I have released my entry, which you can see here. I have been asked twice to implement click-and-hold shooting. Would it be alright if I were to add this now?

I made an animated gif of my entry…

Nyan Cubase ?

Another theme for “Shrink Shift” : Here

You can find the 5 first songs on my last post.

I’m ready for sound-effects ingame now ! I’ll do it on my twitch in a few minutes.

(Do you like the Hulk support for my cheap webcam ?)

I finished Ludum Dare for the first time, and came out the other side with XYZ, and I’m damned proud of it. It goes without saying that I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but I didn’t expect to be saying those words yesterday. When time is running out and you don’t know what to do, its amazing how erratic you can become.

Day 1

I woke up at 8.30 (UK time), checked the theme and made some breakfast. My idea came to me nearly instantly. It was to be a game about the link between power and human relationships, and it was going to be mindblowing. The narrative and gameplay meshed together beautifully in my head, and I immediately started coding. Mistake 1: Don’t attempt to create an HTML5 engine from scratch. By 5pm I had my engine at a reasonable level (I’m still damned proud of that engine), and I quickly built up the mechanics of the game. Except they didn’t work. It was a game built upon 3 simple rules; 1. People seek power, 2. People gain power by taking it from others, and 3. The powerful need more power to sustain their egos; but I couldn’t balance my AI. Power, it seems, is a freight train. The 1% effect. I learned a valuable lesson about mankind, and lost 12 hours of coding. Mistake 2: Prototype everything, even your prototypes. What now? I spent the rest of the night trying to salvage my beautiful engine, attempting to justify using it at any cost. Every 15 minutes I would alternate between a new idea and attempting to fix the original game, swinging from delight to depression like a pendulum. Mistake 3: Cut your losses. By 3am I had finally given up. I sank a couple of beers and went to bed.

All I have to show for 24 hours work.

Day 2

I woke at a more reasonable 11am, and rose feeling defeated. Bitter. Game designer ego does not take well to defeat. I couldn’t resist taking one last crack at the contest. This time, it would be different. It would be simple, concise and different. I chose Unity, my trusty silent compadre, and took a very small and underdeveloped part of a concept I had floating around my mind. Understanding 1: Work with what you know. It was to be the puzzle side of the fast paced racer which had been long ago silently converted into a fast paced racer with no puzzles (shameless plug – you can totally play the alpha of that game here). I cut everything from the idea that didn’t support the core, and carved out the perspective tricks brought forward by the excellent Fez. Understanding 2: If it can be cut, cut it; especially when the theme is minimalism. I started with a test level to make sure the concept worked. It worked. Satisfied, I started work on some essential middleware tools I would need to save time down the line. Creating and saving meshes from within Unity, that sort of thing. If you don’t know it Unity Answers is a beautiful place. This wasn’t fast, but it was worth it – I could create shapes and levels rapidly. I worked up the first 6 levels in an hour. I had 8 left, but I wanted a finished game as soon as possible. Understanding 3: Polish is 90% of your game’s appeal. I created a simple menu and a few more levels. With 6 hours left, I could spend plenty of time on sound and visuals. The style was born from effective of a single Unity filter, mimicking the beautiful world of Echochrome. I am not a sound designer, but FruityLoops makes it insanely easy to create quality sound in a short space of time (and skill). Despite all this, I submitted just 10 minutes before the deadline. I narrowly avoided the greatest mistake I could have made: Understanding 4: Allow an hour for submission. Screenshots within the Ludum Dare submission page lose their splendour and be aware that people pick games based on how they look, not the quirky name or genuinely original mechanic. Exporting and uploading too, takes time. I’m sure some Dare’ers missed the submission date by seconds, and they will have learnt this lesson the hard way.

Keeping it simple in every way but the puzzles.

That was my Ludum Dare. It had highs and lows, but there’s nothing quite like the feeling of finishing something you’re truly proud of, even if it isn’t objectively very good. But it’s not my place to argue whether I made a good game, it’s yours. You can play and rate XYZ here – I’d love to know what you think.

Tags: minimalism, post-mortem, postmortem, xyz

This entry was posted on Monday, April 29th, 2013 at 11:24 am and is filed under LD #26. 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.

Am quite happy with the weekend’s efforts.  I’ve been doing 48hour game jams fairly regularly over the last few years, but this was my first attempt going solo.  Up till now, a huge part of the jam workflow has involved lots of bouncing ideas off others – yknow, teamwork, communication, that kind of stuff.  It was tempting to collaborate again for this one, but figured it was time to step up. Everyone else was playing Planetside anyway.

