We decided to make a game where the player is a thief ready to sneak into a building in the middle of the night. The building is full of people sleeping happily in their rooms with no idea of what is coming!

The thief needs to walk carefully to avoid waking up the occupants. They can hear any subtle noise near them. And God they are merciless! They will shot you right away!

We were fighting all Saturday with the language so we couldn’t complete the game mechanics that day as we have planned. However, we could complete the player movements and a level generator that randomly creates a building with a given number of floors by a given number of rooms and places, randomly as well, a closet and a bed inside each room.

At that point we just had a bunch of colored boxes. Forget any fancy graphics for now. The red object was the player, the brown boxes were the closets the thief had to check to get the loot. The cyan rectangles were the beds where the occupants lay down, the orange objects were “stairs” to go upstairs and the blue objects were other “stairs” to get downstairs. Those weren’t stairs exactly but a kind of teleport between floors.

Sunday and Monday was devoted to program the occupants behavior and the thief’s ability to look for the loot. We also completed the game over screen. Then we create some skins for the thief and the occupants as well as some textures for closets, beds and stairs. At the end of last day we finished the background texture and the startup screen with some directions about how to play.

And that was all folks! We sent the game with no sound effects but we were so satisfied with all the work done. We enjoyed a lot this Jam and we’re looking forward the next one!

Entry can be found here. You can find the postmortem here.

Finally, a timelapse for your pleasure:

Finally got around to finishing and posting a postmortem for my Evil Gnome’s Revenge game. The link is http://blazinggames.blogspot.com/2012/12/ld25-postmortem.html . Here is a quick summary of the article:

What went right:

– going with a simple game

– Knowing my limits and getting enough rest to stay more productive

What went wrong:

– School shooting caused me to go different direction with game

– Too much time spent writing code that should be in the library I am developing.

Now back to rating games.

This is the first time I really completed a game for Ludum Dare!  I’m quite impressed with myself now. 

Misunderstood Monkey, as the title turned in to, is a game where you play a monkey trying to defend his princess from the forces trying to take her away from you.  I basically took the idea of Donkey Kong, and had little Marios coming up to snatch her away from your gentle touch.

The game idea didn’t come up immediately – my first reaction was to make a game in which you play an evil villain out to kill innocent kittens.  I spent most of Friday night starting out on this game.  I wound up with a kitten image and a kitten-spawner and a blob that couldn’t yet shoot things and thought “this game is gonna suck.”  And then I started bemoaning about how I don’t know any good 2D engines.

What went right:

Objective-C and Cocoa: I had planned on using Unity3d; my last entry used that, but as I was experimenting with my ideas I realized that I did not want to do a 3D view and it would be cumbersome to implement in Unity3d.  So, I switched to Objective-C/Cocoa. I did not want to; I wanted to use something a little more crossplatform so that more people could use my code, but I couldn’t think of a nice framework for 2D graphics that I know and can do stuff quickly in; except maybe C/SDL which I hate and wouldn’t be able to get it done in 48 hours.  I hope making the wrong prediction doesn’t disqualify me from any awesome prizes I might win.    However, ObjC/Cocoa was super easy to use and I got stuff done very quickly.

Super Pixel Time:  I don’t know what his user name on Ludum Dare is, but super extra happy extra special thanks to the guy who made Super Pixel Time.   Let me show you how that website transformed impressively bad programmer art in to fancy pixelated art!

became

thanks to Super Pixel Time.  For another image, here is the original monkey:

I may need to put together another build with the original art.

What went wrong:

Idea:  My originally idea was that you were going to be a guy who runs around murdering cute innocent kittens.  I spent Friday night sketching out the ideas and plans, and late Friday night (past my bedtime) I decided it wasn’t going anywhere before switching to my new plans.  While I like my new idea much better than the old one, I really didn’t start coding until Saturday morning.

Fast and sloppy coding:  As an example, the level is a hard coded array.  Changing level design is not easy, especially the first iteration involved some of the ladders in places that made the game much too hard.  I have moved them, and now the game is too easy. I decided not to move them back because it was too much work, however, I really would have liked easier-to-edit levels.

Sound: I had planned on using cfxr.  It’s actually not all that great.  I found Audacity with its noise generators and editors much easier to use.  There are random tutorials on using it for more than the things it comes with out of the box.  I recommend it.

Difficulty:  In my editing layout/speed/speed of barrel reloading/other tweaks, it seemed I had no choice between making it too hard or too easy.  I settled for “faster but easy”, but I would like some appropriate challenge.

Rating other games:  I had a final exam after Ludum Dare, and then the time after the exam I thought I’d be playing games, I got super sick instead.  I tried to rate games – I just got queasy!  I’m starting to feel better but I haven’t started on rating any games today (I’ll get at it soon, though, I promise!).

Future plans:

I have an artist working on this with me, and the vague plan is to replace the programmer art with his fancy artwork.  This is in progress, as it will require me writing up some code to alternate directions of heroes and add animations (the images will actually animate as they move!).  A screenshot in progress:

A further update, possibly as the October challenge, will be to port it to the iPad.  Also, I’d like more levels.

All in all, I’m quite thrilled with what I made, even though some of the other people out there made far more impressive games than I did.

I’ve finally rated 100 of the entries. I was quite impressed with many of them, and as with LD24, I wanted to take a moment to draw your attention to some of my favorites that I feel are underplayed (have under 50 ratings). Here they are, in no particular order (click the titles or images to go to the entry page) …
 

Trolling – permanente1600 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A nasty troll does its best to stomp over the flowers planted by a unicorn.
 

the BRINK – radmars – Jam Entry

Top-notch visual style and audio; feels like a complete game.
 

Another Castle – RosyPenguin – Jam Entry

Break into each castle and run away with the princess!

 

Acidman – Stavu – Jam Entry

A clever puzzle game about a man who gains strange powers after an industrial accident.
 

hunt – Zillix – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Sabotage the villagers’ plans to end your curse using the knowledge of your own castle and its many hazards.
 

Battleship Texas – Yngar – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Great use of silly humor to tell a story.
 

A day in the life of the Minotaur – jfroco – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Eat the hearts of fierce warriors on your way to devour virgins in this simple, but well-executed board game.
 

Just Politics – brantkings – Jam Entry

Climb the political ladder and abuse your popularity as you siphon money behind the backs of reporters and the feds.

That’s all for now; I hope you enjoy playing these games as much as I did!

Tags: LD #25, picks

Here it is, a mosaic of Ludum Dare 25 made using all the main screenshot of Ludum Dare’s 25 games. (click on the image for the high resolution)

Like it? What about rate my game? Is free: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=14271

Tags: composition, mosaic, screenshots, wallpaper

A short while ago, I created a game in 48 hours. You probably already  knew that if you are reading this. It can be found here. You don’t have to play it before reading this as there is no story to spoil. It’s more of an arcade-y thing. Though it will help you understand what I’m talking about.

If you instead hate me enough to make me explain the game to you, read this paragraph. It is a game in which you play as the alien mothership invading earth while lasering the crap out of whatever stands in your path. Including soldiers, helicopters, tanks, stealth planes and some defenceless people just for fun.

The Good

•  It’s pretty fun to play, not an amazing experience but definitely enjoyable, being that it, like many of this compo’s entries, appeals to the human desire to kill stuff. And fun is the only thing you can really judge a game by.
• The music is thematic and I rather like it. There are two songs in the game, both created in “Garage band”, a menu song and a song for the actual game part. I tried to make the former sound sort of otherworldly and alienesque , which I feel I succeeded in. The latter I had felt should sound like a song reminiscent of those played while knights rode in to battle, something like this.  Though, in the end, mine was simpler and more of a reverie of a more brutish brawl. Still combat-like though.
• I survived my first time. Well, not strictly speaking my first time, I had a go in LD 23 but gave up rather early, and I had an “I’m in” in LD 24 but didn’t even really try that time. So I”m counting this as my first time.
• I had my idea early and stuck with it. I just heard the words “The theme is “you are the villain”” and instantly went to an alien invasion. I didn’t have all the stuff worked out by any stretch of the imagination, but the feature creep worked in my favour and I ended up with enough stuff for a full game.

The Bad

• There are bugs, the first was on relating to my use of a non-ascii character (♫) in the game, which seemed to disagree with some people’s versions of python. I fixed that but others have reported different bugs in which the game crashes, which I can not seem to explain. (As of 16/04/13 this has been fixed for a while)
• Worst aesthetic in the compo. No question. I’m working on my pixel artistry skills and have gotten better. I knew before I started that visuals would be a problem as I have never been good at anything artistic, so I tried to minimise time spent on graphics. If I tried to make them decent I would’ve spent far too much time on it.
• Some common complaints in comments are that the ship is too large to dodge bullets, that the enemies move too fast and that the upgrade buttons are too far from the main controls, all of which I agree are mistakes on my part that I will try to learn from in future.

Other stuff

• The game’s name, “Invasion!”, had no real thought put in to it. It’s not clever or anthing, but it works.
• The game doesn’t do anything special with the theme. I would’ve loved to do something like in the book of “I am Legend” where you are only revealed to be the bad guy at the very end.
• My original inspiration for the game, as you will have probably figured out, was “Space Invaders”, but as the competition went on I tried to move away from that and more towards the stereotypical alien invasion scene.

Yay, I’ve finally uploaded the timelapse! Within the 44 hours of development, I’ve used glapse to capture a screenshot every 10 seconds.

Thanks for watching

The game is available for following systems:

• Desktop (Linux, Windows, Mac) – Java required
• Web (Java applet)
• Android

You can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8574

Although it wasn’t my first game, it was my first LD. My first game was in HTML5 too, for a jam in two weeks, it was a TD with physics and A* pathfinding, made from scratch. It was completely broken, buggy and with bad programmer art.

However, I’m writing the postmortem for anoher game, a platformer. I couldn’t make a timelapse, as it missed the first 4 hours (programming,music,some art), and the last 2 hours(uploading the game somewhere). The link is here.

Stuff that went well:

• Knowledge of HTML5 and Javascript.
• It was playable by the deadline

Stuff that went wrong (unavoidable)

• Time. The first day was completely killed, and the second day, I was too tired to think straight. That probably caused the bugs.
• For some reason, my laptop keyboard broke. It was just after uploading it for the first time. Then I somehow managed to fix the mute button bug at least on Mozilla Firefox, but gave up, as typing i dfficult with a broke keybord.

Stuff that went wrong (avoidable)

• Writing collision detection from scratch. Do not try this at a 48h compo.
• Lack of audio skilz.
• Bad programer art (it was supposed to be placeholder, but as it was nearing deadline, I had to make cuts).
• The controls bug. I tried to do something cool with them, but failed trying. However, fixing that bug would probably make the game evr more borng.
• Wrong hardcoded values (too weak gravity, too strong stiction to ground, too much control in the air, too weak hardness of the protagonist

Tags: ld25, postmortem

Pointed at LudumDare by Frozen Fractal in the week before the Jam, my girlfriend and I decided to give it a shot.

Concept

I was absolutely convinced the theme would be “End of the World”, but it turned out differently. It took us about 4 hours to come up with an idea that would be simple enough to implement. A trainride forced us to think about it a bit longer than we would otherwise have. The player walks around on a grid, of which certain parts are occluded based on the player walking over “switch”-tiles. Stepping on a “spike”-tile restarts the level, so these have to be avoided, which can be hard in the dark. The goal is to black out the entire level (cover the land in darkness, following the theme). You can check out and download our game here!

Screenshot of Ninox the Nightbringer

Process

I really liked Python after some recent experience with it, and although Java and C are in general my stronger suits, I expected Python with Pygame to work better for this game (I had created a simple brickles game two days earlier to practice). My girlfriend did all the rest, i.e. graphics (in Inkscape), sounds, music (in LMMS and Audacity) and most of the level design (in Notepad). We took it easy: baking cookies, eating all of them, taking a walk, sleeping enough and finishing on Sunday. Despite this, we finished the game surprisingly fast, having a working game on Saturday evening. Sunday was mainly leveldesign and the imho boring polishing (graphics, “repetitive walking”, fullscreen-mode, intro and outro and of course testing). Half my Sunday was eaten by a futile attempt to create an executable from the Python code on Ubuntu.

The Good

We had fun, and thought the concept was original. Dropping the initial ‘pedophile searching his dungeon for a little girl’ made the game acceptable for my girlfriend’s mother, too.  We divided the work well and finished the game on time, with an intro and ending. The number of levels was okay (though some of them should have been left out). Both of us learned some (more) Python.  Drawing the graphics was great fun, and since they ended up so small, here’s a bigger version of our owl “Grog”:

The Bad

The biggest problem was deployment. I had no experience with putting stuff online, and the game required Python and Pygame to be installed, which most people don’ t have. Some programs exist to create a Windows executable, but it took us two weeks (combined >20 hours, ridiculous) to make PyInstaller work. The main problems were reluctancy to work from Windows, font, missing .dll files (for audio) which we manually included in the end. Maybe next time I’ll try Javascript. Anyway, we have an EXECUTABLE! 😀

Next time we could be a bit more ambitious. We were planning on adding more game elements (doors, walking goats), but with a working game, our motivation (aka pressure) wasn’t as strong as when we started. Also, see the previous paragraph.

Added live highscore table functionality for my html5/js game, SUPER Santa Punchout! Also more content added. Keep in mind I need to move the game files to a proper hosting site because DropBox is being used to host it and it’s response time is slow. But it works! And I’m very proud. I’m moving onward with game developing! From C++ and solid system executables only to HTML5/javascripting and os-agnostic playability. I feel free. 😛

P

eace!

Herein, I unearth a few more hidden games that I found by poking at random icons in the “Browse All Entries” screen. I hit a run of about 5 awesome games in a row, so two of these are from that streak.

White Rabbit – by kato9

We see a lot of first-time Unity users do the same thing, wherein they drop the standard CharacterController down into a scene with a standard 1st person POV camera, don’t change the control scheme, and proceed to experiment with importing some assets, throwing around some particle effects, and getting a handle on sending messages around the Heirarchy. While all these things appear to be true of White Rabbit, there’s a huge investment in attention to detail that make it stand strongly apart from others that do the same thing. The textures and shaders are gorgeous. The overall aesthetic makes it such that the floating text narration feels right. The dramatic timing and set design is thoughtful and masterfully executed. The theme is only tenuously followed, but I can forgive that in light of the polish and excellence in presentation here.

Life of a Boss – by Jiddo

This game gave me some very vague and brief flashbacks to Tecmo’s Deception back on the PS1, if that game had more of a board-game feel to it. I very much enjoyed playing around with efficient floorplans and dungeon layouts. Even lowly spike pit rooms have uses not just for proper spacing but because there are heroes that are particularly weak to them.

Vixen – by bentosmile

I actually felt pretty bad after I played Vixen. Sure, it’s a game. Yeah, I’m exploring all the options given. Still, the particular villain type you’re playing here is both low and all too common. The banality of the situation kind of got to me. Once you’re done being a jerk, it might be worth going back and playing one more time and find a way to *not* be one after all.

Tags: ld25, reviews

I recently participated in Ludum Dare #25. This was my third attempt at Ludum Dare. This time I chose to build a multiplayer game. It was much more challenging to do it this way.

Players start out as demons walking around a castle. Thematically I was trying to make it seem as though the players themselves were the “bosses” that had captured a princess.

Players can chat in the game.

Other players can join, and shoot fireballs at you – stunning you for 20 seconds.

I am pictured above being burned to death by a fireball from Ricky. Damn you Ricky.

The goal is to capture the princess by touching her.

The person who holds her at the end of every 60 second round, gets the point.

I spent 90% of the time getting everything working, and setting up the client/server architecture. I didn’t have time to do much else. It was only on the last day that I decided to implement the princess theme, and turn it into what is essentially 2d doom deathmatch mode. I took the art from “Oryx – LOFI Fantasy 2D/3D [FINAL]” pack, which is a free open-source art pack that anyone can use (google it). The rules clearly state, however; that I am not allowed to use an artpack, so I am probably disqualified. It was fun, though; and I don’t care too much about that.

The third Ludum Dare our team has participated in! Here we’ll post our individual thoughts about our game. If you haven’t played it yet, go do so! 

What Went Right

Rose

• Teamwork / Friendship: The four of us have worked on two other LD games, and have gone through college together. We work comfortably around each other and are not afraid to take risks/try new things. We have a handful of inside jokes that kept us giggling throughout the jam.
• Google Hangouts: Amazing how technology can bridge thousands of miles! We more or less were able to collaborate despite all being remote.
• Art: I have a lot of fun designing the quirky characters. I wanted to lean toward the whimsical and silly with my character designs. The ‘Goat’ sub-theme proved to be a fun inspiration. Also put more attention into animation than previous jams: animated in Flash instead of the silly Photoshop animation tool.

