So my first joke when I learned the theme was “My games are already minimalist.”

I was collaborating with Anand so I could have more elaborate art than I could have made on my own, and the first thought when you think of a “minimalist game” would be red wedges shooting white circles or something.

So on Friday we considered a few directions to take the idea that would address the theme, especially ones that would allow minimalist and non-minimalist elements to co-mingle.

1) A non-minimalist character exploring a minimalist world.
2) Perhaps everything is coloured rectangles until you get close to it or shine a light on it or something.
3) A strategy game that you can switch between two different modes, one with character stats and firing ranges and things, one where they are white and black pieces that move by square.
4) A strategy game of minimalists vs. non-minimalists

We started going with 4, then started thinking a Tower Defense would be easiest to finish in a weekend, ( compared to a more symmetrical strategy game, where I would need to program the A.I. ) and somehow while drawing the sketches for it, we came up with the unique aiming mechanism, which you can see here:

Note also that the towers were initially vertical boxes. The lines were meant to show where the rear towers had a clear line-of-sight, but looking at it, we thought, what if that’s how you aimed, not with a single tower, but with a pair of towers? So we seized on that as a mechanism that made the game a little more innovative than just yet another TD game, and set to work.

I programmed it in Flashpunk, because I had used it before. Anand and I hadn’t collaborated before, so I wanted to keep the number of new things under control. I looked up a lot of things on Flash Game Dojo while the Flashpunk.net site is down.

So here’s the result.

After playtesting, maybe the game is a little too simplistic, which has made it tough to balance, in terms of if you make the creeps too tough, they overwhelm you no matter what you do, and if you make them too easy, you would have to go out of your way to lose. We have a couple ideas on what would add some depth to it, but by the time we thought of them, it was too late to implement them.

Tags: flash, flashpunk, tower defense

I decided to take the theme of minimalism in the direction of minimal interface: try to make a game that can be played by audio alone!

What went right:

• Framework: I used love2d again, and this time I had even more experience. I used the collision library I learnt about in LD24 and without it this game would not have been possible for me to make in the time frame.
• Idea: I think this was a really interesting idea, and a lot of people agreed. I’ve never played such a game before, though I have heard of a few. I’m really interested in making similar games and seeing what can be done with audio games.
• Visuals: I think I have managed to achieve a visual style is simple but elegant, and fits the theme quite nicely. It’s quite neat that the player’s route overlaid on the map looks like minimalist art itself.

What went wrong:

• Sound: I made a similar mistake in LD24 – having really irritating sounds. Some people reported the feeler noise hurt their ears.
• Playability: I really had no idea how to design an audio game, and it shows! I’m not entirely sure the directional sound for the goal works properly, and I think the theramin-style feeler is a very good interface for blind navigation. I don’t think I made it clear enough what the static meant, especially since the grid scrolls even when you aren’t moving! That said, I was pleasantly surprised by how many people enjoyed the game and actually made it to the end!
• Dead ends: I spent a lot of time playing with dead end ideas – namely trying to do levels made of constructive solid geometry (way too fiddly to implement in the time frame). The sound element of the game is very stripped down from the weird stuff I was playing with, and the levels are nothing like I wanted them to be originally!

Like last time, in LD24, it was great fun to participate. I’ve made an interesting game that’s like nothing I’ve ever made before, and really has me thinking about new possibilities for other audio-games.

Tags: audio game, LD#26, love2d, lua, post-mortem

The Tool: Unity

So around two weeks ago I made a reluctant post about being in for the Jam. I wasn’t sure if I’d take part or not, as I didn’t have any colliders prepared from my normal 2D framework, one of the harder lessons from my first Ludum Dare, the other being a hard 7-hour-costing lesson in buggy animation (which I later fixed). In fact I used Box2D the first time around, so I didn’t have any collider experience off the top of my head. Like the first time, I had to decide between GLBasic, or Unity+C#. The first time I chose GLBasic because I knew off the top of my head 3D modelling can be costly with rigging/weight painting, and I hadn’t spent enough time figuring out 2D.

