One Game A Month loves Ludum Dare. You see, #1GAM is not a game jam. It is the gamification of gamedev. You earn XP and achievements for doing what you love. We rely on game jams to motivate us. Like doing workouts, the goal is to become stronger, faster, better gamedevs by releasing many small games.  We’d love to have you join us – 5000 strong and growing! Please SHARE YOUR LD48 GAME with us!

 

Tags: #1GAM, McFunkypants, OneGameAMonth, SpreadTheLove, SuccessStory

This Ludum Dare some friends asked if they could help. While they were very motivated they did not have much experience with the development tools I was using. So my main challenge this Ludum Dare was to get the most done towards game development from my friends enthusiasm.

Since the game jam allows you to use a private code base I started making a generic side scrolling beat-em-up engine a few weeks before the contest. Regardless of the theme I figure I could it could be made into a side scrolling beatem up. Its key features would be movement on the XZ plane, the ability to jump and 2 types of attack. I used place holder art to verify my systems worked.

For art assets I wanted to take digital images of my friends against a green background then convert the green to alpha to make sprites. I encouraged my friends to bring what ever costumes they had lying around their homes on the day of the event, and we would try and figure out what we were going to make on the fly.

When the theme was announced the first idea that popped into my head was trying to distill the “Hero’s Journey” into its core components and check off as many of those components over the course of the game. Considering the how much is written academically on the Hero’s Journey I figure it was due for a quick dirty video game treatment.

I cribbed off this page:http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html for the main steps in the Hero’s Journey. I formed a loose plot outline consisting of 7 stages: Call to Action, Training, Death of Mentor, Escape from Fort, Meeting Goddess, Climax, Return to normality. Each stage would have a series of enemies and some dialog giving pretty blatant hints about what step in the hero’s journey it was checking off.

I spent Saturday morning cleaning up the side scrolling fighter code so that it would do the game specific tasks like AI mentor, boss battles, and event triggers. Saturday afternoon my friends came over with their costumes and props. We decided that all the bad guys would be T-shirt Ninjas (made by tying a tshirt around our head to look like a ninja mask). The roll of Protagonist and Mentor was foisted off Zach and Crystal because they are the most photogenic of our group, and because they didn’t bring a computer that could do development on.

Saturday night and most of Sunday was spent cleaning up the images and importing them into the game engine as characters. Zach had a great idea of doing the backgrounds on notebook paper to add to the whole minimalist theme. I like the note book aesthetic since it conjures memories of high school day dreams. During this period jimmy did of the image processing. While I created character prefabs from his finished art assets. I also created the basic scene files on which we would build the encounters.

Around 9:00 we were finished with the character prefabs and decided we should actually make the finished levels. Zach was down sick and Crystal had work on Sunday so the task of level design was left to Jimmy and I. We tag teamed each level with one person in front of the computer and the other watching and making suggestion. By midnight we had 4 out of the 7 levels done. Jimmy went home at this point and I soldiered on until 2:00am finishing the last levels. I spent an hour on QA, bundling the application, taking screen shots and going through the submission process. Then went to bed around 3;00 am.

Thanks to “cheating” and using base code written before the event this was one of the more relaxing Ludum Dares I have participated in. I intend on refining the code base and image capture process so that it will be even easier to make games of this type in the future. I wish we had more time to fiddle with the game play variables to make combat more fun, but we spent too much time making sprites.

-Wilson

Here it is. My first post mortem for my first ludum dare game!

Click here to play my game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16490

The aim of the game is simple, Keep the lights off. You click the lights to turn them off , Simple!

I wanted to keep as close to the theme as possible, which i think i did well.

My first ludum dare was a successful one,  however i ran into a few bumps.

I went through 2 ideas before getting the idea for Lights. One thing i didn’t do well was plan out my ideas and take enough time to think of others, However i now know that next ludum dare i need to take more time to think of ideas, and not just jump into the first one that i think of.

So to the game!

What went well:

-I kept the theme in mind and i think that it matches it well.

-I ran into hardly any bugs while making it.

-Its good fun, It works just how i wanted and is an easy play. One of my main goals was to keep it simple and casual, and not make a fast paced game.

-the design, I am happy with how the minimal graphics suit the game.

 

What didn’t go well:

– Sounds, There not bad, but i wanted to add some peaceful music but did not get round to it.

-Tweaking/polishing, I think i should have spent some more time tweaking my game,

 

What i will add to the game at a later point:

-Difficulty ramp, Gets harder the further you get.