Iterations for the main villain.

Cast of characters.

Johan

• Teamwork: We coded together on the same project without stepping on each others’ toes. We also wrote tools that theoretically would let content creation be more separate from coding so we didn’t block each other. Levels and other settings were set up in XML where we had previously just put everything in code. Theoretically, it would have made content creation (aside from the raw art/sounds) extremely quick once the engine was set up.
• Google Effects: I don’t always use video chat systems, but when I do, I prefer Google+ Hangouts.
• Music/sound quality: The sounds came out pretty nice considering how long it took to make them!

Vu

• Task Separation: Once we had the game idea mostly figured out we were able to jump right into working. The tasks just seemed to split up on their own. Me and Johan worked with the same project in Dropbox. It was amazing how we hardly stepped on each other’s code.
• Data-Driving: Johan did a really good job of making an XML parsing system and data structures to store and retrieve content. It made tuning and modifying the game extremely simple. We could make dozens of levels in just a few minutes if we wanted.

What Went Wrong

Rose

• Art Consistency: I am usually a stickler for consistency, but this time I was focused too much on the technicalities and little details. The colors felt too muted for the villainous-yet-whimsical feel we were going for, and the logo style is completely different from the game style. A year+ in the industry makes me really critical of my work :/
  I also never got around to the UI/layout of information, which meant that some screens looked like art with default text slapped over it. Ugh.

Poop.

• Wasted Time: Not enough time spent brainstorming and fully fleshing out the game design.
  We were no longer in college, which meant we all had relatively healthy sleep schedules and couldn’t stay up as late as we normally do. 3 out of 4 of us had to work on Monday, making Vu the only one working on the game that day.
  The team was split up in three different timezones, which basically meant there was only a window of a few hours a day where all four of us would be in Hangouts at the same time.
• Scoping: You would think that as game jam veterans, we would have learned to scope games accordingly now. But I think this time we didn’t take into account the lost time on Monday.

Johan

• Incomplete Design/Scope/Work/Timezones: We had a lot of ideas but didn’t really take into account just how much time we would lose on Monday, since three of us work fulltime on weekdays. We brainstormed late Friday night and I could only work the full day on Saturday. On Monday, we didn’t have final music or any sound effects yet, and we couldn’t get in touch with Hal due to work, so when I got home (with a little less than an hour left!) I ended up taking/slightly polishing one of our drafts and making as many sound effects as possible! A good bit of those sounds didn’t quite make it into the submission version of the project, but will be in the post-jam version, whenever we feel ready to post it up.

Vu

• Late Start: Friday was the last day of my 8 month co-op and so my coworkers wanted to take me to see the Hobbit after work. It was fun, but it meant that I would not be able to join the team until saturday morning, so I missed out on a lot brainstorming and idea generation. I felt like this head us back a lot since everyone had to wait on me before we could agree on an idea and start working on it.
• Distance: Although we were able to collaborate well using google hangouts and skype, not being collocated meant that we wouldn’t have nice things like whiteboards, post-its, and just being able to look at each other’s works directly and give immediate feedback and inspiration.
  Additionally, when we work together it’s easier to stay up all night and work harder because we can see everyone else working hard and not sleeping either.
• Slow Prototyping: It look a lot longer than usual to get a prototype of the game up and running. We couldn’t really gauge the gameplay until the game was basically done. We had a lot of trouble deciding key aspects of the game such as whether or not the play should have HP, do enemies have HP?, where do enemies come from? These were things we should have had locked down before we started working.
• All Alone: On Monday everyone had to work except for me so I had to put together the rest of the code by myself and lacked support for sound, art, and general feedback on the gameplay. This put a lot of stress and pressure on me.
  I was scrambling to get all the basic screens and generally code in. I wanted to make sure that we had everything that makes a game feel more like a complete work than just a gameplay prototype. I wish I could have spent more time tuning the gameplay and adding features. I feel like I wasted a lot of time tweaking screens and chasing minor bugs on that day. Thankfully we were able to get some additional content and musics and sounds in at the very last second when everyone got out of work.

What We Got out of the Experience

Rose

• Extra practice working with the technical side and the full art pipeline. Animated bitmaps in Flash instead of Photoshop’s animation tool, which allowed me to create smoother animations. Then had to figure out a quick way to export into a spritesheet, which took some roundabouts (GlueIt) but I was pretty happy with the process. Also, XML!
• This was the first time any of us had worked on a game remotely, which is a good experience to have.

Johan

• Used Torrunt’s Developer Console in a personal project for the first time! Being able to type in cheats/functions that you want to call at runtime was pretty much amazing. Previously, we’d tie cheats to button presses, but in general, it’s tough to remember to clean those up, especially with time constraints. It was also useful when setting up features in code (especially with all of us working on the “same branch” at the same time), since I could do test calls/functionality from within the cheats instead of having to compile and use possibly-broken code.
• Wrote an AnimationBuilder class that lets you determine sets of Flixel animations in XML without going into the code yourself :D. Definitely going to add this to my code library!
• Mostly successful completely-remote working experience.

Vu

• A fresh new game! Although the game is a runner at heart, it feels different because of the spatial layout of levels and environmental involvement. It may not be exactly what we originally planned out but it’s definitely on the right track and illustrates the basic gameplay we planned. With a little more work we could expand the game into what we originally designed and incorporate the feedback we’ve gotten so far.
• Proof that remote development can work well. The HCI person in me wants to try to improve this and make more/better tools for communicating these kinds of ideas. If we had a simple collaborative animation board I think we would have been able to communicate some ideas better.

What Will We Do in Future Jams?

Rose

• I saw in some Post-Mortems that other artists would set up a moodboard before the jam to establish a style and color scheme without wasting time doing it during the jam. I definitely want to try this next time, and make sure the game has a more consistent mood throughout.
• It would also save a lot of time to have a nice library of fonts, textures, actions, and brushes ready in Photoshop. I spent far too long searching for free ones to use.
• Timelapse!
• I wish to be more involved with understanding the code side. I have done an individual jam once, learning AS3 along the way. More of this!
• Have the full art pipeline set beforehand. I’ll need to research more powerful and up-to-date programs to create spritemaps.
• I made an animatic to show the programmers how I wanted the prop-throwing mechanic to feel in the game. They did a fantastic job of recreating that procedurally, giving it realistic physics that varied slightly every time. I strongly suggest making plenty of mockups and animatics to make sure the team has the same vision in mind.

Early background mockup.

Johan

• I’d like to experiment with some more code/design patterns
• I’d like to have more patterns/setups in mind, so while not exactly copying code from previous projects, I’d be more prepared to set something up quickly to solve a problem I’d already thought about.
• Maybe have more of a hand in the gameplay coding…or be quicker with setting up tools. Also goes with my previous point though. Mental preparation!
• I’d like to better-design how objects in the world are set up, with a better relationship between XML (data) and code (behavior).
• Design with non-desktop platforms in mind!? It’d be a pretty fresh experience to try that out.
• Maybe it’d be nice to escape from Flixel at least once. 2D game development has considerably less overhead than 3D, so I’d like to stick with 2D/Flash for game jams. Flixel’s FlxGroups are just too handy though.

Vu

• For other jams we sometimes have two running ideas that are prototyped extremely quickly (by the end of the first night). I’d like to do that again to prove out ideas before going full force on any one idea. We didn’t have time to do it in this case since we lost a lot of time due to schedule conflicts and time zone differences.
• I’d like to spend some more time planning out the flow of the game and all the important systems and have them fleshed out way before starting detailed systems
• Do more art! I didn’t have my tablet or any good art programs on the laptop that I used for the jam so I wasn’t able to help out with art content at all.
• I’d like to be able to have the game pretty much done way earlier than the deadline so that we can just add polish and do testing much earlier
• Try out more some unexplored territory. We’ve tended to stick to single player games with a set of core mechanics. I’d like to branch out in future jams and do some games that are more story driven, multiplayer, and/or totally abstract.

Thanks for reading!

Stay tuned for a post-jam version!

Tags: another castle, postmortem, tl;dr

People post the best games they saw, or the most innovative, or something…

There has been alot of original ideas in the contest, and now, I’ll post the WEIRDEST ones. Games that make you go WTF:

BEWARE as some of these are pretty OBSCENE!

 Mitt Romney and the Case of the Sex Doll

This is a weird adventure game, where you play as Mitt Romney. The art and the music are really obscure. Play at your own risk here

You are the Evil Overlord

In this game you play as an evil overlord and all you can do is yell at your minions that are trying to defeat a hero. The whole game is choosing what to yell at them. It is actually pretty fun, and interesting stuff can happen. You can send your goat… Play here

The Filthy Coward

Here, you are some guy that goes in public removing people’s clothes. Your mission is to be as rude as possible without getting caught by the cops (which don’t really do much) Anyways it’s here

Gin Monster Bob

This is a drunken stealth game. You should get to the kitchen without bumping into anything and it all moves. Play it

Fisticuffs

This isn’t really a game, but a hockey fighting simulator. Bet for your favorite team – the Dicks or the Pussies – here!

If you know any other weird games, post them in the comments!

Go!

Hello fellow Dare’rs!

So for this ludum dare tmtowtdi and I decided to make a multiplayer game for a difference. I’d done a lot of action-arcade type games before and I felt quite determined to make something I hadn’t done before. So we got together with my friend tmtowtdi, which is an exellent server/web/js ninja, and got to work for the LD25 jam.

Tools:

I feel comfortable using flash/as3 so it was a easy desicion for me, moreover we wanted to be able to deploy to mobile so starling, a framework for making gpu accellerated programs in flash, was a great fit.

Determining what to use on serverside was a bit of a challenge. As I said, none of us really did a multiplayer game before so we looked into java, Scala and c#.. Since we weren’t familiar with any of these tmtowtdi decided to go with node.js with javascript, a framework he often uses for his work. And for the socket’s we decided to use Socket.io which is well integrated with as3 and js.

Setting up our stuff:

This was the easist part of the jam, Node.js and socket.io just work! We immideately got our communications running with flash and started exchanging packets right away.

Implementing game logic into the client:

Starling is a great framework, I’d written a small game library a few weeks back that uses starling and does basic asset and scene management. Using this code to make the game interface and game logic for the client was an easy task.

Implementing game logic into the server:

Now this part is a different story now since we used javascript we started banging into some problems as the game logic got a bit complicated. As you know, javascript is not type-safe, and also it is highly dynamic, that means you can declare variables and functions on the fly, these cool features of js kinda’ got us into trouble. We spent long hours ironing out bugs and parts of code just didn’t work for seamingly no reason. Features that enabled us to write fast code was breaking our game and small tasks started taking too long.

But by the last day we got things working, thanks to tmtowtdi’s experience with js and overall awesomeness 😀 and got to testing gameplay, adding small features like help messages and polishing the overall game.

tl;dr:

We had a blast working on something new, and personally it was my best LD so far. Yes, we missed quite a lot of things with game design and interface design. The game is obviously lacking a lot; most people don’t even get whats going on in the game :D. But it was worth it!

So if you feel like you want to do a whole new thing for the next LD and you have a friend that you work well together, just do it!

The game:

The result is BFG TD, a multiplayer tower defence game where two teams attack each other for all of eternity 😀 If you haven’t played the game please check it out here, and please comment on what you think could be added, what works or doesn’t.

Timelapses:

You can also check out timelapses of clientside work done on days 1 and 2. The last day was a bit chaotic so no recording was done there 😀

• Day1
• Day2

Cheers!

PS: Sorry about my spelling, my spell checker is acting up today 😀

Hey Everyone. I’ve been working on my LD game the past two weeks and wanted to share the finished version.

You can play it HERE

The game features better sound / music and a 2 player mode!
Now you can play as mario and attempt to climb to the top while your buddy hurls barrels at you or vice-versa. Unless there are any HUGE issues then I won’t be spending any more time on the game. I’ve got to say that doing LD 25 was a great decision. After being in a bit of a slump during my vacation, LD really revitalized my passion for making games and kept me motivated. I can’t wait for Global Game Jam and I hope y’all enjoy the game. Thank for playing.

So while I wasn’t able to participate I did improve my maze creation library.

Not only is it two orders of magnitude faster but it has a proper unit test. Full code coverage. No loops, there is a solution (unittest checks for the solution and even prints it out).

The code is far more maintainable now as well.

Let me say Visual Studio 2012 is very impressive as you dig into it.

On this one screen you can see I have full code coverage in by my unittests. There are two functions which are taking most of the time when running a performance test. There are no detected code issues (or they’ve been suppressed). Oh and on the bottom left, you can see how maintainable the code is. It can drill in further but I didn’t have space on this one screen shot.

You can grab it here: http://www.kins-home.net/ludum/timelapse/MazeCreatorLib_2.2.zip

Hello!

I really ought to be making a post-compo version (which was already started!), but I found the necessity of a map editor to my liking.

I could have used any from the tools section… but I wanted to try and develop one myself. xD So far, the basic functionalities are finished! It exports in a Flixel friendly format (for I use that framework a lot), which is also the format of the tilesets exported by Pickle. I didn’t delve into whether that is the default way of working with tileset, but it works for me.

You can check it out at my blog, or download it here (right-click and . I also wrote an kind of manual… just some guidelines on how to use it.

The next feature I want to add is a layer to add objects, which will be used to output custom code, referencing the position of the object.

Please comment your thoughts on it. =D

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2012 at 2:23 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.

I had recently been watching a tv show called Venture Bros[1] which features villains, some of which have henchmen, combine this with some inspiration from a film called Bunraku[2] with the numbered killers, and I had an idea set in my mind.

What went right
Firstly the gameplay came out exactly how I thought about it, I wanted quite an abstract game with very little user control, which I have written more about later in this post. The naming on the henchmen amused me and I even felt some sort of attachment to some of the top henchmen I have had, this was sort of inspired by the names in the game cannon fodder[3]. The “combat” between henchmen and the other characters was inspired by the combat parts of half minute hero[4]. I was also quite happy how the graphics came together in the end, I don’t normally consider myself a graphics person but the consistent look of the game I felt was acceptable.

What went wrong
The thing most obvious I felt went wrong was the total lack of instructions. Given that I had been playing it most of the weekend of Ludum Dare I knew what to do, but didn’t really get to writing up some instructions or even putting some of the less obvious parts somewhere to give the player a clue as to what s/he was doing. I also neglected to add a losing condition that means the only way to restart after losing all your henchmen and money is to reload the page containing the game. Another thing that I wasn’t happy with was the unfinished title screen and game over screens that were just left as scans from my notes instead of graphics to match those in the game, although this has been fixed in the version on kongregate now[5] There was (and still is) a lack of decent sounds (a couple of bleeps and bloops from bfxr[6]) and music. Ideally I was going to make some music on my Gameboy with LSDJ[7], but I didn’t find the time to put anything decent together so this was left out entirely.

Thoughts on the lack of control
One of the major criticisms of the game I have seen is that there is little control over the henchmen and that it all appears too random. This was one of the points I wanted to make with the game to express my feelings of lack of control over various parts of my life and that despite the best instructions and intentions, not everything is totally under your control. Ideally I would have been able to make this much more obvious with the henchmen by implementing moods or something that would have made them less or more co-operative with the instructions given but time didn’t really permit me to do this totally and it may have to be done in a post-compo version

References
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venture_Bros.
[2] http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1181795/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_Fodder_(video_game)
[4] http://www.halfminutehero.com/
[5] http://www.kongregate.com/games/henrypenface/hench-for-life-from-rags-to-riches
[6] http://www.bfxr.net/
[7] http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/

It took some training but I finally demonstrated that my game is beatable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9MUukcCZrk

Hi everyone!