I think ultimately the difference here in going the Unity route, was that it presented challenges I was aware of, but going GLBasic appeared less threatening and problems ended up creeping up on me the first time. This time I chose Unity and the result was much better. Not to mention getting 72 hours in the Jam as opposed to 48 hours of crunch time. That said, Platonic Dot Solid could have been made in 48 hours as I took a lot of relaxation time, and much of the last day was spent polishing up the boss fight. Also, the web based player is really convenient.

The Theme: Minimalism

The most minimal idea that came to mind was math and the elements. For me, this boiled down to Sacred Geometry and the Platonic Solids. Influenced by Plato’s ideas, the Platonic solids each represented a basic element: Earth (Cube), Fire (Tetrahedron), Air (octahedron), Water (Icosahedron), and Dark Matter (Dodecahedron).

On top of this, I also wanted to represent the conflict between humanity and the Djinn. In typical Biblical stories, there’s this idea of angels turning bad and becoming demons, but in the Qu’ran, angels have no free will and the Djinn are the only ones that may turn evil out of their jealousy against humans inheriting the Earth.

I created Sucre Cube a long time ago as a spontaneous 20 minute idea for a Sugar cube that travels through a kitchen to save himself from becoming used in coffee. I never fleshed out the idea, but when this theme came up, Sucre became Dot Solid. I remodelled him from scratch, but starting with a sphere. I liked the idea of a one dimensional dot becoming the whole of the 11th dimensional universe. I never followed through with making part of the game 2D, as a progression through dimensions, but I still like the concept. The texture is really the only thing I came into the Jam with.

I’m not 100% happy with the morph to Icosahedron, but I spent 5 hours on it. Blend Shapes or Morph Targets aren’t possible in Unity without an add-on by Chris West called Megafiers. If you use Unity, I think this is mandatory for intentional design and really the only must-have add-on for me at least. It cost $150 but the price is going up soon, so hint-hint.

What Went Right

Because of juxtaposition between all these ideas, including a nod to Metal Gear Solid (originally in title alone), everything seemed to come together serendipitously. By the end of the 48 hour deadline, I pretty much had the game done, but I needed a boss battle. I’ll admit, a bit of laziness led me to putting together different elements of the level to create the enemy. But then something magical happened. I created, METAL DJINN!

His legs were made of pistons, his arms a Cannon, and his head a Dodecahedron Djinn.

I would have liked to add a lot more sounds like footsteps, or the pistons slamming, but automated looping animations are hard to synchronize properly with sound. The humorous voice by Camila really made it easy to not feel that bad about dying. Dying is not a serious issue in this game, which I think is something that works for games. In fact, more people wanted closer checkpoints. Possible one after each obstacle. This says something about casual games and experiences being compartmentalized. I could really consider making a mobile version of Platonic Dot Solid with single challenges and a proper save.

What can I say about the graphics? They were easy to do and they worked. I guess this is one case in which limits influence style. The graphics themselves are minimal and it allowed me to build levels completely out of primitives. I’m happy with the animation. HumanIK in Maya makes it really easy, as did using Legacy animations for Unity 3.5.7. Mecanim would have been overkill and as I still haven’t figured it all out, there’s no way I’d get the game done in time if I did this with mecanim in Unity 4.

MORE LOVE – Is a song I first heard from my friend Ahssan, who I met in University (for Interaction Design & Performance and Media Arts). That was about 10 years ago, and recently he let me hear version 5 of it which is a testament to his improvement. Both songs are used in the game. V5 for the intro and V1 for the ending. I love this song, but I didn’t always love Ahssan’s music. In fact I was the first person who honestly told Ahssan he couldn’t sing back in 2003. He came up to me one day and said he cried and screamed in his pillow, which I felt bad about, but he then said he realized he owed me a debt of gratitude because he had been spending a lot of money on lessons (his teacher even admitted to stringing him along). Today he raps and just synthesizes the music end of things and I think he’s really good at it. In this case, honesty was the best policy. I thought it was a perfect fit for this game.