-Map the lights to keys, so you don’t have to use the mouse.

-music

 

This ludum dare has taught me alot, and now i know how i can do even better next time.

I really enjoyed it! I’m having alot of fun playing others games too!

 

Team SquareWars Postmortem

It didn’t end up looking like that at all.

Check out the entry here.

What went right:
– We came up with an original gameplay mechanic that is simple, yet fun to play but also to translates well to pc and mobile interfaces.
– We honed on the core of the game almost immediately and stuck with it to the end.
– A quick sketch for the battle field gave us a good starting point of how the game would look.
– The initial was for to use a 2D top-down view for an old-school look. Halfway though, it became apparent that the look would be too simplistic, and was changed over to full 3D. This improved the look of the game and allowed us to add 3D specific features like the camera following the units which gives a better feel of the “action” in the battlefield.
– Unity proved a good tool for rapid game prototyping and production.
– Using a Google docs spreadsheet for managing tasks. Although we tried a bug tracker, a simple task list with multi-user editing is perfect for managing tasks as well as a brain dump for all good (and not so good) ideas and features for the game.
– We had lots of ideas about what the unit AI should do, and spend some time implementing infrastructure for supporting it. Luckily time constrains forced us to simplify, so most of the behaviours of units rely on a randomness, which produced surprisingly good results. In part it was also an experiment to see if players would be able to sense any intelligence behind the unit AI, something like a cheesy Turing test.
– The fact that we always planned to keep going on making this game a success even after LD was over. This helped us push back features that would have taken way too long for the 72 hour limit, otherwise we would have ran out of time. “Will the time spent implementing this be good enough for the increase in fun in the game compared to other features?”

What went wrong:
– The Visuals. Even with a favorable theme like “minimalism” the visual quality of the entries was higher expected. In the end graphics proved to be very important and we spent a fair amount of time improving the look of our game, but programmer art has its limits.
– Although on average turnaround in Unity is fast, there were many cases that things need to be done in a certain way.
This invariably means scouring the internet for a Unity-specific solution and generally wasting time on trivial things better spent working on the game itself.
– Source control. We used TortoiseHG and BitBucket for managing and sharing our assets and code. Although Mercurial is an excellent tool for source control, Unity’s reliance in part to binary scene assets which cannot be merged, file commits that generate unwanted branches, added with the complexity of the TortoiseHG UI become an occasional obstacle to our work-flow.
– Not enough time to actually  implement all that we wanted.
– The UI is not good, it’s functional and does what it’s supposed to do, but I wish we had had more time to actually make it nicer.
– In the end, one of us had made much better explosions (the current ones aren’t that good) but after trying them on the web player it would break the game, units wouldn’t die. A bug that made us go back one revision because just eliminating nice things from the explosions wouldn’t fix the problem. Same thing happened with reflected lasers (they don’t reflect in the final LD version).
– Unity, although great in some aspects, holds too many nice features for the pro version, which is pretty expensive actually. It also means that what you do is tied to their engine and not really portable to anywhere else.

What went weird:
– Shouting “Square Wars” repeatedly at the laptop to record a sample for the title screen. In the end sample was not used. (Best for all concerned!)

Conclusion: 
Overall it was surprising with how much of a game can get done in just a few days. Focusing on the core mechanics was very important, as well
as resisting the urge to implement things the proper way. Prioritizing everything by the how much they will improve the game as it is at that point in time is also critical, as this will prevent you from wasting time developing stuff which may or may not be used in end.

http://www.youtube.com/RpkhuqspuYA

Tags: postportem, unity, unity3d

Thought I should write a small post that will help people understand the theme/logic of my #LD48 entry
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=rate&uid=21211

The game by itself is intentionally not self-explanatory.
I see couple of people getting back to me trying to reason about some design “suggestions” … some were really good, and then some made me feel that people are thinking in a quite different direction / not thinking at all.

So here’s what I’ll do mysteriously help all confused gamers

Explaining some design with FAQs.

Q1. The game doesn’t have much controls and is confusing.

Did I forget to mention tough choices?
No I didn’t.

A1. Meant to be so. The theme was “minimalism”
When I thought of the game design, I thought of vagueness and scope for making people think when they play the game. Everything converges when scores are shown.
Yes, I could have made a big 5 stage coin collecting platformer, but that’ll be out of theme and nothing new to experiment.

 

Q2. I did not select the Red Girl but I still got % on perverted scores

It’s not wrong to be attracted to sexy dressed girls, now is it?

