Fuck yeah!

You guys rock
Thanks for playing, rating & commenting!
We’ll upload a trailer to celebrate this 😉 And rate more games, of course!

By the way, any LD#26 game I should play ?

Some awesome people played my LD entry. Go check their gameplay video out

IGP’s gameplay on jumper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhUwiXqJVpc
DAstewardKIDZ’s gameplay on jumper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7-oDHFGaII
My gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1iZdoysB14

For those who don’t know IGP (Indie Game Promoter), he promotes indie games. His goal is to show to the world what regular programmers can make! His channel is still fairly new and there is still lots he wants to add to it but hey, it’s growing fast. So yeah, send him a request to play your game, a link to download it and he will make a gameplay video on it

The entry from the University of Oklahoma’s Game Developers Association.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=19139

The Good

– Theme

I know many people really didn’t like the theme, but for our group it was extremely helpful. The whole team had a lot of school work and deadlines coming up, so going minimal was fantastic (Even though we could have done it with any theme) for us to be able to get in an entry and still have time to finish non ludum dare things.

– Brainstorming

Our first brainstorming session went really well. We came up with a lot of fun minimal ideas and quickly picked one to run with, allowing us to start development early.

– Scale

We were able to run with a really simple idea that we could get up and running fairley quickly (by midday saturday). Then we had the next two days for polish and homework, which worked out great.

– Camera

We played around with the perspective and orthographic cameras a lot trying to figure out which one we liked best. And I think we made the right choice. Using ortho during the game makes it a lot easier to now if you’re about to hit a pellet (if you’re on the right plane) or wall. And then the final zoom out to perspective when you die ended up looking fantastic.

– Audio

I really go back and forth between this being good or bad… The music came from a recording session that went from 2am-7am, so by that point you never know what’s going to come out. I would definitely change some parts if I did it over, but the two tracks came out catchy enough and fit the game once you get used to them.

The Bad

– School

We all had a lot of work that had to be done that weekend other than for the Dare… This made us choose a much simpler idea, which turned out well, but the extra time could have helped polish up the controls and difficulty curve a bit.

– Audio Processing

We initially had the idea of making the colors or scale of the pellets/cube ‘pump’ to the beat of the music (which influenced the harder beats in the audio tracks). However, this ended up just making things a lot harder to see and just didn’t look that great, plus the game was already difficult enough to wrap your mind around. So there was quite a bit of time wasted on the feature we never used.

– Difficulty

I wouldn’t necesarrily put this in the bad column, but a lot of the initial players went in to the game thinking it more a snake clone than a puzzle. They would try and keep mental track of the whole 3d space while they played (really hard) instead of just coming up with a few heuristics/tricks to solve the position puzzle (rather simple). We posted a helpful video and that our current high score was 91 to try and let people know that there may be a better way to think about the game.

I made a playthrough video of my game “llab“ almost 2 weeks ago, but forgot to post about it here until now.

Click here to jump to YouTube, or view right here:

Tags: playthrough, video

I’ve been waiting for it sooooo loooong and it has finally happend! We’ve just released Ghostly Me – post-compo version of my MiniLD #36 game which was originally called Eruption. It’s free as I promised, and you can play it on Newgrounds. I’ll be happy to get your comments, thanks!

Also, cupquake made a lets-play video for the game and she’s really cute, I had a lot of fun watching it.

Tags: MiniLD, post-compo, release, SuccessStory

Over 80 games played and here is my top 3 so far:

1)  A thing about nothing

A visually interesting game of a philosopher traveling the world to find the meaning of it all.
It’s funny, it’s gorgeous and it’s intelligent. Very well executed.
The only let-down is the audio.

2) Hunter HungeHunter Hunger is simply about a prehistoric man trying to feed himself and his starving children. The game looks fantastic and uses interesting and well implemented game mechanics that feel very polished

3) (Follow the) Line
Press any key to change direction of the line.
For me this game is the only clear 5 in the “Theme”-category. The user input is simple, and yet doesn’t cripple the gameplay but enhances it. The graphics are minimal but still very fresh and stylish.

So, that’ll be all for me… do try these games out because they really deserve it!  😀

Oh btw.. I’m working on a post-ludumdare update for my own game.. It’s going to have animations and music and probably a few more levels.. I’ll probably finish it tomorrow..

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a post mortem for one of my entries, so I felt I should do it this time. This time around I made a skill based platformer where the main concept is the ability to switch between a white and black dimension, which is required to avoid obstacles and solve jumpy puzzles. If you want to skip the wall of text and just play, check it out here. Otherwise, read on!

The Good

I’m extremely satisfied that it feels less like a competition entry and more like an actual game. I also enjoyed it enough that I never felt like it was tedious to playtest as I went along. On the contrary, I often spent more time than I should have to test a feature, since I’d test something, but then just continue playing until I remembered I was working under a tight deadline.