Ideas for level design were well influenced by the first 5 hours I spent building Dot Solid. Knowing what his powers were, I could built platforming obstacles around them. One thing I wanted was multiple ways to pass certain obstacles and the Fight or Flight section (Timing or Force) had 3 different ways to pass it. This I think is an important part of good games. Sometimes you have to let the player play how they want, in their style.

What Went Wrong

AI was difficult to put in. I had simple facing scripts, but walking and pathfinding towards the player, firing at him was a mystery. I wanted the final boss battle to be a lot more epic, and less tedious. Yes you can fire at him from the top boxes, but I wanted the player to jump on his head and fire from there. The wind powers were too hard to control in both perspective and orthographic camera modes. I also wanted the boss to have 3 different forms, or timed sections where the player would be challenged to use each of their powers intelligently. In the end, I think Metal Djinn could be improved, but this is a challenge for another day.

Though initially, level design was very easy, as time went on, I started to repeat a lot of elements. I think in some ways this is necessary as it asks the player to get used to using the power, but I would have liked more diversity. I never had a chance to make sections of levels where the player had to use the sphere form to outrun a giant boulder like in Indian Jones. One of the reasons for this is that the orthographic camera makes it difficult to make bobsled-like tracks.

I should have made my game controller-friendly by not requiring the Left-Shift key.

BULLETS! These little 2D bullets which always faced the orthographic camera. This was easy to do when they were fired down the negative z-dimension, but when it came to firing Fireballs from Dot Solid, or Cannonballs from Metal Djinn, I had to overhaul it a little bit. They went all over the place until I set them to fire directly from the tips, and rotate towards the arm’s aiming direction. The fireballs were made collide-able, to make them less cheap, but I noticed when doing the same thing for the Cannonballs, they made the bullets look sloppy, arcing like a wingless bird. They also rolled around everywhere and made the last boss battle look ridiculous. In the end, the Cannonballs had no collisions, but the fireballs did.

Player Feedback

People complained about the controls, which I think is understandable. People don’t like cheap deaths. Most of the time, we’d like to die when successfully doing what we wanted to do. In this case, I thought it added a challenge to the game, as did the orthographic camera which I intentionally abused to mislead the player into false solutions. The good news is you’ll never truly die in this game so it’s basically just a challenge of patience. The game can be completed in 3 to 10 minutes. Possibly longer. The bad news is that my 4 year old nephew couldn’t wrap his head around it, but enjoyed watching me play it.

The orthographic camera was an intentional obstacle, but I noticed a number of players really wanted clarity in this. So this teaches me something about the player wanting challenges that don’t exist in the controls/interface of their character. I think that’s a very valid point. The original Resident Evil was very scary because it was so hard to control your character while escaping, but it feels cheap to die when your character doesn’t do what you expect it to.

The art style was the biggest positive and I kind of agree. Secretly, I’ve always wanted to see shaders that automatically add cross hatching or other patterns to objects so that I can do a game in the style of Valkyria Chronicles, but prepared textures seemed to work fine so far.

Conclusion – What I Learned and Need to Learn

This was my second Ludum Dare. The biggest lesson of my first Ludum Dare was that sometimes you have to cut features to ship. This time around I didn’t have that problem, but I think the biggest lesson was that you can never make a game too easy, and making a game both easy and challenging is in itself a challenge. I was planning on adding a hardcore mode (with one death), which would have been about 10 minutes of work, but then I realized that at one point in the game, you are supposed to die to advance. I didn’t want to risk offending frustrated players either.

AI is the next frontier. Even if I have to figure out how to use an add-on with behaviour trees, AI is really important in 3D games. Pathfinding goes hand-in-hand with that. For whatever reason, I’ve come out of this Ludum Dare really interested in procedural/random level generation and multiplayer, but there’s nothing I dislike more than an absence of bots, so I really should figure out AI first.