A2. Those are just one of the places where I want people to think. On a second thought, you should be thinking all throughout the game.
I was kinda serious when I wrote this in game description.
“You are supposed to make “choices”, which sometimes are difficult than a “RedPill vs BluePill” question in real life! ”

So here’s my question to you, WHY do you think choosing the red dress girl would mark you as a pervert, but the purple dressed girl will not?
What is wrong you are attracted to skinner/sexily dressed girls? Is it really wrong?  It’s a choice and a personal preference IMHO.
The girl in red dress could be a very kind and good human, while the girl in purple dress could be shady. Who knows?

These are not meaningless messages friend.

The other problem here is people are trying to “assume” some stuff about the algorithm behind it but are fixing their thoughts to a linear assumption.
The algo is complex.. it considers stuff from real world.  What could be an act of kindness in a particular level, will be a goofy choice in another.

So “Think”.

 

Q3. The sounds are too loud
A3.  Yeah I’m terribly sorry about that. My bad.
Laptop speakers aren’t that great.. although I  tested my sounds at 100% volume while mixing.. I still hear less
Point noted and will remember that for my next game. Thank you

 

Q4. Any tips on how to play the game?  In other words how do I fake it to make scores look clean.

What game?

A4. I am not going to tip anyone on how to fake it , but yes I can help to reach a point where you can make ‘clearer’ decision on whether to fake it or stick real.
Here’s my mysterious way of helping you guys.. remember 3 things while playing the game
1. Watch the level “name”
2. Level ‘name’ is a ‘situation’/’time’.
Evaluate the both choices along with the level name.  It’s not just about choice1 vs choice 2 .. its choice 1 vs choice2 vs levelname.
3. Think a lot.. get real life decisions as examples to help yourself .

I’d be happy to answer any other queries you might have.
Please leave your valued suggestions in comments

For now, I’m gonna go and play games of other participants and earn some more knowledge.
Signing out.

Tags: gamedev, indie, krish, ld48, Ludum Dare, Mortem, Post, post-mortem, toonheart, you are a shadow

The game I made for this LD was called Friendship in a Post-Apocalyptic World and can be found here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12107

 

I finished and uploaded the game last night at around 2:45 AM my time. In general working on it was a lot of fun and the whole process through which I came to the finished product was a very interesting one. I, first, started off wanting to make an “art game”, after playing a lot of the games in Newgrounds “art games” collection, with a original and simple story based around the role of friends and friendship in our lives and their importance. I brainstormed ideas and had a basic story and concept but I couldn’t decide on anything concrete. I felt as though everything I was coming up with wouldn’t work or wasn’t good enough. I realize now that next time I should disregard these doubts and just go ahead, do my best and make the game I want to.

So, I decided to try and keep the same theme of friendship (a theme that came about from an inside joke with my friends), as my own subtheme and try to come up with a new game. And so after brainstorming a few ideas and even drawing some art for them I finally settled on my current idea.  I tackled most of the art first as it was simple and then started coding. I coded most of Saturday night and Sunday, except for a short break I had to take to study. Despite, my hard work I didn’t finish the game in time for the compo so I instead brought my friend aboard to do the music and set out to finish the game for the jam.

What Went Right

• Art: I really liked the simple art I made for the game. As a non-artist I usually go for simple pixel art and this time the theme allowed me to try to make the game’s art as simple as possible while still keeping it understandable and nice-looking.
• Code: I’m a self-taught coder who has been coding for a little over a year now. My first game was for LD 22, which I made in python and pygame. I didn’t end up finishing the game in time but making the game taught me so much about coding games. For example, I learnt the hard way how to properly implement Vector math and trigonometry and I spent a large amount of my time learning that. But, now I’ve been coding for a while and I’m much more comfortable doing so and thus it wasn’t as big a challenge this time round. That doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything new. Every time I participate in a jam I seem to do something new and learn something new. This was the first time I added a preloader to one of my games and so learning how to do that was very valuable.
• Music: I have a friend who makes music and is aspiring to be a professional producer and artist. He actually made the one song together in around ten minutes at around 5 hours from the deadline. I really love the song he made and he even tried tying it to the game and its theme. Although I wish he had more time to work on the song longer or make more.
• School and My friends: Because I ended up doing the jam I was able to take my laptop to school on Monday and get some of my friends to play test the game. Watching people play the game and getting feedback from them was an extremely fruitful experience. It helped me balance the game and make it much more fun. Without my friends play testing the game would’ve been an extremely different experience.

