Whoa, I’ve finally done my entry for the Jam.
It’s been a lot of fun despite some little unforeseen events that have slowed me down.

Here’s the entry, playable on web (Unity web player required), Windows, OSX, Linux & Android.

Toolset used for the game
Engine: Unity3d
2D Graphics: mspaint, gimp 2.8
Sound: sfxr

Actually I submit my game last night but I just got around to writing a post about it.

It was done in a few hours, I created the assets on my iPad using makePixelArt app while on the plane, as soon as I got home I implemented the game in Flixel in 3-4 hours.

It’s pretty short and simple (fits the theme I hope :p). Enjoy.

Long story short, I didn’t have time over the weekend to enter the main competition, so the Jam it is (although I’m 95% sure I still followed all of the competition rules other than the deadline). Overall, I had three goals:

• Make a game
• It has to be web-based, so I have to figure out either Flash or JavaScript
• Actually enter it (I missed the last two Ludum Dares as well)

The end result isn’t great. Full stop. Basically, it’s a vector graphics (that’s the minimal part) tank game, a la Scorched Earth. But it is playable / winnable and I learned a lot, so I’ll count that as a win.

I ended up starting around 1 am and finished about half an hour ago at 7am. I don’t have a title screen or anything in the way of sounds/music and I’m not expecting to do particular well in the rankings at all, but that’s really all of the time I can put into it. And technically, it does meet my goals.

And hey. I learned how to use Haxe. I’ve been meaning to do that for years. Perhaps now I can get out a few of those other ideas I’ve had.

Here are some the relevant links:

• Jam entry
  
• Source code (on GitHub)
• Blog post (more details, more screenshots)

And last but not least:

Play VTanks

Hello there,

I finished my LD26 entry : Multiplied Screens.

Once again, the experience was awesome!!

Cheers

…a little teaser title!

Almost done. Thought this screen grab of the level design was pretty.

@travischen

@shiftlesshobo

Too many things got in the way this weekend and I was barely able to make a ‘working’ game. Next time I’ll plan ahead!

You can check out Pilgrimage here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18986

I had great time making Perfect Crime and especially the sounds for it. I had already the base game working on the first day, so I could dedicate a part of the second day for Foley.

Pretty much all the Foley I do is accidental discovery, I simply try all the possible things that might produce a sound that might fit and then choose the best one. Of course for the competition I was really pressed time and could not just go out to get some materials that might have helped considerably, so I had to make do with what I could find around the house. All the recording and sound editing was done in Audacity.

The sound of dragging the body across the floor was done by me dragging the mic around my own hair. It gave a nice scraping sound and was passable as long as it was quiet enough.

The most important sound I needed for the sake of mood was the ripping sound of a body part coming off. My first though was ripping up some asparagus or lettuce head for a nice sick-sounding effect, but unfortunately my fridge was rather empty at the time. I tried ripping some old T-shirts but the sound was much too quiet and not sick enough. In the end I used velcro. The sound gave off a decend sick-factor and it was quick and easy to make.

One trick I used here to make the sound more fatter was to mix together several takes of the velcro ripping.

Another difficult sound was the blood spraying sound. A small can of insect repellant in a pressurized can did the trick for that one quite nicely.

The only sound left was the sound of a body part hitting an object in the scene. First version was me simply punching my couch, but the end result was too muted. Next I tried punching my own stomach. The result was not much better but I was pressed for time so I simply mixed some of those sounds together and made it play quiet in-game.

The music is simply me playing random notes from my banjo. Let me know what you think of the sounds now that you know how they were made!

First of all here is my entry http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=14496

What went right

• I finished on time
• Got enough sleep

What went okay

• Code structure was okay but i still got duplicate code here and there

What went bad less good

• Graphics. I can’t draw so well and i could not think of any either, so all my graphic became squares
• Difficulty. I made that the last hour and if you haven’t played the game as much as me the developer then i can guess the game is very hard
• Motivation. Lack of motivation is never fun, mostly because i could not come up with an “good” idéa.

Still i had some fun, and i learned some new things but now it’s time to rate some games.

I’m using HTML to embed the SWF with my game, and I would like to edit it to drop a couple of lines to add  a simple paragraph with the controls. It’s not part of the game per se, but it may affect the perception of the players about it, so I’m not sure if that’s OK or if it would invalidate my submission. I’ve checked the rules and there’s nothing stated in one way or the other.

Does anyone have any idea?

On a related note, would the same apply to “readme” files?

Link to the entry

Wow, this was fun.

Once again i hated the theme. And once again i had a blast either way 😀

I didn’t face a lot of technical difficulties, thankfully. Except a collision problem which i only realized after the submission opened. Doh!

It’s not all too critical, but i’d rather had it not there, for obvious reasons.

Otherwise i’m pretty happy with how TunnelVision turned out, although if i were doing a post-compo version i’d change so many mechanics. But i guess that is just natural.

