Sorry about that. I did weird things and didn’t think about people actually using my website.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20235

So the post mortem now (it seems to be the tradition!)

It was my first participation in the ludum dare … and by the way my first game with Unity.
I used at least all of this tools: blender 2.6, unity 4, gimp 2.8, inudge and audacity (everything was free to use ^^)

Goods points :
– I managed to make and finish a game : I got the idea, made the modelisation, programmming, music, …
– There isn’t any “critical” bug
– I learned Unity basis in a very short lapse of time
– and I managed to create something quite interesting

Bad points :
– Didn’t manage to finish it like I wanted: graphism could have been better, moving platforms were also intended; …
– Bad choices for the controls
– Gameplay a bit too slow

Next :
…you liked the concept? Follow my post, I started to work on a 2nd version wich will clear most part of these bad points!

More
A (very) short video extract:

Cylinder 10s extract

Jacques le lezard
@jacqueslelezard
Play the game (web player available)

I considered calling this post a postmortem… but I believe my LD entry My Little Robo is pretty successful for a first timer so “postmortem” would sound too pessimistic. Hence “after action report” – sounds way more upbeat, doesn’t it? Later I will also prepare a sort of “pre compo checklist” based around my experiences.

What went wrong?

• Integrating physics engine with cocos2d-x html5 – I was foolish enough to assume that if I would need physics engine I would figure out how to use it as I go along. How difficult could it be? It turns out that engines are not that difficult, but oh the documentation. It might not references the same API version as yours. It might not be written with Javascript in mind. It might turn out some stuff is not mentioned at all (like the namespaces). Figuring it all out I wasted several hours I could have used for other things.
• Javascript can make you cry – I am used to programming in C++ and encountering certain bugs like a mistaken variable name, or a lost comma in class definition at runtime was a bit nerve wrecking, especially combined with cryptic error messages.
• No sounds or music – I really hoped I will have time to make some music and sounds for the game, but because of physics engine integration problem I did not have time to do that.
• Physics instability – getting real time physics simulations to be stable can be difficult, especially when using physics to create gameplay – again something I could have done better if I did not waste time setting up the engine.
• Submission – Screenshots? I need my own place to host the zip file? Oh shit. I’ve got a shared server but I couldn’t find an option to upload anything to it, dropbox for some reason couldn’t finish uploads because my bloody ISP was apparently doing some late night infrastructure repairs. After a while I remembered that my wordpress blog allows uploading a zip file and used that, but that was about 5 minutes before the deadline.

What went right?

• Picking an innovative and extendable game idea – I’ve spent about 2 hours considering various ideas before I settled on the minimalistic robot. Compared to other options it was a bit more ambitious and risky, but the risks totally payed off. Judging by the comments, LD crowd likes innovation even if it is not perfectly executed and being praised for an original idea feels awesome.  Also LD judging can be considered a “free focus group”. And it showed me that, yes, my idea is worthy of a longer game. Which is exactly what I plan to do now – have I picked a simpler idea or made a demake expanding would be more problematic.
• Using a web based platform – Javascript might be a bit difficult to get used to, but making a web based game was the right choice. Judging other entries I’ve quickly noticed that I am always relieved to see the web option. Also this should make it easier to publish the improved game later on.
• Javascript – While Javascript is irritating at times, it allows for quick iterations, debugging tools are nice and Javascript platform forces open source code. This last thing was a life saver, since it allowed me to dive in and debug inside the engine and to get to the bottom of the issues faster.
• Detailed running TODO list – this is a technique I’ve developed long time ago for dealing with having to code fast under a lot of stress and fatigue. I first write down the features, then break them down into essential implementation steps. If during development I get any idea of extra check that I should make, or another place in code where something should be changed – I add this to the list. It all works like a charm – frees up the short term memory, prevents forgetting important details and crossing out stuff that’s done is a great morale boost.
• Source control – a pretty obvious thing. More than once I was really grateful I took those few extra seconds to setup mercurial before starting coding. Also frequent checkins should be practiced – you never know when your tired brain will fsck something up.
• Precooking – cooking a lot of food before the compo that can be later reheated. It turned out to be a really good idea, eating a proper tasty lunch or dinner is a great morale and energy booster when you are programming for 8 hours straight. I should have secured  stash of some healthy snacks too.
• Taking part – this was overall the best idea of all. Even though my submission was not as polished as I would like it to be, still many people enjoyed it and I very much needed such a confidence booster.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, SuccessStory

5 Weird and Wonderful games.

I think these are games that make the experience for me when rating Ludum Dare games. Pure shots of unadultered bizarre joy. There were a lot of well-designed boxes doing other things with boxes games, but it is difficult to appreciate playing a whole lot of those games at a time.