What Went Wrong

• Homework: Luckily for me this was one of the few LD weekends where I found myself completely free so naturally I joined. The one problem was that I had a physics Lab Report due on Sunday night. I put off doing it all Saturday and most of Sunday until I was forced, by the deadline, to stop working on the game and dedicate three hours to finishing the lab report, although I missed the deadline by around an hour, at least I was able to finish the lab report and the game. If it weren’t for my homework I might’ve been able to finish the game in time for the compo albeit without the awesome music and feedback from playtesting.
  
• Music: I never really thought about how I would end up doing the music, while I was still aiming to do the compo. I kept on thinking that I’ll think about it when I get to it. Obviously, I didn’t get to it in time for the compo and so I just had my good friend take care of the music. This was also problematic because he was travelling and thus spent most of Monday on an airplane. Although he did eventually find time to make a quick song.

 

So, I think I can conclude that I had a lot of fun making the game, I learnt a lot in the process and am looking forward to participating in another LD.

 

 

The MinimizeArt entry page is here.
Ludum dare started for me at LD23 – Tiny world. From then until now, I have learned a lot and my games have improved. For one, I was actually proud of what I had made and my game was actually kind of fun. Before I continue, let me show you a timelapse.

Although my game was better this time around, not everything went perfectly.

What didn’t go so well
Messing around – I spent a great deal of time just sitting there, looking at what I had done. I would get something done, and I would just keep looking at it instead of coding.

Important things last – I didn’t do things in the right order, I ran out of time to make more levels (which is mostly the fault of #1). I should have added sound sooner in, made more levels, etc. Then the other stuff would have been a breeze.

What went well
Code – In the past my code was really sloppy. I just did whatever worked. But this time I stopped to think about my code. The end result was much nicer.

Lighting – This was actually the first game I’ve made with lighting, so it’s kind of a good thing.

Game was hard and fun – In the past, my game were about as fun as coding a Graphics driver in Assembly, and they were never hard either. But this time I actually enjoyed playing it.

So that is how my Ludum Dare went.

Tags: Lapse, Mortem, Post, post-mortem, time, timelapse

Minimal Interaction Warfare

When I first started MIW the goal was simple: A 2D war fighting game in which the player placed his troops, issued orders and sat back to follow the outcome. I guess I can say I succeeded as my entry featured all the above. The down falls? No sound, over powered player units and little-to-no-polish. That’s why I decided to release a second, post-jam, version with a simple Main Menu, more maps and balanced gameplay. The game still has no sound effects and music because, well… um, I have little-to-no talent in that area and I wanted to keep things in the spirit of Ludumdare where all the assets are created by me. Maybe in another version, when things settle down (I still have to release another Pimps vs Vampires version this week, and I also have some freelancing work to attend).

Gameplay

The first thing a player must do, when the game starts, is to deploy his units. He has 1300 points which he can exchange for Soldiers and Tanks. Both unit types can be placed on the lower part of the screen (2 rows). After deploying all of his units the player can assign orders to each one (move to position X and defend or move to position and engage/attack). He can also skip this phase and start the simulation (in the post-ludumdare version orders can also be issued by pausing the game mid-play). Player and enemy units clash somewhere in the middle of the map. The game can be won by either defeating all the enemy units or by successfully sending 3 units on the opponent’s starting rows.

Graphics

I’m happy with the way I handled the creation of assets. I decided to go with 16×16 (that I upscaled to 32×32 in the game), each sprite having no more then 4 colors. They all turned out well enough, units were distinguishable and you could tell what each tile on the map represented. For the post-jam version I created 2 more versions of the map tiles for Autumn and Winter maps. All in all, I handled this part well (by my standards)

Programming

I decided to stick with LUA for this Jam but I changed just about all the tools that I used in previous jams. The framework I used was MOAI SDK (for which I wrote a basic wrapper) and my IDE was Sublime 2. Coding started out well but halfway through I started hacking things together, which as always, turned everything into a mess. I have more nested if statements in game.lua then your average pop singer amount of twitter followers.

If I were to summarize everything in “Good” and “Bad” things would look like this:

The good

• Assets
• I finished what I set up to create
• Good choice of language and tools

The bad

• No sound effects and music
• Didn’t get to add a navigation menu
• Underpowered AI and units

The ugly

• My code.

