Hey guys,

This is my timelapse video from 3 days jam.

I was mostly develop level editor and design levels.

During this jam we made amazing game The Particle Swarm.

Feel free to check it out.

Game Page

Hey, as you may know my game is a multiplayer game and making a 10 second video playing alone is not so much fun
If someone want to enter in the server here is the link of my entry. When we are at last in 4 I start recording.

Thanks everyone who wants to help me =)

Hi.

During the LD 48h compo I made a game “Farmer Joe Sheep Farm” http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=9486 I only worked 12h straight from 24h, because on Sunday I had a Math Competition that took all the day.

On Saturday I managed to make everything except sound effects, which I completed on Sunday.

I managed to try out Flash game framework that I have never used Flixel. The framework itself was ok, but it lacked Documentation. As of everything else somehow managed to not make many errors and crashes, except one that took me an hour to solve. It was due to the lack of Documentation, so I had to hack it my way – the dirty way.

I think I did well in the compo, better than all the previous times, because back then there were a lot of distractions, so I did not submit anything. Here is my timelapse. 12h livestream compiled into 10 minutes, with hopefully good music.

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse

At last!

After hunting a bug for three days. A bug which caused the pre loading of assets in Haxe/NME to fail, which caused an eternal white screen of death to some of the players who tried to play my game. Now the game is ready for action!

Labyrinth Run

Not the funniest game in the world, but hope you’ll enjoy it!

On a side note. If anyone recognize this problem where the pre loading of assets fails in Haxe/NME, feel free to explain the cause. My solution now is just a hack around the problem.

Fading is a simple stealth game (you can play it HERE) i made for my second LD participation. On one hand because i love stealth games and on the other hand because at my first LD i tried to make one too, and i crashed and burned. So there was a score to settle

As the guard in Metal Gear Solid once said: “!”

What went right

I managed to come up with an idea quite quickly, after 1,5h the game design was roughly finished. The plan was to tear the stealth gameplay elements down to the bare minimum. The player should be able to hide behind one type of object, which happens automatically when he is near such a hideout. And that is it, no shadows, no destructible light sources, no footsteps making sounds, … you get the gist.

Player is shown grayed out when in hiding.

I got that main element working fast and i am pretty happy with it.  At some moments there even comes up the stealth game feeling i was going for, when a guard becomes suspicious and you see a “question mark” above it, but you still manage to barley make it to a hiding spot before the alarm sounds goes off.

I am also satisfied with the look of the game, although i do not consider myself a good 2D Artist. I hope i managed to keep the look consistent while creating something that looks minimal without making the impression that there has been no effort to make decent graphics.

One last thing that i consider going sufficiently well is the fact that the game overall, looks quite complete. There is text intro, main menu, pause menu and a short outro. All those little things make the game feel complete, although i did not managed to finish everything i planned.

What went wrong

Oh dear, where should i begin … I think i start with the infamous “WALL”. I did not hit it once, but 3 times:

1. Right after: “It is starting to look like a game!”
2. Then came: “It does not look like i make any progress at all!”
3. And: “Dammit! I did not think of that!”

I spend an insane amount of time trying to get the main mechanic to work somewhat decent. Although it turned out ok in the end, it still was very discouraging to work on. And it does not work perfectly, because it is to easy to just jump over the guards and vanish into a hideout.

One thing i intended to implement was a small save-point system, where the player is reseted to the last save-point he passed. Although i did have some experience in implementing such a system, i simply ran out of time.

The biggest thing that went wrong, where the doors. If the player passes a switch it should automatically open the corresponding door. They are in the level design, in the actually build level and their logic is implemented in the code. BUT i could not get it working for more than 1 door, and after working on it for 3h until 2 a.m. i decided to scrap it. Otherwise i think i would not been able to submit the game in time at all.

Doors, why Did It Have to Be Doors?

Because of this the level feels quite boring, it was build thinking this feature is already working.

Conclusion

Although not all things worked out as planned, i still had a great time participating. And now i am off, to play some more of the many great entries!

Looking forward to the next time.

And no, i have no explanation why evil robots would need that many water dispensers …

TunnelVision achieved visual parity on nvidia and ati chipsets now!

It was quite the piece of work, but thanks to you guys and your detailed reports and help i managed to fix all the problems to run this game! (if not let me know!)

Now you can have this on NVIDIA cards! :D

Special thanks fly out to these guys for providing detailed info on the problems. Make sure you play their game aswell!

