I can’t claim to be a huge fan of the theme this time. Minimalism seems too broad and very much something that people implement every LD.

I was at first going to be paying a tribute to some minimalist writer (I read a Raymond Carver short on the first morning of the compo) but  I had planned on a point and click adventure since before the compo so I ended up with an homage to fine minimalist cinema instead with Stalker – referencing the Soviet Sci-Fi classic with the same name. If you haven’t seen the movie, make sure to do so. It’s one of the all time greats.

After rating a grand total of 100 games, I found very few takes on the theme Minimalism that I felt were great. But here comes a rundown of them:

Minimalism

Steve Can’t Zen

The world is in your hand

Auraline

Please tip me off if you have found any other games you feel are impressive takes on the theme!

2 days of blood, sweat and tears compressed into 15 minutes.

Day 1

Day 2

Play and rate here

After waiting until 4 AM for the theme, I was a little disappointed it was minimalism. So the next morning I brainstormed for some ideas. In the end I came up with The Void, a horror game where your default view is minimalistic, but enhancing it brought danger with it. If you can see the monsters, then they can see you as well, basically.

So I started out with the end result of my previous LD and stripped all the content so I had a half-assed engine with a rudimentary level editor. Perfect for two days of mayhem, but not without its issues. Since the ‘engine’ is basically the end result of 3 iterations of previous entries all bolted on top of each other with different features, it’s a dirty mess, but it worked!

After bolting even more crap onto it, my entry was done. I’m very happy with the result! Even during development those things creeped me out when they (or I) got too close. So that’s nice 😀

What went right

• The sounds. I was afraid that the voice acting would be terrible, but it isn’t! 😀 Also the atmosphere feels perfect, with the only other sounds coming from the creeps when they get closer and closer. But the voices add a lot to the game, I think. I tried to go for the original Deus Ex infolink effect, also with someone talking into it that shouldn’t be.
• The story. Because of the voice acting, I could add a story to an otherwise bland first person run-away-in-terror game. And since it’s all happening while you’re playing, there’s no stuff to read in order to understand what’s going on.
• The development itself. Things went fast, and I had about 7 hours left until the deadline when I was done. The scope was perfect and I didn’t have to scrap anything due to the deadline.
• Managed to sneak a potato AND a cat into the game! Yay! 😀

What went wrong

• Playtesting. As developer, I could cruise control through the game because I knew every secret. I did let two other people playtest it, and they had relatively few problems as well. But after release it became apparent that the tutorial talks in levels 1 and 2 were very annoying as they were unskippable, ruining the flow. In hindsight I had 7 hours left to discover and address this issue, but I didn’t. The post-compo version I released fixes that, but it’s too late 😀
• I could only do the sounds once. After recording them in Audacity, and cutting out or redoing the parts that were bad, I used a lot of filters and other things to get what I wanted. Both the dude and the voidling had lots of effects and filters added. But I didn’t keep track of what I did to them, so later on I couldn’t add more voices because I couldn’t reproduce the exact same actions that I did to them. Oops!

What’s next

I’ve just released a post-compo version with a level selector and the ability to skip the tutorials in levels 1 and 2. I’ve also fixed a bug where monsters would always see you if you used your goggles and if they were already hunting you, regardless of if you could see them.

I’m also working on a Oculus Rift version, but this is problematic because I don’t have a Rift yet. 😀 So far I’ve managed to get the stereoscopic view into it, and it should use the variables sent by the Rift to render things properly based on the Rift’s setup. It’s also technically possible to rotate your head, but without a Rift to test things with it’s been difficult, and at this point I can’t continue integrating it until I get the device itself. However, optimizing the menus and other things are mostly done, so that’s nice, but I’m stuck now until I finally get mine

Anyway, here’s my entry, with post-compo download link. And here’s the rift preview vid.

www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1

Someone made a great gameplay video of my game, i need to lie down!

