drum loop. As a drumset player, I felt pretty bad about it. Otherwise, the music turned out fairly nicely.
• Custom levels! I absolutely love games like TrackMania and Portal 2, not only because they’re lots of fun, but because of the community level creation aspect. Level editors have always been one of my favorite features of games, and I wanted to create that in one of my own games. Even though the level editor is Notepad, I’m still pretty happy with it.
• References! Sticking in the “name” and “occupation” qualities for heroes was purely so I could add in jokes. I’ve compiled a list of every reference made in the game, if you’re curious.

The Bad

• Design! My hastily designed design left me without much design to design my design around. Consequently, I only packaged 8 levels because that’s how many I felt were really unique enough to warrant being part of the final game.
• Theme! Lots of people mentioned that they didn’t feel like a villain, since the hero was a spaceship-cursor thing. Even something as simple as a badly-drawn hero could’ve alleviated the issue.
• Tutorials! I wanted to make the first level an interactive tutorial, but I ended up scrapping that because I’m lazy.
• Late start! I need some sort of calendar for these sorts of things.

I should probably wrap this up now.  Even if the game wasn’t the best it could be, I had a lot of fun making it, and I hope everyone else has fun playing it.

Oh, and before I forget, here’s a page with every level solution, plus other stuff!

tl;dr: i made a game

Hello there everyone.

So, it’s been almost a week since Ludum Dare 25 finished. In the meantime, I’ve managed to rate 50 games, and I’ve noticed most of them via the rating system, so it was a complete mixed bag o’ games. Here are 7 Compo entries that you might find interesting & maybe haven’t played before.

Elevator Evil by 8bitDamage

In Elevator Evil, you play as an evil elevator which is trying to blow the brains out of some people by dropping them off the wrong floor. It gets kinda confusing in the late game, but this doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to have some serious fun while playing.

Monologuer by Devenger

Monologuer is a hilarious game where you, the mastermind villain, try to explain your evil plot to your victim while his friends are coming to rescue him. Of course, you should try to talk to your victim as much as you can while you stop the rescuers from reaching your prisoner by placing spike traps and activating them on the right time. While playing this game, you should also read what our villain is saying as most of the text written is really funny.

Red Legion by DeathBySnail

Red Legion is a short, story-driven game that you should check out, partially because of the bad jokes, but mostly because of the good storyline.

The Quite Annoying League by pierrec

The Quite Annoying League is a quite intriguing adventure game with a good sense of humor. You’re trying to annoy your victims, but you should balance your actions carefully as you might make them call the police, or right to the opposite, you might actually make them like you, which you might find quite annoying.

Stop Him Now! by TijmenTio

Stop Him Now! is a first time entry with solid gameplay as you’re playing as an army of evil birds trying to stop the good guy by bumping him on the head or firing a rocket at him – which is easier-. Reverse platformer with some nice ideas.

Eaten by wzl

Eaten is a game with hilarious sound effects where you’re a cannibal who’s killing and eating people on the streets. There are a few uncompleted features but the game is still fun to play in its current state. “Yum yum yuuum!”

Evil Keeper by XmmmX

Evil Keeper is a game where you build your own dungeon, try to attract heroes with treasure and kill them with vicious traps and fireballs before they can escape. There are a few unimplemented features that might be available on a post-compo version later, so I’m keeping this on my watch-list.

So, these are a few good games you might want to play. This LD was a great experience and I’ll continue to play and rate games during the judging period. If you liked a couple of these games, or if you’re the developer of one of these games, please consider to drop in on my game page and leave a comment on my game too. You might find it interesting.

Mister Misbehave by arhpositive (me)

Mister Misbehave is a reflex game where you’re trying to misbehave in as many places as possible while trying not to get caught by the villagers who are quite angry at you for stealing their goats and doing many other bad stuff. You should try it.

And don’t forget to play and rate my game!

PLAY CLOSE MY SIDE

Thanks!

Tags: blood, close, dark, happy, ld25, Merry Christmas, New Year, side, taste

I’ve been working a little more on Here be Dragn, and I’m thinking that I havent really done that much since last Monday.. The major roadblocks for me right now are random gc’s and adding features which break stuff. For example, I overhauled the audio system to use a JDK v1.5 class, Clip instead of a JDK 1.0 class, AudioClip. And even though people seem to think its the ueber solution, it misses clips randomly (though looping and sequencing samples would be quite handy for what I have in mind for the music).

I changed the render method to use texturepaints to draw images with subprecision accuracy and that really slowed everything down. Weirdly, the animation as it uses different subpixels brings in features of the original drawing that wont fit in a compressed size image. But only when its moving. I tried moving it randomly 0.6f, but that made me feel ill. Looked pretty though before I canned the concept. I decided that the reason why super-deformed is so big in CG art is because faces need more detail than the rest of the character.. So my dwarfs are now pretty squished (but I think the effect is pretty cool). I also gave them beards and differentiated the existing archers and warriors with different colour cloaks.. And beards!

In the past hour I tweaked a bit of gameplay and made archers shoot more, dwarves appear faster as the game goes on and munching them giving back less health. I made some changes to some sound effects as well, as I prefer them to sound heavily digitised.. I also did this to the soundtrack (19mb>884kb) and it sounds a lot rougher, but a bit more chiptunes.

I got some great feedback from my sister the other day (she’s really into dragons). She was content to just fly about and eat people (until I was bored) and really comfortable breaking the back buffer when the program was in full screen mode, but oddly, she wanted more people variety just so she could “eat em all”. This was kind of motivating for the beards so I can later add more colour variety. I learned from watching her that having the mouse outside of the game window breaks control, a problem I’ve experienced a few times, especially with web games.

I think I’m starting to appreciate how LD enabled me to go further than how I would generally try to make a game. I am extremely detail oriented and like my program to be “just so”.. Because of this I’m playtesting and I’m thinking; This control system feels horrible?! How can I fix that? Why is this pixel not antialiased? LD forces you to code priorities, and if you’re doing it right, essentials first.. When you have 6 hours left on the clock then its fine to drop things you’d like to be working on and move on. I have a few unfinished projects which all have similar breaking points.. I was working on a feature, couldnt do it, and then didnt come back to that project.. Which is a shame really, but with the latest one it has been really nice to have a (mostly) finished project from the start which could then always be upgraded at a later point. Having a playable project also makes it a lot more fun to come back to, so this is just the start, really.

Anyway, there are over 1000 excellent games to be playing and rating, but heres a Post LD version in case anyone is curious:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lisuyi2qx4nkj7l/dragnsv5.jar

Play Bad Puppy

1. randomized petter skin color.
2. fixed some subtle graphics bugs that would sometimes draw a person’s clothes backwards.

Tags: Bad Puppy, csanyk, ld25, post-compo

The Montpellier real-world gathering was a great success, and hopefully we’ll be able to organise a similar gathering next time around

Here you can see Gaael and FlowerPower engaged in “witty” banter while Pierrec (in Black), Niavlys (blond), Doelia and company are hard at work. On the right you can see our buffet (the participants got a LOT of food) and Christmas tree, and perched up on top of the mainframe in the corner of the room is the web-cam we used to stream the event.