I thought I’d write a bit of a post-mortem for my game, Thievery, but in doing so decided on something a bit different.  From my git logs for the game, I have a reasonable record of what happened when (and can take a fair guess at the rest), and thought I’d post it to see if it’s of interest.  The stats at the end were interesting for me (:

My game is about helping a thief sneak around and steal gold from houses and pickpocket guards, while avoiding capture by the guards and guard dogs.  Note that the times listed below include a fair bit of time spent on “art” – it was definitely programmer art, so nothing too impressive, but it still took time (:

Saturday December 15

02:00 Theme announced; I'd decided to sleep through and find out in the morning
 08:00 Woke up; started getting ready and brainstorming at the same time
 08:30 Started work on Thievery
 09:08 Got a basic loop running, with newly-created background and placeholder player sprite
 10:15 Added player movement
 12:53 Added dagger shooting, after spend ages on sprite rotation
 13:18 Finished lunch
 14:13 Put guard & thief images in
 14:46 Can now shoot guards with daggers, using rectangle collisions
 14:57 Limited player movement to the screen dimensions
 15:45 Back from 45 mins jogging
 16:39 Added basic stats, plus dying animations for characters
 16:49 Added damage animation
 18:51 Added houses
 19:20 Wrote some basic level loading code
 19:40 Finished dinner
 20:31 Fixed rectangle collisions (for daggers/houses, etc)
 20:58 Added circle collisions (for living/moving things)
 21:46 Added chests
 23:54 Added looting
 00:30 Guards now chase the player when seen
 00:56 Guards now hit the player when in range
 01:10 Now reports player death, and forces restarting
 02:13 Added guard patrol routes

Sunday December 16

08:00 Woke up
 08:30 Back to work
 10:03 Guards now move around obstacles, instead of getting stuck
 10:23 Added pausing
 11:07 Guards now can't see through houses
 12:39 Added basic events system and character chatter
 13:40 Back from an hour at the gym
 14:00 Finished lunch
 15:48 Added more events with chatter, and a win screen
 16:48 Added guard vision cones
 18:00 Back from meeting friends for 45 minutes
 18:20 Guard vision cones now turn red when chasing
 19:32 Added better level data
 19:50 Guards can now only see forwards
 20:00 Finished dinner
 21:09 Added intro screen
 21:15 Guards can now see at 90 degrees at close range
 22:09 Added guard dogs
 22:35 Added Pickpocketing
 00:07 Added sounds, including triggering from events
 00:49 Added music - main and win screen
 01:30 Windows build fixes: paths, extra keys
 01:49 Added guard alerts
 01:58 Submitted Linux version
 02:00 Deadline for development (start of submission hour)
 02:06 Submitted Windows version

Overall totals:

• Programming: 25 hrs 30 min
• Art: 3 hrs 45 min
• Level and other content design: 1 hr 35 min
• Sounds: 45 min
• Music: 30 min
• Breaks, etc: 4 hrs 30 min
• Sleep: 11 hrs 45 min (+2 hours before LD25 started)

Final points

• Most fun thing to put in: guard and thief chatter (I couldn’t be too inventive given my tiredness, but it was still satisfying)
• Next thing I would’ve done if I had time: given the player a way to hide from guards to get away
• Thing to do for next time: get better at art (;
• Thing that I wasted the most time on: sprite rotations (got confused about centre-relative vs corner-relative, rotation angles and units, etc)

I had a great time creating this game.  I’m glad that many of you have had a play and enjoyed it, and hope you all enjoyed yourselves making your own games as well (:  Good luck to all in the voting!

Tags: postmortem

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I had an absolute blast. I’m already looking forward to the next one!

My entry was Build-a-Bandit, a Wild-West duel simulator game where you create a bandit with very stereotypical villain features and then send him to duel the sheriff and take money from the banks in the towns you visit. By adjusting attributes like how twirlable your mustache, and how tall your hat is, you also affect how your bandit fights.

Every slider corresponds to a relationship between two stats that I left ambiguous to encourage playing around. Going to one extreme or the other will rob you of the benefits of the other stat, making choosing your bandit dependent on the player’s preferred style. Do you balance your bandit in the middle, or make him a huge tank? The three scales (hat, mustache and eyes) are Firing Speed/Defense, Accuracy/Power, and Dodge Rate/Critical Rate respectively. Tweaking the hat size has the most noticeable effects, but all three play a huge role in behind-the-scenes numbers.

I surprised myself with how Build-a-Bandit turned out. I’m very happy with the final product. There are a ton of flaws, featureless gaps and things I wish I could have done, but I get the feeling most people can rattle off lists of should-haves after a timed event like this. I’d never made a game to a state this complete before, even accounting for the missing stuff, and while I was making Build-a-Bandit, I got to enter that coveted Flow State, where you’re so absorbed in the work that everything comes together with no distractions. Little problems that needed solving, I was able to solve without a lot of conscious thought, even though I might have trouble explaining why I came to the solutions I did. For me, that feeling was the biggest reward of Ludum Dare 25.

Other things that went right:

• The Graphics: I’d never sprited anything in my life before this, but the wonderful ASEPRITE made it a breeze. A game with the concept of “create a fighting bandit using outlandish physical villain stereotypes instead of stats like Attack and Defense” needs to be able to sell that idea with the graphics, and I seem to have succeeded. A lot of comments rolling in are about how excited people were to make big mustaches and squinty eyes. My biggest regret for the entire project is not being able to implement comically tall hat sizes in the graphics as well. One commenter remarked that it was “tragic” that a towering hat didn’t translate to epic tallness in the duel, and I agree wholeheartedly. If I could fix one thing, it would be that.
• Bug-free: I can’t know for sure, but from my testing and the lack of mention of bugs or crashes from commenters, I think Build-a-Bandit is clean. I made sure to test multiple restarts, game over conditions, graphical quirks, etc., and if Build-a-Bandit were a ship, I think it’d be seaworthy. Did this come at the expense of some features? You bet. But after being frustrated with only being able to rate about one entry in four that I try to rate due to bugs, crashes and missing packages, I do take pride in the fact that there have been no reported problems to date with BaB.

What I’d love to include in a post-compo version:

• Hat tallness: As mentioned above, having one out of three physical traits not reflected in the duel graphics is a huge deficiency. The sad part is that this wouldn’t have taken much time to fix, and I probably would have if not for last-minute setbacks. I was originally going to do bandit body-size instead, but early in my spriting I realized that drawing different bodies and making the sprites line up would take far too much time. I switched to hat size to make things simpler, but never got around to going back and fixing the duel graphics.
• Better visual feedback: It’s hard to get too into the character-building puzzle aspect if it’s not obvious what every aspect does. Given more time, I’d have loved to make miss, critical and dodge notifications on screen, and a dialogue box that showed what happened the last five shots or so. It would have been easier for players to grasp how the physical features are related, and would have given them a greater sense of control over the duel. I would have also liked to also make a screen where you could view the next sheriff’s stats, so try and anticipate what kind of bandit to make best suited for killing him.
• Better balance: When the crux of the game’s fun is building just the right character to take on a carefully constructed enemy, you have to create just the right level of difficulty and a variety of challenges to give meaning to building many different types of bandits. What I managed to cobble together on the first day is far from terrible, and fine tuning this type of balance takes more time and playtesting than what’s possible in 48 hours, but this is the meat of the game, and if I decide to come back and polish the game, balancing the game to keep the player interested is a priority.
• Naming your bandit: It’s a small thing, but I’d love to add a little box for naming your bandit. This was a feature I gladly cut for time, but it would add a little extra personalization to the bandits. As it is, the standard name for the bandit is “Crudely Knifeslash,” a play on “Snidely Whiplash.”
• Minor graphical touches: The duel backgrounds would be nicer with more buildings, and if they were randomized or different for each town. I noticed that I didn’t add the sun. The death sprites are laughably bad and the work of two minutes as I rushed to put together something, anything. Maybe a woody texture for the backgrounds of the menus where the dark browns are, and an old paper texture for the lighter menus boxes. Different sheriff features and colors would be nice too.

What went wrong:
Only one big thing went wrong, but it almost caused me to miss the deadline, and I was late for work. I tried Py2exe and Pyinstaller to package Build-a-Bandit, and they both failed to work, hanging up or producing unplayable .exes or not including essential packages. From what I’ve read, other people have experienced same problem trying to package applications built with Pygame. I wasted 90 minutes on that garbage. Then I found a recommendation for cx-freeze, downloaded and ran it, and it was like the heavens opened and choirs of angels sang hallelujahs. No errors, no weird dialogue boxes or incomplete dist folders or anything, just an exe and all my assets that worked immediately.

All in all, I had a great time and I’m pleased that I managed to finish a game on my first try at Ludum Dare. Looking forward to the next one with you all!

We have published a port mortem for our jam entry, “The Launch” on our Dev blog.
Read it here
Includes unseen screenshots of the intended UI.

Additionally, we are working on a post-compo version.

…I’ve rated just over 200 games now

@xbelanch was kind enough to produce an OS X build of my LD25 game, Bad Puppy, so you can now play the game if you’re a Mac user.

Play Bad Puppy – Now on OS X!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10473

I am not sure whether the build he produced was the compo version or the post-compo, as I am unable to play it myself due to lack of Mac. Easiest way to tell is if the people in the game are all male and have green sweaters, it is the compo build.

The OS X build is not up on the main site yet, so for now please obtain it from the Mirror link.

Enjoy!

Tags: Bad Puppy, Chris Sanyk, csanyk, ld25, OS X

I can’t put a hyperlink into a blog post anymore.  If I try to, when I publish/update the link gets stripped out.  Lame.

What gives, admins? Are hyperlinks malicious now?

Tags: admin, hyperlink

Must be that time of year! My aim is 256 rated games for obvious reasons, but not sure if I will make it.

There are oliebollen to be had tonight. Happy 2013 everyone!

In the mean time, rate some more games and join the 200 club as well! You get a free goat!

I’ve been busy with a couple things, but one thing I’ve been notably busy with was participating in Ludum Dare, or at least attempt to. As it being my first time participating in such a competition, I didn’t expect any sort of award coming to me, let alone even get anything done. But at least I was able to get a first-hand experience on what it was like to work on the dream that I hold close to me.

Sadly, it never reached completion.

(To note: The graphics are smaller because the engine we used re-sized them. There is a goat because, well, that was also somewhat part of the theme.)

After realizing that we would not make the LD deadline, my partner and I decided to make this a full fledged game, so that it wouldn’t go to waste. Sadly, my partner himself seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth, so instead, I will take a moment to talk about what this game was meant to be, and only stew in it’s nostalgia on what could have been.

The game itself was meant to have a rather simple and unelaborative plot for the sake of simplicity: it was never meant to be complicated because conceptually, it was meant to be a rather mindless game. You are a super-soldier created by the military only to go rogue due to going mad with power. You are hellbent on destroying the very militia that created you, as they unleash their full force upon you.

As the protagonist (the super-soldier who was dubbed Project O, or just plain O) you can fly, punch, and charge up to shoot beams of energy, killing people recklessly. Naturally, the military would fight back: Foot-soldiers wielding a variety of weapons, armed helicopters that would drop more forces, tanks, and more.

This version is only a very bare bones version of what was meant to be due to my partner disappearing, having not heard from him for weeks on end. On the day he left he had linked me a defunct link of what was supposedly the latest version of what we were working on (which lead to a 404 page) and after he said he’d only be gone for the day, proceeded to never be seen again.

I’m posting this in the event my content may have been blatantly stolen and that I may have been cheated out of giving ideas and content to someone I trusted. I do not wish to assume this, and I can only hope this is not the case, but sadly, I wish to take precaution.

Feel free to use these graphics so long as you give credit.

wooooo! Looking forward to what  2013 brings   (aside from more LD’s!)

Keep building games all!

This is the third consecutive Ludum Dare where I have participated and Evil Cat is easily my best entry so far. When I started coding I was not very confident that I could end up having something good but after the first day everything started to fit well together and turned out into a nice game. Check it out!

What went right

Box2D

It took a while (a whole morning) to decide the game I would do for this Ludum Dare. You are the Villain theme can be easily adapted to many videogame ideas just chaning good guys for bad guys, but I wanted something that suited the theme more naturally. I had two ideas in mind, one was doing some kind of Dungeon Keeper and the other was a game with a evil cat that wants to break alls the things in your house, well, like most of the cats use to do :). Usually I don’t like to use a physics systems without a good reason, I’m used to create simple verlet/euler integrators to have a decent physic/collision system and most games doesn’t require more than that. This way I have absolute control over the playability and fun factors of the game, one thing that I cannot assure when using a 3rd party engine. But from the beginning it was clear that I was going to require complex physics and collisions to make the game feel as realistic as it should.

I started creating the game boundaries and adding some static platforms with some boxes on top. For the cat I chose a round box2D collider, but the behaviour of the cat didn’t felt right when playing, the momentum and the low friction were affecting the playability too much and later on I decided to change the collision shape of the cat to another box. This circle collision code was later on used to develop the ball you see on the game. A lot of extra time was put on setting up the right values for the objects and the cat until the result was decent.

Wreck-It Cat

My two cats are adorable and they are too good to be cats, really. But all cats have a sixth sense to annoy you on the most inappropriate moments and I decided to base the main character on them (they look the same, no problem to choose one). The idea of showing what the cat was thinking came up very early, it was not difficult to imagine what the cat things when they break something, feel guilty is not in their dictionary. At the end it was one of the best ideas and people seem to enjoy them quite a lot.

One of the key features of the game is to break furniture and I hadn’t a clear idea on how to accomplish that. The tasks were two, first detect when an object must break and the other one split the object in different pieces.

The solution to detect when to break an object is not very academic but works. First I detect the collisions of the object and in case there is one the velocities of the object (both linear and angular) are used to calculate a value of damage to apply to the object. All physic objects inherit from a class named Element that takes care of these calculations in the cases the object is breakable. Each object has a robustness value that is decremented with each collision.

When an object is destroyed it is marked for destruction. Then, a routine generates particles based on the size of the object and transmits the physics values of the source object to the particles, adding a random factor. The particles are physic objects with a time to live and they use parts of the source bitmap as images. The graphic function that takes parts of the bitmap never worked very well, but I found myself spending too much time to code it and I chose to continue with the playability instead.

I had the breaking part done, which is quite entertaining by itself but how to turn this feature into a game didn’t come up until the second day. It was someway inspired in Katamari, you destroy small objects, you get stronger, you can destroy bigger objects, repeat until everything is destroyed. To make the cat gain weight was not an option so I went for the Cat Power skill, the more Cat Power the easier is to break things. The objective of the game changed from getting the most evilness possible to break everything in the house, a clearer objective very easy to understand.

Art

I’m a programmer, doing graphics is probably one of my worst skills and I got surprised when I saw some comments of people praising the graphics quality. My target was only to have simple and understandable graphics. I didn’t want to spend many time doing art but I had no other option. Each new furniture needed a new graphic and I spent a lot of time doing art compared to my previous Ludum’s. Pixel art and a childish style allowed me to work fast, anyway anything more realistic is out of reach for my skills.

Level editing

How to edit the  level? how to put the furniture in the level? The first idea was going for the known solution, a tileset. But my objects had sizes and shapes so different that given the little time I had it felt like a bad idea, I would spend a lot of time setting up a tile editor for the game and then match what I have on the editor to what I see on the game. Then I aimed to do it via code, for one level it should be feasible. I have a function to put each furtinute of the game and I also have some macro functions to add the bookcases. This way I can add books easily with random size and color. I started populating the house from the bottom to the top, level by level with a trial and error approach. This way I could also hide the potential problems with the physic engine startup.

What went wrong

Box2D

It had been a while since I used Box2D (2009), and I had forgotten everything so I started googling for some Box2D AS3 tutorials. As usual, the tutorials I found were from older versions of Box2D and the API had changed since them. I had to look the examples included on the Box2D package to learn something useful.

I had some objects with physics pretty fast, but then I had to program the cat, it is a different object because it’s controled by the played and you have to be very careful with with forces/impulses you apply to it because it’s very easy to lose the control of what’s happening with your main character. As expected using a physics engine was limiting the playability of the game. Changing the collider shape of the cat from a circle to a square definitely improved things, and I had to force some of the physics values of the cat object to deal with momentum. Probably not the best way to do it but what I could after a couple of hours of Box2D training.

Using Box2D in a two day project was a risk but I must say the engine is very good and it was worth using it.

The cursed lamp

Some people have had problems destroying the lamp on the top floor, I didn’t notice this while testing the game but definitely happens. The lower height of the top floor stops the lamps from rotating and it’s difficult to destroy it although possible to do with some patience or using the bed against the lamp.

Sound

Several people have complained the lack of sound in the game. To be sincere I could have done something but nothing of quality. It was almost 2 AM, very close to the deadline  and I was too tired to find a microphone and start recording samples with my cats . And about the music, well, the only programs I know to make songs are Amiga MOD trackers. I have a library to play them on Flash, but I’m  a poor musician, sure the game is much better without my music in there.

Conclusions

I had a great time developing this game and overcoming the different technical difficulties. It was awesp,e to do a game with cats too!  The challenge I have for the next Ludum Dare is to release something with sound, I have to check the competition rules properly, I think using standard MOD samples should be allowed if you compose the melody. Thanks to the Ludum Dare team and everybody participating in this wonderful contest. Happy New Year!