If you haven’t played the game yet, you can play it here.

And an animated .GIF

I have to say – This is my 4th (or 5th?) LD and this theme really pushed the overall creativity level.
So many smart theme usages, so many cool gameplays with so little.

For now, 15 games that really worth mention in my opinion:

Blinked’s ProductionVille

Simple resource management nicely done.

GertJohnny’s You Must Escape

Awesome concept and nice interpretation of the theme.

gilmore606’s hru

Nice gameplay, relaxing sound and music. A reward at end.

keksdev’s Tzatzauberer

After you figure out its mechanics you just cant stop playing.

kernel panic’s Ant Commander

Find the path to the food for your ants on an endless world.

leafo’s Moondar

Amazing music, furious gameplay. A bit too hard but worth trying.

mortus’ True treasure of Kartoffelschloss

Amazing music, amazing graphics and a powerful message that it delivers about true minimalism.

NostraDamon’s Merkaba

A little hard to control but rewarding with nice scenarios and fantastic music.

Ranmara’s Critical Failure

Clever theme usage, nice graphics and music.

rezoner’s QbQbQb (cube cube cube)

This one is getting famous around there and is in justice, really nice visual, gameplay and music.

Shigor’s Screaming Cubes

Not so polished entry but with original gameplay and lot of upgrades. With more work, the potential of this game is huge.

TylerGlaiel’s Geneva Convection

Very fun, challenging, good graphics and music.

Volute’s This is not a minimalist game

Another very original theme usage.

s0ulcrusher’s MIN

This is the result of going to another dimension while drunk and this is a good thing to try. Liked this game a lot.

Benjamin’s Four Scepters

Deep, complex game with lot of powerups and strategy packed in nice minimal graphics.

Hey, everyone! Green Pixel’s artist here! Ludum Dare 26 was a blast and we came up with our Jam entry: Eternal Journey 😀

If you’ve played it and rated it, thank you so much for your feedback! If you haven’t, check it out here and we’d appreciate your thoughts!

We made Eternal Journey with mobile devices in mind (as we have released an iOS title in the past) and we’re happy to read that a lot of the feedback seems to welcome the game – albeit a more finished version – on smartphones 😀

This was our second LD Jam and one thing I realized from LD25 was that I didn’t really learn much artistically – besides learning how fast I could work under a time constraint. So, this time around, I decided to experiment. Why not, right? When I heard that the theme was Minimalism, I thought of triangles and, inspired by games like Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing, I came up with the art for Eternal Journey. Below is a handy screenshot if you don’t have time to play the game 😀

Triangles galore, eh? Now that we’re going ahead with the fully-featured version of the game (that we’re hoping to release before the next LD :D), I’m wondering if I should continue with this triangle-istic style. As a game artist, I’ve only really ever worked with pixel art and it’s the most comfortable style for me. I whipped up a quick mockup of what the mobile, pixel art version would look like (note that the background is largely unfinished :D), seen below:

See the huge difference? 😀 Gameplay aside, which style would you prefer? Do you think pixel art still appeals to the masses or is it played out? Would the semi-abstract triangles fare better in the world of apps?

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Thanks and happy gaming! 😀

Tags: art, pixel art, post-mortem, postmortem

I just released a post-compo version of Less is More? to Newgrounds. The game itself is almost identical to the compo-version, but I added a level editor integrated with the Newgrounds Save Api. Let me know if there are bugs!
Post Compo Version
Ludum Dare Page

I’m only halfway at the moment. I have 2 weeks though. I found out that if I play games all the day and play them till the end, give detailed feedback, etc. I rate 25 games per day. However, on the second day some people had over 100 ratings………

I was playing games randomly: sometimes by the default rating, sometimes just random games from the front page, sometimes games by request… Here are some games I liked those have rather little votes:

The Lamp

A minimalistic horror game, where you have to run away from different-colored eyes.