That’s about it. I look forward to the next edition of Ludumdare and other gamejams that might be thrown my way. You can download the post-jam version of MIW here or, alternatively, you can check out the version made in 48 hours. If you took part in the jam then feel free to also rate it

P.s. I’m Open Sourcing the code under CC-3.0 for non-commercial use. The assets are available under CC-3.0 SA  and the .pdn (Paint dotNet) file can be downloaded from OpenGameArt. Feel free to fork the project on github and alter it. Going to try and work on MIW during my spare time, to add new units, fix bugs and improve code readability.

[ Re-posted from my personal blog ]

So as part of my game, Tech Troop Tim’s Big Pay Day, I’ve been keeping track of high scores.

Here’s the thing, you can only see 5 or so entries in the game, you might want to see more. So I’ve put up a website where the raw data is being dropped:
http://techtrooptim.heliohost.org/

I wanted it up earlier, but the host just finally activated my website. It isn’t pretty, but it works!

So, I managed to finish off my game just in time for submission hour last night. There’s not much, but it’s really been a great learning experience! If you’re interested, you can find the submission page at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=5788. I’ve put together this postmortem for anyone interested in the myriad problems that can occur if they’re looking to join in Ludum Dare:

Timelapse

For my third Ludum Dare and my third game, even though I preferred it to my other games I was a little bit disappointed. Why? It’s simple – inexperience with javascript pushed me beyond the 48-hour target and into the Jam.

Tools and Software Used

• Sublime Text 2 was used for all the Javascript code, HTML and CSS. I even edited the maps exclusively with it!
• Photoshop CS5 64-Bit was used for the tileset, sprite and image design.
• Famitracker, an excellent NES tracker was used to create the sound effects.
• Google Chrome for testing.

What went right?

• The stylistic choice of an 8-colour palette really helped simplify the graphics work, and using a set of tonally similar colours makes the graphics easier on the eyes.
• Tileset design was just as easy as I’d remember it!
• I had written a system in javascript for loading files and calling specific tiles from tilesets in another project a few weeks prior – a lot of the initial code (which I was writing before I had a fully-formed idea) came naturally.
• Thankfully, working with canvas and javascript for game logic proved to be quite intuitive in the end.
• Level construction was quite an easy task once I figured out the many quirks of my systems; it took just a few hours to extend out from a single room to an entire complex of rooms!

What went wrong?

• Having never so much as looked at collision checking code, writing this (very important) system took a significant amount of time.
• Writing the game logic was unfortunately troublesome at first while I tried to figure out where each step should occur in the update queue.
• Being a newbie at javascript, it felt a bit like writing the rendering and control systems took far longer than it should have taken. Ideally I should have anticipated this and prepared an engine in advance or researched an already-existing one.
• Map editing by text was painful. And I do mean that with all sincerity. I had a look at Ogmo engine mid-compo but I ultimately decided that decoding the file format would have been far too much trouble.
• Sprite design is… not exactly my cup of tea.
• I could have probably managed my time more efficiently, or planned it out at all.

Thoughts for next time:

• Have way more experience with your chosen programming language!
• Plan out your time well, even if bugs do crop up it’s good to keep a rough idea of what you want to have finished by a certain time.
• Have an engine you want to use picked out in advance! Unless of course there isn’t an engine quite suitable for your idea.
• Ideally, write something simple enough that you can finish with enough spare time to write sound effects and/or music. They really complete the experience, and it really sucks not having any completed in time.

If you’ve read this through, then thanks a lot for your time! Now you can return to rating all of the wonderful games that LD48 gives rise to.

-Mach

We are extremely proud to present our Ludum Dare Jam entry, Minimalist Horror Story!

A Unity-based FPS horror mini-story that hasyou waking up in house with only a burning candle to light your way. Can you escape? Is there something else in the house with you?

Is there a potato?

Please try out the game, vote and prepare to be scared!

Thanks to everyone that made Ludum Dare the EPIC EVENT that it is today! We had a blast and we’ll keep voting on our favorites!

So, I had most of my cloud code written by the time the competition had ended on Sunday, but it didn’t work.  It took me about another 20 revisions of my Parse cloud code to get things finally working (I hope!).

I must say, while I had all the concepts down; debugging cloud code was a nightmare.  And half the time, things didn’t work as I expected with their API or objects weren’t updated when I’d thought.  I really want to like their system, but this took me about four times as long as it should have.  Especially without support for transaction type calls.

Anyway, the game is exactly the same, it just now supports hooking you up with a random person and playing head-to-head.  So, if you don’t have a friend to play with, try it out here.

Please let me know if you notice anything wonky.  Thanks!