Minimum Reason Game: Hail To The Potato King

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=2154

I feel that the instructions are clear.

Perfect Crime

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22508

I feel like Surgeon Simulator opened the door to a lot of interesting physics games. And then a wall of blood poured out of that door.

Special client

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=23430

I would like more games that feel like Oatmeal comics.

Mr Potato assembly-line

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=4681

Its a little tedious, but the fun is all waiting until the end and looking at all of the ugly babies you created.

Get The Potato

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=2117

YOU HAD ONE JOB

Number of games in this list that have anything to do with minimalism: 2? Games that have everything to do with potatoes: 3. I’m not some kind of vegetable-humor activist (But now that there’s a word for it…) But I don’t think minimalism was the greatest theme.

5 other great games

Leaf Me Alone

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=7984

Its a metroidvania! There’s floating mechanics! Its absolutely adorable!

Line Knight

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15244

There were a couple of games with the line flipping theme (Did I miss some popular Adult Swim game or something?) But this game made me the most happy to think about.

This is not a minimalist game

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11243

This is similar to what I originally planned on doing: You unlock concepts for the world by progressing through the game. Super neat!

Flight Time

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20

There were a lot of graphicless / themeless games, but few as engaging as this, I felt. My consoles detect a high ratio of players making swishing noises while playing.

Nega-girl

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=2074

THATS RIGHT THERES A GODDAMN LADY IN IT. Plus some really good illustrations and an interesting mechanic.

Shameless plug: Look at my game I Dream In Color! I THIRST FOR EYEBALLS! Its been described as Lemmings meets Closure. When I read that comment, I feel a small part of my heart die, but I also know good ad copy when I read it http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=7902

Here is a run-through of what went right and what went wrong in the creation of my game entry, Minima.

Minima is a simple game of dodging fast-moving enemy spaceships with the cursor or W, A, S, and D keys.  The original game was made for Windows using C# and SDL.NET.  It has since been ported to Flash for the web.

The Good

This was my first time competing in Ludum Dare.  Two days is an incredibly limited amount of time to produce anything game related, so I’m glad I finished it at all.  The contest was fun, and I now have something to add to my game development portfolio.

I felt well prepared for the challenge, partly because I’ve been writing business software for many years and I’m accustomed to scope management and tight deadlines.  But I also got a lot of good advice from a Ludum Dare survival guide, most of which I followed.  I got plenty of sleep, ate sensibly, and didn’t overdo the caffeine or sugar.  I took frequent breaks and went outside occasionally for sun and fresh air.  In some ways I lived more healthily than I do on most other weekends.

I resisted the urge to refactor, optimize, or maintain clean code.  This goes against every instinct I have as a developer, but 48-hour dev contests are the exception to the rule.  When you’re the sole programmer on a project this small (and a deadline so short), you can keep everything in your head.  As far as I can tell, Minima is relatively stable and bug-free.

The Bad

I decided to address the “minimalism” theme with a specific game feature, and that was my first mistake.  Games made in two days can’t have “features”.  For the most part the core game mechanic is the feature, and everything else gets cut.  As a result, my game is somewhat bland and uninspired.

Going into this, I thought I knew my toolset pretty well.  I use Visual Studio and C# every day.  The problem is that game libraries are just as important as the core language.  A lot of time was burned reading the SDL.NET docs and generally stumbling around the library.

I didn’t really think people would mind downloading an executable and double-clicking on it, but it turns out that when you’re trying to rate dozens of games, downloading stuff is annoying and gets in the way.  Therefore, I learned Flixel and ActionScript and ported Minima to Flash as quickly as possible.

One almost-disastrous mistake was waiting to test on a non-dev machine until last minute.  Of course, when I tried it the first time the game crashed immediately, and I spent the last two hours of the contest figuring out which files were missing from the package.