Graphics. At the start I had terrible tiles. I normally don’t spend time redoing anything once I’ve completed it, but after I got the autotiling done and realized how bad my tiles looked, I redid them from scratch, and I’m extremely happy I did. The end result let me easily add cool effects such as the tile swapping. I also randomly got the idea to add noise, which I think ended up looking really neat and enhancing the visuals in a very short amount of time.

Content. I was able to get quite a bit of content into the game. I feel like the game is long enough that if you like it, it keeps you interested for a while, without being too long. The length also lends itself well to trying to speed run if you’re so inclined.

Difficulty. Some people will hate it for being hard, but I feel that it hit my goal of how difficult I wanted the game to be. There are some rooms that are unnecessarily hard, and some that are quite easy, but overall the difficulty will keep you smashing your head against the wall on your first time through, but due to skill based rooms you’ll find that once you get better all the rooms end up being very easy. In the post competition version, I’m creating a higher difficulty mode, which is many many times harder. You’d be surprised how much harder a room can become when adding 2 or 3 enemies. This lets me make the normal mode a bit easier, without taking away the experience from the more hardcore players.

Theme. As usual I got quite a few comments complaining about the theme, but I personally loved my take on it. I listed out a bunch of ways to interpret minimalism, and eventually settled on “limited palette”, and further narrowed it down to “black and white”. But instead of just making a black and white game, I based the entire gameplay mechanism around this small concept, and I really enjoyed how it came out. It borrowed a lot of ideas from past projects I’ve done, but I feel it still came out feeling quite unique.

Library. Using Axel was a great choice. There’s always times when I’m tempted to use something else, but I always feel satisfied that Axel lets me create a high quality game in a short period of time. There’s always the slight downside of alienating those who are running on hardware without stage3d support, but in a community like this where the people playing are also developers, there are very few players who can’t play the game.

The Bad

Inconsistent feature set. Initially the game was heading towards a kind of ikaruga-meets-platformers style, where there was going to be a lot of bullet dodging and absorbing. This was the main cause of the gun and shooting aspects of the game. However, by the end it was more of a VVVVVV if you swapped colors rather than gravity. Unfortunately, the gun had become an integral part of the game, so it would have been hard to remove (and by that point I’d become somewhat attached to it). But if I had to the chance to start over, I probably would have completely foregone the shooting and put more emphasis on timing jumps and planning routes. I feel that the areas where the gun is used don’t fit in all that well, and sometimes it just feels like a waste of time (eg. “each time I die I have to sit and rekill that snail, ugh”).

Lack of secrets and achievements. I think secret rooms would definitely increase the sense of exploration. Also, I think achievements would give more you another reason to play around and explore, rather than simply moving straight forward. Speaking of…

Linearity. I feel like I didn’t get a good balance of linear vs exploration. The very first 2 items require you going back and forth between the same room, but after that there is very little backtracking, and you simply follow the path straightforward until you reach the end, then turn around and take the 1 side path you passed that you couldn’t reach before. There definitely could have been some improvement in this regard.

Controls. Apparently a lot of people want space to jump, but that ended up not working too well. I think the biggest issue is that I really wanted to allow the player to shoot with the keyboard if they weren’t using a physical mouse (it sucks with a touchpad), which severely limited the amount of keys I could reasonably use. I feel that once a player gets used to the controls, they do fine, but it can be a bit jarring. If I had more time I’d probably have added a couple alternate control schemes.

Music. This is a given. I dislike creating music, it just doesn’t interest me. I don’t expect to ever be able to create the really nice soundtracks that some of these other games have, but this is something I have accepted.

Tutorials. I had originally wanted to go with instructions written on the wall, but I ended up dropping it for the sake of time. That’s a kind of thing that I can end up spending too much time making it so it doesn’t look terrible, and by the time I needed instructions in game there wasn’t much time left. The way it ended up was that message boxes would pop up, and completely destroy the immersion you had. This was one of the things that I managed to fix for the post-compo release.

The Meh

Planning. Something I don’t know whether I liked or not, was that rather than planning out my full feature set and figuring out exactly how I wanted the game to play, I instead dove straight into code after figuring out the core concept of black vs white platformer. I designed enemies as I went along, and came up with new features constantly. It wasn’t until the last 18 hours or so that I actually knew what I was expecting the game to look like at the end. I feel that the end result was good, but most of the way I felt like the game was going to turn out terribly. And while I was satisfied in the end, I don’t know if it was worth the anxiety during the competition. However, the data point of trying it once makes it hard to determine whether this is something that is worth it going forward.

Sounds. I feel that while the sounds are okay, there could definitely have been more dynamic sounds. Since there are so few actions, the sounds don’t really do much to fill the gaps in the bland music. I feel perhaps things in the environment that make noises as you run by them, for example, could go to great lengths to help. But on the other hand, things like that take quite a bit of time, and typically I’m afraid to spend too much time on sound, so I’m unsure if sacrificing something else to improve sound (which many people may not even have enabled) is worth it.

Post Mortem. This thing is really long and after skimming over it I feel like I’m trashing my own game, when honestly I feel quite proud of it.