This is pretty much a re-post from my own blog, I was going to link to it, but that’s a little lazy / traffic grabbing.
It’s a little rambling, so brace yourselves.

The Game:

The theme was “Minimalism”, which when you’ve got to do your own art isn’t a bad theme. I was awake when the theme was posted on Twitter, which was at silly o’clock UK time ( 4 am ? ) and I just went to sleep thinking about it.
What I came up with was a world that was going to be very clean and sterile in iso. Lots of cubes, cube particles, cube sprites. It was inspired partly by Marble Madness and an old Spectrum game ( Which my mate Bas mentioned when we were chatting about it, which was strange, as it’s quite an obscure reference ) Quazatron.

 

Which in itself was an iso remake of Paradroid ( My favourite game ever ). The clean visual style I had in my head was of an unreleased official remake of Paradroid that just looked stunning.

 

So lots of clean white iso lines.
That was the look & feel sorted, next, the game play. I figured with the theme the player should be making the game area minimalistic, bringing some order to the chaos. Another one of my favourite games is WizBall, where you have to collect colour and paint a drab world.

 

So let’s do the opposite of that, lets position the player as almost a baddie, turning a beautifully coloured world to a nasty plain drab one.
It just needed a name. R.G.B was an early thought ( I’m glad I didn’t go with that, http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&q=rgb ) but felt a little obvious ( No offence ! ).
It was all about Colour, and keeping with the theme I stripped that right down so it was just C… ( Written in game as C [Dot][Dot][Dot] ).

What went right ?

Let’s do this one first, save the nasty ’til last.

• The look & feel turned out really well. I knew I couldn’t spend too much time on the assets. I can do pixel art to a degree, but it takes me forever.

  I lost a ton of time trying to get the colours plotted correctly. I had this vision of undulating hills with stunning shades of pastel colours all overlapping creating lots of different hues ( I was thinking of a pretty version of the Red Weed stuff from War of the Worlds ).

Instead what I got was this:

 

It took ages on the last day to actually mix the colours as I wanted, and even then I never really nailed the shades I wanted ( Remember, this is the stuff I thought went well ! ).

• The level generation worked so much better than I could have ever hoped. I used Perlin Noise to generate the height map and it only took a couple of attempts to gauge the height of each tile sprite correctly so they appeared like a solid wall, but aside from that it went really smoothly, and once I could scroll over it it looked great, I’m so happy with that.
• The colour bomb mechanic was a late addition. I realised that if I was going to have lots of baddies milling around I had to either make them slow, zombie like and you’d die just to their weight of numbers, or speed them up but give the player a weapon.
  I couldn’t have directional shooting, it would have been a massive pain to do with the different heights of the map ( There’s no depth sorting going on ) so it had to be a smart bomb type weapon.
  I couldn’t just give the player three to start with and I didn’t have the time to add collectables. But hang on, don’t we technically collect the colour emitters ? ( Well we don’t, we just destroy them, but it’s just a game kids, I’m allowed to break the rules a little ). There’s also a certain nice irony that the colour emitters can be turned on their defenders.

 

For the visual effect it was an obvious thing, let the whole level wobble like a giant water drop. I left the player’s tile untouched, partly to keep that slow motion water drop effect and partly because it would have been a real ball ache to move it too.
I abused TweenLite a lot to create the effect and it came out pretty much how I pictured it in my head, which is a rare treat.

And that’s all I can think of that went well. The particles the colour emitters ( And the sprites themselves ) look ok.

What went wrong ?

Less grabs this time, I don’t want to draw too much attention to all the bad things.