I wasn’t prepared at all to create a soundtrack for the game, which is funny because I’ve composed a lot of electronic music in the past.  I downloaded some sequencing software and fiddled with some samples, but it just wasn’t coming together.  In the end I wound up downloading a free sample loop and playing it repeatedly in the background.  The effect is decent.  Next time I will be far better prepared.

Overall, I enjoyed my weekend and I’m inspired to create more.  Thanks to everyone who makes Ludum Dare possible.

Play the game!

Tags: post-mortem

So i’ve rated 100 entries and here are my favorites in no particular order

Compo entries:

1. Art attack by Morgawr. It’s a very stylish quest.

2. Mad World by patrikspengler. Special mood included. I think it deserves more rates

3.  ::.::::::. by rwos. Sort of FPS.

Jam entries

1. minobi by Pixelboy_85. Addctive (but sadly short) ninja platformer.

2. Aranami by Frozen Fractal

3. Enlightment by  xploitgames.

The most crazy entries

1. Please Ignore The Dancing Llama by Zed

2.  Staring Contest by timtimtimtim

3. Minimum Reason Game: Hail To The Potato King by nodoxi

Advirtisment

And don’t miss the opportunity to get “Hardcore coder” badge for your LD account by trying your best in my entry: Coder

My  LD26 entry, We Dreamers, is a collaborative minimalist art piece. Aside from a small start, all of the content was created by players. I thought it would be fun to extract all of the notes and collect a few here to give you a taste of what people have been doing in the abstract space that is the “game world.”

I should mention that each one of these notes was left in a specific context. They were surrounded in 2D space by colored rooms and other notes. I callously dumped out all the text without the position information. To compensate, I’ll try to respect the wishes of the original authors, and not give away too much.

People Who Mark Territory

hey look in the next room!! 😀

IGNORE THIS PATH, MISCREANT.

LEAVE THIS PLACE, IT WAS NOT MEANT FOR ONE AS FRAGILE AS YOU

this Is my humble abode welcome

don’t go into the next room

PLEASE ENTER MAZE FROM OTHER END

~ Society for Protection of Mazes and Puzzles

People Who Think Deep Thoughts

Solitude. I sit here in a populated room, but I am alone in my thoughts, as they are in theirs. I am now more comforted by the text on my monitor than the activity around me. I itch the back of my neck.

“My legs hurt, my color is fading… but I’ll follow you to the end of all colors if I must!”

What are those 3 ancient sculptures ? Surely an ancient civilization wrote those long before us. I’m sure it’s some kind of message for some supreme being watching us from another dimension.

My note, an abstract scribble of ink on a worthless slip of paper, taken from the wall and discarded, is now an inextricable part of someone’s mind.

And here it was. A brand new color illuminated the adventurers, and they realized that the world was bigger than they thought. They wanted to bring the new color back with them. But instead, they left it there. Someone, one day, will come here with his own color and dig into this new world even further, and illuminate the world.

People Who Tell Stories

HEED YOU NOT OUR WARNINGS?

Traveler’s note, page 496: I lost my pickaxe in the tunnel below. I must go deeper. I wonder what horrors and wonders await me down there; I may never come back alive.
Chonodrax

Once Upon a time, there was a foolish man.

(You’ll have to play the game to read the rest of that one! It’s a proper short story.)

People With Different Ideas Altogether

My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father… Prepare to die!

Easy West-African-ish stew (from friends who were in the Peace Corps): heat up peanut butter, water, tomato paste, and chili powder to make a sauce. Serve on roasted sweet potatoes or winter squash.

—,===,”<   crocodile

Never go full Zen.

Oh God oh God this whole game’s a trick don’t get to level 4 DON’T DO IT

To everyone who’s left an interesting note,

Thank you! I am delighted, as I’m sure other players are, by the random bits of humor and thoughtfulness scattered around We Dreamers.

This was my first participation to Ludum Dare and to a Game Jam.
I played games from previous jam, but this time “I’was in”.

About the theme

I’m a fan of clean manga and “bandes dessinées” (ligne claire), of “minimalist” web design “minimalist”.
Daily I work on a game vdrones with minimal gfx (triangle, cube, plan), sound, …

So I should do something different.