——————————
Agents – Bug Fixes
——————————

A number of people here and elsewhere who tried to play my voice-controlled Android game for LD25 were on Jellybean devices. That’s great for you guys, because Jellybean is pretty snazzy and you actually have devices running it!

BUT, it was unfortunate for me since the game totally didn’t work on them (the voice commands would not interpret at all). As such I have fixed the problems that I’ve found in Jellybean so the game is now actually playable, as you can see in the video above. The solution isn’t perfect, but it’s at least playable now.

Why do I care so much about supporting Jellybean?

All the conventional wisdom around Android development says that you have to support older OS versions at the expense of all else. Talking heads point to pie charts that show big slices of Gingerbread out there in people’s hands (nearly 50% of the total market), and tiny slices of Ice Cream Sandwich and Jellybean.

But my own download numbers for Agents?

Gingerbread : ~20%
Ice Cream Sandwich : ~22%
Jellybean : ~50%
Others : <10%

Close to fifty percent on Jellybean. Let that sink in for a moment. JB may account for less than 5% of the total devices wandering around in the wild, and maybe lots of people out there have older OS versions in their hands (like in my Droid 3), but those older device owners aren’t the ones doing the downloading.

Play Agents here

If you tried the game before, and you were on OS version 4.1.X or 4.2, and couldn’t get it to recognize your speech, give it another try.

This summer I participated in my first Ludum Dare, and I have to say that, as development goes, I managed to make a couple of really bad choices. Here’s a short list of what you should not do:

1. Do not spend 30 hours making graphics assets and music.
2. Do not make a game that relies heavily on animation, animation is the worst time-consumer.
3. Do not use tools that you are not familiar with (in my case—RagePixel for Unity, an awesome but buggy tool that I decided to try for Ludum Dare).
4. Do not spend hours making levels: level design is something that always takes more time than you expect.

Now, to give you an idea of what came out of this, go check out my 30-second game with lots of stuff packed into those 30 seconds, but 30 seconds nevertheless. It’s called Dissolution (screenshot is a link to Kongregate).

Now, I have learned my lessons. For my second consecutive Ludum Dare I sure as hell wasn’t going to repeat the same mistakes. Here’s my short list of conclusions regarding what you should do for a 48 hour solo game project if you want to actually complete it and maybe squeeze a few hours of sleep somewhere halfway through.

1. Do make all things procedural. You’ve got enemies? Great, make them spawn procedurally and randomize their types. Got platforms? Generate short sequences and randomize them. Making a labyrinth game? Awesome, there’re dozens of maze generation algorithms on the web.
2. Do make stylish graphics. Your Ludum Dare game can look good even without those shiny sprite sheets and complex 3D models. Keep your artwork as simple as possible and compensate by having nice-looking visual effects.
3. Do make sounds and music. This is essential for correct perception of your awesome art style. What worked great for me so far is stylized graphics + more or less realistic sounds.
4. Do design a simple game for each of the 12 themes in the final round of voting. It is a good exercise in game design, and it will help you get straight to coding once the theme is announced. Ideas are cheap, what counts is implementation.

As far as assets are concerned, you have to find a balance between sound and graphics, because you can’t make both very sophisticated, you have to prioritize. If you do all of the things suggested, you will find yourself being able to sleep a whole night and spend up to 12 hours polishing and optimizing your game, which, in turn, means that you will end up with something that feels infinitely better than most Ludum Dare games.

All those things out of the way, I give you Pineapple Dreams, my Ludum Dare 25 game about being a villain. The game features ultra-violence and was inspired by A Clockwork Orage, Drive and (you guessed it) Hotline Miami. Screenshot is clickable and leads to the game’s Kongregate page.

If you are looking for desktop versions, they also exist on the Ludum Dare page of the game. You can rate it there also if you want to

Two days ago I posted a 2D map editor. Since I only used it with simple tilesets, I didn’t notice how limited it was. Well, thanks to Sestren I enhaced it some and that fixed some bugs! =D

The “tileset” is a 4525×3174 image

The links are still the same. Anyway, you can find it at my blog, or download it here (right-click and . The manual is now outdated… so I won’t link it… (it’s still on the blog, though) The download version is more interesting, because you can resize the window (and every component will resize with it).

It’s now possible to navigate the palette using the arrow keys. And I noticed that most tilesets have few autotiles… so I changed and you must input now how many autotiles are on the end of your tileset.

Hi, I’m Matteo Gagliardi, composer of the President vs Eevol sountrack.
I use a 55 pounds vintage Korg keyboard (from 1993) as my main working tool. Its only storage is a 3.5” fdd drive.
It’s mostly made of lead.
I upgraded my DAW for the first time since 2006 last week.
The total cost of my home studio doesn’t exceed 1000$ (excluding the PC).
I’m a Windows user. My DAW works only on Windows and I’m too lazy to change.
I mostly desktops. I have only one laptop, a ten years old Dell Latitude that I use to check the mail.
I value things that lasts. In this world full of short-lived things, music has to be eternal.

Hi, I’m Sun Shiranui, President vs Eevol team lead.
Even though Matteo likes going about his equipment and how it’s better than newer technologies, I use a 15″ MacBook Pro for all my computing needs.
It’s portable and sturdy. I also use a Intous 5 M to help me when making graphics and a Keystation 61es MIDI controller from M-Audio when i want to compose.
I don’t have any desktop computers anymore, and I like getting my hands on new technologies.
My setup is pricier than Matteo’s, because Apple likes money, but I still think my investment is worth what I get.
But when making creative work, even though equipment is important, in the end you can make good stuff even with poor resources. Hard work is all that matters!

We know each other since forever and we both love videogames.
With the other Team OR members, we made this game with our heart and our differencies helped to make the game better.
We hope you will enjoy it.
Happy new year from the President vs Eevol team

We all love goats too!

This is my post-mortem for my Ludum Dare 25 game, Kleptomaniac. Kleptomaniac is a topdown-stealth game, you can check it out here.

What went well:

• I did some small things that really saved time. I made a special object corner for the walls, so that it automatically sets to the right corner dynamically. If I had to manually do this it would have costed me a lot of time.
• Level design, I mostly did level design in Paint.NET and then I would turn it into a level in about an hour. This went pretty quickly which was pretty good.
• Planning my time, I did all my code on Saturday and the art, SFX and music on Sunday.

What went wrong:

• The controls aren’t the best. It would be better if I had just used WASD instead of WS + Mouse. I realized this at a late stage in the compo, with only a few hours to spare and while implementing it wasn’t hard, it broke a lot of my collision code and so I decided that I wanted to stay with WASD.
• The music is slightly repetitive, around the fifth level it gets annoying, so I should have probably made 2 soundtracks instead of just one. I really need to learn this, because it is something I do 9/10 times.
• Making the story, the story was honestly the last thing I did. I had all my levels done and I had to change a lot of objectives just to make my story right. After all it is still a shitty story.

Overall I think the game turned out okay. It’s definitely not the best game I ever made but people seem to be enjoying it apart from a few little things here and there. I probably won’t start working on a post-compo version, because I don’t really feel like it.

Why did I find that the hardest part of Ludum Dare?  Sorry guys.  Some of them were even good!  I’ll give an honorable mention to Under The Bed, that game was awesome.  But it was still hard work playing 20 games.

——————————————————————-
And I have just rated my 200th game.
——————————————————————-

In honor of 200 ratings, here’s the one that took spot #200

White Wizard Tower For Sale – by GJ

The game is more a prototype than a finished product, and there’s the beginnings of a complex gesture system that sadly has only one spell it recognizes. This entry needs polish and some tweaking, but the concept is very interesting and solid even with only one spell and one enemy type.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to place in the final results, you NEED votes. The easiest way to get votes is by rating other games. Judging lasts for 3 weeks following the end of Ludum Dare. For best effect, rate 20 games as soon as possible. Rating more games is encouraged.

Yes, but does anybody has a clue of how many ratings are needed to place in the final results? I’ve got 22 comments, would that be enough? Also, does everybody always comment while rating?

I have successfully completed version 2.0 of the game presented here and, like others, have added to the download page. I hope you enjoy it XD

This is the Patch Notes:

– Auto fire (no need to spam the left mouse button)
+ Highscore board implemented (Each player can challenge your friends at home or, as I do, my work colleagues)
+ Spells: Added 4 spells: 3 unlockable to the score of 650/2000/4500.
– Spell 1: Arrows (orc archers will shoot two arrows to hit the eagles coming from above)
– Spell 2: Trolls (2 large trolls come out from the tower that will kill the first 10 enemy units that will be on their way)
– Spell 3: Meteors (A meteor shower will wipe out a large number of incoming enemies)
– Spell 4: Heal (The tower will regenerate 30% of his life)

“Mordor Must Resist!” Ludum Dare’s Page

See ya!

Although there are a lot of good things, some games just catch your eye.
I would like these games to do well, so here is a bit of advertising.

Maybe they are not the best in any category, but all in all for me just GREAT:

First one: little villain.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=14772

Second one:

We meet again, mr. Mond!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=12053

After over a week of thorough polishing and bug fixing, I’ve finally released the improved post compo version of my ludum entry Mad Princess! Play the new and improved game here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/608745
Check out and rate the original entry here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=11391

There are lots of improvements over the original, for example:

• Total of 21 levels, with the final stage being epic and tough final boss fight!

• There is now a proper tutorial how to use every trap

• Stage Selection and game saves progress after every won level.

• Hotkeys 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to pick up different traps!

• Traps don’t slide down hills anymore, but enemies attacking them will! Use this as your adventage.

• Agiles cannot run through Wall trap anymore and stop to attack them just like Regulars, but they deal half as much damage.

• Bombs can only be placed one at the time, but they explode little quicker now. They also won’t explode instantly when dropped on the princess or other traps. (except Spike Carpet)

• Most traps don’t destroy each other anymore, in fact, if you drop a trap on the same type of trap, for example, Wall on already existing Wall, the old one will be fixed!

• The princess now correctly stops if you manage to kill the enemy who has reacher her, so enemy touching her is not instant lose anymore.

• Bombs can be dropped everywhere with the exeption of Spike Carpet, which destroys the carpet and makes the bomb explode instantly. Good for sacrificing almost broken Spike Carpets to wipe out Spike Carpet immune Agiles!

• Enemies now flash when they take damage!

• Crossbows don’t shoot the instant they are set on the battlefield.

• Chain Ball appears much more often now and has reduced speed and increased HP.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013 at 1:26 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.

Idea

At some point, we have seriously decided to turn Super Mario Bros upside down and make a game called «Mario’s Nightmare.» Goomba was going to be the main character, with Mario and Luigi as enemies. Trying to develop this idea further, we even started to play our NES (.. instead of making the game).

In the end, we chose one idea that we could implement in time. In the game we play as crazy professor. He had just made the discovery of his life. But because of the fear that someone could steal his discovery, the professor turns into an embittered sociopath. The player should help him to get rid of the pesky scientists who are eager to get the cherished formula.

Development

Initially I spent too much time creating the main background. The size of the characters and animation were corrected during the final hours. And that, as expected, did not make the animation perfect — the main character runs as if he has a broken leg.

As for programming, at this time, we’ve decided to use a new approach. The prototype was written not with squares or rectangles, but with quite a real images taken from public sources. Later, it allowed us to save a lot of time on the sprites connection.

Music was written at night of the second day of development. Initially, the soundtrack was going to be funny and a little crazy. After several unsuccessful attempts, there was written a serious and heavy title theme about which we had some doubts. But as there has been spent too much time on the music, we decided to leave it as it is.

Unfortunately, we forget to add some game tutorial. And at first, many people could not understand how to play the game. They had to read description on the community page. We immediately tried to fix it by adding to the page with the game information about controls, game elements, etc. Also, we’ve added a gameplay video, the ending of which came out very funny.

Interesting Facts

— From the very start of theme voting, we tried not to discuss and not to see all the possible variants.

— Initially, enemies climbed the stairs to their full height, and then began to walk. But after adding animation, we realized that dancing Gangnam Style scientists — it is too much. We’ve cheated and made their appearance on the top as soon as they reached it. As it seems to us, it turned out not bad.

— We did not have time to do the death animation of enemies, so we decided to fill them with white and then make them disappear. Since we did not have time to implement our fill color programmatically, we decided to fill animation manually. And then simply replaced the image.

— The game score is incorrectly counted. You will get nothing for the bomb activation. All because we hung score increase at the wrong event.

— Due to a bug in the game, you can gather up to 4 flasks, although the maximum amount should not exceed 3.

— Despite the fact that falling bricks have its own formula of random correction, in most cases, brick falls on your head.

— Devolonter had to become a reference of the creeping up the stairs enemy, showing this action on the floor. Now he can not look at these characters calmly. Their animation has turned the most plausible.

View entry

Tags: Mad Professor, post-mortem

Can someone fully explain to me the different Ludum Dares and rules for them? Thanks.

You can play and rate this game here.

Tags: timelapse

The game

Path to Death is a turn-based strategy game where you upgrade different locations you hold to defend your last location (the throne) from the enemy forces.

Every location has an attacking value (sword), a defending value (shield) and lives (hearths) for you (pictured at the top of a location) and for the attackers (pictured at the bottom of a location).

The attacking value is the probability to hit, whereas the defending value gives the chance to cancel the attacker’s hit.

The enemies move to the first location, fight against your forces in this place and then move forward to the next location and so on.

Every location has a skilltree where you can invest the skillpoints you get after each round. They increase the attack values, enable special abilities and more.

My intention was to check out the “skilltree as a game mechanic”, providing a complex or deep game while balancing the mathematics of such systems with a narrative. Now then to my personal evaluation of the game:

What went right

I’m happy that people understand my attempt to propose a dynamic narration given with the skills in the skilltree. I got positive feedback about that, so this went right.
I’m also happy with the visual style of my game. Surely there is a lot of improvable things, but drawing the little icons was fun and satisfying.

What went wrong

I missed (again) to have enough time to test, bugfix and balance the game. There are so many bugs in Path to Death and it’s way too easy. Perhaps it’s a harder challenge to lose…
During the jam I hung around with friends who participated too. This was really fun. But not eating much and not sleeping was (again!) not that good at all. After the weeks passed, I think it was not jamming, but rather physical destruction  : D

My resolution for the next time

Sleep more and make a more accessible game which you can start and just play without getting into abstract background systems.

You can play the game here!

Tags: post-mortem

This Suese has received his OUYA Dev Kit.   You are witnessing quite possibly the first 3rd party image of a working OUYA console.  How exciting!

Revolutionary Indie game console for the TV.

Lots of people said we wouldn’t get this far,  but we did.  The Indie game has changed.  The TV is now ours!  Rejoice.

I’ll post the unboxing video soon with my initial review with bugs and bouquets alike.

Tags: ouya

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2013 at 12:45 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.

First off I apologize for getting such a late start on rating, but I’ve had many issues come up and didn’t really have time to submit a full entry myself.  Normally I just rate myself and put up a “best of” every 100 games I rate, but this year I’ll be doing it a little different, plus kicking off an “event” I’ll be doing at the same time.

First, the link! http://www.twitch.tv/raptor851

Here at my twitch.tv page i’ll be livestreaming playing and reviewing as many ludumdare games as is humanly possible in the next four days (while still keeping the reviews fair and detailed).   My order will be semi-random, but for anyone who joins the stream and shares their link I’ll be happy to skip ahead to their game immediately and give some live feedback/directly answer why I liked or disliked certain things.  It would be nice as well if afterwards you stuck around in the stream to view other people’s game reviews, and perhaps provide some feedback of your own.

Later, though it’s going to be a small one this week due to the ludum dare reviews, I’m going to start my challenge this year.  Every week I will develop and release a fully cross-platform desktop game from scratch, using ideas from the previous week’s stream or just coming up with something on the fly, and using the development and testing of them, and perhaps support of the stream, to help drive forward my game engine project (unfortunately it’s kickstarter only raised 10% of the funding, so i’ll have to re-launch)

Hope to see some of you around!

This was my first entry into Ludum Dare and I must say I enjoyed taking part. With Christmas fast approaching I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to work on this project but I did feel I managed to make something which is fun (at least that’s what I’ve gathered from the comments).

What went right?

I spent the first few hours playing around with ideas in my head, what sort of villain I wanted. Eventually I came to wanting to make a game based on old sci-fi horror movies where a monster terrorises a city destroying everything in it’s path (like Godzilla). With this decided it then made it very easy to figure what style and assets I needed.

