I really want to thank everyone for the great feedback I’ve received about Pïxl! I was my first time at LD and the experience has been amazing.
Here is a timelapse of how it was made: http://www.youtube.com/embed/nY4SEY_VBN8
If you haven’t played it yet, you can do it here.
Here’s my screencap timelapse movie for my game ‘m’:
It’s not as interesting as my previous ones due to the lack of graphics in my game. Watching the timelapse of the graphic creation is usually my favorite part.
Play ‘m’ and let me know what you think.
Tags: timelapse
What do “Reich 18” means? Well, it’s from a minimalist music masterpiece: “Music for 18 musicians” (1974) by Steve Reich cf. http://youtu.be/zLckHHc25ww There are only 4 musicians on the game screen because the screen is small; … I’m wondering if controlling 18 buttons/musicians could be possible! So you have to press the right key (X,C,V or B) when the range of notes is full; 5 bonus points if the maestro is vertically above.
It’s not the greatest gameplay (it’s pretty boring after 1minute…) but I think the feeling is similar to the old 1980s game & watch.
Tags: Construct 2, Game&Watch, html5, jam, retro
I tried to create a minimalistic jump and run called “The Box in the Box”. The visuals are similar to LIMBO and I also worked pretty much on the physics.
I used an older project of mine as a template which was made in September and tried to built on top of that. Unfortunately I couldn´t finish the game.
It would be great if you tell me how you think about the game and if you experienced any bugs.
And here is the link to the playable build:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/PiotrMi/the-box-in-a-box-prototype
Yeah, I decided to make my game simpler.
I’ve made the fade effect to red blocks, so it is more comfortable now to remember the map. Also, the speed has got the limit now.
—CONTROLS—
The main feature of the game is the irregular controls. So, there is the scheme:
W – left-up
D – right-up
A– left-down
S – right-down
INO – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10839
This is the second time we do a Ludumdare and this has went much better than last time !
Presentation :
This is a competition inside the LD26 competition !
Are you ready to test, brutalize and paint the other LD26 games minimalism ?
Are you ready to become the artist of this upcoming influence ?
FOCUS
We tried very hard to not do simple, but try to integrate a minimalism idea from the painters, arts,…
THE TEAM
Flash developper : Francois Provansal, from Lotusgame
PHP developper : GUNNING Sky, from SkyWEB
Designer : Phlox
Beta tester : Yukister (Many thanks to him !)
WHAT WE USED
Flash (AS3), Box2d
PHP, Apache, HTML5, Jquery, MySQL
Photoshop, Premiere, Audacity
All Ludumdare 26 games primary screenshot
YES, we’re done! “Stargazers” is out and ready to be rated and played. 
Here’s the link:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10976
“Stargazers” is a simple game of drawing constellations using your little stargazer. Fill up your gallery log with all of your perfect completed constellations and have fun!
Click here to PLAY and RATE MBlok
At the beginning of the project I set myself a goal, like I did in the three Ludum Dares I have participated in prior. In my first, my goal was to finish. I was disappointed with what I made, as I focused so hard on finishing my game, that I stripped away polish and ended up with something that wasn’t very fun. In my second, my goal was to make something simple. I ended up with Stargazer and was very happy with the result. In my third, my goal was to do something I hadn’t done before. I chose perlin noise generation, and randomly generated my terrain for A Villain is YOU! Again, I was rather happy with the result.
This time, my goal was to make my game polished and fun above all else.
I chose HaxePunk for my platform of choice, as I wanted to be able to easily compile for multiple platforms. I would have gone with Stencyl, as I had for two of my previous entries, however the longer I use Stencyl, the more I feel limited by it. It is a wonderful platform, but it lacks meaningful class structure, and the interface makes it slow for me to develop in.
That said, I love the concept of haXe, and the syntax is familiar, and so I chose HaxePunk over Haxe Flixel. Why? It’s quite simple really. Haxe Flixel’s API listing page is broken, and HaxePunk’s isn’t.
That said, I had a few moments of frustration with HaxePunk early on, but overall I quite like the library and would work with it more in the future.
So, let’s tackle this whole scenario in chronological order.
First, the theme. Minimalism. I wasn’t too hyped about it, but it wasn’t Alternate Physics, so I was happy ( though in retrospect I could have made the exact same game and it would have fit for Alternate Physics as well ). I brainstormed for about an hour and settled on two ideas. First, a one button game where you played a planet at the center of a radar system, and you hit the button at the right timings to fire on enemies that are revealed by the rotating radar blip. Second, a game where you click to remove blocks, and gravity changes to rearrange the mess of blocks into new and interesting patterns.