Gaeel, Agamgad and I did a radio interview for the event. We were also all interviewed on site by Fight4Game, who’ll be putting cutting together an interview and putting it on their site. I was called in on Saturday morning to present the event (as the “final boss”) in French after 15 minutes of sleep, so I can’t vouch for anything I said 😮

In the background you can see the projector where we put up the countdown, the LD twitter feed and the live-stream, depending on the overall mood.

I’ve gathered together list of the games produced by the participants. Unfortunately I’m not on it myself: I spent a lot of time getting things ready and as a result had to spend the weekend catching up on course-work rather than making games

Hopefully next-time we’ll have the process a bit more stream-lined – I can’t wait: after seeing all these amazing entries come together I’m aching to make a game 😀

“The quite annoying league” by Pierrec

Pierre had a rather bad experience on the train coming over from Marseille – you’d never guess 😛 This is my personal “coup de coeur”, and if it wins a medal I’m claiming 100% of the credit: after all if Pierre hadn’t taken the train to come join us he’d never have been so… inspired. Made with AGS (Windows).

• post-mortem (french)
• time-lapse

“Trainsaw” by Znoraka

The French rail-service seems to have been an inspiration for more than one participant 😉 Made with Java.

“Godwin” by nitramgc

Swing Swing Submarine’s epically-bearded programmer apparently doesn’t like Batma- euh I mean “Bhatmann”- very much. Swing Swing are awesome: you should buy their game. Immediately. Made with Unity (Windows / Web).

“Fuuuuuu” by Agamgad

A game about anger-management through the destruction of inanimate objects. My friend’s first ever game – a stepping-stone to greatness 😉 Made with Game Maker (Windows).

“For the love of the king” by FlowerPower

Sometimes the ends justify the means, even if the means involve the mass slaughter of poor people so the rich don’t starve. Reminds me of the economic crisis. Made using HTML 5.

“Villain – the game” by Arihy

Another first game made in 48 hours. The Ludum Dare is a good way to start in my opinion Made using Unity (Windows / Web).

“Somso” by Niavlys

Niavlys was very indecisive, so ended up making multiple prototypes before settling on one. It’s rather abstract, but the movement feels good and you can tell he had fun with the procedural sound-effects! Made with HTML 5.

“Crobal and friends” by Gaeel

A game about a happy monster who just wants to play. Gaeel (who is Welsh and isn’t called Gaeel) decided to teach himself LWJGL, OpenGL and procedural animation in 48 hours: what a show-off! Made using Java (LWJGL OpenGL).

• post-mortem (english)

“Minelia” by Doelia

A cross between mine-sweeper and tower-defence. For those who don’t speak French “Niveau” = “Level”, “Cibles restantes” = “Remaining targets” and “Recommencer” = “Restart”. Made using HTML 5.

Tags: France, gathering, irl, montpellier, real, um2, university

Happy Holidays!

Have an awesome holiday season everyone! Octopi just threw this together while the kids are driving her absolutely bananas so its not the best she can do but we are happy with it

Though, Grim’s list is one you don’t want to be on! Have a play (If you want! We won’t be offended if you don’t!) to get you into the holiday spirit 😀

Play Grim’s Christmas List!

Tags: arcade badgers, Grim's Christmas List, ld25, octopi, stuckie

First off this was the first Ludum Dare that my team and I have competed in. We decided to enter the 72 hour jam as a team so that we could create a more complete game than if we had entered the 48 hour compo. Initially we had a large team planned but a few people dropped out last minute which left us with 3: Myself and my friend Paul from University as the programmers, and our housemate Leela, who has never created any animations before or been involved in creating video games at all, as our artist and animator. So how did it go?

What Went Right

A lot went right to be honest. Like a few others we were expecting ‘End Of The World’ to win the theme vote. As such we’d started having a cheeky think about what we’d do if that came up the day before. ‘You Are The Villain’ took us by surprise a bit. We were a bit stumped for a bit but Paul came up with the main idea and we had decided on the sort of game and rough features we wanted after a few hours. I feel that the game fitted in with the theme quite well. We didn’t want to create the obvious you are a thief/bandit/zombie/vampire type of thing because we knew that many people would be going for that. As such Mother Nature as the villain was a little more left of field but we felt it was justified. After all she is trying to take down the entire human race in the game. Interestingly some of the criticisms we have had from the game is that people can’t see how Mother Nature is the villain and therefore how it fits in with the theme – If exterminating an entire species doesn’t make you a villain I don’t know what does 

We got a lot of the features we wanted into the game. When we were first discussing the game we were talking about upgrades, different types of enemies, different landscapes and all sorts of different features. We were realistic about what we could achieve in 72 hours though and we managed to whittle this down to the core features, leaving other ideas as things we would add on if we had time (which we didn’t J) The game’s features are therefore fairly Spartan but they are the core mechanics and any other features would be built off of them. So we feel they enable the game to be played out as we had envisaged it.

Gameplay is one of the areas where we could have done a bit better. However I believe it is still enjoyable, if a bit short. We wanted to lock down our features on the Sunday So that we could focus on refining the gameplay and building levels on the Monday. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way. We had a discussion on Monday morning about whether to hard code in our levels or to build a simple level editor to streamline the development. Paul was in favour of hard coding as he believed it would take too long to get a working level editor up and running AND then to create the levels. I believed I could knock up a level editor in a couple of hours and that it would save us time in the long run. I also thought that hardcoding would mean creating less interesting levels and more problems if we wanted to move things around after testing how it played. As it turned out it took me almost twice as long as I’d thought to create the level editor. Nevertheless by around 4pm we had a working level editor which could place our tiles and objects, set tile passability and so forth. It took Paul a short amount of time to create the level he had designed with it after that so I believe this is something that worked out well. I also believe that if we decide to enhance the game post-compo then this decision will pay off.

A few criticisms have been aimed at the need to invest early on or be swarmed by enemies in later levels. But this was a design choice. You can spam comets for the first couple of waves and get by but after that it becomes very hard to make it to the end. If you look at RTS’ such as AOE you will see a similar design pattern. You can build a barracks, spam the militiamen and send them over to the enemy. Whilst you might do damage initially you won’t do enough to finish the enemy off and they will be investing in their units. When they have better units they will destroy your militiamen then come and destroy you! Our game requires you to think a little and make an investment in the early waves to help you out in the later waves. Waiting and buying a volcano early on helps you out enormously!

I was particularly impressed with the artwork. As I’ve mentioned Leela had never made any sort of animations before or created graphics on the pc. On top of this she could only take part for about 2 days due to coursework commitments. So I was very impressed with what she produced for us in such a short space of time. The graphics fit in with what we had envisaged. They are bright with a good amount of contrast. The artwork she produced for the menus was my personal favourite.

The sound is something that only made it in at the last moment. I had created a simple sound manager on the first day but we didn’t have any sounds to really test it with until the last day. As it wasn’t central to gameplay it was left until the end as a less important feature. Nevertheless we all knew how important getting good sound into the game would be for setting the right mood and atmosphere. Once we had sourced some sound effects from online suddenly our comet impacts and lightning and so forth came to life. Our other housemate David, who couldn’t take part until the Monday night created the main theme and in-game music for us in a couple of hours and that really made the difference as well. Overall I am satisfied with how the sound turned out given the limited time we were able to spend on it.