THEME REVEALED

And I was all groan.  I know we’re all hipster indie wankers and yes obviously we all love cubes and stark Eno-esque soundscapes and empty blank canvases –  but was honestly disappointed that something a little more exciting didn’t come up.  It’s already been pointed out here a thousand times already, – we’ve only got 48 hours.  Less if you want to sneak in a quick round of your favourite MMO.  It’s gonna be minimalistic anyway.

The theme was revealed, I leaned back in my chair and sighed. Profoundly.  Then went and took a shower, soak up some steam and decide if this was something I wanted to spend my weekend on.  I almost walked away.  Almost had a regular weekend.

So I spent about four hours just sitting around trying to think minimalism.  What do I do? Cube Rotator: the game?   Circle clicker?  Line drawer?  Screen Shaker?

I think I was taking the theme too literally.  I was getting frustrated that minimalism is a design choice, an aesthetic – not something to base your game on.  After a few hours following that rabbit hole I read someone’s twitter post – sorry, I didn’t catch the name.  It said: MINIMALISM DOESN’T SUCK. YOU’RE PROBABLY TAKING IT TOO LITERALLY.

Man, you’re right. I was.

That got me thinking – take something – anything, and just do a minimalistic presentation of it.  What’s huge? What’s epic?  What’s something you love?

SPACE, obviously.

Man, I frigging love space.  And space battles. Who doesn’t?

And strategy games.

Oh man, SPACE!

…and minimalism.

THE GOOD

Once I was over the initial brainfreeze, this game started coming together really quickly.  I had a good idea of what I could expect to do in a weekend, so managed to come up with something right on scope, I think.  And timewise, it was about right – the game became playable and (slightly) enjoyable about halfway into the Sunday, leaving the rest to add sound and tinker around with bugs.

And I think the game’s got a certain charm.  I’m thinking about adding to it over the next few weeks, add a few extras that should make it faster, more fun, better.  That’s what it’s all about right?

THE BAD

At about midnight on the Saturday, I got caught up in this bit of C# that just wasn’t working.  I spent about an hour and a half just trying permutations of what I already had there.  Normally when this happens I go for a walk, clear my head, watch a movie and come back to it fresh.  But no time man, no time!  I figured I’d spent enough time on doing this with code, I’m using unity damnit, and have learned with Unity that if you’re spending more than half an hour trying to write a script, then you’ve probably missed a checkbox somewhere.  Just drag and drop it my friend.  So that’s what I did. I spent about ten minutes doing some fairly tedious and labour-intensive drag-and-dropping (if you must know, I was manually linking each grid space to its neighbours by selecting each neighboour and dragging them into the centre square’s Neighbour List. This requires very tedious clicking of the padlock button on and off).  The really funny thing is, I think this was all the break I needed – literally as I dragged the last lot in, it dawned on my where my code was wrong.  Oh, how I laughed.  It was kind of this awful,  wretched, demented chuckle that really very few experiences in life other than latenight dev can dredge up.  Anyway, it was done. I had dragged, and I had dropped. The great labour was done.

WHAT HAVE I LEARNED

So the two big hangups I had on this project were kind of thematically related.

I had a lot of inertia dealing with a jam theme I found uninspiring, and I probably spent too long on one fairly simple code problem. In hindsight, both those timespans could’ve been used much better doing something else.  I think I need to be able to detect when I’m in a loop and exit out much sooner.  Step back, look at what I’m doing, and know that there is another way.

That probably applies to a lot of things in life.

Cool huh?

Also, how good is space?

Anyway, that’s my rant.  Check out my game, and I’ll try to check out yours.

It’s this one

Well, inconsistent performance of the game has lead to some people getting stuck and quitting before the end. For some reason, running it twice makes it flow better. Game maker… you are a mysterious thing. In any case, I wanted to post the credits here as I thank some people who deserve the thankin!

So, I just published “Venture Ville!” from Visual Studio up to azure at:

http://brainslugs83.azurewebsites.net/

Be sure to log-in and check it out! 😀

Also, in the spirit of Ludum Dare’s whole Latin thing that it has going on, we gave our team a motto — wasn’t able to really double check it as apparently, my friend’s who get Latin are out of town. — But Google Translate’s cool with it, so I’ll leave it at that. 😀

I’d throw the source up somewhere, but it’s like 40 MB… maybe my Google Drive?  I didn’t see anywhere on the LD site where I could upload it.

Also, I Chronolapsed everything, so I’ll be cutting that this week and hopefully YouTube’d by Friday.

Happy Monday!
–Mikey

Tags: finish, finished, fuck, unfinished

We pretty much finished our entry: Aranami. It’s a web-based geometric puzzle game, where you have to find the path for a triangular rake across a zen garden filled with unpassable rocks.