"Google Search" page is a famous example of "minimalism" web design. So start on a game with a visual like it.
 + An other place where we use minimum keystroke : chat, forum, coding,... via abbreviations and acronyms
 + gamefication (try to include fun and juicy)
 ----------------------------------------
 = AbbrevsMaster
 

What wrong ?

about game:

• I prepared some stuff (atmosphere, color palette, libs of code, …), I nearly use nothing
• poor abbrevs’database
  • not tune, simple copy / paste from some web page
  • the random selection in list should need to integrate a popularity weight of term
  • I failed to read data from a wiki page (github) due to security issue, spend too many time to try
  • I didn’t find an online service that allow to request by category
• No introduction (instruction, credits screen)
• Not enough funny juicy animations when traduction are crunched (quantity, quality)
  I could not fix a bug in css 3d transformation.
• The fun is hidden, the game is hard
• no time to provide an Assistant
• not enough gameplay tuning
• It’s not the kind of game I enjoy to play
• Not enough time to provide a way to share score

misc :

• not enough reuse
  • I didn’t reuse all the code (lib, framework) I prepared during previous week
• very short night 😉
• I didn’t post progression, I was not aware of others participants.
• I failed my timelapse recording (glapse has no pause).
• Not enough preparation, I didn’t follow my pre-roadmap
• Last hour on a stupid bug in audio
• Stack email, news, … during 2 days
• I found the name (title) when I filled the submit form.
• Crappy code (and image) lot of places for improvements

What Right ?

• I submit a playable version (80% finished) (last deployement at H – 30 min)
• I was able to reuse audio code (, build code from other project
• I toke time for my friends and familly (saturday afternoon)
• Using a kanban (Trello) vs todo file.
• I successfully try freemarker as css preprocessor (day 2, I should use it day 1)
• Very stimulating
• Good wife’support (Thank you Darling)

Next time

• Prepare better (real project skeleton, timelapse recorder, video capture)
• Try to improve and to enjoy

AbbrevsMaster

An now it’s time to explore LD games (to play … to rate)

Tags: Google Dart, post-mortem, postmortem

Mondritron: 2026 Post-Mortem

Ludum Dare #26 was the first Ludum Dare I’ve ever participated in. Mondritron: 2026 is also the first real game I’ve ever made by myself and released for people to play. Through this combination of little experience in game development and a rushed project, I found Ludum Dare to be incredibly beneficial to how i’ll go about designing games in the future and the what it’s like to develop with a deadline. While it was incredibly hard to do and even stressful at times, by the end I was able to create an actual game that people can play, and that fact that I can simply say that is incredibly validating and fulfilling. I have been trying to jump into the world of game development for about a year and a half now, and this ludum Dare really pushed me to finally create an actual game, and to get over my hangups of coding, programming languages, and the stigma I created in my mind that games made in Gamemaker are inherently low quality and un-inspired. I made Monditron: 2026 with Gamemaker and I’m incredibly proud to say that. Regardless what I used, I created a game and that’s a hell of  a lot better than sitting around thinking about creating a game.

I really owe it to Ludum Dare for actually encouraging me to make something, and I highly recommend participating if you’re trying to get into game development. Regardless of how you make the game, by the end you’ll actually have a game, and that realization is wonderful.

Anyways, about my game…

Theme: I started development by looking at the theme, reading some definitions of minimalism, then looking at some Google images, one of which was the work of Piet Mondrian – which would go on to inspire the concept for my game. After that I did a free-write in my super secret book of game development, and came up with a few ideas such as, minimalist renditions of other video games and a game where you collect music notes to create a song (both not very original). However, I quickly came up with the idea for Mondritron: 2026 – a robotron inspired top down shooter with a twist of complementary color battle, similar to that of “Ikaruga”, but more focused on the theme of minimalism and the color theory that goes into minimalist art.

Here’s all the notes I wrote:

Development: Development went fairly smoothly, I ran into a few problems regarding how to change the color of the player, and how to create the enemy spawns, but I eventually figured them out and got the basic structure of gameplay down by Sunday morning. For the rest of Sunday I worked on level creation/design and polishing, however as a result of all the time I spent on the basic structure, I did not have enough time to add all the levels I originally planned on having, and did not get to play test a whole lot and figure out that the game was actually incredibly hard, and that a better progression of difficulty would have benefited it immensely. However, such is the way of Ludum Dare… the fact that I was able to actually create the concept I drew up on paper to a good extent is very nice, regardless of the problems that it has.  The last problem I ran into was music, I don’t have a lot of experience with music so I opted to use inudge.net, However, once I created a song I was happy with, I tried to export it as an audio file but couldn’t find a way to do it (or didn’t know inudge doesn’t have that feature). Pressed for time, and not able to make a new song in another program, I unfortunately had to play the song through my speakers and record it with my microphone(MINIMALISM!(sort of)), that’s why the song sounds weird in the game.