Colliders. Although Unity makes this really easy, I still need to understand how to build this from scratch someday beyond simple box checking.

C# and Javascript do not communicate together well. I like C# more, but for the enemy rotations, for some reason I used Javascript as I learned it that way from the Tornado Twins. It’s not that I can’t do it, it’s that the porting hasn’t been done yet and it took less time to come up with a cross-script call.

All in all, I often fall into the trap of procrastinating, just because I know how much work is ahead of me, but when you buckle down in a game jam like this, it really brings out the best in you. Also, using Sucre or Dot Solid officially removes a game idea out of my mental vault of ideas. I wasn’t planning on participating but I’m glad I did and the community is the best part. I’ve only heard constructive and honest criticism, but mostly supportive comments. A much better contrast to when just posting videos of progress on youtube or forums and getting death threats for it. Hahaha… that actually happens.

I’m really proud of what I created so I hope more people will get a chance to play it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=17759

Tags: Metal Djinn, Platonic Dot Solid, post-mortem, Prelucid

I’ve spent my day trying to fix big issues with the build I’ve posted yersteday (or in the morning), but I finally made it in less than 72 hours. 😀

Now I’m tired, so I just copy the description I’ve put with my game: Sunset Death.

YOU CAN PLAY HERE

Sunset Death is 2 player duel game:
– The goal is to kill your opponent 3 times before he does the same.
– You can dash, backdash (both only once in a fight) and slash with your sword.

Controls are simples:
– P1: s (backdash) d (slash) f (dash)
– P2: l (backdash) k (slash) j (dash)

The game is a mix of reflexes, mindgame and alea. But the most important is that it keep the fight simple. Everything is in the atmosphere.

This is my first time making a game in solo, my first time doing art for game and my first time animating something. That was REALLY TOUGH !

Softwares :
– Photoshop
– Construct 2
– Audacity

Hope you’ll enjoy it.

It was a bit harder to rate games, as I was on linux, and it is a pain to find games that actually package linux natives with their jars, had a linux port, or just didn’t use Unity, as I was having a lot of trouble with Unity, too. I wish linux was more widely accepted. None the less, I rated 20 games and I am going to keep rating until the judging time runs out! Good luck everybody.

I wrote a game titled Conversion, after the condition known as Conversion Blindness. You cannot see, so you must complete the game using only your sense of hearing and sense of touch. It’s minimalist by reducing your senses and distilling the environment down to the remaining senses. The game is intentionally vague about what’s going on in an attempt to immerse you in the confusion of someone who just had a traumatic event trigger blindness.

That’s already a bit of a spoiler, so if you don’t want to be spoiled further, go rate Conversion and come back. We’ll wait.

Theme Selection

I did not like the selected theme one bit. At all. I hated it. Everyone is just going to do “minimal crappy graphics” I thought. It took me a couple hours of pouting before I decided to take the “minimal graphics” idea to it’s ultimate conclusion – no graphics. And since text adventures are a well defined genre that just left audio-only games. It still took me another hour or so to refine what I meant by audio-only – a game where you hear sounds and have to walk to them to get the next bit of the story.

Implementation

I knew I needed positional audio and I knew XNA (my chosen platform) could do positional audio, so I went to work creating a simple tile map and player actor to interact with. And then I heard it. And it was awful. XNA’s positional audio is so far from precise that you’d be bouncing around the map trying to locate the sound. You can’t tell front from back, and the zone where the sound was equal volume for both ears was so wide that the sound could have been coming from anywhere. And JSIL doesn’t support it. So I went about implementing my own positional audio using just volume and pan. I was able to narrow the area that’s considered “in front of you” and I made “behind you” quieter than in front. Both cues that’ll help you find your goal.

Problems

There were plenty. I was not prepared to build an audio centric game. Though I had the tools available, I didn’t remember how to use any of them. But when the muse strikes, you don’t say “sorry, no tools” you just plow through.