What Went Wrong

Our biggest problem with the theme was that we didn’t realise that there was a bonus goat theme! All through the jam we were wondering why everyone was making games with goats in it but we’d just completely missed this extra aspect of the theme!

As I’ve said we would have liked to have added more features into the game. In particular a couple more weapons would have been good to have in. A hurricane/tornado was one we wanted to do but thought it would be a bit tricky on the art in the time we had so it was dropped. An upgrade system was something we really wanted to get in as well. This would have meant being able to upgrade the radius of attack for different weapons or their damage and so on as a trade for resources. We were hopeful that by limiting the number of weapons we had we could still keep the upgrade feature but it had to be dropped due to time constraints.

Whilst I like the gameplay it is also the area we are most disappointed with. Not so much in terms of how the weapons work and so on but more in terms of the levels themselves and this is all due to time constraints. The biggest issue is there is only one level with 5 waves. These waves are all too predictable. What I mean by that is that when the level starts all the humans spawn at a fixed time interval and all together. When we originally envisaged the game I wanted the waves to come down in groups. So rather than a continuous stream of people running to the spaceship you’d have little groups running together. I also wanted these groups to be separated a bit rather than all coming down at a fixed interval. Again this was all a case of running out of time. Another aspect that never really materialised was the points system. Although you earn points for kills this doesn’t actually mean anything to the game. We wanted to add in a highscore screen or something so that the points had a purpose but never had the time.

My biggest issue with the artwork was a lack of content. Again this is all about the limited time our artist had. We are missing animations in places which had to be replaced with static images instead. For example our volcanoes are static when idle when we really wanted them to be gently puffing out some smoke and ash. Our comets don’t animate when they fly just when they land. I don’t feel this has a huge effect on the gameplay but it would still have been good to have those animations in the game.

A lack of sound and music was the key problem although I think we managed to scrape in an acceptable amount at the end. Sound is a key component in games (amazingly I’ve played some ludum games without sound at all) which was demonstrated for us when we started putting the effects in the game. The game really came alive with the sound of comets exploding and volcanoes erupting and so on. There were other issues as well though. Some of the sound effects aren’t as loud as others, some go on too long or not long enough. When the music repeats in the menu it is not seamless as it should be. I would also have liked for you to only hear the sound effects emanating from the part of the game world you’re looking at, with all others either faded out

Conclusion

Most importantly though was the game ultimately fun to play? I believe that it is. One of our biggest criticisms was that the game does not last long enough which I will agree with. But that was a result of lack of time rather than design. I think that had we managed to create a few more levels the game would have entertained a bit more. Nevertheless I believe that it is still a fun game as it is. Whilst I have a few regrets over some of the features lacking in the game I am on the whole very pleased with how our game turned out. None of us had ever actually completed a full (largely bug-free) game before. The entry for our last game was riddled with bugs and almost unplayable. It left us very frustrated at the end with the time we had invested into it. But that was 2 years ago when we were starting out as programmers. This time I believe we have created a full game which is fun to play and looks and sounds good.  It has also left me excited and looking forward to the next ludum dare. Can’t wait!

Play it here or check out my blog here

Twitter: @TJ_Clifton

Tags: C++, ld25, Mother F****r Nature, xna

Well, to begin with, it’s worth of notice that “Rest in Pixels” was our first game EVER. Not a single Team member had ever made a game before. So, the “what went wrong” part is a little heavier than the “what went right”.

Rest in Pixels by Overlord Game Studio

What went Wrong:

Time Management:  If this was our firs game, obviously this was our first jam. Being so, we had LOTS of problems with Time Management, that including sleep time, eat time, smoke time, coffee time…

K.I.S.S. : We didn’t have any clue about how to keep things simple, at the begining. So, we started by developing a GREAT idea of a HUGE game (25 lvls with ass-kicking almost realistic art) and about 2 hours later, our faces were smashed against the huge clock of game jam reality. We had to make it simple and the art was reduced to squares and basic colors (but we kept the 25 lvls concept). Many many hours later, with only 40 minutes to upload the game, I had to cut off 80% of the levels we had planned because we ran out of time and the levels were not ready yet.

Final Game: The final game is nothing close to what we expected it to be. The art is ok, the code is ok and the levels are ok. We wanted it to be great. We all got very sad about our failure to manage our time and complexity.

What went Right:

We finished it! :  Even  if  ”Rest in Pixels” is not the great game we wanted it to be, it will always be our firstborn and WE MADE IT TO THE END. The feeling of being able to finish the game was enough to make us feel awesome at the end.

We learned A LOT :  After all the struggle and hours of development, we have learned more about making games than we had in the last six months! This was an amazing experience and we´ll absolutely be comming back!

Thank you all for the comments and ratings. We are doing our best to rate as many games as we can!

if you have not played “Rest in Pixels” yet, CLICK HERE to play it!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2012 at 12:36 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.

As a gift I made you all a desktop background to enjoy.

Click here to download the full size version

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2012 at 1:11 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.

This article is a copy from my blog.

On December 15th, Ludum Dare 25 started. As usual, this was an interesting experience, as exciting and awesome as it was soul-crushing. But this might be just me.

Like before, I didn’t have the right idea for the theme. This time it was “You are the Villain”, which was a better theme than usual, but unfortunately it only triggered gameplay concepts for me which all belong into the “that was already made before” category. So the first thing coming into my mind was “Dungeon Keeper”, and as much as I’d like to do a game similar to this awesome piece of gaming history, it just would be a clone without the right amount of innovation (or would it?). Among the other ideas I had were a “Pirates!” roguelike, a game where you control four bandits at once (robbing innocents and wandering around) and a board game creator where you’re the dungeon master placing the monsters (think “HeroQuest” or so).

None of these ideas were the incentive for me to actually start developing (although I still like them). In my mind, I combined them, added features and the result got bigger and bigger, and after finally deciding that it would be too much of a hassle, I started at zero again. Then I came back to a thought I had days before, namely the thought that often, good ideas for games (mostly puzzle platformers) are those which are inspired by childrens’ fantasies. So I imagined a bit what a child could think, and being able to grab the moon with the fingertips and move it around just like that, well, that seemed like a good candidate. At this point, the theme was still in the back of my head, but I tried to ignore it mostly as it obviously would just hinder me to actually develop anything. I never was good in the “Theme” category, and for that I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s the category I want to shine, really.

I tried to create a Unity3D prototype out of that idea with the moon. Of course, prototypes become the real game eventually when doing a game jam, but first I wanted to see if I could actually create something like that. The main problem to begin with was the scale of the object currently grabbed, as it always has to be the same size for the player, no matter how far or near it would be away. I read something about the focal length of a camera before and I thought I had to factor this in in any case. I experimented (using some basecode I already announced in my “I’m in!” post) and searched on the internet, but it just wouldn’t work right. The object’s subjective size didn’t stay constant, and being very frustrated, I stopped after a while.