So how about some eyegasm inducing bug-screenshots? 😀

I’ll just leave this here. Don’t let the collision bugs bite!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=5751

wzl out

Click here to go to the game.

I didn’t get much sleep last night so here’s a rather incoherent mini post-mortem of my game Super Neo Tektropolis.

I knew beforehand that I wanted to do some kind of platform or action game mainly becouse I wanted to play with Box2D and I wanted something a bit more fast paced than my previous LD entries.

I had planned on using clanlib (the game is written in c++) but when doing some preliminary testing I could not get cross compiling for windows (with minGW) to work. Being able to cross compile is great so I looked around for another graphics library. I finally settled on SFML 2 and looking back it feels like a great choice.

In the end I have mixed feelings about the game. It feels like the it’s missing some sense of progression. I went for infinitely sized procedural  levels but they turned out quite boring and monotonous I’m afraid. However, the enemies and the controls feel pretty good and I’m overall happy with the graphics. There are some parts that I really like and there are some parts that look pretty bad, but you can’t be too picky with a 48 hour game I guess.

The theme was a surprise to me. I hadn’t really noticed it when voting and wasn’t prepared for it at all (but to be honest, when are you ever ready for the ludum dare themes?) so I went with the lame aproach of “I’ll make the graphics simplistic and consider that the minimalistic part of my game”. Coming up with an unique take of the theme can be challenging but I had a hard enough time finishing the game anyway so I didn’t even try.

All in all I had a great time. A friend of mine also participated in the compo (check out his game, Super Monster Attack) and I spent the weekend at their place. Having someone to talk to, even if they are too absorbed in their own game to really listen, is great and I don’t think making the game would have been nearly as fun if I had been alone at home.

Anyway, enough rambling. I’ve got some Ludum Dare games to play.

This is my first Ludum Dare and although stressful it has definitely been enjoyable, and a good learning experience. “barry-cade” (I normally sneak a character called Barry into all my games… this one has no characters so….) is a basic constant scrolling avoid the obstacles thingamabob.

I hope people like it *looks nervous*

This game requires Java or OpenJDK 1.6+ to run….

I am looking forward to playing some awesome games

Tags: first-timer

MinGW forces me to quit. Can’t bugfix the compiler in a weekend (or even in a year). Will try newest version and hope it works. Otherwise I’ll be out.

EDIT: I’m out. Allready had the newest MinGW installed (and downloaded the installer for the 3rd time). Might submit hello world to be able to rate. Will ask before. Timelapse video will follow.

EDIT2: Timelapse

Tags: Failure, Im out, timelapse

I made a game “Minimal Force” this weekend, and here is the post-mortem:

What went good:

• Idea. A puzzle platformer! A reverse metroidvania! At first the idea didn’t seem trustworthy, but it appeared to be a good one.
• Level design. Hmm… I managed to make a level for every item lost, without any not-fitment.
• Graphics. I totally made some good graphics myself! I’m going to make an individual post about it.

What went bad:

• Time. I submitted the game at 0:33 AM. That’s too late!
• Planning. I had to recode several things because I didn’t plan them well!
• Bugs. I had a lot of bugs, and I still have some. I didn’t plan to release a post-compo, but I think I’ll have to release a bug-free version.
• Punctuation. Sorry about that, I just don’t know English punctuation!

What went average:

• Sounds. I included just one sound, and generating music seems a bit unfair. But who cares if the music is awesome, right? (Now I think the music wasn’t quite made in the given time. I just had a folder of music generated beforehand, and I picked one from it. But I could just enter the seed into the generator and generate it once more, so I think it’s OK.)
• Theme. My favourite was ‘Every death is meaningful’, and I was a little disappointed when I saw it’s ‘Minimalism’. I couldn’t make any idea for some time, and the one I came with didn’t seem trustworthy.
• Maths. I still haven’t found a way of calculating velocity of an arrow so it perfectly goes through a given point. But the boss wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
• Community. I was streaming the process of game making, making a timelapse and posting frequently, but it’s not more than usual. I didn’t even have a journal, unlike the previous time.

What did I learn:

• Drawing a bit better.
• Using Tile Studio a bit.

And here is a timelapse (I missed a part at the beginning, when I was drawing levels with Tile Studio, and a part at the end, when I was submitting the game):

Since I have a lot of holidays this and next week, I’ll make sure I get a gold coolness medal. I’m also planning to stream playing LD games.

Tags: post-mortem

This Ludum Dare has been a triumf for me personally, being the first time I’ve participated in a game jam. I never would have guessed how much is possible in less than 48 hours when you put your mind to it, and the community is fantastic. I will definitely make time for something like this again in the future.

I ended doing a small game called Mini Circle Wars.

Theme: Minimalism
I didn’t like the theme initally. It didn’t really spark my imagination and it seemed like a carte blanche to just do anything minimal and simple. But I quickly got an idea and started working on a minimal RTS with circles battling each other. So the gameplay is simple (build circle towers), the graphics is simple (circles in a handful of solid colors), only three sounds, and one game mode. I think it fits the theme well.