I knew I wouldn’t have much time so I started by using small block to create structures and the main characters. I knew that if there was time at the end I could improve them, the main thing I needed to get down was gameplay, so that’s what I aimed for.

I started constructing buildings for my city from a collection of tiles. This was quite time consuming and if I wanted to make a whole city it would take hours. I opted to go for a procedural algorithm which could generate the buildings for me. This was a great choice, not only did it speed up development time, it also meant that the game is slightly different on each play through and in theory (depending on how well you dodge the tank shells) could never end.

From here I added functionality to destroy the buildings by simply passing them, which became a bit addictive when testing it. Functionality for the tanks and civilians soon followed it was still a bit dull however. This is where the sound effects really made a difference. As soon as I added in the screams and building destruction sounds it became a completely different experience.

I then topped it off with a grain overlay, some mist and also had time to make a title screen.

If I had more time…

If I had more time I would like to add a selection of monsters for the user to choose who to play as. I would also like to add more units to attack the monster, i.e. planes etc. Would allow the monster to be able to eat civilians to regain health. I would also make it more difficult to destroy the buildings in an attempt to add some skill in addition to the existing dodging to the game.

Conclusion

Overall I enjoyed creating my entry and plan to continue working on it. If you would like to checkout my entry the link is available below (requires XNA 4 to play).

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=19151

Tags: post-mortem

Hi there!
 I'd like to present my game "Keine Zeit für Würmer".
 
 The game "Keine Zeit für Würmer“ ("No Time For Worms“) is an old school
 2DPoint& Click-Adventure in which the player is catapulted in the World of
 birds. The same is happening to the human Martin who accidentally gets on a
 city tree in the World of birds.
 
 The little bird Fritz who is an ice cream seller in the local shopping centre and
 the main character of this game, discovers that human and takes him to his old
 but scatterbrained buddy Fred. Martin can stay there until Fritz is back from
 work.
 
 But as the young ice cream seller wants to pick up Martin after his work the
 human is untraceable. Fred also does not know where Martin could be and that
 is how an exciting and thrilling search begins.
 
 A world full of strange birds is to be discovered! Accompany Fritz on his
 adventure and find out the reason for the mysterious disappearance of Martin.
 
 Download: http://www.keinezeitfuerwuermer.de
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

HOWDY:

Well here we are, two weeks or so after the comp ended and i have to say i enjoyed my first game making weekend as much as i’d hoped too! There’s a nice sense of achievement in my belly at the very thought of my little game existing from out of my fuzzy head and in to the world…. So anyway, enough silly babble and smarmy yarn….

GRAPHICS:

I have fiddled around with pixel artwork for a good while now and this project brought together that harmonious joy of blocky stuff and very limited colour palettes….and that’s what i’m happy with most graphically. The late 80’s style restraint on the palette and the consistency of all the artwork in general. downside is a lack of much animation i guess. My short timelapse video will show you the creation of stuff in more detail: https://vimeo.com/55937163

SOUND:

Oddly i think the greatest thing from the weekend for me was the matching of overall pace and soundtrack which helps the rather limited gameplay to have way more frantic appeal.  BIG MENTION though goes to TWEAKBENCH : http://tweakbench.com/   for there amazingly good nes/8bit vst plugins that gave me just right sounds to use on this game! cheers them’s guys.

GAMEPLAY:

Well it seems my main intentions were to create an old school game with old school game sensibilities….a little too much it seems.

Im pretty crappy at playing games as a rule (except at Burnout 1,2,3 and Lightforce on the ZX Speccy. All challengers welcome!!!) But i do love a good challenge and a way to get around the fact that im also pretty ropey at tight programming (hence the use of good ‘ole Stencyl and very basic mouse click input) was to amp the difficulty curve through the roof!  I wussed out a bit by adding the training bit but i wanted people to at least see all the levels after braking my balls designing the damn things! I really should have made better hit boxes for the objects and a preparation countdown before each 5 second round…… I forgot that most people don’t mind high difficulty if they think its actually fair or totally just the own fault that they lost.

SO…..

That sums it up, im  pleased with the overall result and glad that a fair amount of you generally liked it, but i have learned a decent lesson about gameplay….. A difficult game  is okay but a FAIR game is better.

> CLICK HERE TO PLAY MY GAME <

I’ve been trying to rate as many games as I can and try to do a few a day.

I figure it’s worth focusing on the most active people as well. If you play and rate my game (and leave a comment so I can click back to your game), I’ll return the favor. May as well swap ratings in the final days of judging?

>> Here’s my entry <<

It’s very quick to get into and will take you 5 minutes total. Look forward to checking out more of your games!

You can read the blog post here.

Another team radmars game finished!  (whew, this one was a biggun *_*)

This time we went with a top-down ‘brawler-esque’ exploratory thing? Not sure. I’ll refrain from talking too much about what we were ‘going for’ with this game, other than to say we pushed ourselves pretty hard this time. (one might say… to the brink? HA!) 

Emarcotte and Adhesion coded it up~

spacemars got to get his weird on for our lovely character sprites.

Brendo designed the levels, spacemars and tokken made the word-tile sprites~

and Adhesion proved what a boss he is (yet again) with the SFX and music,

more detailed postmortems and goodies inside!

Goodies: 

Art Timelapse  *this is kinda NSFW* (spacemars can be rather crude):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC0wfGqsWH4

Music & Code Timelapse (adhesion) :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vLE3C0EcbY

soundtrack:

http://adhesion.mu/sic/Adhesion-theBRINK-OST.zip

Now time for the rants.

Emarcotte: (who broke his previous postmortem word count of 19)

” ”

Adhesion: ( who actually wrote quite a bit this time~)

Whew! This Ludum Dare was pretty brutal – probably the most
collectively difficult one we’ve done so far, though Minimars was way
more personally stressful due to a last-minute insane memory leak. Our
idea gelled at least gameplay-wise relatively early on which was nice,
though lots of little details remained vague for a while which was a
bit frustrating. Scoping was a bit painful – this was probably the
most ambitious game we’ve attempted purely in terms of the amount of
little details, though that didn’t really become clear until we
realized we were really running out of time. Thankfully spacemars came
up with the key thematic aspect to tie the whole thing together on
Sunday. (It’s pretty subtle, but if you figure it out… hoo boy…)
As far as my coding productivity, I wasn’t able to get as much as I
would’ve liked on Saturday, partially because I lost some time to a
silly velocity-related math issue – plus I didn’t have all of Monday
to work like I did last time, so the game suffered a bit for polish,
particularly in the sound department. Audio otherwise went really
well, particularly since I felt like I could be a bit more adventurous
beyond basic chiptune stuff thanks to our theme. The rest of the
coding was pretty much fine too (though I’m not happy with the quality
in some parts – this always happens…) though multiple collision
issues reared their ugly head again thanks to some changes in melonJS
that we didn’t notice. Even though we didn’t do another platformer,
I’d like to do something more adventurous next time – some of the
coding felt pretty paint-by-numbers, aside from standard bugfixing and
whatnot. Also, having a new team member for more art & ideas was great
too of course.

in SUM:

• melon is a great platform as usual, but have to keep on top of changes to it
• need to be less vague about details/scope – write everything down and make decisions earlier
• time management time management time management

Tokken:

“I’m not writing a GOD DAMNED postmortem!”

Brendo:

(has apparently fallen of f the face of the earth, he does this after every LD though so I’m sure he’s fine)

Spacemars:

last time I wrote a massive wall of text, so this time ill keep it short.

• Use Tiled for map editing.
• I need to find a better tool for making sprite sheets.
• 4-way movable characters seem to take much more than 4x the mental stamina  to make *_*;
• As usual, the theme wasnt one I picked, but it always seems to work out better that way.
• Really tired, but really proud of this one. go team!

That’s all for this one!

>> Check out the game! << 

Join Rating Rescue Rangers!

Since I got some great feedbacks on The Quite Annoying League (Thank you!) I thought some might be interested in a time-lapse and post-mortem. So here they are :

Time Lapse  (integration doesn’t seem to work, click the link) :

(some little part are missing, that’s because I used to stop the recording everytime I went out for a cigarettes, and sometimes I forgot to relaunch it when I came back)

The Quite Annoying League Time Lapse par Oujevipo

Post-Mortem

What went right

The theme

As a lot of people, I was quite sure the theme would be End of the World. So I started to think about some game ideas like 2 or 3 days before the compo, and I came up with many of them. Having a game idea before the compo seemed like a good thing, but deep inside, I knew it was a problem, because 1) I would feel like cheating 2) it wouldn’t be as fun. So, the You Are The Villain ‘s victory was quite a relief!

The train-trip

I spent my three first LDs all alone, I spent the last one with a friend (Jam) and this time, I wanted to do something different, so I went in a LD gathering in Montpellier, 2 hours away from my house. To go there, I had to take the train (yeah, in France, we’ve got trains), and that’s exactly when I got my game idea : a train trip in which people are quite annoying, obviously because that’s what I was living at this very moment. This confirms something : I never ever ever ever got a LD idea in front of my computer, always in a café, a train, or walking in the streets. So…this could be a tip.

The gathering

Working with other people (even if I made the game alone) was very motivating. I was a bit afraid at first, but it turned out to be just great. I met a lot of cool people, I’ve seen them working on their games, some gave me ideas, some lend me some material (microphone…). It was a great experience overall, and very useful too! I never worked that much on a LD : usually, I work something like 30h on my LD games, this time, I worked 42 hours, and wasn’t even sleepy!

Cigarette breaks

My biggest fear was the fact that I wouldn’t be able to smoke in front of my computer as I used to, but it turns out to be great too, because I had to go out to smoke from time to time, and think about the game away from the screen. Once again, that’s when I got the best ideas, and when I decided, for exemple, to restart some things from scratch because it wasn’t that good.

The mini-games concept

My game is in fact made of five mini-games (and some barely interactive cutscene). I think this is a good format for LD games : after 30 hours, I could have submitted my game with 3 mini-games for exemple, or work to add some of them. It’s a very good way to be in times, whatever happens, and I understand why this LD have so much WarioWares minigames in it!

What went wrong

Annoyance

I have a problem with Adventure Game Studio : I can’t find a way to create a skip button to skip many dialogues at the same time. So…replaying the same scenes again and again in the game could be quite annoying. The game being called “The quite annoying league”, people might think it’s meta etc…but in fact, I don’t believe it’s a good thing to annoy the player, even for a laugh, and especially not when he has hundreds of games to rate.

Sounds

The game has sounds, this is good. But I feel like I cheated by using a train sound from Freesound.org (I warned the players/raters about this, but still), it’s not something I made, and this is frustrating. I wanted to record train sounds myself with my mouth, something funny like repeating “bruitdetrainbruitdetrainbruitdetrainbruitdetrain” (which means “train sound” in french, and actually sound quite like a train sound), but I’m too bad at editing audio, and it wasn’t good at all. On the other hand, I’m quite happy with all the other sound effects I made myself.

And that’s all.

Overall, I feel things went mostly right for me.

can’t wait for the next ludum dare

Tags: post-mortem, time lapse

I just wanted to share my progress with my post-jam version of Evil Chopper

• Multiplayer! Up to four players, same-screen mayhem
• Gamepad support (Chrome only so far). Great for multiplayer!
• Touch device onscreen controls. Works in multiplayer as well.
• Settings for graphics, sound etc. Some browsers lie about their webgl support and then you can just force the 2d context mode
• Graphical improvements for the 2d context mode

Now I just need to create some more interesting levels and an intro screen…

Hello everybody! This is the second of a series of four postmortems for our LD25 game “President vs Eevol“. Every article will cover a different aspect and point of view on the game’s development. The following post-mortem is on the game’s coding and is written by programmer whitesora.

President vs Eevol
Postmortem #2 of 4: Coding

Hello everyone, whitesora here. For this LD I was the programmer of Team Omniaring’s “President vs Eevol”, a stealth game and also our first Ludum Dare entry. As Shiranui did, I’ll try to give you a small “behind the scenes” of the coding process, our expectations, what went right and what wrong. This time, of course, from my point of view.

1. Participating or not

Believe it or not, I learned that Sun Shiranui, our team designer, wanted to take part in the Jam only two days before the start. In the beginning, I refused to help him, since I not only didn’t know anything about creating a videogame, but I hadn’t even heard anything about Flashpunk before.
In the end, he managed to persuade me, and so I found myself taking part in this project, with no idea of how to use Flashpunk and with the pressure of doing everything in only 72 hours.

The result of our hard work. I still can’t believe we did it.

2. A small head-start

No, I didn’t start coding things one day before.

Since I had never used Flashpunk before, it’s like the LD started half-a day earlier: the afternoon before the start, I downloaded everything needed to start coding using Flashpunk, and I also had to learn how to use it properly in something like 4 hours. Once my “tutorial session” ended, the LD began.
I was surprised to see “You are the Villain” as the theme, since I was pretty sure that “End of the World” was going to be chosen, and right after that we began the brainstorming to decide what our game was going to look like.

One of the things we thought to do was to implement our avatar as small portraits.

3. Our expectations

Even tough I study IT at university, I never really tried to make a videogame. Sure, I’ve messed around a bit with programs like RPG Maker, but nothing serious.
I always loved videogames, ever since when I started playing the old Doom 2 when I was 2 years old (literally), and I still play a lot now; Sometimes I start defining the base mechanic of a game I’d like to develop some day, but this was the first time I’ve really done something.

So, I expected to come up with something even worse than this, but the result was way better than anything we expected.

4. The results (Pros/Cons)

Almost everything went way better than expected: good music, good graphics, good animations, good gameplay… I even learned to code using Flashpunk AND to make a working videogame.
But, as I said, if almost everything went smoothly, then there are things that went bad, too.

First thing, we spent a lot of time to solve organization issues (especially us overwriting each-other’s files), so I hope that the next time we will be able to organize our work better and without any issues, but the thing that went bad the most was the boss battle.
In my mind, the battle was supposed to have 3 phases: running away from the player, following a “strange” pattern and moving randomly. The second phase was pretty easy to do (I programmed all the movement patterns of the game, after all), but the first and third ones were really buggy, and we only had time to fix only the first phase. Too bad.

Our boss. He may be buggy, but I like it.

5. Post Post Mortem

In the end I can say that I don’t regret anything of this Ludum Dare, it was fun and I had the chance to learn a lot of new things. Expect to see me again in some other project.
Whitesora here, ending my in-depth look into the development process. Don’t forget to try out and rate the result of all our hard work, President vs Eevol!

Click here to play Dr. Vile in The Greater Good!

A huge thank you goes out to everyone who has played, rated, and commented on our entry: Dr. Vile in The Greater Good! We’re very happy and grateful to have received some great feedback from all of you 😀

We’re planning on expanding Dr. Vile into Java and iOS so stay tuned here and follow us on Twitter (@GreenPixelDev) to stay updated! We greatly appreciate your support and continued feedback!

Happy gaming 😀

Tags: LD #25

Watch me make my game!

This time around I record my face the whole time, but I did it really stupidly. I actually had a camera program open for the 48 hours, meaning I could watch my face. It actually turned out to be quite distracting, and it took up quite a bit of the screen. Next time I’ll prepare something a bit less annoying, but I’m glad I did it because it definitely makes the video a lot more interesting.

If you haven’t played yet….

Click Here To Play And Rate X-Moon 

X-Moon

I already made a post the day after LD ended about how ambitious my LD concepts should be. When coming up with a concept for LD I like it when that concept borders on the impossible of what I can make in only 48 hours. Of course it’s easy to venture into “way impossible” territory, and that’s what usually happens. It happened this time.

I never did a propper post-mortem however, so here it is.

What went right:

Graphics: I had very little problem finding the right style and keeping it consistent. It didn’t take long for me to create a nice palette and start pixeling. This was important, because I had a lot of programming ahead of me.

Music: Music came naturally as well. I had only 2 pieces planned (battle and overworld) but I missed a town piece, which was finished in no more than an hour. I didn’t end up spending a lot of time on either audio or graphics and I went on to programming sooner then I would normally have. The best thing is I don’t think it actually shows.

Programming: Making an RPG, I knew programming was going to be long and difficult, but I never really got stuck anywhere.

Unintentional humor: I never set out to make a funny game, and I think most people who do set out to do that usually fail. What ended up happening is that a lot of test messages, initial dialogue and one second decisions ended up staying in the final version, somehow giving the game a cohesive humorous character, that people have seemed to like.

What went wrong:

Programming: While I didn’t run into any mayor problems, there was simply too much to do. The battle system took up so much time, and after that I still had to program breeding, which I had already carefully planned out before making the battle system so it would take less time. I’m actually happy I managed to finish those two things at all.