• Audio recording. I have a Belkin  TuneTalk. They’re supposed to be good at recording good quality audio. Unfortunately they’re noisy as heck. I spent a lot of time cleaning up sounds and re-recording them. I need a new portable recording solution (or just a better mic for this thing).
• JSIL, the XNA to javascript compiler, doesn’t support audio panning. I’ve since taken a whack at trying to solve that, but my first attempt failed, possibly because I don’t understand the Web Audio API. I’ve got a bug filed against JSIL on this and I’m still continuing to look into it so I can provide a web build. The game plays completely fine in JSIL otherwise. But imagine being blind and deaf in one ear trying to track down that damn leaky faucet.
• Content. There was supposed to be a lot more content. This is largely a problem with my engine primarily being for arcade/action games, there just wasn’t any support in it for pre-determined events. With time running short, I only got the win/lose condition in  literally just before the compo ended. The “intruder” you chase literally teleports between two locations because my event triggering system doesn’t allow for the spawning of actors with actual AI. I lost a lot of time because the feeble triggering solution I had kept breaking every time I needed to add another type of trigger.

Surprises

I completed. No, that really is a surprise. Literally 15 minutes before compo deadline Serilyn can attest to my giving up. I literally had no end condition. You couldn’t win or lose. Somehow, cobling together a lot of hacks, I managed to make the gun fire a bullet (instead of just making a sound) and have that bullet kill the intruder and have it trigger a player death if you use too many bullets (yeah, cheesy, but I needed a lose condition). Thank God (and the LD admins of course) for submission hour.

Conclusion

I love the concept that I proved. I hate that it’s so short and that the neat story I had envisioned was completely lost. I plan to do a post-compo version, though it’s going to have to compete with my other non-LD project for time. Luckily both projects make use of the same engine and use exactly the same mapping tech under the hood, so I can advance both titles simultaneously for a bit.

For those interested, I use Mercurial for revision control and did multiple commits over the course of the compo. The repos have been mirrored on Bitbucket. Compo source. Engine source. I tagged what was released for the compo so that I can continue committing post-compo code.

So now that you’ve read this, please rate Conversion. Tell me what you liked. Tell me what you’d like to see. Tell me what you didn’t like.

Thanks!

Game:
Mono Cave

Description:
Mono Cave is a little game where you venture through a cave and shoot the bad dudes that get in your way! The entire game is made up of only two colors: black and white. It also features the retro sound of a gameboy synth for the music.

What Went Right:

• I completed the game. Considering I didn’t even plan on entering in the first place and worked on the game purely because it was fun to keep going, I’m very happy that I finished. It’s nice to work on a game for no other reason than it’s fun to do so. In the end I created enough content to last someone a good 10 minute play-through.
• Some people seem to like it! I’ve gotten a decent amount of compliments which makes me super happy. I have also gotten a fair amount of criticism but I think it’s all justified and it’s about things that I would have sorted given the time. I’ve found only a few people have straight up said it sucks but I can take it… Honest… :'(
• I learned a bunch. I’m not used to using flash, I generally work with java and Libgdx or game maker. (Occasional some C++ and SFML.) I found I was able to very quickly adapt to FlashPunk in combination with Actionscript. This seems to be partially down to FlashPunk being very easy and straight forward to work with. I’ve come out of this with far better skills when developing flash applications.
• I feel like I managed to stick to the theme fairly well. The graphics, sound and gameplay are all minimalistic while avoiding it being ugly and boring. (At least a little bit. 😉 )

What Went Wrong:

• A game breaking bug. I managed to let a bug slip which would mean picking up a key would sometimes not work. The player would then be stuck, unable to beat the level. I believe the bug is sorted at this point but it still bums me out to think many people had to deal with the frustration of things breaking. I found especially early on, many of the comments on Newgrounds where complaints of keys not working. I must have lost a fair amount of people to that glitch.
• One of the game-play decisions I made to simplify the game backfired. I decided early on that I wanted the player to only shoot in two directions and the direction would be determined by which way the player was facing. People didn’t seem to like this and would have preferred Binding of Issac style controls. I do agree that the game would have been more fun that way. Sadly by the time I realized that was the case, I didn’t have enough time to re-work the levels to fit that gameplay.
• The music is very love hate. I think this is kind of a good thing in some ways and I’m especially happy when people say they like it because of the great rush I was in to make it. I almost didn’t bother because it wasn’t going well at first and I literally only had about 20 minutes to write and implement it. The reason this is in “what went wrong” is because I realize that picking high pitch notes in such a short loop was a pretty bad idea. It really becomes annoying unless you’re into that sound. I should have probably gone for something a little easier on the ears.
• I didn’t give enough time to really take the game to it’s full potential and to the level of polish that I would want. As I mentioned earlier this was just a spur of the moment thing and I only kept going because it was fun. I feel like if I had really set aside time I could have taken the game a bit further and made it more fun. On the same note maybe the spur of the moment decision was what made it such a joy to work on.

Summary:
This was a great experience. I don’t expect to come close to the top 10% of games or even come above the top 50% but I managed to make a game with about 12-14 hours of work and enjoyed doing so. I learned a great deal and many people have said they like the game. What more can I ask for?

Imma be streaming me playing some LD Games woo!

http://www.twitch.tv/saampahlavan

Once again, I finished my entry in time. For the fourth time to be precise.

As usual, I kept the graphical appearance to a basic level. Only this time I was encouraged to do so *sqeee*. The thing about basic graphics is that I can put more time in the game rather than making it look good.

My finished entry is Trapped In Minimalism.
You are a man who is trapped in a mysterious world in which everything appears different to ours. Everything looks basic, simple, minimalised. You have to escape in one way or another. Your plan to escape puts your life on line…
Click the image to get to the game.

What went well?
* The most important thing that went well is that I managed to finish the game.
* As opposite to the other times I participated in Ludum Dare, I had a scribble file to write down all ideas and plans I had to sum up how I wanted the game to be.
* To add to the previous point; TODO list vs optional TODO list. Knowing what is highly needed in the game and what would just be a secondary feature. With these two lists I could easily finish the core of the game without having unnecessary code in my way.
* Knowing when something headed the wrong way. I quickly noticed, halfway through the first day, that my sprites did not look anything like I wanted them to. Because of the early notice I managed to redo most sprites without feeling stressed out for the deadline.
* Oversleeping. During the other LDs I have participated in I did not sleep a lot, maybe 4-5 hours á night. The outcome was always feeling really bad the next couple of days, not to mention catching a lack-of-sleep-cold. Because of me oversleeping both days this time, I managed to keep my hours of sleep, have a clear mind and feeling relatively good afterwards.
* Testing. Oh dear Goddess, test the game as much as you can throughout the creation to spot errors in time. Streaming helped a ton since the watchers would spot an error or two which I missed. Thanks guys! <3

What went bad?
* Some things on the list changed throughout the event. I did end up with some working but horrible looking code in the end.
* Do NOT do something if you do not think you can do it easily. I got stuck with two things during the event because I was experimenting. Mainly, I tried to add a type of projectile, Missile, which would home against targets. I struggled a lot with the code for the homing effect and wasted time on something that was not even added.
* Something something, I know this point is important but I have unfortunately forgot it.

What happens now?
Time to play and rate games! 😀
When I hit 100 games rated I’ll post a top-5 or top-10 list.

So until then. Toodles~

I am learning things!  In this, my first Ludum Dare!  (Take a drink?)

This probably won’t be a proper postmortem.  I’ve never written one, but I do think quite a bit about things I’ve done, so here.  we.  are.