The world is in your hand

A one-button adventure game with an amazing story and outstanding mood.

.cp

A very innovative yet minimalistic strategy game about pixels.

I’m going to post a more detailed list, but only when I’ll rate another 50.

Tags: review

Hello everyone !

Maybe some of you have already played my entry for the Ludum Dare 26 Jam. A lot of you also complained about the lack of single player mode.

You ask for it, so here it is ! You can now practice the art of dueling at sunset, in SOLO. But don’t forget to try it with a friend, it’s way better. 😀

You can play here : *CLICK CLICK CLICK*

I thought I’d broken it – just updated with linux and windows version [ they were in there before, but I’d not included the HTTP:// bit in the link ]

Play here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20903

Save the potato!

Gameplay Video :

Click link

Tags: LD#26

A long post lies ahead! My game is The One Road, which I wrote in JavaScript for the 48 hour compo.

Analytics

My game is played in the browser so I can just look at web server access logs. No special logging, I’m just looking at which resources were downloaded.

111 unique visitors. This counts anyone who loaded the background for the battle screen. 38% had referers, with 6% of those coming from Facebook and the rest coming from Ludum Dare.

89% of visitors requested at least one audio file. This means that audio is broken for 11% of visitors. That’s huge! I could figure out no rhyme or reason to the visitors without audio: they used different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer) and different operating systems (Windows or OS X).

There are three background music tracks. Each correspond to a different point in the game. For those with audio, 100% played track 1, 40% played track 2, and 29% played track 3. So under 30% of those who play my game got to the end. Is that a big number? Small?

48% of visitors with audio played the “you died” music, so maybe 52% gave up without dying. Well, it is possible they faced an unbeatable battle: the first gremlin. I’ll talk about that later. Actually, three visitors got to the end without playing the “you died” music. Congratulations to the seasoned RPG veterans out there (or cheaters).

Only 54% of visitors with audio ever bought something (sword, potion, etc.) at the town store. I think the store was not obvious enough, or people tried to get too far in the game without visiting the store. You can’t beat the game without going to the store, it’s simply not possible.

Browsers: 65% Chrome or Chromium, 27% Firefox, 5% Safari, 2% MSIE, 2% other. One visitor claimed to be using Safari on Android. Huh. People generally used up to date versions of Chrome and Firefox: there was a Chrome 18 user and a Firefox 14 user, but almost everyone used either Chrome 26 or Firefox 20: those two specific versions account for 80% of all users. All that time I spent testing on Firefox 10 (yes, seriously) was a waste.

Platforms: 57% Windows, 28% OS X, 12% Linux (except Android), 2% iOS, 2% Android. My game shouldn’t work on iOS or Android, but I want to make it work. Again, this only counts users who got to the battle screen. Windows XP was the oldest with 6% of Windows users and OS X 10.6 had 16% of OS X users.

Gameplay

I focused on the core mechanics of turn-based RPGs: start at a town, go through the overworld, and end at the final dungeon. Defeat monsters to gain XP and gold to buy better equipment. This focus worked well, but…

Balancing the game was tough and took too much time. I expected “Impossible” difficulty to be literally impossible, or at least extremely tedious, but it turns out that it just requires a little grinding, a lot of caution, and some luck at the very beginning. “Easy” should be very easy, but if there’s one thing I learned about Ludum Dare game balance, you should err on the side of making your game easier. If you make it too hard, people won’t see most of it.

The major problem with gameplay is that stupid gremlin you fight on the other side of the bridge. The gremlin has a defense rating of 3, so you can’t harm it unless you buy a sword at the shop in town. Worse yet, if you decide to buy chainmail but no sword, the gremlin can’t damage you either. Oops. I suspect a number of people stopped playing here. I should have made the shop more obvious or reduced the gremlin’s defense rating on Easy.

One user complained that potatoes are overpowered in the game. They actually fill a specific need: they cut short any encounter you’ve already faced, so backtracking is less tiresome.