Feedback: A lot of players commented that it wasn’t clear to them why they died. The game doesn’t really give good feedback on how much damage something does and why. If elements align up in the opponents favor that quickly ends up in an instant kill. In the end one of the more important skills for a player to learn was knowing when to run away.

Enemy design: By the time everything was in place and I could start designing the world and enemies, there was almost no time left. What should have happpened was that I had a number of enemies that increased in difficulty, forcing the player to breed bit by bit to create better and better critters. In the end I only had three enemies. The difficulty gap between those enemies was so large that I don’t think many players felt motivated to breed better critters.

Conclusion:

Yes, I did end up choosing a concept that was way too ambitious. But in the end I did have fun trying to do the undoable. I’m proud of what I did manage to do, and I will probably try to do something insane like this again next time.

Some things you just never learn.

 
Play the game here

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2013 at 6:18 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.

Evolution

“You are the villain”. My immediate thoughts revolved around men in diabolical capes with greased back hair, big nose, moustache and evil cackling laughter. Railway tracks. Ladies in distress. Cartoons…

I put those thoughts to one side.

What I like most about the pressure of 48 hours is that allows one to take big creative risks. This, for me, is the most satisfying part of Ludum Dare. When I play other LD48 games what I most want to see is originality – a spark of brilliance born of panic and enthusiasm – a glimpse into a gaming universe which no sane gaming studio would seriously explore.

I wanted to create a game which, rather than shrank away from the grotesque possibilities of “you [the player] are the villain”, embraced it with perversion and panache.

The (admittedly obvious) theme of initiating a mass shooting grabbed my attention.

During day one of LD, as I progressed with my design, news came over the radio: a massacre had occurred in Newtown, USA; a massacre of mostly young children. A sad day for humanity.

I decided to pursue my current game idea regardless. But the tragic events at Newtown helped me focus on what I considered important to such a game concept.

There was to be no romanticism, and the game would itself accuse the player of being a coward.

The visuals would be abstract, a representation of a cold calculated killer. Killing shapes is easy – killing people not so.

There would be no screams from the victims, nor graphic spurts of blood, nor spasms of death – figures would simply fade, as if fading from memory, fading from consciousness.

The gun would not let out a satisfying “BANG!”, but would be a simple muted “click”.

All of this would help distance the player from the act, but the fascinating twist is that I wanted this abstract interpretation to represent a very literal interpretation of the mind of the killer. What you are seeing in this game IS what the killer sees. This is the only way the killer can shield him/herself from the awful truth.

There is also a simple blood overlay with opacity and movement changes which reflect the players current health. It begins to obscure the player’s vision as health gets critical. As the veil of blood descends, it fogs the player’s vision… disorientation… panic… a sense of inevitable death… and finally, an urge to die.

The only tenuous thread connecting the player with reality would be the background noise – a blend of street sounds and general panic. These sounds represent encroaching reality – the thin line between  the killer and victims – and would attempt to worm their way into the ear.

I am happy that most people seemed to pick up on this idea, with many comments reflecting upon these stylistic devices.

Did it work?

The fun challenge here as a game designer is to make this style work, while trying to embed the mechanics of a fun game.

I think I succeeded, in that if you take away the cosmetics, you are still left with a game. That being said, definite improvements could be made.

There are a couple of interesting mechanics used. The first, is that civilian targets score more than police targets, even though civilians can not defend themselves but police will fire at you. Presently, a civilian scores 10 points, while a police officer only scores 5. A miss costs you 1 point to discourage mouse mashing type play.

The second game mechanic is the suicide mechanic. There are many ways the suicide score calculation could work, and originally I wanted it to oscillate a little. But in the end I used this simple formula:

suicideBonus = Math.floor(health/4) + 10

There is an annoying bug somewhere which makes the shooting collision tests a bit iffy.

More graphic feedback for player health would be better. For example, the player foreground sprite dims/flashes when damaged/low health. I am a little disappointed I didn’t include this obvious idea in the original, as I think it’s a small addition that would make a lot of difference.

Some floating score indicators could help too, appearing when you shoot a target.

More graphic variety would is also an easy thing to add.

Cheers,

Play the game here.

Tags: postmortem, snap

Hello everybody! This is the third of a series of four postmortems for our LD25 game “President vs Eevol“. Every article will cover a different aspect and point of view on the game’s development. The following post-mortem is on the game’s art design and is written by animator Daniele Piscitello.

President vs Eevol
Postmortem #3 of 4: Art

Good day! I’m Daniele Piscitello, and I worked as the only artist for Team OmniaRing’s first game “President vs Eevol”. As the other members of our team are doing I’ll talk a bit about some aspects of how the art and the animation of “President vs Eevol” have been done.

The game’s main idea was to have a sort of evil british gentleman infiltrating in the President’s mansion. The player’s objective is to find the hidden key and take it to the door in order to reach the next level sneaking silently and fooling the president’s armed bodyguards. When we came up with the game’s design I understood that, in order to properly follow the theme, we needed to give our protagonist an high level of characterization. In a few hours the basic look of “Eevol the evil” was ready. Most of the first of the three days was spent only on making that exaggerated sneaky tiptoe animation that immediately gave life and an evilish look to Eevol.

I decided that our protagonist should have had a very peculiar and evilish walking animation.

After that I designed his signature bomb. I opted for a classical looking bomb immersed in a teacup. That was very funny to do and I hope that it made the players smile for a moment.

I tried to follow a priority list for the graphic and the animation, so, after completing all the main character’s animations I noticed that half of our time had already passed and I still had to make all the other graphics. After I completed all the tiles that compose the game’s levels I understood that I didn’t have enough time to make a proper walking animation for the enemies. At the beginning the idea for the enemy’s design was to make them human. I have to admit that I never liked the idea because I thought it was too common to have human guards and that something different could have make the game atmosphere funnier, so I decided to make some floating robot bodyguards, which were easier to animate due to their lack of legs.

You need to make some compromises if you develop something in 72 hours, and
animating a floating robot was easier than animating a human.

I would have loved to make animations for the enemies in all the four directions, but the thing I regret the most is that the levels are too much empty for my taste. In my mind, the levels should have been full of furniture and little things, but I fortunately understood in time that such level of detail is almost impossible to achieve in only 3 days.I hope that with the help of all the experience I’ve earned through this Ludum Dare, by the time the next one comes I’ll be able to produce a lot more in a shorter amount of time, even though I realize that animation is always a looong process.

I’m an animation student, but I started my course just this October so they haven’t even started teaching to animate anything yet, and therefore everything that I made for this game was absolutely self-taught. This was also the first time I seriously animated something and I’m very happy of the result and of all the amazing feedbacks I received for my animations. Thank you all! It was very important for me. If you want to know more about me in the future be sure to check out my Twitter account!

You can reach Daniele Piscitello via Twitter at: https://twitter.com/danipiscitello

Next up is the last of our four postmortems for President vs Eevol: the music postmortem by composer Matteo Gagliardi.

Tags: animation, art, eevol, president, vs

This is my post-mortem for my 1st Ludum Dare game, Death Star.

What went right

• Finished the game in 48hrs! This was my 1st priority.
• Using Web technologies (HTML5/CSS3/Javascript) really sped up development
• Ate 3 meals a day and got some decent sleep during compo

What went wrong

• Game controls suck! Apparently everyone who played the game complain about the crosshairs being too difficult to control with the arrow keys. I think part of the problem was that pressing a key would cancel all other keys. So, once you were ready to shoot (by pressing the spacebar) this would cancel the crosshairs from moving. I think using a mouse would remedy this fine
• Game only renders (correctly) in webkit browsers
• Music track does not loop properly
• Not a orignal story nor game, but what do you expect in 48hrs 😉
• I left a boiled egg too long in my microwave which resulted in a big mess!

Timelapse

Conclusion

Participating in this event was a lot of fun. The people here are just awesome! I love reading their posts and viewing the in-game progress screenshots.

Here’s to an awesome 2013 year and I wish you all success!

Play Death Star!

All in all I wasn’t very pleased with my entry, but have seen a lot of good stuff. I think the quality this LD was very high.

There is just some time to do a postmortem for my game called: ‘You naughty beast’.

So what went right:

1.  I finished the game within 48 hours, which was one of my goals. It was very tight, and in the last minute I had to come up with a title (which I hate now).

2. It was more of a game then my previous effort (‘fun but not much of a game’).

3. Faster, tighter coding. I did some planning, made an actual class diagram, had a good system for difficulty tweaking, better imlemented intro animation technique.

4. Better preparation. This was my second LD, but I also made some games during the mini LD’s and had some experience with Flashpunk. Also, I brainstormed all the top-10 themes so my brain would come up with an idea moer readily.

And what didn’t go right:

1. My worst mistake: No practice in my method. I have had some experience with Flashpunk since the last LD, but decided not to go with pixelgraphics this time. I made sprites in Flash and wanted to convert them to spritemaps.  This gave all kinds of unforseen trouble and cost me WAY TO MUCH time.  To get the graphics at the right positioning and the collision the right way was a big pain. And Flashpunk did throw me some curve balls. It turned out, I didn’t understand it enough.

Because of this I ran out of time, I had no time to tweak the difficulty and some of the humour and gameplay had to be sacrificed (for instance no real end, just a score, no cutscene).

Conclusion: I should have used the warmup weekend.

2.  No objectivity. I  tried to finish my game in 48 hours, which didn’t leave any time to sit back and try to see how other people would play the game.  Ludum dare people play a lot of games in three weeks. They wont take the time to master a mediocre game. Most of the feedback was about the controls. I played my game so much during development, that I didn’t realise how troublesome they were.  Because of this my game was too difficult.

3. Finish within 48 hours. It was one of my goals this LD, but after investing a day for a post compo version, my game was A LOT better.

4. Take more time for my idea. I hated the theme and I grabbed the first idea that came up. It wasn’t bad, but could be better.

Next time I’ll aim for 48 hours, but 72 will be OK if that is what is needed. try to do it more  more relaxed and less ambitious, but have more fun.

For this LD25 I came up with the game “Crime in the City“. This is a cardgame where you compose a deck of baddies and send them on raids throughout the city to raise the crime level in the city and, ultimately, take control of it.

What went wrong

The theme
I wasn’t very fond of this theme, “You are the villain”. Partly because with my partner we had just finished a game that let you play as the villain (Demons vs Fairyland). It made the theme feel somewhat old to me, and made me feel uninspired. All I could think of was the villains in super hero stories.

During these last two weeks, I played and rated about 80 games. I was really impressed by the ones that put the player in the opposite of the role he usually has. I wish I could think of something like that.

Bugs
I used AS3. As soon I do my second compilation, everything is all broken ! My little base code doesn’t work anymore and it’s an error message I never had before. The compiler enumerates all my classes and says they’re undefined or something like that… It wasn’t a good start !
Turns out I had given a class the same name as a package, which was a very bad thing to do. I was lucky it only took me a few minutes to figure it out.

I also made my usual mistakes a few times :
– write “lenght” instead of “length”. Where is auto-completion when you need it !
– write “i < array" instead of "i < array.length" in a for loop…
– instructions happening in a bad order, but at this point the code is too tricky for it to be obvious so you have to go through the long debug session to spot the problem.

What about you, do you have "usual mistakes" ?

The plan
I thought I would have a full day to work on the graphics and the sounds. I had big plans. I wanted to do an interface inspired by Inspector Gadget, with the hand of the villain moving when you push the buttons (It was actually done in a LD game ! Villain OS 8). And instead of a cat, I would have drawn a goat.
But it was highly unrealistic given the amount of options in the game. The number of game design pages should have given me a hint.

What was disturbing was that the features felt almost finished at the end of the first day, only one was missing. But I had worked too much and without breaks on the first day, I was very tired at the beginning of the second. And when I saw it was late and I wouldn’t be able to work on the graphics, I stressed out and it made things worse.

What went right

Game complete
I finished the game in the 48 hours, which is better than last LD when the game I started as a compo became a jam game (Lucas’s Quest Backwards).

Game complete (bis) !
When I look at the game… it actually has a lot of options ! I’m very happy I could do it in only two days. It’s amazing how jams make you surpass yourself.

Bugs
They weren’t that many. Considering how the code was rushed and how tired I was, it could have been a lot worse.

***

A second jam

With my partner we decided to participate to Folis’ New Year Game Jam. The result was another cardgame : a team for the job.

On paper, it looked a lot simpler. A few different cards, a few interactions, very little procedural content. The game design documents were nothing more than a few notes.
Once again, things didn’t go as expected, and we couldn’t complete the game for the jam, we only released it 2 days later.

What went wrong

Bugs
The code was done the first day, but there was two or three very nasty bugs which took a lot of time to fix during the second day. As the IA needs to temporize for the player to understand what’s happening, there are a lot of callbacks in the code, which made debug sessions a lot more painful.

Time
We didn’t have a lot of time to work on the game (the jam was december 31 and january 1st). And anyway, as far as I’m concerned, I didn’t have the motivation to work 16 hours a day like I did for LD25.
In the end, it’s not very surprising that a project that seemed simpler than “Crime in the City” took more days to finish.

Next ?

So far, our projects have always taken more time as we thought they would. Jams are a good training to help us get better at evaluating the time needed by a project. That’s why we decided to participate to One Game a Month. You can find us there as StormAlligator. Aside from our regular projects, we’ll try to do a game in jam conditions each month. We publish regular updates on our facebook.

Reading back this article, bugs seems to be part of the problem. Bugs are a big time consumer and cannot be planned. A good thing before choosing a game idea for a jam would be to evaluate if it’s likely to attract bugs and if the code will make this bugs easy or hard to remove.

Thanks for reading !

Play Crime in the City
Play a team for the job

Classic gameplay gets dressed up in a cosmic story and evil is heavily incentivized, for good or for ill. The story of designing a game about retaliation and violence.

You can read the postpartum here and play the game here.

I managed to finish my first LD entry and I now present you a post-compo version of it. Play it here. Title screen:

I made improvements based mainly on what people said about the game:

• Added music (from http://www.nosoapradio.us/)
• Added sound effects (with sfxr)
• Added intro/help screen (as seen above)
• Polished the graphics a bit, lowered window size
• Increased player control
• Made it more game-like instead of a simulator
• Let the player control destinies of Igor and Dmitri

Some post-mortem thoughts:

Comments gave mixed feedback about the graphical style of the game. Graphics were made in about 10 minutes, and I doubt more time would have made them any better, considering my interest and skill in art.

Lack of music and sound was perhaps worse than I thought. Next time I’ll try to include those in the compo release. The post-compo sounds are not impressive by any means, but I guess it’s better than nothing.

Intro screen to explain the game and controls is also something I’ll try to get into the actual release next time around.

Player control was a central issue in this game. The player can only vaguely affect the behavior of a large number of independent AI agents to indirectly achieve his goal. Many players reported they didn’t feel like they were in control and I’m not entirely satisfied with the improvements of the post-compo release I made to address that.

The game was an experiment in emergent gameplay created by multiple AI units – a simulator type of game. I think the emergence was limited as the minions do not really interact with each other, only the Hero. That is, the game wasn’t complex enough to be really interesting. I have a feeling I’ll be trying something similar in the future, using what I learned here.

In conclusion, I think my first LD entry was quite successful. I learned a lot and want to make more games in the future. I was also very impressed by entries by other people and look forward to seeing the results of voting!

Tags: emergence, goat, post-compo, postmortem, pygame, python

Based on some of the feedback I got for my game, I made a post-compo version. There are still improvements to make, like adding audio for more villainy pixel destruction fun.

(Compo version here.)

So with voting coming to a close soon, I’m very eagerly awaiting the close of my very first Ludum Dare. Overall, I’m happy with the result of my game, Minion’s Defense, even if the list below says otherwise. I’m astounded by the amount of feedback I’ve gotten, and I think this entry makes for a very good baseline for proceeding competitions. This post-mortem is a bit late from what I’ve seen of others, but I really wanted to let the game slip out of my mind for a few weeks and revisit it with rejuvenated eyes. So onto the list!