Conclusion: By the end most things worked out well. There’s definitely room for polish in the areas of difficulty progression and lack of levels. I’m also now working on my FL studio skills so that I’ll be able to make better music in a nicer way. Through this experience I created something that I am incredibly proud of, and have been pushed over the hump of awkward pre- game development hangups all as a result of the motivation that Ludum Dare created for me. If anyone is going through the same phase of game development loss, I highly encourage you to participate in Ludum Dare, it’s incredibly motivating, inspiring, and rewarding. don’t worry about what you’re using to make games, just make games, and things will eventually fall into place.

Now that I know I’m capable of making a game, I am incredibly inspired and I can’t wait for the next Ludum Dare to utilize everything I learned during this one, and everything I hope to learn in between. See you all there!

Oh, and if you want to play Mondritron: 2026, here’s the link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=17685 (Oh my god, that’s awesome that I’m able to say that).

Hey!

My LD26 entry, the Potential Energy Generator is available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store!

It is the exact same game, I just adjusted difficulty levels a little bit, and it’s on Apple’s Game Center. Download now!!

I wanted to make a top X from my first 100 ratings, but I went so fast from 100 to 150 that in the end it’ll be favorites from the 150 first ratings x)

Favorite Compo games

Budget Squad by deepnight

Amazing graphics as always, with a cool and innovative gameplay.
It was a pleasure to see the game go from a red circle to being awesome during this week end, thanks a lot!

Weapons of Minimal Destruction by bluescrn

Awesome and addictive arena shooter, with a great concept and theme interpretation. Usually not a fan of Unity games, but this one is really cool!

You Must Escape by GertJohnny

A great gameplay and an amazing mood, a must-play.

Favorite Jam games

Mustache Armies by TurboDindon

After Inside My Radio, another awesome game from TurboDindon. Just play it. And again.

Swimming Fool by blackmagic

Amazing HD graphics, cool humor, nice gameplay and great music.. Cool game, too bad it’s so short 😀
This week-end was fun, thank you guys!

Potato Dungeon by _Rilem

Fun game, with nice graphics, gameplay and sfx. And 31 levels! Amazingly complete for a game made in 72h.

Take a look at our game too! Drug Hunt is a crazy warioware-like (as players said) game, but on drugs. Made with Gnux (graphics) & LeoL (music).

In Drug Hunt, you are a junkie.
Your usual drug dealer will give you your favorite drug (or another one.. he’s too high anyway). Take it, and here comes your trip!

You’ll have to find out the adequate moment to use the only action your reduced brain could trigger, and get out of your trip before the overdose.

[Cross posted from Omiya Games]

Before I go any further, I wanted to make a quick mention that Omiya Game’s (the game studio that currently consists of only me) latest mobile game, Touch Yoga was just published on the Barnes & Noble NOOK HD tablets! Don’t have one? It’s also available on the iPhones, iPads, iPods, Androids, and even Amazon Kindle Fire HD tablets.

Anyways, I digress. To compliment the unexpectedly useful things list, I now talk about things I thought were going to be useful, but weren’t.

Pen & Paper

I expected myself to doodle and draw a lot of pictures.  Instead, I leave as the cleanest paper yet.

At least it came with a free Mario figure. And speaking of doodling…

Wacom Tablet

My wacom tablet was left untouched on top of my printer. The latter which was also useless, but that was expected for this event.

No love for the poor guy.

Fossil Wiki

I ended up using the Wiki more than the tablet and the notepad, but only for two things: first, the 30 minute game brainstorming.

And coming up with the game’s title

Fun fact: the second best contender for The Sentient Cube title was, indeed, The Artist’s Pornography. I decided against it for an obvious reason.

Unity’s Pre-installed Scripts

Seriously, I ended up using only 2 scripts in the end product: one for the water refraction, and the edge detecting post-image effect. Everything else? Illegibly coded and completely impractical for the game.