Thus, I re-evaluated the idea of the four bandits. This one would follow the theme and I’d really like being able to control a group of (evil) adventurers – in first person perspective! In order to make it easier for myself, I started programming the movement (again in Unity3D), which would be along the cardinal directions only and also on a grid. Just like those age old games you might know, “Dungeon Master”, “Eye of the Beholder” or “Legend of Grimrock”. In the end, the movement worked somehow, and you could add NPCs to your party, and press a button to see all four viewports at once. Probably I could have made a more or less full game out of it, but at this point I didn’t see how I could add “fun” easily and I stopped yet again.

second prototype, no fun

With the thought of fun being the most important part of it and without really expecting any results for this Ludum Dare anymore, I got back to the first prototype, and suddenly, the old problem was gone. Thinking about the focal length was a dead-end, and just getting rid of it was the way to get it work. The only problem now was the collision detection of an object that would get bigger the further it goes. Using Unity3D’s SphereCast() was the wrong direction, because the size of the collision sphere would be always the same. So now CheckSphere() gets called with a gradually increasing size of the radius parameter, and it does that a lot of times every frame – because of the simple nature of the rest of the game, this was possible without any noticable performance hits (at least on my computer). Of course, this means that every object basically has an additional bounding sphere, and that’s why most objects sometimes don’t behave as expected, especially those which don’t have uniform dimensions.

first prototype, working

I uploaded the first prototype of the game – just a simple demonstration of the gameplay – late in the night, and those who actually started it and “got it”, said it could be awesome. Yay, motivation! Also, I earned myself some sleep. The next day I “only” had to make levels and fix any occuring bug. Also, story. Also, sound. Also, …

I planned five levels at the beginning, and because of some very sad events before Ludum Dare, I didn’t think about it too long when I realized that I wouldn’t have time for all of them – as one of the levels would had have a kindergarten setting. So, three levels were made (in 3dsmax), and they describe how the protagonist is a kid with just an overly active imagination, and how this leads to an unfortunate outcome. I didn’t have time for more, and the ones I made aren’t really balanced/tested, so I am sorry for that. On the other side I am just relieved that the main gameplay works and can maybe be the foundation of a cool game; the Ludum Dare version of the finally named game “Tale of Scale” is mainly a sandbox game which happens to have a subtly communicated goal in each level.

the end result: Tale of Scale

A short summarization of What-Went-Bad:

• The start, or rather the theme. Either it is the start of a game for me, or it just stands in my way. Harumph. I squeezed the theme into the final game, but as most people won’t play it through, they probably will wonder where it actually is. I got a bit inspired by the movie “Looper”.
• I still can’t make music. I tried composing some once or twice before, but I’m always embarrassed by my own efforts, so I don’t ever get over a certain point.
• I don’t have a cool base code which actually would free me of the burden to do some stupid and boring stuff again and again. At least that’s a learning and can be helped … some day.

And What-Went-Good?

• The idea was cool enough to let people ignore the crude levels and graphics, hehe.
• I actually managed to make three levels, even in the timeframe I wanted to make them. Seems like I finally get the hang on estimating such things, and this is one of the things a game jam really can help with.
• I made most of the sounds myself with a microphone, and they sound okay enough. Nice.

That’s it! Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to play the game (here’s the entry page) – or at least watch this gameplay video:

Tags: ld25, post-mortem, postmortem, puzzle platformer, Tale of Scale, unity, unity3d

Happy Christmas everyone, may your hearts be filled with joy and happiness!

Tags: christmas

Hello, Mohammad once again, here to once again explain why I wasn’t in the ludum dare, again. I really was blown that end of the world didn’t win, but also embarrassed because I also   chose “You are the villain!” as well. I already had the plot down. You as a Exno-Phobic human, now has to purge the world of foreign when furries introduce themselves into our war. It was going to be kinda hitman kinda gears of war.When the theme came out, I stopped staring and instantly opened up blender, and well… tried to install Unity. Remember about the posts I made a few days ago regarding my potential freedom…. Yeah, well… two things on that:

1: This was AFTER the ludum dare ended.

2: All the tools that I used that LAST ludum were on that computer, the computer I was using didn’t even have word installed on it.

So as you can see that was one 2 reasons I couldn’t get it done. Another reason was that the computer kept logging me out at 2:00 because of the basic windows vista parental controls. Finally the last reason I couldn’t get it done was because I couldn’t finish the models. I spent 2 WEEKS, working on a M22 Silenced pistol. I would have gotten more work done if it wasn’t for the damn parental controls. Then there was school. I had a F in Algebra and I had to do Khan academy or flunk math. I had no choice, so I gave up time on the ludum to work on that. Another downgrade. Then I was down with fever for 4 days. By the time everything cleared out, the ludum judging was halfway over, and I missed the ludum.

-Sorry I couldn’t be in it, Mohammad.

This was my first time doing a jam game with other people, and it was a lot of fun getting incoming graphics to work with. I was kind of busy that weekend and couldn’t finish a complete version, so I came back to it last night and added sound, music and some gameplay improvements. Click for the flash version:

Finally joined to post something. My first flash game on Kongregate!
http://www.kongregate.com/games/innomin/f-p-s

So I know the last thing you guys probably want is another game to play, but I was inspired by a bunch of people here. I made this game in exactly 3 weeks, while learning Flixel.

It’s a programmer friendly puzzle game, where you create simple programs to solve visual puzzles. Move forward, rotate right, etc.

Or at least, that’s how it starts. The later levels include programming a binary calculator, among other things. I did it in 50 commands. Programmer challenge set!

(Sorry for the terrible pun).

So, my second LD I finished within 48 hours, but wasn’t totally happy, because some ideas didn’t make it into the game.

Last weekend I made a post-compo edition and because it is almost Christmas (for some it already is), I made it into a special Christmas version.

If you haven’t played my game: I know there are better games, (it literally is crappy),
but I would like it if you would try my game here.

The page also links to the much more playable (and enjoyable I think) post-compo version.

If you did already play my game, you might try the new version (yeah, as if you don’t have tons of LD games to play!).

Happy holidays,

MOO!

Greetings all! A week-and-a-bit after the fact, here’s a mini post-mortem of our LD 25 Jam entry – SUPER Witch Hunter Pro.

level layout sketch compared to final version

General
Overall, the Jam was a fantastic experience for us both. It’s the first time we’ve worked as a team on a finished indie game, and has whet both our appetites for more of the same.  At the very least we’ll be taking SWHP to a further finished version after LD judging is completed.

arting in progress

Hits
Overall, things went quite well.