Things that went wrong-ish: should have allowed more time to properly flesh out the concept.  As I mention on the game page, I was indisposed for a large portion of this weekend, but… I figured, if I had something built that I was relatively proud of by the time the 48-hour period ended, I might as well submit; no?  Maybe you, my audience, would have been better served by a spill over into the jam, but what are jams for if not to challenge oneself and expand experiential boundaries?

I used Construct 2, which I’d never used before other than to assemble a sample game from a tutorial earlier last week, and found it to be more helpful than restrictive.  I almost certainly would not have been able to get things up and running so quickly without it, but also ran into some relatively severe limits to either the product itself or my knowledge of the product (most likely the latter).  What should have been seemingly simple sprite collisions were totally all like, “wait, what brosef?”

So back to time as a factor: I furiously pounded URLs into fields screaming, “SUBMIT, YOU MONSTER!” as the clock for preparation time counted down to zero.  Then I realized a timer for submission had an hour left on it and cackled as would a maniac.

Spoilers?  There might be spoilers coming up here.  Actually, I think I’m about to spoil what didn’t make it into the game, but that might spoil a little bit of what did, so you decide if you want to keep reading before playing!

“Oh no, don’t.  Stop reading.  Ahhhh.”

I wanted to explore a little more; I envisioned a sunrise paired with music.  I wanted to wander through the thoughts of the character with a little more abandon.  I wanted to visually represent the people speaking in the narrator.  I think I will, but probably not for another twenty days or so.

I have this nagging feeling, which has become a fear, that I have “ripped-off” this concept; that I have seen this very game before in passing and internalized it in such a way as to not recognize the idea as belonging to someone other than myself.  I seek comfort in the knowledge that the game is populated with the thoughts and feelings of my character, and not someone else’s.

 So did anything actually go right?

Some things did!  For one: you people!

I have thoroughly enjoyed playing, rating, and commenting on the contributions of others.

I have also enjoyed reading comments on one life.  After a while I started to view the game as sort of a fun social experiment: it’s fascinating, the different ways people play and interpret.   It brightens my day to know that others have laughed, or contemplated, or maybe even a gotten a little angry, and this community seems fantastic.

The game’s nowhere near perfect, but I am happy with my submission, which with any luck will be the first of many.  Nice meeting all of you.

So it seems the comments for my game are split down the middle: half seem to like that there are no instructions, and it’s a bit more rewarding once you figure out the visual clues for the gameplay, the other half think that that instructions would have made it less frustrating to jump into the gameplay and just start chopping guys in half right away

One of the problems we face as designers, is we always know what to do when we test our games. Boss battles are always easy since we know the pattern, and hints are always clear, because we know they are there. In this case, I took the minimalism approach to the instructions as well and just left a hint above the first battle.

So try it out, and let me know: more fun observing and figuring it out, or add instructions so you can jump right into gameplay.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20811

M.

I made a time-lapse with commentary of me working on my game, Mono Cave!

It’s been a full year since my last LD…  ::sigh::  But it’s great to do it once again!

This time I made Runaway Money, a party game about being invisible and stealing money.  Sounds kinda fun, right?  Does it also sound kinda strange that a multiplayer game would use invisible players?  Yeah, me too.  I had to think a while to make sure it was possible.

As it turns out, it is and it’s pretty fun.  Give it a try with your friends!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=654

Tags: C++, invisible, multiplayer, opengl, party, SDL, SDL_gpu, stealth

I’m so happy with my entry this time around, just making it is a reward in itself.

It has (by the standards of stuff I make) gone viral, and almost 1500 levels have been played.

For those who haven’t played my game; It’s an action/puzzler where you can manipulate gravity by pushing buttons. You also shoot fireballs. It has 15 levels.

The game posts some statistics about the playing itself, here are some charts I made — as you can see there’s a big increase in difficulty, but some players just won’t accept it! They have to push through;

Did I tell you how happy I am with my game? I’m happy with my game.

Right, so, video,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9zCTDGtSb4

Nuff said.