Perry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15778

Hyaku: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=7393

wonderwhy-er: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=232

Pighead10: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=8539

Special thanks fly out to MetalCanine who didn’t make an entry this time and to NeiloGD (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=1154) who helped me a lot figuring out whats wrong, aswell as providing a solution!

The fixed version replaced the old broken one, so you can play it at the usual place: ://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=5751

Thanks to all you guys, and enjoy the game! 😀

wzl

Thank you all for voting and kind comments! .) Special for you here are POST-release version.Rate main entry, then be free to play post-release. It is ALOT easier, you can control demon with mouse(“new-age modern”) or with keys (“old-school hardcore”), also when you die, you restart at the level you died.

Here’s little post-mortem.

What went right.

Timing. I did realistic estimations how much can I do in 48 hours.  Tried to keep it minimal, preferred hard-coding to soft-coding and sticked to the plan. It turned out well and I had spare time to add few features.
Using Box2D. It saved a lot of time with it’s pre-baked collisions and physics.
Had slept well. And it has a great boost on my productivity.
Using png images. At first my idea was to use Qt vector graphics, but I discarded this idea early and it greatly simplified content pipeline.
Community! I was afraid and insecure about my first entry, but got really positive comments. Thank you guys, you are great!

What went wrong.
Ui. It was a last thing to add, and integration of the level switching and different ui screens and buttons was a great hack. I wish I thought of it in the beginning.
Not many levels. I haven’t done level editor and hard-coded levels. With editor and level-switching framework it would be possible to add more content.
Game mechanics. In the beginning my idea was to use only demon’s impulse to slow down molecules. After first play-tests it became obvious that it was way to hardcore, so I was forced to rethink mechanics and to add the force-field.
Lack of design. You know, learning curves, difficulty progression, that kind of stuff I completely overlooked.

Well, It was great experience and I hope you had fun playing my game!
Thanks to ludum dare staff for their hard work, and to thousands of creative artists, developers and simply good guys out there!

And the winners of the 26th LD,

is.. EVERYONE WHO MADE A GAME

And the winners of the 26th @ludumdare / #LD48, is.. EVERYONE WHO MADE A GAME

— Olav (@Cellusious) May 2, 2013

(instagrammed screen from the game because YES, that's why.)

– Play Here –

It’s been a great pleasure to take part of the Ludum Dare compo for the second time, the game I submitted is called “Ten Levels”. Its a simple avoid-the-enemy-collect-the-something-to-pass-to-the-next-level game that I hope you will like/have fun with.

I voted and really hoped for the theme “Minimalism” to win but without a real reason () and when it came out I had no clue at all for the game..

Also i had to spend all saturday away from home so I spent most of the time thinking about the theme and what I could do (while everyone else around me were having fun).

It was during the trip back home that I realized that it didnt need to be closely related to the art movement or the kind of graphics, the game elements just needed to be taken to the minimal possible point.

So I decided to make a game that was playable inside a simple title screen, or better, inside the loading-level screen. It was just when i wrote down “LEVEL I” that I realized that V could have been my hero looking for I and avoiding evil L and E.

I’m a big fan of classic games like Robotron and Berzerk and I tried to put all my experience on these two games on my title, and i think somehow something went into it. I wanted it to look like a minimalist Robotrozerk that sounded like an Atari 2600.

My laziness fotunately found in Construct 2 a good friend to fast prototype and design the game, so I have to thank once again that little incredible piece of software to let my imagination turn to reality once again.

I closed the game in a real hurry during Sunday (I also found the time to watch a football match in between) and I didnt realize at first that it was so difficult to win. Almost impossible!

So I spent two more days to try and win it and finally I made it so I can show you that it is possible!

Have fun(I hope!) trying to do it yourself !

I’m still playing, voting and commenting as many amazing games as I can.. I really love this competition and I already can’t wait for the next one to take place!

Bye!!

This was my 3rd participation to the Ludum Dare, and until the end I wasn’t sure to submit something. Here are the key points of this weekend.

Background: On Friday I published a game called Laitida, and I don’t know how it is for you, but finishing a project always put me down. So I wasn’t really motivated before the compo started.

Theme: Waow! Minimalism, this was a tough one. I know nothing about minimalism in graphical art, surely a bit more in music, but I didn’t feel like I was able to make a good music game in one week end. I wanted to use minimalism on an artistic point of view but also regarding the gameplay.
Lacking ideas, I finally googled “minimalism art”, and the first result was a Piet Mondrian’s frame. I guess Mondrian inspired a lot of participants this week end, which is funny when Mondrian seems to not even be a minimalist. Anyway, this separation of colors made me think of a battlefield with units, warzones, fortifications. The idea seemed a good one.