• Theme
  We made good use of our first hour with a focused discussion about how villains can be interpreted in various media, and the different approaches to playing as one. It wasn’t long before we settled on subject of history judging once righteous/heroic actions as villainous or unseemly. The most compelling villains are often well-intentioned, and history often decides where villainy lies. Our scenario – What if 17th century European witch burnings were today widely perceived as good and heroic deeds, and how would they have been realized as a series of hit arcade games? We were both inspired by this, and it energized us both from the offset.
• General design & Scope
  Since subject matter and history were quite “heavy” – what with women being burned alive at the stake (and worse) – we decided a simple arcade gameplay treatment would help lighten (or conceal) the tone, as well as forcing us to boil down a complex situation into basic elements. Those elements became Pyre, Wood, Witch and Fire. We looked at Game & Watch titles as an example of the sort of “plate-spinning” gameplay we wanted, though we decided to take it a step further, with many small simple loops operating in a single screen layout. We set ourselves a gameplay goal that wasn’t too ambitious, but suitable for LD. It was important to us that we could realize something relatively final, without too many obviously unfinished elements.
• Teamwork
  We both knew exactly what we were doing as a team, and where our individual strengths and responsibilities were. There was little to no downtime during the Jam due to this. We prioritized tasks that were dependencies for each other, so that there was no waiting for one another.
• Mechanics
  Implementation per design/plan went without too many hitches or serious bugs. The Pyre object acted as a nice anchor for much of our gameplay events, which helped concentrate development efforts.
• Art, 2.5d Approach
  We decided early to go with 2.5d, largely sprite animation due to the short dev time and classic arcade inspired gameplay. A fixed camera allowed us to exploit a lot of time-saving tricks, and provided the game with a strong visual style. This choice allowed us to very quickly test and finalize character, gameplay and level assets.
• Scoring & General Feedback
  Although we certainly could have had more, we were both pleased enough that we managed to address most important game events with visual and aural feedback. A decent variety of text dialogue/copy lent the game some added character. Scoring with combos and a basic rankings system being intact helped us get closer to our arcade game goal. These things went a long way towards making our entry feel complete.
• Sound
  Though not our collective strong suit, it was great we managed to get in as much as we did – ensuring no screen was too aurally empty and key events had sound. As well as boosting the final presentation, ranting about burning heretics  for the VO recording was a great way to release some pressure during rapid development.

final asset art

Misses
We’re planning to add all of these and more in a future (post-LD) version.

• Difficulty curve
  Though we had several avenues for adding a difficulty curve, and it being fairly necessary; we knew we wouldn’t have time to properly adjust or test it, or to make It obvious enough it was in effect. We left it out so that everyone that played the game once would at least be exposed to all it had to offer.
• Victory Conditions
  You can’t technically “win”. Though this is true to the arcade and game & watch references, it’d still have been nice to provided round/levels for a  greater sense of progression and encouragement. As we didn’t include a difficulty curve, however, there was little basis for inserting this (and not enough time).
• Pyre score feedback
  One important feedback layer we didn’t have time for was the score earning display which would appear at the pyre on “Burn Complete”. Unfortunately, though the combo (Serial Burn) bonus multiplier is working in the final game, it’s not really something the player is aware of due to this feedback not being there.
• Gating, Rain, Cauldron Bombs…
  Evolving level design to include dynamic blocking and slowing volumes, rain clouds which slow or reverse fire growth, wood thieves, witches flying overhead with cauldron goop bombs, other stuff to set on fire… all the “next step” ideas that you gotta drop due to time 😉
• More Power-ups!
  To go hand in hand with more hazards, a greater variety of power-ups would have exposed further gameplay depth.
• Piety loss feedback
  Since this is essentially player HP, more obvious feedback is needed – especially when failure was imminent.

it lives

Play the game:

SUPER Witch Hunter Pro – Ludum Dare #25 Entry Page

Song of the Entry (I still have this stuck in my head…)

As happy as we are with the game, I think the biggest positive for us was our proven ability to work well as a team, and under within the time constraint. LD has really empowered us to push harder at making indie development a personal reality. So – thanks LD!

from Ben & Jerry

@JerryVerhoeven | @benjkers

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

I know I was really impressed with the quality of entries this time around, and I wanted to share a few of the less publicized ones with you all.

Crime Scene – by Saulotti


The premise is very simple here. There’s a killer on the loose in the crowd of people, and your job is to select the villain out of the crowd. Of course, if you fail and you accuse the wrong person, then you yourself are the villain for ruining an innocent life and letting the killer get away.

Sisyphus – by Wan & Manu


Yes, there are some bugs in this one. That said, I very much enjoyed the premise of this at-first simple-seeming game. You are a temple raider in the vein of Indiana Jones, looking for hidden treasure. When you find it though, you are cursed! At that point, you now control the spirit of the temple, and your job is to lay traps for your former self that will kill you on your way to the jewel. Once you succeed, you are back to playing your old self, and this time you have to avoid the traps you just laid. Repeat this for 4 – 6 cycles. It becomes an exercise in making sure that the little explorer doesn’t ace the level so hard that he can’t be trapped, and not making the temple so deadly that you yourself can’t win the next time you take over as the explorer.

Kroc Le Vilain – by DrGeraud


You are the dark lord of evil. You are the ultimate final boss, who no hero has ever managed to face… in fact your minions are so powerful that no hero has even managed to find you. It’s kind of boring being the ultimate evil, sometimes… so in this game, you must distract your minions by shouting at them, so that the hero can have a chance to dispatch them on his way to your throne room. Truly, the hero is incapable of standing up to even the weakest of your minions on his own, so he needs all the help he can get!

Tags: reviews

Play / Rate | Timelapse | Demo | Postcompo version

I’m currently working on a postcompo version for my LD#25 game: Blob Revolution. I’m fixing the “bugs” highlighted during the rating weeks, adding some content, etc. This post will keep track of my progression. I’m obviously accepting any suggestion 😉

Screenshots

Display more for postcompo modifications (done & pending).

Gameplay modifications

– Hold system –
Many players complained about the hold system, kinda buggy in the compo version. I recoded it in another way.
Done & Uploaded: better maneuverability, no more “flying”, you can now hold for how long you want to.
Coming soon: improved vertical jumps.

– Jumping –
Done & Uploaded: no more “wall sliding”.

– Shooting –
Done & Uploaded: better collision detection while shooting, can shoot while “holding” (opposite side).

– Misc –
Done & Uploaded: death/level reset DO NOT reset checkpoint (quarters) progression any more; save points added on some levels.
Coming soon: unlockable power-ups (higher jumps, double jumps, etc.).

Level design

– Level modifications –
Coming soon: some modifications on the boss level & the “story telling”.

– New levels –
Done & Uploaded: 4 new levels with new entities & gameplay.

Graphics/Audio

– Graphics –
Coming soon: improve some sprites/animations, add some more.

– Audio –
Coming soon: new music (different tracks?), new/more sfx.

Lumberjack is a game about bouncing between trees by cutting clean through them with your mighty axes!
We hope you like our timelapse from this year! It’s a bit gappy in places but I think I managed to fill the holes successfully.

Click Here To Play The Game (link is fixed now)

Available for windows only!

Look what I found, quite by accident, by going through Pixel’s previous games (click on the pic to get a link)

Yes, a CaveStory-ish metroidvania, where you control a squid, with an unorthodox control scheme
What does it remind you of?

Why of course, my game, Trina

As my Arts Professor said,  it’s all been done before. It’s all about different treatment of the same subject matter.

Disappointed and super-excited at the same time! On the one hand I’m not original, but on the other, I’m not alone in thinking an underseas game with bizarre controls is worth experimenting with.