Coding

Two hours in, I switched from C++ and OpenGL to JavaScript and Canvas. That worked out surprisingly well. I did web searches for “how to make a simple HTML5 canvas game”, followed some tutorials, and expanded until I had a game.

I found the core UI in an RPG like this is the menu system. The game used a stack of menus, where hitting escape would pop the top menu off the stack and return to the previous. I didn’t realize how critical it was until I had reimplemented it in four or five places.

The other fundamental piece of code is the tables used to drive the game. There are tables for monsters, encounters, swords, armor, items, spells, and difficulty levels. The rest of the code only has a couple special cases, mostly revolving around the potato.

I also like the battle animation system, which runs a bunch of callback functions in sequence or in parallel to adjust the position of sprites on the screen. For example, one function will generate a tween callback, another function will cycle through sprite frames, and the two of them in parallel make the “sparkle” animation when you drink a potion.

Media

Not much to say: I didn’t want to SFXR everything but recording sound effects was tough. However, the music came out well. I scrapped plans to draw and paint because I suck at that, and ended up pushing pixels in GIMP.

Summary

An extra hour or two might have made worlds of difference for game balance. It’s just too tempting to add features right until the last minute, next time I’ll try to save a little bit of time to play before release. Next time, I’d also like to add a little extra analytics code: I want to know how long people play, how far they get, and what strategies they use.

Looking forward to doing this again in August… or even sooner!

Hi everyone, here’s my desktop time lapse during the writing of Minimum Friction, my entry to #LD48.  This was a very exciting competition and I am very satisfied with my results. While I did three Global Game Jams, this was my first time on a Ludum Dare. It was also the first time doing a game all alone in such a short time. It’s very different from jamming with friends and is a great way to check our skills to deliver something complete, instead of part of a total.

At first the theme seemed daunting, until I had an idea about a platform game that played around gravity. To make it different, I decided to remove the ground and platforms, both to get a minimalistic game and and to something different. That was a little before I started writing the code.

Some funny things people can notice, I started writing the menus and splash screen. I was trying out the SFML 2.0 library for the first time, so I spent some time playing around with the lib to get the feeling of how input was handled and how to use graphical resources, which is quite different from SDL (which I used for a long time). It wasn’t until late in the night that I started coding a level.

The best I did was in Saturday night: a level loader. This allowed me to do many cool things that would have been difficult to achieve if I used hard coded levels. By Sunday I had a “to do” list that was 50% done for submission (I can’t believe I actually planned multi language support). Credits screen was a late addition, and I had to cut some corners, instead of loading a text and rendering the credits, I used an image and that did the trick. Finally, I fine tuned the levels and by 10PM EST Sunday I uploaded the final version.

If you still have to play it, please check out the Minimum Friction page and let me know what you think! 😀

Wow, a lot of nice games are online and it’s taken me some time to play through even a small amount of them.

Metrocraft is my fourth LD attempt (3rd submitted) and it turned out well for the limited time I had. Never as polished as I would like but it’s nice to see all of the constructive feedback. I fixed the mouse bug so the controls should be much smoother.

Would like to hear more feedback on what types of features and changes you think would make this game much more successful and move away from the simple timed levels that even I don’t like.

Some ideas I have: Creative mode, Score based on time to complete, Obstacles.

You can play it here: METROCRAFT (I recommend downloading the windows version and play on full screen)

Thanks for the support, challenging games and great inspiration!

Enough of the minimal posts, it’s time for introspection!

What went right:
Minimal theme. This was my favorite theme so I was very happy to see it win. It’s specific, yet can influence art, music, and game design. Like everyone else, I rushed to the wikipedia entry and stared at Mondrian’s squares. I read that minimalist art didn’t have to say anything in particular but existed just to look good. I usually have a story and theme linking everything together but with minimalism I didn’t have to worry about that and could remove all meaning and still fit the theme. At one point during the weekend I read someone’s post that said that minimalism was the best theme ever because programmer art was the perfect art for it. I have to agree.