Can you see the battlefield ?

From scratch: Maybe one day, I will learn to be a good developer and stop wanting to write every single line of code. Writing everything gives you a complete freedom, but what a lack of time when you have to code GUI. Another advantage is that you think differently, you don’t ask yourself “what can I do with those tools?”, but “how can I shape my tools to do what I want?”. The problem is that you’re quickly trapped in unstable solution if you didn’t anticipate problems.
That’s what happened to me. I lost two hours trying to write an algorithm which should give me the resulting rectangles of the intersection of two rectangles (btw if someone has a solution, please tell me, I’m still looking for). I had to change a bit the gameplay since I wasn’t able to find an efficient solution.

A.I.: At the end of the first day, my prototype was ready and working, but only for two human players. I know that people usually don’t have the opportunity to play a game for two players, I definitively had to write an AI, even stupid, but something the lonely player could interact with. On Sunday, I started working on it, and I spent 6 hours. It was way too much. I should have stopped before, but a lot of small errors I made, resulted in a non working AI. Still in the compo version, the AI is buggy but at least, it acts like an opponent.

Tutorial: Even if the game is pretty simple, the rules are not straight forward, and without any explanations people doesn’t catch it. Hence the tutorial was an obligation. Therefore I decided to use the remaining time to work on this important point and sacrifice all other ideas.

M.I.A.: Since I lost a lot of time on the AI and I decided to choose the tutorial over the rest, some points are missing. I wanted to enhance the graphics, use some small animations to facilitate the understanding of the action, allow the player to save a picture of the final battlefield as a resulting minimalist frame, and finally add some ambient minimalist soundtrack.

Play Drimonna, a minimalist strategy game.

tl;dr: I wasn’t really in the mood for this LD. I got inspired by Mondrian and decide to make a minimalist strategy game. I lost ~10 hours over 23, on algorithm issues. I finally decided to prioritize the tutorial over polishing, sounds and extra features. As usual LD was a great experience which taught me a lot.

Click here to play Drimonna !

Tags: post-mortem

Someone commented that they could not play my entry into this LD due to an error stating “Not A Valid Win32 Application.” or something like that. I recompiled a version that should run on Windows XP machines as well as windows vista +.

I hope this solves the problem, and thanks everyone for your nice comments and constructive feedback

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yip3kh3ydgnqr47/LD_26_winxp.zip

I’ll post a pic too because it is more obvious what my game was then just the name so you can see if you were effected by this.

My game (it’s called COLORUS) on the main page of Newgrounds. Again!

I never slept with Tom Fulp but I love him. Thanks for LD promotions every time.

I can’t descripe how it is awesome to get positive reviews. I never had so many good reaction. It’s like my little triumph.

I’m already started making of mobile version of game. I hope it will be cool.

And now I made chronolapse of development on LD. Here it is:

My game’s page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16034

I’ve been going around trying to test and rate some of the games. One thing that I like is how this competition heavily encourages you to rate games, so your own game gains visibility. I feel this helps create the great community for this competition.

I’ve personally been checking my entry page every once in a while to reply to every comment and thank them for checking out my competition, and check out their game if they have a submission. I feel like I really want to give back to the community, and really like getting constructive criticism.

I remember there being a lot of complaints on the IRC chat after the theme was announced. I personally really liked the them, because it forces you to cut out unneeded elements from your game until you get straight to the core of the game. That, at least, is my interpretation of the theme. I feel like if you really embrace the theme, you can get a lot out of it, no matter the theme. It really gets you to think outside the box, and outside your comfort zone.

Tags: compo, first compo, First entry, First Ludum dare, journal, minimalism, post-compo, theme, thoughts

You can play the minimal RTS game here

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22273

What we did

Eric Lewis – Art & Nap Design

As the Art Lead, I designed the assets (art and geometry) for the game after doing some concept roughs of our idea. I used 3DS MAX for the models and Adobe PhotoShop for the credits and titles.

Sonny Mcknire – Code & Evil Design

As a Programmer & Designer I helped define the concept and game play.  I designed and created the monster with a combination of a model I asked Eric to make and lighting effects and particles built into Unity.  I also programmed the creatures behavior and assisted Brad with character control and scripting the key placement.