Has this ever happened to you? Does it discourage you? Does it make you want to do better?

So I hope you had a good Christmas !

I take the time before the new year to write a little post mortem about my entry : Villan Glance

I have to say that in the beginning I was a bit annoyed by the theme YOU ARE THE VILLAIN, that seems a bit too classic, I mean in a way there would be a lot of game where you simply play the bad guy. So I tried to be in the theme not only with the scenaristic side. I thank about different things, but this time I decided to follow my own advice about short game jams : Make something simple and fun.

So I suppose that I thank what a true villain migh feel in this bad work. I realized that in a crowd the villain is alone against his victims, he has to be discreet and quick in his task. He has to work with the suspicion of his peers, and with his own guilt which can eventually make him spotted. In the game I used all these elements and combined them in a stealth-like game that ask you to look at the view of your future victims, and be careful about the shot noise you make.

The concept is pretty simple, kill all your peers without being spotted. You’re spotted if when you shot a dude in the head another dude is looking at you. The suspicion of a dude increase if he “hears” a gun shot, in fact if he is in the zone around you when you shot. I used view angle and circle area as obvious zone feedback. The red face feedback shows who is more or less suspicious, and give the player a direct indication about who must be wary. Indeed, the most suspicious has the largest angle of view, that increase the chance to be catch. The global suspicion (sum of each suspicion  amount) increase the rotation speed of each dude, like if they were like “hey, what, behind me ? no, here ? what was that ? what ?”. And if you are not a discrete villain, you become darker and darker, like if the rumors about your strange behaviour make you more suspectable (and that’s the case, the dudes will tend to walk to your position if you seem dark, to keep you in their view). All that to say that I wanted some clear basic feedback so the player would understand a bit more what the fuck is happening. In fact it still be a bit complicated at the beginning, but ok it’s not as random as my previous ludum dare entry =3

Before coding hard the body and balancing things I suppose that I wanted to test the mood, and I made and coded the particles and the death animation. That is something I’m very proud about, and certainly the funniest thing in the game, to the point that sometimes I just want to be catch to watch the result (or maybe I just want to be arrested to pay for my crimes lol). And I had gun and splash noises, and screen wizz and all. I’m pretty sure that all these polishes (ok I made them before completing the code but they are) play a huge role in the mood and fun of the game.

I coded a graph that show the evolution of the guilt and suspicions at the end of a game, but finally it found it not relevant for the player. I tried to make a score which depend of the discretion of the player and number of shots plus the time, but finally it was not very clear and I only keep the time score.

If I had more time and motivation, I could add more feature like obstacle, paranoid policemen or other villains, and sure a multiplayer mode which would be funny ! Anyway I’m quite happy with the result, this Ludum Dare was great for me.

I have to insist one more time, we should try to make something simple, but which works and is playfull ok, and make it someting good looking, visually fun, and powerfull in the atmosphere side. I mean we hardly have the necessary time to do anything too complex.  So FOCUS AND POLISH !

I had lots of encouraging comments for Villain Glance, and I am truly grateful !

Have a good New Year and take care of yourself, awesome people !

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2012 at 10:42 am 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.

Working on a post-holiday, post-compo expansion to FirePower over the next few days.  Aiming for 18 total hours of work.

Check out the game here.

Check out the stream here.

Feel free to send along your ideas!

We’ve added an option for you guys to download our theme song.
We will soon release the full soundtrack.

DOWNLOAD THE THEME SONG HERE: http://www.esnips.com/displayimage.php?pid=34266571

We are working on a tablet version. So.. this is our progress.. Changing how the code is done and re-creating the visual identity to make a post version.

Check out our dev video: http://vimeo.com/56341486

Link for the game

STORY:

Santa Decided he wanted his presents BACK! Selfish St. Nick fights off every last child in order to get his presents!

ABOUT:
I took and old-school direction on this one. Direction as in playability and style rather than the content. The blocky style reminds me of the Atari 2600 and the sounds help bring in nostalgia as well. I also directed it that way so it brought in that “you have to figure it out” feeling. Most old school games you had to read manuals to figure it out, but I went lightly. Once you read the simple controls and use them, you piece together what the game is and how to play it.

That’s meta.

PLAY ME

Keep in mind that this entry was finished AFTER the LD, and is here only because I wanted to share my thoughts. Also, I didn’t quit even after the deadline ended and worked on the game, because NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER!

I have finished it. And on my birthday, too . What a wonderful gift to myself

After not having that much free time on the weekend and during the week, I finally managed to closed the deal (more or less) on the strategy game. This concludes our challenge. Sure, the last game took longer than one day, but I have finished it, which is most important after all. Giving up is never an option.

It’s not fully equipped, there are bugs, there are features missing (intro/help menu, display of attack range), but the game is playable, from start to end.

So, how did I go around creating it? As this was the biggest game, I had to combine everything I learned to make it happen. I’ve started, as always, by drawing some characters and textures to get me in the mood, trying to figure out what style should I go for:

During that phase, I laid out the game design in my head. I decided that it would be a turn based tactics game, similar to XCOM. For that kind of game I needed couple new things:

-Pathing algorithm (I’m using A*), on which I spent majority of the first day, setting up the tile system, character-tiles interaction. It still doesn’t take into account many things, so opponent units can stack themselves, and the AI is wonky at best, but we’ll come later to that.

-Menu/notice system: the game was complicated enough that the feedback that can be given by simple icons was just not enough. I wrote a tiny script that displayed overlaying menus and notices, and shaded the screen using dithering (later on I decided that it was shame I didn’t use same thing for the floor hilighting system.

Second day I have spent mostly connecting the pieces I wrote earlier, and adding AI.

Holy shit, the AI.

Now, I had basic pathfinding, but it was written in the wee morning hours, after loooong day, so it was far from perfect. My code started getting more spaghetti like, and I had to write ginormous state machine to govern the AI. The turn based system support was also something that I haven’t had prepared place in code for the start, so it needed to be hacked in by tons of bools and timer variables. The pathfinding worked only on tiles, checking if they were passable or not, didn’t check if there were other units already there. Picking nearest unit to attack also didn’t work that well. The AI would be cruising in same, A*-predicted lines as soon as it saw you, so they’d form nice conga line for your skeletons to shoot.

On the other hand, it worked well enough. It could kill the player, and that was fine enough for me.

Last hours (over the week, like I said – had to stop developing game over the weekend) were mostly making sure that the game is actually playable and some early polish.

HERE’S THE GAME!

Little bit about it:
CONTROLS:

Select unit with left mouse button, move them within their move radius with right mouse button, you can attack units you're next to with your melee warriors, ranged warriors can kill units within their range.

Middle mouse button hold + mouse move or arrow keys move the screen.

Back/Next icons jump between your units.
Done icon ends your turn.
Cast icon lets you summon units and cast Heal.
Floppy disk icon lets you enter options (restart only in this version)

Story fast version:

World is heading downhill in the Fantasyland. Feudal lords are oppressing the common folk, and abusing their power to do 'good' deeds, that are only good for them. One necromancer has had enough, and decided to wage war on the Lords. With his awesome powers he tries to overcome the obstacles and win against the evil knights.