The Side Factor is a local 2 player turn based strategy game. It explores the idea of creating a strategy game with a minimal number of unit types, in this case only 1. The core mechanic is shooting through things.

What went right

1. Paper prototyping – We used a Chess board and some folded pieces of paper to iterate over the concept of shooting through things. Originally we played with a rule that you could capture enemy pieces by straddling it on both sides and shooting through it. That was abandoned in favour of gameplay where players never lost any pieces.
2. Audio design – One of the reasons why I entered the jam instead of the compo was to work with a fantastic audio designer, Gordon McGladdery. I spent a lot of time implementing it and adjusting the animations so it felt right.
3. Visual design & polish – Gameplay was completed on Sunday so I spent all of Monday polishing it. It’s one of the prettiest games I’ve made in a game jam. Below is a series of progress shots from the end of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

What went wrong

1. The Theme – Minimalism is not a great theme when you assemble a team ahead of time to create a highly polished game. Instead of focusing on aesthetic minimalism we tried to explore it through gameplay. When I created the instructions on the website I realized even though there was one unit type the rules weren’t that compact.
2. Playtesting – It’s really difficult to playtest a 2 player game by yourself and writing an AI was out of the question.
3. Publishing on Android – One of my goals was to release this on the Google Play store. It runs surprisingly well on my Nexus S but still needs some optimizations, buttons need to be bigger, and support for different aspect ratios. It’s still in the cards but a post jam version with playtesting and tweaks instead.

Play Now (Unity web – Mac/Win/Linux binaries too!)

Tags: jam, multiplayer, unity3d, vs

I’ve now added OSX and Linux ports for my entry: Astral Offset!

With Astral Offset I tried to experiment with the idea of representing the game world in an alternative minimalistic way, alongside the normal one, and also allow for some form of interaction between the two.

I also put together a small gameplay+timelapse video, enjoy:

Entry page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11939

Well, this was my second attempt to 48h compo and the first time I finished and submitted my game.

What to say? I think I learned some things.

To be honest, I learned a lot from my first attempt on LD #25.

What I thought after giving up on the last compo revealed as being true this time: first goal must be “being pragmatic”. And by “being pragmatic” I mean aiming at a target that’s reachable in 48 hours according to your skills.

This is a good lesson, that can be extended outside the specific LD target, into the “real world”.

I’m not a game developer, I’m a CS student. I think I’ve got skills, but I need to work a lot on myself and to improve myself and this competition is a great way to do it.

My game won’t surely win anything and won’t surely appear in the top rated games, but I don’t care at all, because designing my own game, crafting my own game, coding my own game and seeing it coming to life was just a real pleasure.

And I’d like to thank you guys for making fun games, making me feel part of a cool community for 48 hours of hard work.

Submitting my game, playing your games, reading and writing comments, seeing how many incredibly smart ideas you people have got about my same theme and put into your games… I loved this competition. Thank you guys!

And, by the way, this is my game, Euler’s Inc.:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=19092

See you on next LD! 😀

Tags: post-mortem

Doing the super short version :

What went right?

– Couldn’t come up with something initially, so I JUST STARTED WITH SOMETHING. Sometimes you should do that and more ideas will come along while doing so.

– Others said they had fun playing it. Why? Because I made it the way I liked playing it myself!

What went wrong?

– I should’ve acknowledged EARLIER that I couldn’t come up with some clever idea.

– A lot of minor things you probably didn’t even notice 😉

PLAY IT HERE

The End

So, I had to work two full shifts this weekend, as well as take care of some other business – meaning, I wasn’t able to participate in LD26. That didn’t stop me from trying, though! I tried to get something together soon enough to enter the jam, but I didn’t quite make that, either. Still, after about 14 hours, I’ve got enough to show off. If there’s any interest, I’ll update when the game is actually finished.

Note: The following are all gifs. Kind of ruins the effect if you don’t open them up. ^^

Yeah, things got a little messed up there at the end (but it’s fixed now).