• The lack of sprite images. I’m kinda lucky with the theme that it’s a slight way out, but I planned to have the player as a metal ball and show reflections in it to create a sense of movement ( I’ve written a similar routine for Outpost 2 [ The monster of a game I’ve been working on forever ] just the other week so it was still fresh in my head ).
  But then I realised that it may look weird the player being this detailed sprite in a world where he was trying to make everything drab, so I would need to give the baddies some love and… just out of time with it all, hence the baddies being the same sprite just tinted, which was a crap cop out.
•  Speaking of the baddies, the AI was the very last thing finished. I had massive issues with it, which I wasn’t expecting, as they’re ultra simple ( Is the player to the right of this baddie ? Yes, move right. That’s it! ).
  I had pre-caculated all the possible positions on the map and I was using a simple tweening code to move them, but they’d go mental after a little while. Turns out I was accidentally over-writing my coord values so their movement was getting more broken as the level went on.
  By the time I’d discovered that ( On day 3 ) I’d ripped out my tween code assuming that was wrong and replaced it with TweenLite. Now TweenLite is fantastic, but you don’t want it running in-game, it’s for title screens and other transitions.
  The performance is ok on my machine, but it’s a beast when it comes to Flash for some reason, it’s probably going to be dog shit on a lot of peoples machines.
  I also wanted different baddie types. The one really clear image I had when I nodded off on Friday [ Saturday morning ] thinking about the game was having these sand worms type baddies. They’d burst out of tile with a shower of cube particles and arch there way across the screen. Picture Loch Ness style humps, like a snake where you’d see it’s arches / humps. Even thinking about it now makes me want to do it.
•  The chunk scroll came back to haunt me. What looked so nice with just the static objects, looked fucking dreadful when I had moving baddies in there. A combination of them smooth moving whilst the player moved a tile at a time just didn’t work. It’s my least favourite part of the game and in hindsight I would have smooth scrolled the whole thing and added fogging to edge tiles to try and soften that out.

• Lack of time / planning. I always just wing things. If I don’t know how to do something I just put it on the back burner as there’s always a million things to do when writing a game anyway, and then normally my brain just works it out for me in a bolt of inspiration.
  You can’t rely on that when pressed for time. Every little thing seemed to come back to haunt me, an added complication I wasn’t expecting, and that’s partly why I missed the comp deadline and it slipped into day 3 making it a jam submission. Which annoyed the shit out of me, I hate missing deadlines.

There are other things, I’m not overly loving the gameplay itself, it’s very basic. Also the map was a late addition, then I realised you actually see the colour splat before the emitter shows up on it, so that was pretty pointless ( When I first did the map I did it with each emitter just being a pixel, turns out a pixel on a map is very very tiny and pointless ).

I’m not overly happy with the sounds, they were very last minute and pretty much the first things BFXR spat out at me. Outpost 2 has 212 sounds in it’s library, I just couldn’t face spending a ton of time on these ones. Again minimalism was a blessing.
One last thing, I decided to give Starling a try as I’ve been meaning to use it for ages and this seemed a good chance. Ripped it all out Sunday as I wasn’t happy with the colour shading on the tiles, so that was a bit of a waste of time.

Conclusion ( Or the bit you skipped to )

I really enjoyed doing the comp, the team spirit within the community is great. I can’t express how annoyed I am with myself for missing the comp deadline, but overall the game’s ok. Well rather, there’s a good game in there somewhere, I just didn’t manage to extract it.
At least it’s a playable game and I’ve got a real taste for LD, hopefully I’ll be entering future ones.

If you’d like to play the game / grab the source / vote / comment here’s the link:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15712

Cheers,

Squize.

The Lamp is waiting for you (and it is not alone) in our LD26 entry.

Turn the lamp off, then turn it on.
See what happens.
Survive.

Play it here!

Show us your interest and get a cool post mortem back (which is in the works)!

My first Ludum Dare (25) was a shameful fail. I wanted to do too much things for 48 hours and not having much experience with programming. So I decided to make a simple game in next Ludum Dare… and there it is – “Out Of Darkness”

Theme was great for my plan. The goal is to escape from darkness by only hearing sounds and seeing light.

The most minimalistic way to make a game

What went right:

• I have finished my Ludum Dare entry but… (read what went wrong)
• Made a simple game as I wanted.
• I know  more now about Slick2D features.
• I think I came out with a good idea for this theme.

What went wrong:

• … it was made only in 13 hours. (9 hours of programming + 4 hours to remove all bugs). But why only in 13 hours? There was 35 hours still to add more features or details BUT I had to finish my school competition project. YES I didn’t plan properly my weekend.
• I had (and still have)  a problem with applet version. Every time when game play sound it freezes whole browser and java console. Have someone a solution for this?

Conclusion:

I love this competition and I will participate until I die. I have still much things to learn but I like it! In the future I need to plan next Ludum Dare weekend 2 weeks earlier.

 

 

 

THE STORY: Imagine it’s the morning of that big job interview or business presentation. You were up ’til 3 a.m. preparing, but you forgot to set your alarm clock and you’ve overslept. Your train leaves in 10 minutes, so you only have a few precious moments to shave…

THE PITCH: Since the dawn of time, mankind has yearned for a realistic beard shaving simulation.  The dream of virtual beard maintenance has sadly, to this day, proved elusive.  Today, however, I am pleased to announce that the most anticipated shaving game of all time is some other game which, quite possibly, doesn’t yet exist.  Until that game exists, until our collective grooming vision is realized, I humbly submit… Shaving Quest: The Razor’s Edge!