Gameplay:

This is a turn based tactics game. You control a squad of units, each of which has following stats:

-attack, governing damage it can deal
-defence, governing how likely is it to defend the strike and take minimal damage
-health, when this runs out, the unit dies
-speed, governing how far can can it move every turn

You, as the necromancer, have spiritual energy. You start with 20, and can use it to summon more army, and empower the one you have. You replenish the resource by killing enemies.

-knight gives you 1 units of spiritual energy
-goat gives you 2 units
-Lord gives you 10 units

Killing the Lord also ends this version, so that doesn't matter, but in full version, where you would have to defeat many lords, that would be important.

You can summon 3 kinds of units:

1) Ghost, your basic scout unit. Moves quite fast, is cheap, and has average health, but poor attack power.
2) Skeleton Archer, your ranged unit. Can shoot units at a distance of 4 squares. Hits decent, but has poor defences, needs to be kept out of front lines
3) Zombie, your toughest warriors. Slower than other units, but pack quite the punch, and are very tough.

And that’s it for the game.

And here is a list of the entries in the series:

Last Day summary and Challenge Post Mortem
Ludum Dare preparation
Day 6 summary
Day 5 summary
Day 4 summary
Day 3 summary
Day 2 summary
Day 1 summary
Series kick off

So, how about a little summary of the long week?

7 Games in 7 Days Post Mortem

The week was tough. Like, really tough. But I got through it, I managed to refresh my skills, and I am looking happily into my future as a past time game developer. Let’s see what I learned.

General lesson was, as expected, don’t overwork yourself. I could’ve finished the Strategy game if I’ve crunched hard, but I’m happy that I didn’t. 2-4 hours every day of afterwork development is good enough to make a game in short amount of time, and way better for your health and personal life.

The bad:

– When I was really in the zone, I lost track of time. I spent 24 hours straight in front of computer developing the Dungeon Crawler. That didn’t make my girlfriend happy, and when she’s unhappy, that means something’s really wrong. She knew that I was preparing for the LD, but whole week of coming to bed later and later every night did put a strain on the relationship (nothing serious, but really REALLY unnecessary and whatever the earnings, not worth it).
– The tempo. I had really tough week at work, and the challenge meant I didn’t get even one day of rest, but rather not sleep till 3am+ every night. My sleep schedule started slipping, and last day I pulled an all-nighter, going to sleep at 1pm. I was recovering from that most of this week.
– Art before coding. Sure, it might’ve helped me stayed focused and interested, but I was supposed to write games, and while first games were fast enough, starting from Adventure Game, the art took WAY too big part of the game development time. Because of that, I had only one drawn screen in Adventure Game – I noticed how late it was, and I was still playing around with art, not having any gameplay to speak of.

The good:
– I did make 7 games. That’s a massive boost to the self confidence. I haven’t really finished a personal project in ages, so when I look at these games, I feel like I can take on big challenges again. I even feel like picking the games (especially Dungeon Crawler) and expanding on them, possibly turn them into full products.
– I haven’t given up on the challenge two times: first, when I worked really late in the night and didn’t finish any real game (with the Racer), and second time, with the Strategy, which I had to put off in time, due to work and personal issues. I have continued the challenge after the first, which was really discouraging, and I didn’t give up on the second till I decided it was ‘good enough’, even though the 7th day (or, indeed, Ludum Dare) was long over. I was rewarded with huge feeling of satisfaction for both of them.
– I really got from 0 to hero, engine knowledge wise. First game was a really bad clone of Asteroids, and last game was quite complicated strategy game, combining every single lesson learned so far.
– Art before coding. Sure, it might’ve stopped me from doing awesome stuff, but when I was doing them, my brain was resting, I wasn’t thinking about solving some hard problems with code, but rather looking at happy little pixels.
– Choosing the VIC-II palette was great. Limitation has turned into inspiration. Less colours make my sprites look better and more interesting. Working on them and trying to figure out how to achieve certain effects was FUN, with capital F, U and N.
– 7 different game genres. Each day new, exciting set of challenges waited for me, and that at least a bit alleviated the challenge fatigue.
– Tools. As the days progressed, I got more and more skilled in using GraphicsGale and Blender. That helped me every next day, when I had to do more complicated stuff in same percentage of development time.
– Simplicity. Each game was designed to be as simple as possible, and for the most part it worked out really well. I rarely if ever had to cut features, and there was enough time to implement full games.
– SUPPORT OF THE PEOPLE: thanks to people that were interested and commenting, I found strength each day to sit in front of computer and continue coding, for the 16th+ hour that day. Without you guys, I would have never managed. Thanks! Really, that meant a lot to me.

And on this, I will end. But keep your eye out on the lookout for more projects that I’ll be working on. I hope you’ll enjoy them as well.

Hi everyone!
We would like to thank you for playing and rating our game!
For those who did not and would like to, here you go!

During the last night, CAPSLOCK and I put together a little clip from our livestream archives…
We dedicate this minute of sillyness to Juliette, the 3-days-old daughter of Mewine and Fleacontent, who was with us in a way during this LD! 😉
Have a good time you three!

Enjoy! (and sorry for the webcam quality, that’s all we had to work with…)

Tags: baby, clip, jam, making of, music

I think the use pre-existing content, eg, royalty free images and sounds, should be allowed.

1) Publicly available code libraries are allowed.

I must admit that I myself never use pre-existing code or libraries and start all my projects from a blank canvas. I understand the rationale behind using such libraries – no need to reinvent the wheel – and I have no issue with it. But why doesn’t this reasoning apply to content? If I can use a royalty-free image of a simple space-invader why should I create it from scratch, especially if I have limited artistic ability?

Currently, this seems biased towards artists. Game developers are, above all, programmers; they may have some artistic ability, but first and foremost they must be able to program. Yet, we allow existing code libraries to be used.

Is it permissible to create, use and distribute a public code library which renders royalty free images or plays royalty free sounds?

2) “We want you to create something free of copyright restrictions” (from Competition Rules).

Surely, Ludum Dare is then the perfect place to delve into royalty free content then? It is a skill to find, assess, rework, and credit if necessary such content. This is the perfect place to practice such a skill, and a breach of copyright in the realms of a 48 hour programming competition is far preferable to a breach of copyright on release of a finished product.

3) “Photos and recordings you make of people or things are acceptable content, just you must acquire them during the competition.” (from Competition Rules).

Again, if coders complain of having to reinvent the wheel, isn’t this a far worse situation? For example, I want to use a siren. I now have to spend valuable time walking the streets, waiting for a police car to pass, while clutching a hand held recorder. It seems a bit unnecessary to me, when game development should be the priority – 48 hours is a much shorter time-frame when it comes to collecting media assets as compared to purely programming.

Can I ask a friend to play the assorted sound effects I need, and stand beside him with an audio recorder?

4) “Fonts, drum loops, drum samples, and sampled instruments are allowed IF you have the legal right to use them.” (from Competition Rules).