Tags: Amazon, android, fossil, iOS, iPad, iphone, iPod, Kindle Fire HD, Mario, Nook, NOOK HD, paper, pen, The Sentient Cube, Touch Yoga, wiki

Introduction

Hi everyone! It was the first time our team entered Ludum Dare. Even though it didn’t go entirely without hitch, we enjoyed this competition from start to finish. So here’s the game postmortem, with all highs and lows of our experience.

Timeline

Arming for the competition. Before getting down to work, we prepared all we would need: food, a webcam, set up a Twitch stream and scheduled our work for these days. We also read a number of LD postmortems for tips what to watch out for. It appears even guides on game jam survival are published, here’s a funny one: http://www.amazon.com/The-Game-Survival-Guide-ebook/dp/B007R0NTF4

So we were all set not to loose a minute when the contest opens.

Day 1. Brainstorming was the time eater. The plan was it would take about 4 hours, while in fact it took almost half of the day. First, we’ve had a heated discussion on how we can interpret minimalism in terms of level design and sound. Maybe we should stick to a low-res screen… The ideas were gushing forth!

After that, we moved on to discussing the core mechanics. We did not have time to elaborate neither on the game world, nor the story/characters. When the first day came to an end, we only agreed on the following: the game is about cubes that can move in a chain, like a snake. In addition to that, we started to create assets to be used in the game.

Day 2. Houston, we’ve had a problem. When it came to the world design and narrative, it turned out each team member had a different vision. And nobody wanted to capitulate. After a lot of stressful arguing, the game that started as a simple 2d puzzle platformer became a 3d isometric puzzle game with a story.

Then the thing went on wheels. We’ve sketched the world map on paper, for prototyping and even testing the game balance (it proved to be a good idea). Music was ready in no time and was spot on thanks to our great musician. So we could focus on creating puzzles. It was quite a challenge, since we had no prior experience in designing them. But that’s what made it probably the most interesting and fun part!

As the second day ended, we had a number of puzzles done. What else? The basic world template was ready. Sound, including all SFXs – check. Still, there is no UI, no game yet, and a lot of work to do.

Day 3. It’s time to put this cool game together! As the day dawned, we’ve started in high spirits and quickly designed rooms one by one by transfering the paper 2D model into 3D. One of us created text triggers for rooms, another one linked rooms together into a world.

Running really short of time, we threw out around 9 rooms. The gameplay did not suffer one bit from that, while it gave us a chance to finish the game in time.

It was almost night already when the game was completed. And by completed I mean TONS of stuff was yet to be polished and fixed. Bugs, level design fixes, improvements… Still, we made it! As the imminent deadline came, the game was ready and uploaded. To tell the truth, at least three bugs are left unfixed. It is also possible to cheat and completely bypass the puzzle-solving mechanics. Well, if you find a way

What went right

* Music & sounds production
* Task management, so that all team members worked efficiently
* Project schedule

What went wrong

* It took the whole 2 days to agree upon the vision
* Long & stressful brainstorming
* Didn’t have time to add sounds

Conclusion

Ludum Dare is definitely an inspiration. We are eager to participate in next competitions: avoid the pitfalls, perfect what was good, and make another great game!

You can play the Deja vu game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22220.
Feel free to drop a line or ask a question. Rating is much appreciated as well. Thank you!

Escaped with all alive

Hi there, just a noobie question…

On the compo site it says :

“IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to place in the final results, you NEED votes.”

It’s not like I could influence the number of votes given to my game in a significant way, but I was wondering HOW MANY VOTES you would aproximately need to place in the final results.

So just for my curiosity, does anybody know this ?

Sorry to bother you again …

This entry was posted on Friday, May 10th, 2013 at 3:58 pm and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Hipster Pad is my third Ludum Dare submission.

In Hipster Pad the player attempts to arrange oddly shaped furniture on top of a rug.

Previously I did the 48-hr jam and was fairly happy with the results, but I wanted to see what I could do if I got a few friends together for a team. Unfortunately most of my prime candidates were busy that weekend. I did get a few friends to do some brainstorming and design talk, but not a lot of help with programming or other development aspects.