The name is Japanese for something like “stormy waves”, and is apparently a traditional raking pattern for rock gardens (as well as a knitting pattern).

Stars are awarded based on how close you can get to the “par” score, which is the minimal achievable number of moves as determined by us, the designers. There are eight levels of increasing difficulty. Please give it a try!

My entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20636

What went right:
-I made my first game!
-I “finished” within 48 hours!

What went ok:
-Tile textures.
-Collision checking.
-Idea for a game + realization of this idea.

What went not ok:
-No particles and sounds
-Amount of fun, my game isn’t difficult at all!
-Whole code structure.
-Level design, and name of the game.

The whole event was quite nice. I plan on joining next compo if I’ll have the time. But now, I need some rest from code(I’ve ended my sentence with semicolon too many times today);

Hi everyone!

It’s post Ludum Dare Blog!

Here I will talk about went well and what went bad!

The Good:

• I finished a game!
• The Idea I thought of came into a game
• I was able to distribute the game for you to play!
• The graphics were okay but could have been better, but hey it’s simple right?
• I got to learn how to stream on Twitch and got some feedback when I was doing it!
• I was able to make ammo and health and enemies respawned into the map once you collected it!
• It was my first LD48 and I was able to finish a game I think in less than 10 hours haha

The Bad :

• I spent the first night on one idea but it turned out I wasted 2 hours on it and could have gotten more sleep as it was 12 am when I went to bed. I came up with a new idea the morning of the second day which worked well!
• I couldn’t get multiple waves to work for the Circles making it harder for the player
• The music could have been better
• I wish I could have spent more time on it but Other stuff got in the way so i had to finish it early
• I wish I thought of a better name for the game as it was pretty bad haha
• I think I could have thought of a cooler idea for a game after seeing what other people have made which some were awesome 😀 (Good job to everyone btw)

What I learned for next LD:

• I need to spend more time on the idea so it will be a better game before I start coding!
• I need to think of a better title and overall goal of the game.
• Make more of a story for the game and not make it so simple.
• Next game I will be doing it in html5 so it will be easier to distribute to people to play since not everyone just has a windows computer and it helps those who are lazy
• Don’t spend too much time worrying about people watching you on twitch, it can be a distraction so I may do the next one with just a longer time lapse.
• Eat and drink water while you program to help you stay up later haha
• Make sure that you have fun playing the game! Even though I had fun playing it I still got bored after a while!
• Make it harder for the player to beat for my next game

Conclusion

I’m really happy I participated in this LD it’s cool to be a part of something like this and finish a game! Which I rarely do because I don’t have a time limit or deadline and just get bored of making it and think of an idea that seems cooler! I want to do better for the next LD so I will definately learn HTML5 and try to get that to work!

Questions:

Is there a good place to host HTML 5 games on the web that everyone can access like a portal website for games? Or can you get a free website and host it there? I know you can use dropbox but sometimes it may be hard because everyone’s trying to access it.

You can play S.C. Space Hunter here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20776

Rate it and please give me feedback in a comment so I can improve!

Have a great week of judging!

I will be making videos of me playing your games on my YouTube channel starting tonight! www.youtube.com/cableplays

I will probably do a few games per video! Will give links to the games in the descriptions!

Subscribe if you want to see me play your game can’t wait to try it out!

Peace out!

CablePlays

Wanna see some awesome geometric action!?

HERE you can play, web version or PC downlod! ;-D

Im very happy with your Feedback.

A lot of users liked the sounds, and asked me if are originals. I make all sounds with my voice and some GarageBand filters.

The game mechanic decision of the fireball is not very popular, it makes game harder, and many people tell me to change it. Summoning of fire powers is not easy !! 😀

Thx for playing and your comments!

So this was my third Ludum Dare game, “Less is More” – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=8404

Good:

• Streaming: I didn’t get many viewers, but having the sense of people watching over my shoulder, and not using a microphone made me write more comments and gameplay notes so people could see what I was thinking.
• Time-planning:  I finished 90% of the features I’d planned, working at an easy pace for all but the last three-four hours. I usually plan epic masterpieces which just won’t fit in a weekend, so that’s good progress.
• Music: This is the first game I’ve written which included a soundtrack. It’s nothing amazing, but the theme helped me start simple, and I’m really excited to have jumped this hurdle.
• Graphics: While I didn’t like the theme, it allowed me to do less work on the graphical side and focus on writing game code.
• Code Structure: I’m learning lots about writing code that runs in the immediate-mode environment of typical games; definitely valuable experience for future projects.