Damon Frankfurth – Code & Light Design

Bradley Erickson (Mesidin) – Code & Level Design

I laid out our level plan in Unity and I placed/play-tested almost all of the beautiful assets Eric created.   I had my finger dipped into 100 other pies as well, such as item interaction/selection, candle melting, cameras, scare triggers/scripting, menu setup, etc…

What went right?

Eric

We initially planned on The geometry in the game to have simple textures but after some tests, we all agreed that the untextured, raw geometry looked awesome in the Unity Engine with default shaders. This made it a whole lot easier for me to build more assets (50+) to make our game even better. Also – we planned the game well –  the sketches and idea were very simple. We ran out of time and were forced to leave out some sound effects, which turned out making the game even scarier – the lack of sound between scares makes it more exciting.

Sonny

 I think a lot went right.  The mood was perfect thanks to some sweet lighting work, the monster works well, the theme was adhered to, and I like how the game controls.

Damon

Brad

We finished a game!  That is exhilarating.  As a cherry on top, people played it!  During development the thought had never occurred to me that strangers would be actually playing this.  The comments and feedback have been incredible.  I am proud of what we accomplished for our first game.  As to development, grayboxing was surprisingly beneficial.  We had a plan on paper for the house as well as a design with measurements I worked up the first night for the layout of the house.  We ended up changing quite a few things when we could actually run around a graybox of each floor built with unity cubes & planes.  This allowed us to change things quickly before Eric had put any time into it at all.  Finally, I exported the final layout as an .obj file so Eric could build the actual geometry in 3DS Max using my layout.

What went wrong?

Eric

Some really good ideas were dropped because of time constraints. We had a shadow that would pop up in a window with light behind it, like lightning… spiders and rats that would fall on the player or run out from under furniture… there were quite a few good ones.

Sonny

 The candle burning out didn’t work correctly. I wish we had more time to implement more scares, and there are issues here and there like getting stuck in the attic,  lights poking through the level, the rocking chair not working correctly, etc… that we couldn’t address due to the time constraint.

Damon

Brad

Since I was involved in a lot, most of the bugs lie at my feet.  This is frustrating, but I am just glad at this point that the game is playable.  For post-compo, I plan to fix the raycasting on object highlighting, the candle melting sideways bug, plus hooking up all the drawers with the interaction system, adding the doors upstairs, and adding all of the scares we originally planned, including more sounds.  Eric built some incredible assets that didn’t make it into the compo version, so I would like to add those in.

We had a great time participating.  Thanks for checking out our game, commenting, and being such a welcoming community to newbies like us!  We will continue to enjoy your great games over the next few weeks!  There’s some incredible titles in this competition!

Walthrough(spoilers):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWF_Q06_pzw

Before I begin to explain all the process we have gone through as a team,i would like to point out that this is our fist Ludum Dare , we are a spanish team formed a few months ago and we are in full attempt to grow, trying new ideas and get better.Our desginer started 3 or 4 months ago with pixelart.I , the programmer,learned to code about 3 years ago , I’ll tell you our experience this few days.

Before LD26

In the beginning my idea was to participate alone in the 48 hours LD , it was more achievable given that I worked on monday (Because of the time zone ,for us the LD started the 27 at 3 in the morning). Talking with the designer in my team he told me : “Don’t you dare going in alone!, I’ll handle all the graphics” .Truth be told I really liked him telling me this but I didn’t want to involve a person to be 72 hours of his time sitting in front of the computer suffering the presion of this hard 72 hours ,yet I let him in.As long as we were participating I started talking with the rest of the team ,the musician and the co-designer(he manages to improve my ideas and the leve design, he is something like my right hand) agreed to help .So we created the account of the team and started to work , voting much interesting subjects. The time came were the announced the theme of this jam

Theme

The truht is that when they announced the theme I was already sleeping ( it was 3am here in Spain) , I woke up at 8am ,went to the LD page and BOOM there it was , the worst theme for me :“ Minimalist”.For 5 min, I felt a bit of rage , there were very interesting topics like “Aiming to the starts, useless gods” , topics that without a doubt could have done better for my game , but I decided to take some coffe , take it easy and start the design of my game , at 9am my team showed up and we started to think the idea.