What went right:

1. Simple Mechanics: I’ve seen a lot of other great ideas during this Ludum Dare. I think the minimalism theme has really helped developers embrace the “less is more” philosophy. When I first thought of doing a block-style pz

2. Physical prototyping: I pulled out my copy of Blokus and drew out some different levels to see how the gameplay worked. I played around with different block mechanics for a couple hours until I had a simple rules system that still seemed meaningful. Every 5 minutes I could completely change my game rules without worrying about the code implementation. For the next Ludum Dare I will definitely prepare a prototyping kit ahead of time to test out game mechanics.

3. Familiar frameworks: The entire game was built in one html file with a bunch of supporting css and javascript. I used bootstrap in my last two games to try and save time, but this time around I skipped that and only used jQuery. In my day job I mostly do business web apps with these tools so it was really easy to debug any issues that I ran into.

4. Playable demo and Feedback from other people: I had several people that checked out my game over the course of the weekend. I was able to get some good feedback even on Saturday morning. That was much better than my last attempt were I didn’t have a playable game until the last few hours of the weekend.

5. Relaxed schedule: I followed most of the 48-hr rules even though I did the 72-hr jam. The major benefit was having 72-hrs. Instead of working 2-days straight I did just a little work on Friday and Saturday to get my base game and on Sunday I spend time with family and friends. I think that gave my subconscious mind some time to mull over different aspects of the game.

What went wrong:

1. Forming a team: I spent some time before the jam weekend trying to recruit people to be part of a team. I got some interest, but I don’t think I gave people enough time to block out some time from their schedules. Next time I might start pinging people a month ahead of time to try to get something bigger. Alternatively I might go back to the 48-hr solo jam.

2. Complicated level design: I hand-code my initial 5 levels and didn’t create a simple level format until nearly the end of the competition. I spent a fair amount of time tweaking and copy/pasting updates between my levels. Next time I will probably create a level template sooner in the process.

3. Too much time on art: I went down several paths trying to create sketches of furniture, doing fancier gradients and boxes for the rugs in the game. Ultimately I was happier with polished versions of the basic squares and probably could have created more interesting levels if I spent less time on the superficial appearance of the furniture.

Summary:

With my third Ludum Dare under my belt I feel like I’m getting more efficient at creating a base game. Scope creep is always a lurking danger, but I am already looking forward to creating another game in a few months.

After playing over 200 of the 2347 entries I’ve picked out 48 awesome games (that you should try). I can say that these games are nothing short of awesome!

Here are the first 6 from my list:

1. essentia


 

2. Minimalist RTS


 

3. Battery


 

4. Join


 

5. end


 

6. XYZ

Check out all 48 Awesome Games Here

I have made a port for Android devices of my entry: My Mini Castle!

However, I did have to change the controls (obviously) and I balanced the game a bit more so it’s basically not the same game as the original entry.. But it might still be fun to try out

And I am happy to tell you that I’m the continuing development aiming for the app store and google play store! 😀

Link: Android

(playing on a tablet)

Note: I haven’t actually tested the latest version so it may contain errors/bugs…

Tags: android, LD #26

This is the postmortem for my entry: My Peculiar Car! If you didn’t played it, please do!

What happened

Conception

Well, when the theme went online, I was on a party. I got home drunk so I just decided it was better to drink water, have an inspirational sleep and a shower. After all that, I kinda had the idea ready (I was lucky this time). What I thought: so, minimalism was doing the minimum to express the most? And combining that with an idea I had some time ago that changing a gear would be a puzzle while driving cars, I had maybe a good idea, and hopefully I wasn’t too far behind.

Programming some squares

So I went programming right away. Flixel is my engine of choice because it helps you a lot with basic stuff like States and animations. I decided to do first 5 discrete lanes and have a car being able to change between them first. I opted to not make them continual because it would be hard to make a parallel between a gear change and a car move. OK. With that ready, I had my first problem: how should I give the the impression of speed? I really thought about doing a top down view with parallel lanes and all, but opted for a top-gear like experience, using perspective.

Ah, Top Gear. I actually tried to implement these darker lines of colors on the road that made the impression of speed here, but it bogged down the fps so much, I left it away.