Quick design conecept. While taking in the internet’s examples of minimalist art, I pictured in my head a moving line and manipulating it with a button press. Depending on the location of the goals, the player would end up with interesting minimalist pictures. To keep things fun, I thought of adding pickups to modify what the button does and laying out levels that require obtaining the pickups in a certain order. After I had my prototype I noticed how crazy it was to have the button down and button up work differently. And that’s pretty much all I needed. I think Ludum Dare works well when you have a good design from the beginning that you can focus on and it flops when you start with too general of an idea and have to rush to design something coherent at the end. I got very lucky this time that my design ideas ended up working out.

SVG. Rather than use the bitmap graphics of a canvas library, I chose the Raphael SVG library for web based vector graphics. I decided on SVG because minimalism made me imagine a very clean game. With vector graphics you can rotate and scale to any size without worrying about jaggies or pixilation. It is also very easy to manipulate colors and outlines since you don’t need to create new graphics but simply change the stroke and fills. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to use much of this in the end, but ever since I came up with the design I knew I wanted to take P27 past the Ludum Dare weekend and try and get a complete fully polished game out of it. Hopefully the time I lost implementing SVG will pay off in the future.

What went wrong:
SVG. You probably saw this coming. Pretty much all of the problems and time sinks I had were the result of choosing SVG. I’m going to break them down further in the next items, but know that SVG was the root of them all.

Rolling my own. There aren’t any SVG game engines out, just graphics libraries. This meant I had to program all of the pieces that make a game a game for myself. P27 isn’t very complicated so it wasn’t too bad, but I did lose time on tracking movement and position, handling collisions (thank GOD Raphael computes bounding boxes), and level setup.

Sweating the small stuff early. Since I hadn’t done an SVG game before I had no idea how it would perform. My initial tests showed ugly jitteriness on the iPad. That had me worried that most users wouldn’t get the smooth animation I was looking for. I could fix this by swapping out Raphael’s setInterval animation with some custom css transition code, but that was risky and did I have the time? What about modifying the animation after it had started? SVG animation is mainly used today for interactive pie charts and bar graphs, could I stop it in response to an button press event and change the line’s direction? I think I spent all of the time I saved by coming up with an idea early by worrying over the perfect execution of it. I was afraid of going too far down the road with SVG and then finding some impossibility that would cause me to start all over again so before I started I spent too much time researching every little thing to make sure it would work. In LD you don’t have time to worry, you have to go with gut decisions. Before I started I spent too much time in my head and not enough time putting bits to processors.

That damn line!. My final worry came from the moving line I saw in my head. Even though I already had a dot moving and changing direction, I wanted a revealing line instead. I wasted hours thinking about how to do it and researching how to reveal an SVG path. I found some solutions, but they all sounded too slow and time consuming and I once again I found myself pre-optimizing in my brain. The quick solution I ended up with did turn out okay, and I suppose one could argue that a point is more minimal than a line, but I want a line damnit!

If Ludum Dare were a video game it would be a resource management game. You would have a finite amount of the time resource and have to figure out how to best distribute it among thinking, coding, polishing, making art, and making sounds. Last weekend I spent too much time on thinking and not enough on coding and sound (I will gladly admit the music ended up pretty awful).

In the end, however, I am very proud of the result. It fits the theme in art, music, and design and more importantly can be entertaining to play. The comments from the LD community have been very inspiring. I have a goal of spending the next 30 days fixing it up and turning it into a polished little product (I think it would be perfect for touch control on a tablet or phone). Who know, maybe I’ll even get that revealing line I’ve been looking for.

P27
by hi-scor.es
1 programmer
946 lines of javascript
Libraries:

• Raphael.js (SVG)
• Buzz.js (HTML5 sound)
• Requirejs
• Font-Awesome
• jquery (who doesn’t use jquery?)