Bad:

• Theme: God, I hated the theme. I guess it feels like the artistic equivalent to a game mechanic theme, like “FPS” or “2D Platformer”; I really struggled to come up with an idea and whilst it may just be “developer’s perspective”, I don’t think the final game is much fun. In the end, I learned more about the grunt work of making games than any game design insights, but that’s as valuable as lesson, I guess.
• Interruptions: I never seem to have a whole weekend off; guess I just have to work on that Work-Life balance 😀
• Time: Thanks to timezones and daylight-saving, the jam started & ended at 3am – that means staying up late on a Friday to find out the theme, and then staying up late before going to work on a Monday, which gets rough.
• Focus: On top of interruptions, I can’t seem to focus on a task till the last few hours, but that’s a personal flaw I’ll just have to work on.

Hi!

It has been a very nice weekend to design and code this game. I was to tired to post an article yesterday, so now is the good time to do it.
It will be a brief overview of the idea and a presentation of the tools I used.

Play here.

Description

It’s a survivor game, top-down view.
You control the hero, who is totally tired of carrying so many items each time he leaves for a quest.
There are several ancients who keep trying to give you a bunch of useless items, that of course you don’t want. They are rushing all over the map and you should survive as long as you can before getting full of items.

Screenshot

Tools

As mentioned in my first post, I wanted to do something playable in the browser, and also use pixi.js for the rendering.

• Rendering: pixi.js
• Play sounds and music: howler.js
• Art: Inkscape
• Music/Sounds making: lmms

The music was made during the last 2 hours, using lmms pre-built samples, so it might sound a little bit simple and repetitive!
For my first participation it was very fun! I’m happy with the results even though the game may need some additional tweaking with the AI.

Here is the page of the submission: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22254

Here’s my entry for Ludum Dare #26, on the theme Minimalism.

It’s written in pure JavaScript and a “library” I cobbled together a few days before the competition. I also snuck in jQuery for doing the ajax requests when loading level data.

The sounds (my favourite part of the game) were made in Ableton live with various VST plugins. The tiles were actually made in Blender. Blender! And edited with Pixelmator.

The result was… alright. I was really looking for a nice puzzler, but ended up running out of time. Was good fun though.

Test you in AbbrevsMaster over 4 categories x 10 levels : smiley, gaming, forum, chat

Share your score on AbbrevsMaster !

I ended up jamming, and don’t regret the decision. Best to get something done after all, and it might even be kind of an interesting experiment. You have to connect a bunch of floating platforms by tending to supernatural plants. Keep them watered and collect more water from their droppings.

It’s quite zen but still puzzly. Not in the sort of obviously designed way as my puzzle games usually are, but in the way that you’ll naturally come across problems with your resources, and have to plan ahead. You’re just given the game board and some simple rules, which you’ll have to get the most out of.

A water pulse going through a plant. Not pictured: me haunted by ugly race condition bugs again.

(I’ll change that plant texture, don’t you worry.)

Tags: stumbling towards the finish line

The last version is available ! With some tutorial levels

Click to play !

Controls:
– Drag and drop parts to create a thingy,
– Right click rotates parts in place,
– Click “LoadLevel” in the bottom to throw your creation into the wild.

 
Well, it’s finally done I was having some troubles last night with the jar so I didn’t make a post then as few people could have actually played, but it’s all been sorted out now.

ANYWAY, meet Lead (like a pencil) the Bunny, whom you have to lead (the opposite of follow) through a series of treacherous levels, with dangers waiting at all corners. Jump, dash and hop your way to victory as you traverse the 14 levels I managed to finish.

What went right

• This was my third attempt at Ludumdare and the first time I actually finished!
• Everything I tried to implement worked
• My idea came fairly quickly
• I actually managed to get through most of the game making process with few bugs!
• I am very, very proud of my bunny. I am no graphics pro but my bunny is lovely 😛

What went wrong

• I was away for a lot of the weekend so I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked
• In the end, I only had 2 hours to finish up and start making levels, so there’s only 14 levels. But they’re easy enough to continue making if I feel like continuing
• I never had any time to implement any sounds, not even simply ones from BFXR like I planned
• When I went to upload, the jar simply would not work. Turns out I had an extra slash when loading images, which Eclipse was fine with, but windows was not 😛

Final Thoughts
I had a lot of fun. It was great sitting down and coding and watching my game come together so quickly. I’m only in grade 12 and just finished my Computer Science course last semester, and the game I made for that took forever to get through. Admittedly, it had a lot more but this is still a full game and really well done (in my opinion) for my first java game outside of school.
If you’d like to play, the link is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=5827
And I have a couple screenshots below

I was browsing through the games and started wondering what is the popularity of various game development frameworks.

So I made quick poll: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6RXTKBY I’d be great if you could answer, it’s just this one question

If you think some major framework is missing from the list let me know.

[EDIT]

The “Other” option should now work fine.