Making of

A lot of ideas came trough our heads , we thought many crazy things , we propose ideas like making a grapich adventure , a puzzle game , mazes and many other things.After a while exposing some ideas and voting we created what it is now “Life in a nutshell”.In this game the idea was to create a game in which a person feels aflficted with the life they lead and wants to break the chains that stops them from searching another life style .The game would consists of 2 gameplay styles.The first one , a very dark one, in which there were practically no vision of the enemy and you have to sue the light to hide.With this , we wanted to send the message that happens to many people , sometimes we sink in our bad times , fight against them and sometimes you can’t win so we need a “light” that guides us. It was more or less what we wanted to show.In the second gameplay we wanted to make a part which consisted only of “taking punches”.We wanted to give the idea that “As many times as you fall , as many beatings life gives you , you have to hang on and move on and don’t let anything stops you”.

Day 1:

The first day was the best with lead , it was our first day , there were many laughs in the streaming , I devoted my time to the creation of test PJ’s so I could test the gameplay , here you have an example of what you could see in the stream:

Day 1 was all about the “dark part” , I was able to create a decent gameplay for the character , fixed the camera so it wouldn’t show unnecessary things , I created an alert system for the enemies, the incognito system , it wasn’t a bad day , everything was going good.

Day 2:

I dedicated this day to the “taking punches” part , I created a mob that prevented the pass and didn’ attack , it just stood there ,blocking , say that we were gonna create an archer and give it a parable attempt but I didn’t get the result I was expecting , we finally transformed the archer into a wizard that threw fireballs by the floor.There is nothing like a bug becoming a feature.

Day 3:

It was monday already , I had to go to work from 8 to 15( I work as a programmer).That day I kept receiving messages in skype about bugs in the game , big errors, I felt panic of what I could see when I got home.I arrived home at 15:20 , ate ( the food burned and I had to eat it like that , there was no time to waste),my team told me my alert system didn’t work , enemies didn’t detect when you were hidding , I didn’t understand anything, everything was working okay day 2 when I tested.I started to check in my friends computer and nothing was working they way it should .I looked how I put a guard and I went straight for the character , good, yet when the character hid , the guard kept hitting him, weird.I realized something , when I tested the game I only put 1 hidding zone and they were 3 now and I thought “It can’t be that this doesn’t work if I put more than 1” so I looked and yes , this was the error , for a while I fought and I found a way to fix it , then I tough “if I put more than 1 enemy then , this will fail” and yes , I put 4 enemies and It didn’t work only 1 went for the character and the other 3 remained bugged , I lost at least 4 hours in this , the time was ending , I wasn’t making any progress , I was frustrated so I decided to take out the alert system and everything worked fine but I lost my alert system.Then it was the mob in the other gameplay part , the “taking punches” part , if I let it be ,it attacked non stop, it killed the hero in less than 10 sec, I tried to make it better putting a limit of 2-3 seconds, errors came , there were a few hours left and still much to do , so I put a random and now it attacked randomly.Moving on there were only 4 hours to turn in the game , I even consider not turning in , the music was good , the history was good , graphics were good but the gameplay hadn’t turned out they way I wanted ,what do I do? Tell my team they had suffer and worked for 3 days straight for nothing?, that it was my fault for not being able to solve the problems? No , I couldn’t do that , I decided to move on and finish , give it all the necessary tweaks and leavit as much “finish” as I could and prepare my self for the shitstorm I was about to get , even so it didn’t matter because I really enjoyed and I’m really happy , I learnt a lot in this LD and I wish with all my heart I can participate in the next one.

“Life in a Nutshell” in Ludum dare

We ended up turning in the game at 2:30am (Spain time zone), next day I had to work from 8 to 18:00.I slept 4 hours that night , while I was at work I wasn’t able to concentrate thinking about the things people could say and that the message we were trying to send with the game wouldn’t get to the people.When I got home I started looking the things people said , not all where good but not all were bad either , I liked the set up and any received criticism.

To end

I’m really happy for some things we did and not so happy for others , I hope I can fix the game in its complete and get a new version , I wanna thank everyone that tried the game and leave a comment even if it was bad , any criticism is well received as long as it is constructive.If you haven’t tried it yet you can try it HERE and leave your opinions , you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter

Here’s a list of my favorite games with a short description. I really recommend everybody to try, play and rate the following games, they deserve it.

Piet Mondrian – Best game ever, seriously. Go play it right now. The humor is seriously off the charts.

1951 – Join together multiple atoms trying to keep the reactor stable. I could go on playing this for hours without getting tired.

PRISMA – Great soundtrack, amazing mood. Solve the puzzles and combine the colors with the music to advance levels.

Refracted – Really weird and ingenious game, change color to pass through different layers and parts of the level.