So samples are OK? So to circumvent the rules as they stand I can create a soundback of royalty free sound effects, package them together and claim that I am using an instrument?

I don’t see any practical difference between a “sampled instrument” and a “sample”.

I also don’t see any different between a character from a “font” (esp. wingdings) and an “image”.

I hope I’m not coming across as pedantic, or spoiling the “spirit of Ludum Dare”, but it seems to me that the current ruling as regards royalty free content fails for many reasons: It is difficult to “prove” if someone has used them or not; It is difficult to enforce; It can be circumvented in clever ways; It puts people with little or no graphic experience at a severe disadvantage.

There exist content generators, and one can procedurally create content – but why remove the option of pre-existing free content?

As an additional note, I love scrawly scratchy art and amusing sound fx generated solely for the competition – like people saying “BANG!”. Such content has it’s place, and it will always be used.

Any thoughts on this?

Tags: content, free, royalty, rules

80 games rated!

This time, I want to highlight some really unique games that I have played so far. These games go the extra mile to be a little bit different, bringing something new to the LD environment. Watch and learn!

• Super Escape – by Saspiron



This game can best be described as a “Turn based platformer”. You control a character with your mouse, as he walks and jumps through very fast traps. Thing is: if you don’t move your mouse, the traps won’t move either! Great concept, some nasty bugs.

• Red Legion – by DeathBySnail



Normally I don’t like “story” games, but this one is great. Not only it has an interesting, funny story, but it also managed to include a typing based fighting mechanics that is actually relevant to the storytelling.

• Burglary – by Tobias Wehrum



Burglary is a sneaking-and-lighting game with two interesting twists: You control the light level, and a very interesting unlocking minigame. The difficulty of the unlocking game is based on the current light level, so you have to balance how much you see the world, how easy the lock-unlock is, and how easy it is for your enemies to notice you.

• Ante-christmas – by nSun



This game does a great job at replicating those old liquid display “game and watch” series. Not only on the graphics, but also on the play style, and the overall feel. If you are older than 20, prepare to be awash by the nostalgia.

• Space Greed – by lotusgame



A multiplayer game with two games in one: The game is a top down shoot them up, but you also get to build your own base, which will be the game stage for other players. The idea is quite fun, but balance isn’t quite there yet: It is pretty hard to get money to build up your own base – so it gets old rather fast.

---

Hope you liked the reviews. I will take an extended break for the new Years, and I will be back to rate more games after the 5th! I hope I can break the 100 barrier!

In the meanwhile, please read my previous review posts:

• Review List 1: Good use of the Theme
• Review List 2: Awesome Graphics
• Review List 3: Fun games

And if you could also rate my own game, that would be great:

Tags: innovative, rating, reviews

Almost half of the judging weeks has passed, and I’ve seen many great games. Unfortunately, I couldn’t rate games this week, and as I wanted to keep a pace of 20 games rated per day, I’ll “have to” rate many games this weekend. So, in order to make this task more enjoyable and to keep experiencing great games, please tell me :

What are the best games you’ve encountered in this LD so far?

Some of the best LD#25 games I’ve seen during those 10 days are:

– Compo –
Atomic Creep Spawner!! by deepnight
Video Games Cause Mass Shootings by adnzzzzZ
They All Fall Down by Fififox

– Jam –
Demon Quest by Carduus/Thotor/Mathieu Hallouin
Seeds of Wrath by 01101101 & friends
The Rise and Fall of Professor Moriarty by ProfessorMoriarty

You all had awesome holidays? Hope so.

So this is the post-mortem of our game Just Politics we did for the Jam. It’s out now because, you know, time + holidays.

This is what happened in the three days:

So in the beginning of the first day we’ve just finished arranging who was going to participate in the jam. We did the whole thing in one of the team members’ house. After we got the theme we were having some problem with getting the entire team together, so one of us transformed into a laptop with skype and we begun to discuss ideas and the engine we were going to use.

After a lot of ideas, the team started to like the idea of “a politician going around sucking innocent people’s money and laughing”. Then we began to finish discussing the engine we were going to use, and we ended up in a fight between Flex+Flixel and Unity. Simplicity and what we thought the power of the IDE (Flashdevelop, if you’re wondering) won and we kept Flixel. We divided our team of three people in “Game Designer”, “Programmer” and “Artist”. It was like just the focus of attention, because by the end of the day everyone programmed (we’re all Computer Science students, so no problem at all with that).

In the second day, after we started working on things we did realize that everyone was thinking on a different game and the game was taking a peculiar shape because of that. In the beginning, as shown in the screenshot below, the road was divided so the politician was robbing people from an abstract distance, from his office or something like that, without people ever noticing his presence. We soon scrapped all that and ended with one, big road. All was discussed every now and then.

So in the third day we continued to work until at afternoon the basic game (a single sprint, as we would call a mandate of the politician) took place. So we discussed for some time where we could go from that point on. We decided we made some sort of meta-game to make the played feel that he is progressing and at the same time we would do some tweaks on the game itself to be more satisfying.

So in the fourth day, one of our members had to leave HQ, but he worked fine from a distance. In the end we rushed some final tweaks in the game (like a pause screen, and pre-loaders) and finally launched it. At the time it felt like we could do more but now I see that we did our best. I believe the entire team is the same way about this.

So, tl;dr, we’ve came from nothing to this:

And then this:

Well, the good parts are:

• We were doing it for the jam, so we made it accordingly and plan things through before starting any move.
• We discovered one of our programmers to be a fast and good artist.
• Flixel actually helped us with performance (I believe) and things like off focus events and pre-loaders, so the game could be more complete.

And, the obligatory bad parts:

• We couldn’t agree too much in a game design idea. Every new idea brought up led to a discussion. I don’t know if that’s really a bad part, but surely made the whole thing more exhausting.
• We used a game engine without anybody experienced on it.
• We forgot to introduce some kind of invincible blinking on the game, resulting in some frustating sprints if you got unlucky.

PS.: Engrish? Typos? My bad.

A few games which I’ve reviewed which really amazed me in terms of their creativity. Not exactly my top-5 but definitely up there.

1. Agents by Reclusive frog – HERE

Never seen or heard of a game like this – something like a text adventure but with spoken commands. Even if you cannot play it on your phone, watch the fascinating video:

The command recognition works imperfectly but I hope, like me, you will forgive a lot for something so fundamentally creative. hats off to Reclusive Frog.

2. Ludum Dare: The Musical by ilo – HERE

Wow, double-Wow.  So simple, and yet so creative, different and funny. Truly hilarious and refreshing. a must-play!

3. Korruptor by Codexus – HERE

Quite original I think, with a certain hard-to-describe cool. Can be hard to get the hang off (not necessarily something to complain about!) and the graphics use pre-created textures a lot, but very nicely done.

My own entry (Jam…) The crown Jewels Job

Unfortunately, I didn’t think of it in time for the competition, but either way, I just had to make this once I thought of it

You are the Yeti is a “just for fun” entry in to LD48 #25 – You Are The Villian. It is quite clearly inspired by the classic game SkiFree.

It is playable at the following page

http://chrismingay.co.uk/yaty/

Thanks

-Chris