While the top down would be really easier to implement, I wonder if in the end the game would feel less like an racing game and more like a double puzzle-game kinda like Frogger with more restrictions. I spend a lot of time implementing the perspective, mainly because with Flixel, use scale and position at the same time and you are never really sure of what is going on. I had to use a lot of magic numbers that mysteriously make everything work and I hate that. That is really one of my few problems with Flixel.

So, with the lanes, cars and obstacles ready, I had a silly little game hihi. But I still had to implement the gear. That was way easier than the perspective lane, and everything went pretty straightforward. I finished implementing it, and when I finally had the two together  the gear blocking the movement of the car, I actually thought I had a neat game idea. The problem was with the gear map generator: it was super random and sucked. Always guaranteeing that, with each new map, you can go left and right at least once made it a lot better, but in my opinion, it still lack something more.

Squares race! You can see how the first gear map generation algorithm sucked horribly here.

Another thing that I did very rushed: the cactus positioning. It was completely random. It maybe still is. I tried to making it better by making the chance of cactus appear bigger in less crowded lanes, but that was it. It is still bad. If I ever expand this game, the level design is the first thing that needs to get better.

Drawing some stuff

On to the graphics, I really wanted to draw everything as simple as possible, without shades or anything. Then I completely threw that from the window while drawing the car, because I shaded and everything. It took a lot of time (it looks kinda cool). For everything else (except the fish because it is important), I tried following simplicity.

For most sprites, I drew a fast silhouette on Graphics Gale, changed it’s colors, and that’s it. I tried to exaggerate the man’s animations on the car to make the impression he is trying really hard, I don’t know if it passed that message. But if it ended up not terribly ugly, I guess it is hooray.

I concluded a pretty obvious thing: if you make it smaller, you draw better. So what I did was drawing the intro, game over and the outro images as 80×60 sprites, and then scaling them 10x in the game. It looks rushed, but it looks like something.

I tried to make the color palette like a really sunny desert, that goes well in the eyes, and I guess that went awesome.

Sound

Then, finally was the part of putting some sound in the game. This is where the game got downhill.

See, sound is a very important part of the game. But it ends up that flex only accepts 44000hz mp3 files. And wasting some time editing, recording and filtering to discover that your sound fx wouldn’t be able to be used in flex is so frustating it almost hurts. Some sounds did work though, like the motor one. I don’t understand why sounds recorded with my mic didn’t work, if it worked before (including on my last LD entry, Just Politics).

But that led up to a good thing: after failing 3 different sound effects for the gear, I stumbled upon a free sax solo on the internet. I said “why not” and that turned out to be one of the best features in the game. Way better than me screaming on your headphones when you achieved the sweet, blue spot. Haha!

I couldn’t compose any music, I wish I could, I’ll try to learn that.

Finally

I ended up just moving the GUI, asking my friends for a opinion (something that did help a lot!), and trying to polish the game the most I could. In the end, I was finding difficult clicking with the mouse. But then, the reception was great, and I liked it.

I didn’t really do it all in that chronological way depicted here, but more or less so.

So, to sum it up:

The final game!

What went right

• Well, I was for five minutes browsing through a certain free sound page on the net, and while I couldn’t find any honks I have been able to find a snazzy sax solo. Downloading it ended up being my best decision in this compo, as the sax sounds really got praised.
• Simple, without shading pixel art with exaggeration is kinda beautiful, passes the message and it is easy to do. Don’t have time? Do the sprites on a smaller grid and then enlarge it.
• It was really easy to screw up with this idea. Early playtesting people were just asking themselves why the car wouldn’t move. Adding a little trembling on a locked gear handle did the trick, maybe? Or the tutorial? Anyway, people didn’t ask that in the comments.

What was wrong

• I really wish I knew what went so wrong about sound. This Audacity vs Flex fight was really, really frustating, and I ended up giving up a lot of sounds that could make the game so much better.
• The cactus generation is of course the worst part of the game: a little less procedural generation, and more well-thought position I guess would be for the best.
• I don’t like how the gear HUD look, I could do better (and the handle don’t look like part of the game at all).

PS.: Yeah, sorry for any engrish.

On a projector!

So yes. We will  be streaming and hopefully the audio won’t completely jack and you can hear us. But maybe not.

http://www.twitch.tv/superdisk_

CLICK IT AND POST YOUR CREATION IN THE CHAT (or on the piratepad: http://piratepad.net/SOSAfyaZIp)