Edward Was Human – Amazing story, amazing mood. Really great game with simple mechanics. Fit very well with the theme.

hru – Really soothing and calming game to play. Bounce the ball to reach the top. Really god sounds.

Linewalker – Weird game, interesting mechanic. The mood is very nice in this entry. Good choice with the theme.

ORM – Best minimalistic management simulator ever. In a league of its own.

Between the lines – Amazing graphics and theme adaptation. Gameplay is very smooth and polished.

BLoX – This is certainly one of my favorites. Such simplicity and minimalism, managed to grab my attention for hours. It manages to catch the essence of hack ‘n’ slash games, so simple.

I’ll keep playing more and more and more games, lots of good submissions this year for LD. Thanks to everybody for making all these nice games. Let me know if you have your personal favorites, I’m dying to try them out.

If you feel like it, try out my game as well, I’ll appreciate it

In order to make my entry more accessible, I decided to port my game to the web using JSIL (check it out, the project is great: https://github.com/kevingadd/JSIL).

It even supports an Xbox controller (at least in Chrome), so give it a try: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12344

Oh, and if you also want to port your XNA game and get stuck, don’t hesitate to write me a message!

Tags: JSIL, xna

Last week-end, I made a game for Ludum Dare 26. It was the first game I ever finished, except it wasn’t really a game.

The theme was “minimalism”, and I had absolutely no idea how to exploit it. But it clearly was the best theme ever for a first time.

The first idea I came up with was about a path leading to some kind of monolith. Maybe it was because I’ve been playing Xenosaga Episode I, but I just couldn’t forget this almost clear image, so I had to use it somehow.

The first iteration consisted in some sort of platform game, with moving and rotating platforms that would lead to the monolith, but it was really classic, and boring, and I thought it lacked of something… so I threw it all, and I worked on the second iteration all saturday afternoon. This one was waaay more simple, but it was the almost exact expression of what I had imagined in the first place.

I’ve always had imagination, but I was never able to express it. I’ve tried writing, drawing, painting… but nothing would ever come out the way I imagined it. So, you can imagine how happy I was to finally see something that matched what I wanted.

But then what? Well, I must say I don’t really know what happened, or how it happened, but I came up with this abstract experience that would represent life, or at least my way of seeing it.

At first, you ended up being on this platform, with those forms on the sides and this monolith, you could walk everywhere (and fall… so I add to add collision walls), the sphere and the cube would start to get animated, and that was it. So I added messages.

The first one was “You must leave everything”, and the cube would go up and down, as if it was endlessly falling. This was meant to represente physical posession and some other things.

The second message to appear was “You must forget everything”, while the sphere would start to pulsate and a heartbeat sound would appear. It represented the feelings: love.

Then you’d continue to walk towards the monolith, and it would end with you looking up with a last message: “Press Enter if you are ready.”
Doing so would make the title screen appear with the title: “Life”. An indication to “Press Enter to continue” figured on the bottom center of the screen, and pressing enter would restart the game. That was it.

But being able to move and look around felt wrong, so I ditched the Unity’s default Character Controller package and I wrote my own script, deciding that the player would only be able to go forward. I thought it would be useful to give some indications of what the player can do, even if the game was awfully simple, so I added a message at the beginning (“You can only go forward.”) and with that my “game” was finished.

That’s only a day later that I understood that adding that message was the best thing I could do. When you play the first time, it’s just a simple tutorial message, but when you play a second time, it can mean something else: “You have to move on.”

That’s exactly what I wanted my game to reflect, because no matter what happens in your life, moments will always replace other moments; you’ll have to leave places or objects you hold dear in your heart, you’ll love and you’ll leave or be left, but then you’ll do it again, and again, and again…
Discovering that, I knew I had put myself into this thing in more ways than I had thought.

And some people seemed to understand it; or at least understand something in it. But mostly everybody told me that my game was lacking of gameplay or that it wasn’t really a game (which I totally understand), so I guess it’s more like some kind of interactive experience.
But yeah, some people seemed to like it, and my game even had the honor of being listed on Indie Statik, the author of the article referring to it in rather kind and positive words.

So, in the end, even if my interpretation of “minimalism” wasn’t quite what people seemed to want, and if it’s not even really a game, I’m proud of it. Plus, the message it carries is exactly what I needed myself, so it unexpectedly managed to help me.

Making games as a therapy, why not? So, thanks Ludum Dare, and congratulations for everybody who won just by making a game! :]

Remember: you can only go forward.

(Originally posted here.)