Let your creativity soar to new bearded heights as you nimbly create the perfect Fu Manchu, a razor thin pencil mustache, or perhaps the venerable Van Dyke.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=3609

… And the reviews are in!

Thank you to everyone who has commented on Shaving Quest!  You have all provided tons of encouragement and I thank you all sincerely!  Below is a sampling of the reviews (taken completely out of context).

You made SOMETHING.
this is pure nonsense
I almost didn’t play this game because the thumbnail reminds me of “Un Chien Andalou”
I very badly wanted to shave his nose off.
I enjoyed this a lot more with debug mode on!
It is a shame there is no actual goal
it’s not really a game
What the…
Ho ho, I guess it’s something.
more of a toy than a game
It’s definitely minimalism.
The character haven’t nose in my version.

What went right?

Mission Accomplished!  If the goal of LD is to create a game, and if the definition of “game” is relaxed to include such activities as erasing pixels from a bitmap image, then SQ is technically a game that was completed before the Jam deadline.  This was my first LD, so I was pretty much in over my head from the get-go.

Phun with Physics!  Box2DWeb was successfully incorporated into the game with humorous effect.  If you poke a man in the eye, does he not blink?  I think he does!  His nose also twitches in a totally unrealistic manner.

What went wrong?

Know thy tools.  I had never used Box2D and hadn’t spent much time with CreateJS.  I wasted several hours figuring out the API’s.  I should have invested some time during the week  leading up to LD26 to familiarize myself with both libraries.

The enthusiasm gap.  As the code got uglier and more convoluted, my enthusiasm crashed through the floor.  I slept in on Sunday.  I lost several perfectly good hours to the History Channel’s Vikings season one marathon.  As the compo deadline passed, so too had my will to continue.  However, the jam still had one more day to go, so I tinkered with it a bit on Monday and submitted what I had (sans shaving).  I was so completely overwhelmed by the amount of encouragement I received shortly after submitting that I decided to take a few hours Monday evening to add a crude shaving mechanic just before the jam deadline.  Feedback helps.  A lot.

You wanted to make a game about what?  So, the original idea was to make a crude version of Surgeon Simulator 2013, but with shaving.  Yep.  Shaving.  Somehow, late Friday night, that seemed like a good idea.  I imagined with glee that players would end up cutting, bludgeoning, or otherwise mutilating their cartoon selves.  I envisioned Dexteresque blood splatters, Gwar-tastic fountains of gore… but sometime Saturday evening I was regretting my game choice.  There was supposed to be a timer counting down and a blood loss meter that, if emptied, would cause you to black out.  You would be able to stanch the flow with toilet paper, and… and… as the hours wore on, it just seemed like there was too much to do and I found I had lost interest.

Conclusion

1. Know your tools.
2. Solicit feedback early and often.  It helps to maintain your enthusiasm.
3. Don’t bite off more than you can chew in 48 hours.
4. Keep your code clean and well organized.  You have plenty of time to comment and refactor, so there’s no excuse for messy code.
5. Maintain a good supply of Oreo’s and milk.  Seriously.

Happy shaving!

I submitted a new version of my game. I didn’t add anything, I just fixed several bugs and problems.

Here is the complete change list:

• Added WASD controls
• Less waiting at the end of the level
• Fixed boss doublehit (a rare bug)
• Added “R” key hint
• Added potatoes

Now go and find those 3 very secret potatoes, hidden in places you’ve never thought of!

This has been my first Ludum Dare, and I must say, I have loved it. I learned about finishing games, and overall a bit more about Java.  I have had a wonderful experience. I decided to enter the Jam because I felt it would work out better that way for being a beginner, in August I’ll definitely do the 48h Compo.  I love the community, everyone has been incredibly nice.

I am definitely going do this again.

I made a video for my game to give you a brief impression of the visual style and the core gameplay.

It has more to offer than you can see in the video, but you’d have to find that out on your own

Oh and the music in the background is actually in the game and was recorded during the 48 hours. If you like what you see or want to jump directly into the game instead of watching a video

this is a link to my games entry page

Going to do a post mortem tomorrow

Congrats to Billkney who proved me, the game designer wrong!

I only thought that the maximum amount of points you can get is 100, he got 119!!!

Quick challenge, can anyone get more than him?!

 

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18650