What I did right

• Art: I’m not an artist. If I pick up a pen and doodle something, it usually comes out as a pile of squiggles. That said, I’m very pleased with how the game looks. While simple, it conveys what it needs to and is consistent, which is good for me. Other than the fact that the player minion looks like the rest of the minions, there’s not much I’d change.
• Finishing: This might not seem important, but I’m bad about finishing things that aren’t for other people. Bad as in, I never finish anything.
• AI: While nothing special, my favorite part of the game is watching the minions swarm the knight. I probably spent way too long on getting it to feel the way I want. Each action a minion does has some random jitter, and at certain intervals they’ll just pause. This adds a lot of variety to their movement, and I just can’t stop watching them. fun tip: Start the game, make your “town”, and then switch to a different tab for a minute or so.
• Joined the IRC room: Ok, this doesn’t really have anything to do with my game, but being in the IRC room made the game so much more enjoyable. Though I didn’t talk much, seeing the progress everyone made was a ton of fun, as was showing off periodic builds on Friday and early Saturday. I highly recommend that EVERYONE who participates joins in.

What I did wrong

• Motivation: I was very motivated for Friday and most of Saturday. I went to bed on Saturday feeling a bit discouraged, and woke up on Sunday with a bad headache and the feeling that the game wasn’t worth finishing. I did some shopping that could have waited and watched some 30 Rock on Netflix  and with 3 hours before the end, decided I might as well get it ready so I could submit at least SOMETHING. I was completely amazed at how quickly the game shaped together in those three hours. I kick myself thinking about what I could have submitted if I had worked the entire day. Next Ludum Dare I’ll remember this and keep working all weekend long.
• Theme: A lot of people complained that the game didn’t fit the theme well. Looking back on it, I feel a little dumb because that’s such an easy thing to fix. If I had made a sprite of a princess tied to a stick on the right side of the map, I don’t think anyone would have had any trouble with the connection. It would have had the added side effect of putting the build mode in better context. I’m sure most people put down huts on the left side not knowing the night would show up there and lost prematurely. Next Ludum Dare, I’ll be sure not to make the same mistake.
• Balance: At the last moment I panicked that it would be too easy and bumped the knights health up by 50%. I smoked tested it to make sure I could beat it, but didn’t stop to think about the fact that when you make a game, you always perceive it to me much easier than the average player will be.
• Framework: This will probably seem crazy to participants that have been through a few of these competitions, but I went into this with a blank project. Most of Friday and early Saturday was spent on basic things like movement, collision detection, and getting animations to play. These are game agnostic components that I really shouldn’t deal with during a 48 hour competition. I could have had a much more polished game if these things were done ahead of time.
• Sound: Sound? What’s sound? This one might not even make it into the next competition, because making sound and music is so far beyond my grasp it’s barely funny. To me, it’s some kind of wizard magic.

All this said, I’m already super excited for the next Ludum Dare. I’ll probably be doing my next entry in Java as I’m trying to get into android development. I’m very much looking forward to applying these lessons and making an even better game. See you then and thanks for reading!

I’m also posting this on my blog, scott.mcb.ee, where I’ll (when I can remember) be posting about a different town building game I’m starting. Check it out if you want!

Well, there’s under 11 hours to go, now. The deadline really crept up on me. I’d been meaning to do some write-ups on my favourite entries, but with such a small amount of time left, it’s not going to be anything fancy.
In no particular order, I really think you should check out:

The Visitor, by avaki : Play as an alien sneaking onto a spaceship to kill all the humans by cutting the power supply. The catch? Humans are radioactive to your species, turning the wandering crew NPCs into toxic hazards. The level of polish and unique twist of this game impressed me. It only has 8 ratings right now, though, so go check it out!

Young Villain, by Rubsrub : All the pieces come together in this game, where you play as a future villain who hasn’t quite grown up yet.

Sealed Evil, by Neonlare : You are an ancient evil, sealed away…in a can. Squish innocent victims in a variety of locations to earn souls, used to buy some really fun powerups and more levels to stomp around in. Don’t let the slow start and a bug or two get you down. This game is the most fun I had during the competition, and the game I spent the most time on.

Sorry it’s so brief, but I really thought these three games deserved a mention, even with just a little time left. Try them out!

Hello everybody! This is the fourth of a series of four postmortems for our LD25 game “President vs Eevol“. Every article will cover a different aspect and point of view on the game’s development. The following post-mortem is on the game’s music and is written by composer Matteo Gagliardi.

President vs Eevol

Postmortem #4 of 4: Music

Hello, I’m Matteo Gagliardi, the composer of the President vs Eevol soundtrack and one of the original founders of the OmniàRing Project.

1. The OmniàRing Project: An introduction

This post-mortem will be mainly focused on music, but Sun asked me to write something about OmniàRing itself so I will start with that.

In early 2006 I was a lot younger and I used to spend most of my free time playing and talking about videogames. I was involved as admin in a Nintendo fan community, we were quite small and I decided to create a webring of Nintendo communities to help us grow: Nintendoring was born.

Shortly thereafter all the communities of the webring merged and we realized that we were mostly more interested in our various artistic projects than talking about videogames: I was composing my first EP (called Tetraktys), Sun Shiranui was making his first videogame (a Zelda ALTTP clone as he recalled in his post-mortem) so at the end we changed our name to OmniàRing, from the latin word “Omnia” (Everything).

The OmniàRing Logo

2. Making music for flash games

I worked a lot of times with Sun Shiranui but we never made a complete game together.

When he gathered this incarnation of the OR Team for this Ludum Dare, initially I wasn’t supposed to join as a composer, since I was busy working on the final mix of my latest album. So what happened is that he wrote a song on his own, and when he sent it to me I started arranging it for fun. In the end, he asked me to join the team and the song became something completely different and new.

Since we were working on a flash game, I had two important goals in mind:

1) Make something easily loopable

2) Make something short and lightweight

One of my main concerns were loading times

3. President vs Eevol: The main theme

The main theme is thirteen seconds long. I used some drones and a sparse beat to give a subtle rhythm.

I wanted this to be hypnotic and mesmerizing.

Usually, working on a soundtrack for a videogame I prefer it to be interactive and bounded to the action on-screen, but since the team was working very hard on the core of the game they coudn’t give a lot of feedback on my work, so I had to keep it simple.

The use of drones makes the track easily loopable

4. President vs Eevol: The boss theme

The boss theme was more of a problem because Sun suggested using electric guitars. I worked on it during the second day while nothing of the boss battle was ready, so I had no idea of the precise scene I was supposed to make music for.

So, using only the general description Sun gave me, which consisted in a room where you have to kill the president using your bombs while he runs around, I started working on the piece.

I’m a keyboardist, so I don’t have any real guitars. I tried some synths, but in my mind the sudden change of style from drone ambience to something like Doom’s OST wasn’t good at all.

So during the third day I decided to try something else.

The track is mainly based on some huge percussions played on a Korg Wavedrum, but I used also the same drone of the main track to have a feeling of coherence. It was finished way before the team even started working on the boss battle, so I was really clueless, but listening to it now I think I made the right decisions.

The drone loop is synched with the wavedrum

5. Last thoughts about developing the game

So, did I accomplish my goals?

In a way, yes, I did.

The team had some difficulties dealing with the looping of the tracks. They tried mp3 and they later found out that for some reason mp3s don’t loop well, so to make the loops work they had to use uncompressed wav, compressing it only later using the flash IDE.

The main track of the game is only 580 kb and the boss track + all the SFX is 380kb.

I wanted them to be even lighter, but time constraints forced the team to work on more important things.

I think it’s really important, working on a web game, to have really short loading times and it’s even more important on a Ludum Dare, where you can try thousand different games in a short period of time and maybe you can even drop one just because the loading time is too long.

At the end it was a really interesting and compelling experience and I want to thank all the people who enjoyed (or will enjoy) the soundtrack of President vs Eevol.

Thanks again for joining me in this review of the composing process.

My home studio at the time of President vs Eevol development

Thank you kindly for joining us during our series of four postmortems for our game President vs Eevol. You can read the other postmortems here: design, code, art. See you in the next Ludum Dare!

Tags: eevol, music, president, president vs eevol, sound, vs

Just realized I hadn’t posted this timelapse of our jam entry recorded by Toinane (thanks!) here yet:

The first 16 minutes show us working an infiltration game (first 24h), but then as we realiezd we weren’t going to be able to do something fun and complete in the short time left, we decided to switch to a simpler, more directly fun project involving a dictator shooting tourists hogging his beach. You can start watching at 16:45 if you want to see the second project directly.

The software we used to work together in real-time is called CraftStudio (I’m the developer of it), it’s a blocky, pixelarty 3d game-making platform with a strong focus on being easy to use for people of all backgrounds / ages and featuring fully collaborative editing tools over the Internet.

If you haven’t already, you can play Beach, please! here. It’s fun, I promise.

Tags: craftstudio, jam, ld25, LD25 Jam

In your opinion, what is the best way to make a game?

Tags: antvenom, help, lol, mcpixel, oppinion, PLEASE, question, themonkeystaff

Congratz to all !

This Ludum Dare was a ton of fun. I’ve always loved villains – my main project puts you in the role of the villain as well – so I was very happy with this theme.
Besides having a coder as a roommate makes for a very easy and instantaneous team setup at home which was awesome. We’re still working on Tyranoforce. It will take some time to get a new version because of our full time job but we will do it. We really want to push it further, no only because we got cool feedback, but also because its a game Idea I’ve been wanting to explore for a long time.

Xewlupus even got http://www.tyranoforce.com/ up haha! That shows we’re serious about it 😉

Check it out sometime for updates

See you soon for another Jam!
-blob

PS: Here’s a WIP at the boss look. Prepare yourself to punch some wannabe hero.

PLAY CLOSE MY SIDE

This time I had a lot of time to tinker around the game, and I placed decently, comparing to my previous entry. See my entries.
EDIT: 42% Coolness!

My dearest fellow gamedesigners!

Although the submission deadline has passed I haven’t left my project barely finished. It was still in a state where a continuation of development was possible (although the spaghetti-mess in the code seems to be increasing by a power of two with every additional feature), so I continued implementing what I had in mind but did not came around creating before submission deadline.

I took all your feedback in consideration, redesigned the visuals and implementing most of the suggestions, and here we are at version 0.2! So thank you for everyone who played my game during the voting weeks, and I hope you all enjoy this next release.

Features list:

• Two new minion types: shadow beasts and skeletons
• Three new enemies: pest doctors, villagers (they run away from you!) and wolves
• Zoomed in the view so the pixelart graphics are better visible on high resolution screens
• Press CTRL around a claimable area to assign your swarming minions to that area, and stand in the middle to recollect them
• Updated colours to match better (not my strongest point) and made some more graphical details

The most important feature not implemented: a winning condition :-). Just conquer all you can and create a large minion army!
Unfixed bug: claiming castles is often bugged, try to stand on the exact middle of the square that appears when pressing CTRL.

Kill any enemy to convert it into a minion. Some enemies are too strong, find the weaker ones first. Your minions by themselves are also quite weak, try to create a lot of them first and then swarm the villages.

I would gladly see more of your feedback!
Have fun playing.

Also, screenshot:

The Plague screenshot version 0.2 (update after the contest).

Okay, seriously, didn’t expect that! My game got in 3’rd place(tie with Happy Little Murder Friends), I did really not expect that! This is only the second time I enter the competition(third if you count miniLD) and I think it’s the 5 game that I actually finish. Damn did I get a confidence boost from this!

I’d like to give a huge ‘thank you’-hug( and kiss( and slight fondle)) to everyone who played my game! Also thanks a million to the wonderful people who make Ludum a reality, this competition is so great for game-creation-training it’s unbelievable! I’d also like to congratulate everyone on their games, I’ve played a bunch of awesome stuff in the past weeks, great job!

I’ve convinced one of my programming teachers to enter next Ludum, so that will be extra special. I don’t really enter the competitions to win, but next time I actually have to win over him at least! See you guys then!

test

Although it’s a positive experience either way, it’s really cool to be able to quantify how much better I’ve gotten over the last 3 months. I’ve worked really hard since the first Ludum Dare, so I’m glad my skills are actually improving. I can’t imagine anyone else climbed more than 328 spots (being so bad the first time helps 😉 )! Can’t wait to see what 2013 has in store for me, see you in the top 100!

Ludum Dare 25:

Ludum Dare 24:

I found time to make a playable alpha version of Prophecy of the Villain for LD25 and submit it to the Jam. Unfortunately, I have not yet had time to finish the game or to judge other games, both of which I would really have liked to do. Oh, well, I can still play the games now.

As another note, it seems like every compo I’ve gotten more ambitious. In LD23, my first Ludum Dare, I completed a rather poor game in 48 hours. In LD24, I completed what I consider to be quite a good game in 72 hours. This Ludum Dare, I aimed to make a top-down RPG, even though I’ve never made an RPG, or even a story-based game, before, and didn’t finish in time. The engine’s quite good in my opinion, though. I’m going to have to remember not to be too ambitious next compo… and not to work on the game engine for too long.

Tags: judging

My first Ludum Dare yielded scoring results with which I am satisfied.

#34 Mood 3.77
#101 Theme 3.81
#115 Overall 3.50
#119 Humor 3.31
#176 Innovation 3.28
#297 Fun 2.98
#582 Audio 1.35
#687 Graphics 2.00

If you look at that in terms of percentiles, I’m in the 98th percentile for Mood, 93rd percentile for Theme, 92nd percentile for humor and overall.

I feel like I did really well for a first try, especially considering my well-deserved low scores for audio and graphics. I must say, I’m surprised I scored as high as I did for graphics… I know at least a couple of people gave me some for the formatting, but that’s still higher than I anticipated. xD

Tags: postmortem, ranking

Wow~! #21 in “Innovations”! I’m in Top Scores! Totally didn’t expect that! Was dreaming about top 200 in any category, and I have also reach #188 in “Graphics”, wow!

Thank You guys for playing my game and voting, despite of how uncompleted it was. Now I feel really obliged to finish post-compo version (which is going to be very freaked out ). The bad news is that it probably won’t take place until February. I’m really jaded with school stuff right now

See You during LD25, with the aim to deploy a completed game this time! Also congratulation on every single game on this LD! It was fun to play Your games!

Click on the image to get it!

MidBoss post compo version

So, MidBoss did fairly well in the ratings. I won’t bore you with the full overview, but it came in #81 in fun, and #91 overall. Pretty good! I kind of wish I hadn’t taken Sunday off, maybe it would’ve done better as a compo entry than a jam entry. It’s not like I actually spent the available 72 hours on it, but oh well.

Since the competition I’ve been working on the game, to polish it up and make it more playable. The post compo version is now ready and you can get it here. Keep in mind that I intend to change core gameplay mechanics to make the game easier to balance and maintain in the future! New features include:

• Dynamic line of sight and lighting
• Save/resume feature (save scumming is available)
• Dynamic music system
• Options menu (also for key rebinding!)
• Various bugfixes

And that’s not the end of MidBoss, I want to keep developing it further, so if you have any comments or feedback, or want to keep updated on progress, please follow @Enichan!

Tags: 2D, ld25, postcompo, pygame, python

Wow…
Cant believe i got 6th place in audio (555th in overall though T_T).

Anyways thank you guys for rating my game (or just the audio =_=), i really appreciate the votes and hope u guys enjoy my next LD entry game.

Hi wonderful community of Ludum Dare! Context:

I’m a hobbyist game developer who’s previously only worked in the Linux / Android / Mac / Online world. I’m about to attempt creating my first game using Microsoft tech and wanted some suggestions.

I want to create a Windows Phone game, but would love if the same code could also be ported to Windows 8 / XBLA / Surface. From what I’ve read, I believe the following is correct;

• XNA Studio can be used to create Windows Phone, XBLA and PC (desktop-style) in C#
• For Surface / Windows 8 Store style games, you have to use Direct3D / DirectX / C++. As of Windows Phone 8, this is also an option for Windows Phone.

Can anyone comment on this? Am I correct in thinking the above? Are there any popular middleware engines I should consider using if I do go down the C# route? I’ve only learned C# in the past month or so, and as such don’t know what is out there.

Thanks so much!

Tags: OneGameAMonth

In LD 23 and LD 24, I did TERRIBLE! The games were buggy and not even that fun. I figured that this time around I would do better, but due to me getting sick, I didn’t have much time to finish.

If you haven’t seen the timelapse, here it is:

If you want to view the entry, click here.

What went right:

Speed – Because I knew I only had a little time, I seemed to work faster. Hopefully I can do the same next time and NOT because I only have a few hours left.

What went wrong:

Pretty much everything else.

Practice – I should have took some more time to practice between now and LD 24. I think I might participate in a few Mini-LDs

Didn’t use enough packages – I only made two packages of code so I spent a lot of time looking for files.

Graphics – I decided to use 64×64 tiles, figuring that it would look nice because of the resolution. But it didn’t. I should have spent more time on graphics. The tiles were just gradients. Nothing fancy about that.