I chose the second, as it seemed like much more fun to make.
Originally, the goal of the game was to reduce the blocks from multiple colors, to a single color. I also wanted to make blocks fall down off the screen when they were no longer supported. This never made it past the planning phase, however, as I couldn’t come up with a good ( read: clear ) set of rules for when a block would fall. So development continued, assuming that the block had a bottom, and everything fell according to the gravity.
I then encountered my first frustration with HaxePunk: there is no true camera.
I originally wanted to rotate the block when gravity switched. The stage would have been magically dynamic and interesting to look at. Rather than rotating every single block and their positions around the center of the screen, I had planned on simply rotating the camera 90 degrees. Unfortunately, the camera I found in the API was just a reference point for where it should be, and I could find no way to apply a rotation to it. There were mentions of rotations elsewhere in the API, however there were no resources or examples showing their usage, and my tinkering with angle properties amounted to nothing.
If there was a proper camera, I could not find it.
Instead, I worked around this restriction, and came up with the square stars in the background. They fall like a normal field of stars, with their speed proportional to their size so as to add depth, and they fall according to whichever direction gravity is currently set to. I’m rather happy with this workaround, as it retained a measure of the dynamic feeling I wanted for the gravity, and was also incredibly simple, much like rotating a camera should be.
Around the 4:30pm-5:00pm on Saturday, my game was shaping up and graphically pretty, and I was working on adding actual levels. However at this point in time, I had changed the goal from one color only ( which was far too easy ) to one BLOCK only. Gravity was moving automatically at set intervals. I wasn’t happy though, as the game didn’t feel fun. It was a mechanic with nothing to drive it. There was no challenge, very little thought, and the level design was unclear.
So I whiteboarded for a couple minutes. My train of thought went something like this: Minimalism as a mechanic. Reducing the complex to the simple. Combos are good, gravity is good, the block is dynamic, the mechanic is simple. What makes it challenging, what makes it a puzzle? What if I let the player control the gravity? Could work, adding control can add strategy. One block is pointless, one color is pointless, the former is too easy, the latter has no pitfalls or strategic feeling… What about no blocks? Easy to do…oh. OH. As few moves as possible! Maybe as little time too! Minimalism isn’t the mechanic, it’s the strategy!
I had it. I knew it would be fun, and all I had to do was make good levels.
I added level select, a good level config system, five levels that I sorta threw together and calculated pars for based on running through them a couple times myself. I have terrible problem with making games too hard, so I raised the pars a little, and almost doubled the time limits. I probably shouldn’t have, as it resulted in the game lacking in challenge.
I’m also terrible at making puzzle levels quickly, and having them be fun.
Around midnight, I had five levels, a level select screen, and a results screen, and it all flowed well. So I decided I deserved to sleep more than four hours, and took a good long break.
Woke up Sunday at noon, and started on the title screen and music. I’m terrible at music, but it seems to have come out decent at least.
Then I ran into my second issue. In cpp targets, I can only have one mp3 play at a time. I had originally planned on only using mp3’s for sound, so I wouldn’t have to conditionally compile my sound code. I had to use OGG files for cpp targets, which to be fair are far better, but it was a tad bit annoying. Sound also doesn’t loop, and seems to cut out on Windows. I’ll deal with it later though.
Then I had a fun little nightmare trying to build for windows, when my haxe install broke apart. But in the end it worked more or less.
So, I finished and submitted my game, and I’m rather happy with the result. For the third time, I feel like I’ve accomplished my goal. My game is fun, if easy, and polished.
Lastly, I looked into itch.io, which is essentially bandcamp but for indie games. I think it’s pretty awesome and I’m going to keep using it in the future to distribute games. I’ll be posting updates to it, and possibly updating this blog when my post-compo version is done.
Oh, and I also did a timelapse for the first time.
I had a great time with this project, and look forward to LD27 in August.
Tags: postmortem, timelapse
It’s an odd thing that this turned the best game I’ve made so far, and yet this time, I was able to do it in 48 hours.
I feel like, somehow, I finally got the Ludum Dare right.
In Ludum Dare 23, I got through it in 48 hours, but the game that came out was terrible in every way possible.
In Ludum Dare 24, I disregarded all the advice you’re supposed to take during this competition, including my own, because I was obsessed with getting my way too over-complicated idea done. I ended up doing the Jam.
In Ludum Dare 25, I barely focused on doing the work at all, and had to do the Jam again just because I spent too much time on Saturday watching TV.
In Ludum Dare 26, something felt different. I was just tired of not getting anything done that I was actually proud of. So I shut myself in my room for the weekend, followed the tips for a succesful LD, and actually got something done that was good.