Gameplay
It’s sort of like a Tower Defense in survival mode where you are attacked from all sides until your base is destroyed. I like how you need to spread out your towers to extend the area you can build on, yet you need to keep towers close to each other to protect them. Balancing the game turned out to be hard. I think I spent three hours going back and forth between “this game is too simple” to “this game is too hard”. I still don’t think the balance is quite right, so I might fix that up in a post compo release.

Other than that, I think it turned out quite well. I especially like how you can zoom in and out and watch your creation getting attacked. Of course I can think of a lot of features that could be added in a future version, like more game modes, several difficulty levels, mission based instead of survival mode, more upgrade types, more interactive environment (like mining resource from circle rocks instead of just harvesting them out of thin air), and so on.

Tools
Picking Java and IntelliJ was a no-brainer for me, since I’m pretty fluent in Java (having used it since 2002 for various projects), and IntelliJ is so much nicer than Eclipse for general development. It’s not necesarily the best prototyping environment (I’m considering learning Lua for that purpose), but developing in Java is pretty fast if you now the language and your tools. Libgdx is also a really great framework that supports plenty of platforms. The only other tools I used was Aseprite for … well, mixing colors, and bfxr for the three ingame sounds. That’s it! And the GWT-version of the game is compiled in Eclipse since I never have gotten that to work in IntelliJ with libgdx

Implementation
I’m actually quite happy with my code quality. It’s nice and clean and I can still find my way through it the day after. Not so sure about the overall architecture, since it’s neither MWC or anything else I know. It kinda just evolved dynamically while I made the game. It might need some refactoring if the project is to be extended.

I’m not nearly as happy with my rendering code, since it’s a mix of libgdx’s SpriteBatch and ShapeRenderer. One for text and one for interface and circles. They don’t mix that well since you have to end the SpriteBatch before issuing shapes with the ShapeRenderer and vice versa. I assume the ShapeRenderer is really meant for debugging mainly and not actual ingame graphics. But hey, it works

Some of my basic helper classes resemble stuff I’ve made earlier, so I’ll most likely create a small library from them for future use. Just basic stuff like Timer, Animation, and asset loading classes that fits my workflow.

What went right

• I made a game. Succes! 😀
• Tools and frameworks just worked. I’m glad I didn’t try to learn a new framework during the compo.
• I like the sounds in the game, they fit well. Should have made some more.
• Good code quality I think. The architecture might need some refactoring.

What went wrong

• I would have liked to spend more time on the visual part of the game, but didn’t really have time for it.
• Working past midnight on Saturday was a mistake. I didn’t really make much progress in the last 2-3 hours before sleep and was quite tired the next day.
• I underestimated the process of balancing the game.
• I spent entirely too much time thinking about pathfinding until I realised that the game AI didn’t really need it after all.

That’s all I can think of now. I’ve uploaded a timelapse video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ4yL3SKeXI

Tags: post-mortem

As a bit of a quick reflection on the compo, did a quick little post-mortem write-up on my personal blog.

I have to admit, I rather enjoyed the concept – and tempted to see about revising & expanding upon it at some stage.

All right! My game TrackSurfer is up! I ran into some weird packaging errors, but now everything should work fine. I am really happy with the flow of the game and the minimalism especially in the controls. You can find my entry here.

Here are some screenshots:

Have fun surfing!

Man, look at that, REALLY! look at that!
now, RIGHT now, you can PLAY the awesome and incredible game called IIII!

REALLY, we are not joking, just click there and BLOW YOUR BRAINS!

HERE the web version
and HERE you can download the PC version

just let us know how many AEWSOMENESS did you get playing IIII posting a comment down there!
tell us how many was your incredible max score, and how many of these “strange features” (also know as bugs) did you find!

it was our first experience on Ludum Dare, so thanks everyone!

tomorrow is bug correction season, and the game is complete! =D

Here’s the game page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20494

The Good:

• My first Ludum Dare, and I finished a game!
• Version control saved my bacon a couple of times.
• Got a working prototype, and feedback from friends, very quickly.
• Made a timelapse of the design process.  Showed me where I spent too much (or too little) development time.
• The theme: it really enforced the idea of making a simple, solid game.
• Bfxr is the bee’s knees!

The Bad:

• “Developer Perspective” — I thought the game was too easy.  So far the reviewers think its too hard.
• I didn’t really have a plan for the music coming into the compo.  So I had to pick a program and learn it on the fly.

The Ugly:

• The code is rather… inelegant.  I put the source files up, but I hope people will take them with a grain of salt.
• I wanted the colors to be vivid, but I think I erred on the too bright, possibly garish, side.

Still, I had a lot of fun, and I learned quite a bit.  It’s amazing how motivating a deadline can be!

Happy Ludum,
Cahman

Tags: postmortem, timelapse