After the competition, I made the mistake of not spending time on voting and my post-compo and instead doing other things, messing with my new raspberry pi:

I would have liked to play more games, but it’s too late now.

Besides, it’s not like I would have gotten a better rating.

here are my ratings:

I think I would have done much worse if I entered the compo as there are more people.

I think I’ve learned quite a bit for next time.

Dear plebeians,

I’ve posted a post-compo version of Hunter to Hunted on Kongregate. This article focuses on said event, making it a post-“post-compo post” post. The new version fixes the bugs you never encountered, includes online high scores that you can only watch from the sidelines while drooling (most likely out of retardation rather than admiration), and adds a help menu to wrap your pathetic minds around those colorful funny things moving on the screen. Radical changes weren’t needed because one can’t improve on perfection.

Not that you’d deserve to pick the fruits of my efforts. Not that I’d expect you to understand the revolutionary nature of the gameplay after you’ve rated my entry #461 in Fun. I’m no mathematician, but it seems to imply you implied there were 460 more fun games in LD25, and that ain’t right.

I also wrote 25 pages of witty remarks, but they’d be wasted on a bunch of illiterate rednecks, so I’ll cut this short.

Now go to hell, and take my game with you. So you can try it out.

Tags: flashpunk, Kongregate, pearls for swine, post-compo

I loved this competition so much! And felt I did good just accomplishing my goal in 48 hours, but, based on the comments, I learned, if you have even the slightest feeling a link is broken for everyone, and not just you, DO NOT POST IT, PERIOD. The comments on my game were lit up with ” Disappointing the html5 version doesn’t work” And honestly, I don’t know why! However, next Ludum Dare, I got studio (game maker) And can now make 100% sure the html5 will work.

A post-mortem for “A Villain By A Chance“.

What are my results:

• Coolness: I’m sorry I didn’t get a gold medal (how much games is it?).
• Innovation: A success! Yes! I got over 3! It means about 25% gave me 4! according to my criteria, it’s more that average! I’m so happy!
• Audio: It can mean 2 things: either I’m a great composer, or my other categories are fail. But I believe I could get a higher score. Let’s see… For the LD #23 I made a soundtrack for the game, each minigame, and finish screen, 4 total. This time I made only 1 piece and got a higher score. It means: quality over quantity! And I think if audio fits the mood, it’s an upside for audio as well.
• Humor: Doing nothing but receiving 1 more point is a success as well. Ridiculous.
• Theme: I dislike the theme. Other themes, like “Fortress”, “Chaos”, “Night and Day” allow very much possibilities. But when the theme is “You are the Villain” I can say a thing about almost every game: in it, you are the villain. I hoped to get a better score by making the protagonist not a villain yet, but it didn’t work. (In top games in “theme” category you are the villain. What a fail.)
• Mood: I don’t have many things to say about this one. But I can say one for sure: making a game with no mood and making a game with a little mood is equally difficult. Got it?
• Overall: A new high score here. It’s reassuring to see I get a higher score every LD.
• Graphics: Another example of quality over quantity. Instead of making a lot of images, like in LD #23, I made only the map and the goat.
• Fun: I knew that.

What went right:

• Innovation. I didn’t aim for it a lot, but I did it. *yeah*
• Polishing. I balanced the system, made some difficulties, a tutorial, level 2 feedback and other things.
• Balance. I spent about 1/4 time balancing, and it’s worth it.
• Time. To the end of the first day the game was fully playable. I had more time for balancing/polishing.
• Graphics. I used lighting for the pixelated map, and Inkscape for the goat.
• Drawing a goat. It’s an individual chapter for a post-mortem. I searched the web for a picture of a goat. I put it in MSPaint and drew a grid on top, then using grid copied it to paper, then to Inkscape. And it was my first image with Inkscape ever.

What went wrong:

• Fun. I knew I need to KISS (keep it simple and stupid), but I ignored this. But if I KISSed, I wouldn’t have got 3,22 innovation!
• User-friendliness. Most of my games are not user-friendly. They are more like user-fiendly. That’s my downside.

What I learned:

• You can abandon some things to get something well done.
• Getting 2 in mood (and humor) is a piece of cake.
• People like simple music with guitar chords.
• I’m lucky with games like this. Some one said “This is quite a complex thing to try and perfect in 48 hours!”, but I think it’s pure luck. Erm, I guess I’m mistaken, because it’s my second game like this.
• Consistency pwns. I’m sure it can be used to solve most problems, whether it’s making games, doing business or communicating with people.
• Quality is much better than quantity.

What will I try:

• To KISS.
• To make some other type of soundtrack. I know I can.
• To spend more time thinking over the idea. I can generate good ones, but I never did it for LD.

What do I suggest:

• Make “Coolness” like all other categories, so there is 1 gold, 1 silver and 1 bronze medals (by default). It’ll be super interesting.
• Make a self-calculating category based on all the categories. You know, this way you are cool when you get a high score in some category. I have 3,22 in innovation because I ignored the KISS rule, does it make this rule useless?

I made an instruction of what should you try hard to achieve a good rating in a certain category. I found out that for each category it’s either “Plan it” or “Come up with ideas”, so that’s the only thing you have to do. Do you know “Man in Gap”? A first game, yet a big success. So don’t be down if you are novice, you have a good chance to win.

Well, the results are in and it went like this

#28 Innovation 3.98

#103 Theme 3.80

#170 Mood 3.19

#181 Humor 3.09

#188 Audio 2.96

#200 Overall 3.29

#202 Graphics 3.40

#356 Fun 2.86

Innovation: Holy crap that went well, and I can see why. It’s a pretty off the wall concept and it stranded out among the crowd and I can see why I got so high, Heck if I didn’t gave up in the middle of it I’d probably got in top 25 (unless the mindfuck ending gave it a higher score)

Theme: Gotta say, I really didn’t really like the theme so it’s kinda odd to do well on it, it made me go a hour just thinking a decent idea and changing it after 5 hours of working on it so yeah..

Mood: The direction was kinda weird but I guess it’s added to the mood for some and killed it for some.

Humor: When I was thinking of the two categories I thought this and Innovation. I was thinking this of a kinda silly funny idea but I guess the ways stuff got corrupted and well…. I was kinda idea dry when I was thinking of stuff to happen, still not bad score.

Audio: Audio isn’t something that I’ve done in every game I’ve made so far so I’m not too used to it, still  it went well. I saw sfxr in the tools sections and decided to try it out for the comp and while I should have gotten more used to it beforehand it went okey. I got a pretty catchy melody as the “Flowerz” main theme and I feel like that is the reason it got somewhat high.

Overall: Surprisingly nice score considering how the game wasn’t too fun, I was not sure how high i would get on this and decided to be happy if I was above the avrage be really happy and I got better than 75% and that’s a muuch better than I expected.

Graphics: Gotta say Graphics had the toughest competition, it was my #3 highest score wise yet among the thing I got the lowest rating, Still I’ve never seen myself as good at grapics so I’m glad that the effort I put on this went well.

Fun: Expected to get worst on this and… yup. I never came up with any good idea to make it more fun and heck it even was one of the main reason I rushed the game. still I got over the average so it wasn’t as bad as I expected.

Anyways I’d definitely join the next Ludum Dare. It was a nice learning experience and I finally succeeded to upload a game, something I have troble with considering I’m kinda of an perfectionist and is kinda bad at finishing stuff. Thanks to this I also saw One Game A Month and decided to join it (and join twitter) to improve on myself even further. (If anyone is curious my twitter is https://twitter.com/RealXgor)

Still until the next ludum dare I intend to look at the tools from the tool bar to see if there is anything else that work well/works better than I use right now, also I used Game Maker Studio for the first time for this Ludum dare and it was a huge mistake with all the differences I didn’t know of and I’d definitely try to learn more about it until next time.

If anyone still interested in playing the game click here.

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

Tags: One Game A Month, post-mortem, postmortem

Let’s go. I was busy during LD compo and jam but now in miniLD this is my chance… I have no idea what I’m going to do but updates will come soon. I’m sure you don’t care too much about me or my games but I felt the need to write a little “I’m in” about this.

So, Ludum dare 25 was very fun and now we have a new little compo!

What I may be using:
>>> Language:*
>>> Framework:*
>>> Art:Paint.NET and/or Flash
>>> Sound: LMMS

Looking forward to this!

* This is a bit of a blind spot really. It’s a tie between :
Lua/Love2D;
FlashPunk;
XNA;
Java;
game maker.

I’ve gotten In depth in most of them, and I’m not to sure which one is best.I’d love to hear some feedback on the above languages.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2013 at 9:09 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.

I just compiled all of the songs from my various Ludum Dare entries into a single soundtrack. You can download it for free HERE !

Tags: download, soundtrack

Opening myself up here, but to be honest I’m deeply disappointed about our LD score history. I expected more of us; we aimed higher, and we hoped to make something that would please and wow the crowd.

And we abjectly failed, again.

We’ve always aimed to challenge norms; in LD23 we’d tried to put graphics into text adventures in an interesting, new way. We’ve tried to enter a multi-player on-line game in LD24, and we’ve tried in LD25 to make a 2D platform game without tiles.

We really are overactive underachievers.

Our highest LD25 score was for music. We were perhaps not clear enough that that was the one thing we had not ourselves made It was a track we’d picked up on the Internet, and we thought we’d explained that.

So why did we fail so miserably? Bad control.  We should have had a lot more and we lacked in plenty of areas, but I think that the playability was most affected by the bad control.

Its fairly non-trivial to do collision with arbitrary lines and so on, and do it efficiently too. Our collision code, which we’d written for the game and mostly as the deadline loomed, was immature and incomplete. We should of course have learned how to code it before the jam, or borrowed a library or something.  But we’re not really borrowing-code-libraries kind-of-people.

And what happens is that you do badly in a core area such as control and people voting just give you a low score across the board. We got 1.92 for innovation which just means we hid the code well I guess.

I’m deeply saddened that we didn’t score higher for graphics, as I myself am in awe of my team-mate’s artistic prowess and thing it deserved more. A very big part of that is my fault, as I also didn’t get around to good GLSL lighting. Meaning the whole making the scene out of meshes thing didn’t work, and it was hard to see where the platforms were because of the uniform shading.

In previous LDs the winners have always wowed me. I’ve always looked down the winners list and been awed and inspired. This time its been a whole lot, well, distanced. I don’t mean to take anything from the winners and everyone else in on the game; I think its in a large part because I didn’t find the theme exciting.

We had had an alternative game that was a FarmRomanVilla thing; Zynga being villains and villain being a medieval French word for farm worker and all. All actually inspired by a recent episode of Time Team I’d watched where they excavated a Roman villa in Britain…  But whilst that was very much the kind of game I like making, I think it would have disappointed just as badly as the lets-make-a-platform-game,-they-always-do-well game that we tried.

Its been a introspective start to the new year. Our strength is art and we do ok-ish at coding too, but general story and game-play, audio (we’re both terribly untalented musically) and overarching fun we fail miserably at.

I know I’m supposed to end on a high note of future optimism and enthusiasm and a promise to try harder and come back next time. But its hard to muster the bravado. Time heals, so maybe we’ll be back for another beating; we’ll see.

I have always been a fan of Notch (Because he made minecraft) and I heard he has done LD,so i thought just today,”I wonder if I can use gamemaker/craftstudio?”,well yes I can (: so im like I must make a game,so in planning to compete,this will be my first time so im going with Jam because,like I said its my first time.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2013 at 4:21 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.

– We got to the 67th place, you stupid crow. Maybe if you weren’t randomly losing those seeds we’d have done better!..
– BRARK!

Yeah, this was fun! We won the Gold medal for audio and got the 6th position for Graphics, so we’re quite happy of those results!
Thanks to everyone who played and rated our game, and see you all in April! 😀

LD #25 was my first Ludum Dare ever, and I just want to say that this community is great. I’m in the mood to list some of the stuff I like about you guys:

1. I asked a question and got an answer in the same day. The answers were very polite and informative.

2. My game kinda sucked, but even people that couldn’t play it pointed some good aspects about it, and that’s just really nice.

3. I’ve never seen anyone offending someone else here, so…

4. Some people make awesome stuff like motivational posters and mosaics, and sometimes give tips to others.

5. It’s a lot better to know your game is being rated by people who know how difficult it is to make a game.

:)

Just pointing some cool stuff out, because after you read lots of reply chains on YouTube, you end up thinking the whole internet is full of jerks and annoying teenagers, (nothing against teenagerns, I am one) and you are just awesome.

So, if you are reading this, you are probably really awesome.

There is an occasional game development competition called the Ludum Dare. I’ve participated in this competition with my newest game: Nyan Cat vs. Waffle Cat. This game is for the Mini-LD Jam #39

Why yes, I do lack proper sanity.
Why yes, you should play this game.
How do you play this game? The installer can be found on: http://nyancatvswafflecat.blogspot.com/
-Sledger721

I’m glad I had the chance to participate in another Ludum Dare compo. I made Skeleton’s Revenge, a Nintendo Hard 2D platform game where the standard player and enemy traits are reversed. I planned better and got a game done in 48 hours without cutting features, but now that the ratings are in, it’s time to take the gloves off and critique my own game for real.

No video this time, since my previous LD video has only 77 views as of this writing. Throughout this postmortem, I’ll be comparing my ratings with my other LD game, Asteroid Defender from LD23.

Innovation (2.79, #394), was (2.67, #549)

LD 25’s theme was “You Are The Villain,” and the first approach that comes to mind is to take an existing type of game and flip it around so you now play as the villain. I took it a little further and made the player character act like an platform game enemy, and make the enemies act like platform game heroes. I spent a lot of time on the enemy AI for running, jumping, and attacking, but I couldn’t get them to convincingly act like a player would.

Fun (3.57, #65), was (3.17, #239)

Yay, my game is fun! I’m really happy to make top 100 in something this time. The platforming mechanics are solid unless you’re an enemy landing from a big jump. Every death is your own fault unless it’s the jump pictured above, which I found out was a two-frame window. I got a lot of comments saying that they couldn’t get past that jump. I had to rush and build all the levels in the game in the last two hours of the compo, and the game suffered.

Theme (3.23, #360), was (3.25, #314)

I adequately stayed within the theme. After playing other entries, I realized that my skeleton doesn’t do anything evil or villainous other than attacking the heroes that get in his way. I do like the video game hero archetypes I ended up with: the animal mascot character (goat), the weapon-swinging warrior (hunter), and the brittle soldier with a gun (gunner.) At least the game has an ending this time, but the final boss battle was terribly anti-climactic.

Graphics (2.38, #569), was (2.58, #593)

Yeah, my games look like ass. I thought I stepped up my programmer art this time. My sprites are actually animated now, and I stuck to a monochrome theme to make it easier for me to crank out sprites when I needed them. There’s no reason I couldn’t have done 3-color sprites instead. The levels are constructed entirely out of white blocks and spikes, which I admit is extremely lazy. I should’ve added some backgrounds, or at least some different-looking blocks.

Audio (3.00, #169), was (3.00, #216)

Renoise rocks! I put more effort into music this time, and I like how it turned out. I wanted to sound like a Nintendo hard 2D platform game, and I don’t think I subconsciously channeled Castlevania this time. That SID sound I used as a lead instrument is loud and kinda grating, so I should have replaced it with something better. Bfxr is excellent for generating sound effects, but it’s so ubiquitous in Ludum Dare, it didn’t help my audio scores.

Mood (3.08, #211), was (2.36, #626)

Players seem to really like trolling this game’s enemies. Finally, you deal collision damage to enemies! We haven’t seen that since Wario Land! I reversed the vulnerability to spikes, too, so only enemies get killed on spikes but you can walk across them harmlessly. It’s good to troll enemies, but like I said, you don’t actually do anything mean in this game. I really should have worked some Videogame Cruelty Potential into this.

Overall (3.14, #282), was (2.92, #452)

This game was a good experiment. I kept my expectations low, and I got a fun game out of it. It’d have been better if I made better decisions in design. The monochrome graphics were easy to make, but it wouldn’t have killed me to add some color. Considering the game was made in 100% Game Maker pseudocode, I had no reason to run out of time for level design and testing. I made a decent game, but I want to make a better game next time.

Coolness (28%, #990), was (20%, #1007)

I could say some stuff about how I started a new job two days after the compo and multiple schedule changes sapped my energy to do stuff outside of work. Yes, that happened again, but that’s no excuse. I still had plenty of days off, and I got sidetracked with Minecraft, Deus Ex, and other games instead of rating more entries. Thank you to all the players that found my game and tried it. If I get another LD weekend off work, I’ll do it smarter.