You can just look at the top of my LD page to see it. Compared to all those other game screenshots, something about this one just feels better.
Tell me, which of these most draws your eye? If it isn’t #, you might want to get your eyes checked.
In short, I feel like a completely different person. And not just because of the new profile picture. (Although it’s pretty sweet, if I do say so myself.)
In fact, this game is the the first one that makes me want to do a post-compo version. So I likely will.
So, come play my game, #. Welcome to a new Puzzlem00n. Better yet, a new Tim.
Just want to thank everyone for having another fantastic event and can’t wait to play everyone’s games!
7 hours and the clock is ticking! Still so much to do, let’s go!!! Yeah!
We’re back from work and are streaming the final development chapter on Twitch again: http://www.twitch.tv/udnozor
I added the awesome music that Łukasz Langa made, touched up the backgrounds made by Joanna Piechowiak, added the death and victory screens, packed it all up into an .exe file and a .zip.py file, and uploaded. Please play and rate it.
Now is the time of a couple of words about the making process. I planned to make a beat-em-up from the start, and was hoping to reconcile it with the theme somehow. I talked with Łukasz about the music and with Joanna about the backgrounds in advance, hoping that they will make some awesome things. And then the theme was announced, and I was crushed. For the first time in my life I had the team to do some really really awesome and elaborate stuff, and the theme had to be “minimalism”. Also, isn’t that a kind of a non-theme in the context of Ludum Dare? I mean, it’s implied in every LD! Not fair! But we went with it, and I think that both the backgrounds and especially the music turned out fantastic! This may be our best Ludum Dare game so far, but that is up to you to decide.
Not having to worry about backgrounds and music, I proceeded to thing about the gameplay. Initially I wanted something that would give you a sense of great agility and freedom — think about jumping around on the monster’s heads, hovering in the air with the sole force of the blows you inflict on them, and swiftly dodging their slow but powerful blows, until one hits you and sends you flying across the screen, smashing everything in your path… Yeah. I wanted a top-down view and gameplay similar to Rakugaki Showtime, but perhaps not as chaotic. Then I played a little of Advena on my phone and realized, that managing 2d movements *and* jumps on top of that is beyond human capabilities. So I decided to limit it to 1d and jumping — that should make it more manageable. I still wanted to have gigantic monsters and jumping on their heads, but it was hard to control the jumps. I experimented briefly with making it a mouse-controlled game — you would basically click where you wanted to have the highest point of your jump — but that turned out too hard. I needed something simpler. Then I remembered an old arcade game titled Ninja Kid (and its sequel, Ninja Kid 2) and thought that they had pretty fun gameplay, so why not use something similar. Except I didn’t have the platforms and the hero or the monsters didn’t shoot — so I made some tweaks to account for that. What was left from my original idea is the massive chaos and stuff flying around.
Latest image from my stealth game in progress.
The game is coming along at a speed I never knew possible, but even with such a late beginning, Fearless might make it in time for the Jam! I finished the player and enemies, now it’s up for the items.
I lost the first day to an idea that I wasn’t really happy with, progress was slow, and my motivation was disappearing quickly.
Got up on the second day, scrapped the original idea, and had the first playable of a different game in only a couple of hours. I could’ve pushed myself to get it in for the compo, but I took the extra time and got some more work on it during the jam day. What I ended up with, I’m quite happy with.
It’s quite simple really. 2D top-down arcade game where you mash the keys, run around picking up coins, and get to the exit. There are some enemies as well, and each level has a timer on it.
Anyway, here it’s here: AYUG V0.3.0 Submission
For anyone, who wants to help and maybe needs it:
I uploaded the new source code. 
But the horrible bug is still remaining… -.-
Die, mystic bug!!! 😀
Here’s my very short, very minimal entry. The title is ‘quanta’.
The aim of the game is to cut the block into as many pieces as possible. Avoid the flying pieces as you go.
Arrow Keys move, WASD shoot (is that the wrong way round…?).
Enjoy!
This jam went surprisingly well for me! This is the first time that my project has come together and is actually playable! Yay!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=23016
and….
=)
and pics!
We are giving it one more hour! Then we build, upload, and PLAY :D….
… and SLEEEEEP.
Squibble is now online and playable so please check it out this is my first entry in a ludum dare though i have entered the mini ludum dare before all comments are greatly appreciated, i have really enjoyed making this game and i will be add lots more content once the judging is complete. i have thoroughly enjoyed the experience and look forward to entering in the next competition.
I was reading this post from last year:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/05/14/are-the-results-fair/
So how do things stand now?