Tools:

• Sublime Text 2
• Chrome

Entry
Play

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ludum dare so awesome!

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This is the fourth time I’ve participated on a Ludum Dare, but the first going solo. It was a big challenge as I would have to make everything and I wouldn’t have the support of an awesome team.

First Day

beer beer beer bere brre beretb mdsamda bwqe IDEA!

The first night I was preparing myself with some beers and something to eat, just anxious about the theme. Once the theme was announced I was a bit disappointed, I wanted afterlife to be the chosen one, but at the end an artist is formed by challenging him self.

I spent about 5 hours trying to figure out a game, I made a lot of prototypes which at the end I discarded. Finally I decided to use a very old idea I had, even before I could actually program. I thought the mechanic was very minimalistic, so I just went for it.

The result of that first 4 hours was this :

http://shin.cl/ld26/

A very simple version of my actual game which had the core mechanic.

Second Day

The second day was a bit easier for me as I already had an idea, now it was just about polishing and adding more features, at least that’s what I thought first.

As the hours passed I was getting  a more robust game, I’ve already added some new levels ( you could actually play with more than just 1 core ) and a couple of effects ( particles and some reduction affect on the cores ).

At the end of the day I just decided to submit my game to ludum dare, saying “yeah it’s playable” plus I thought It would be great to get some feedback before the deadline.

This was the first version of the game I submitted:

http://shin.cl/ld26/02/

After that I just went to bed wishing the best for my game.

Third Day

After sleeping 4 hours I decided to watch how my game was doing on the comments. Great ideas as many errors and ideas were mentioned. I was skeptical about making does changes, but after more comments I noticed it was mentioned very commonly. Then it’s when I decided to just make the changes and added moving cores, this was the result:

http://apps.monkeycoder.co.nz/249/1/html5/MonkeyGame.php?width=800&height=640

I needed to give my game a name, so I just looked at my cat and thought why not call it like him. I like my cat!

origin of the name!

Last Day

The last day I only slept for 3 hours. Fortunately my friend, with whom I am developing indie games, told me to take the day to recover myself. I didn’t do that so I decided to keep working on the game. With just 10 minutes left to submit my game I sent my final version which included a couple of fixes and more enemies. I thought that would have made it a better game.

giffin’

The Good

I really liked making a game all by myself, I felt I could do anything I wanted.

I could finally do  a game I wanted to do for a long time.

I believe the mechanic is very solid.

The Bad

I really wanted to expand the gameplay, after a while it gets a bit boring.

Very disgusting source code which had so many bugs.

I wish I could have added better graphics.

I wish I’ve had more time so I could have added more type of defense.

If you haven’t played my game please do, if you could rate it that would be awesome too. My cat would love you for that!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13148

Thanks!

Felipe

www.twitch.tv/ecool377 We will be announcing it at 4:35 Come and watch!

I’m very happy with all the positive reviews I’m getting from you guys. Although I was dissapointed that all the features I had in mind could not be implemented, I realized that, well its Ludum Dare. Anyway, Thank you so much everyone, and if all goes well, and the good reviews continue, I will be sure to make a better Post Compo version with more levels, features, and music.

To anyone who has not played my game yet; WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR MAN!!!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20256

Here’s a quick gameplay video of where I hid all the potatoes in The Sentient Cube.

Tags: Katamari, Katamari DA, potato, Potato Challenge, The Sentient Cube

Hello everybody.

This was my first Ludum Dare. I was initially going to enter the Jam with a team, but my friends bailed out at the last minute. It was a good thing, because if I would have done the Jam, I probably would not have finished a game for this Ludum Dare.

I might not have spent as much time on it as other people did, but I used the time that I had wisely.

I invite you to play my game, A-Void. Feel free to comment at the bottom of the page. I enjoy reading all of the comments.

It supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS/X, the Web, and it is made in Unity.