The Future

I’ve almost completed work on a post competition version which fixes a lot of the difficulty issues by evening out the normal mode, and adding a harder mode you can play after. I’ve fixed a lot of minor things (tips on the walls at the beginning to help players realize they need to backtrack instead of simply going forward, saving of your progress, better mute/quality controls, etc). I’m trying not to rearchitect or spend too much time on it (as I’ll never actually end up finishing it if I do), so I’m leaving things that change the core concept for a future game if I feel so inclined.

Anyway, here’s the related links. Enjoy!

Play And Rate The Game
Download The Source
Watch The Timelapse
Check Out Axel (The Library Used To Created Antichromatic)

Ludum Dare 26 was certainly an interest ride. The odds seemed against me, from missing pets to frantic coding catch-up, I was a bit surprised that I was actually able to complete my game on my first attempt at a Ludum Dare competition.

A lot went good about it, some went bad. I have been learning Go Game recently and playing it quite a bit. When the theme of “minimalism” was revealed, I was pretty excited that a board game would be a perfect fit for that. It didn’t take all too long to come up with a plan to build a game that is very similar to Go Game, but uses a different ruleset, and thus vastly different strategy.

The biggest asset I had was that I had a very clear picture of the final result after only about an hour or two of planning. There was a direct end goal that allowed me to code the game without following a bunch of tangents along the way.

The game itself was actually very simple to implement, which was nice.  The rule system is quite simple, and fit very well with the theme of minimalism: high strategy to win, all you have to do is place a game piece into an empty space on the board.  Every occupied surrounding space becomes yours.  That’s it, that’s all.

The most difficult part was coordinating the multiplayer system and keeping everything in sync.  But thanks to the excellent SignalR framework for .Net, it was fairly simple to handle the realtime communication with the server.

All in all, I was happy to finally finish a game.  And on my first Ludum Dare attempt to boot.

I have been online as much as I can to help other people with play testing, as I didn’t create a bot opponent to allow for single player mode.  Some gameplay experience has helped me to identify some potential gameplay issues, which have been adjusted in the second version:

• A few dead squares to prevent mirroring
• In-game chat
• A “pass” button (not yet implemented) to allow you to skip those empty pairs at the end of the game.

I am looking forward to completing that pass button and having a really good game ready to go.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10626

Thanks to everyone who has played my game.  I appreciate every vote!

-CrazyCage

I update it my game with some stuff to make more…a game

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15628

I’ve uploaded a post-compo update to Pink Haze which you can check out here.  You can also vote on the original, I’d appreciate it.  Enjoy!

What’s changed:

• Two new rooms, bringing it to eight total.
• Infinite play.  I got rid of the rushed ending, so now you can keep playing until you run out of health.
• A few style and AI tweaks.

my entry for this LD

click this to view my entry

this game is about shooting a jumping apple with limited bullet every stages, in the first few stage, you will only just see some apple jumping. after that you will begin see some purple triangle that can bounce your bullet. in some level, you have to bounce your bullet to shoot the apple. another thing to consider when playing this, is that combo mechanic. you will get a message showing like ” X combo!!” when you shoot more than one apple with one bullet. this message mean to encourage player to try shooting all apple in one shoot.

enough about the game, now I want to write about how I get into making this game.

ludum dar compo consist of 48 hour or two days. in my country, ludum dare always start in saturday morning, around 9 am. so usually I know the theme just several minutes after the anouncement. for this ludum dare, I spent a whole day thinking and brainstorming about idea and mechanic of the game with minimalism in mind. what I had in mind other than minimalism, is that I want to make game that only controlled by mouse. this kind of my own goal that I haven’t reach that time. so for a whole day thinking about that and there’s no idea come out. actually I try to code some idea I have in mind, but stopped because I think it’s unfinish and still need more thinking to make a concerete game mechanic. what I want to implement about minimalism is in game mechanic. I want to make it simple but still enjoyable and maybe can bring more depth in gameplay. sunday started and I still struggling with idea, I fear that maybe I can’t make it in time. and than around maybe 10-11 am, I got the idea about shooting some object that bounce or jumping, first I’m thinking about rabbit but ended up with apple, I don’t know why. after the arrival of my idea, I rushed to my laptop and start coding. after the core mechanic done, and creating a few level. I need to add more mechanic to enhance the gameplay. that’s when I got the idea of bouncing bullet. actually this idea is a bit hard to implement for me, because I  don’t know how to simulate a real bouncing physic and I got a deadline just few hours ahead of me. so I make those triangle thingie to somehow fix the angle of bouncing and somewhat make some sense and easy to understand. after that, it’s time to make a levels. after all those coding, this is the hardest part when you make a game that based on stages or levels like angry bird, cut the rope, etc… I need to make every stages challenging but not too hard. because all my games before this ended up too hard. and even it’s not challenging I too like stages that refreshing, like maybe you can shoot all those apples in one shoot and the bullet bouncing through all corner of the stages.

monday morning, I wake up and remember that I’ve submit my entry last night. if I’m thinking how it ended up like this considered that I nearly frustrated in the first day, but I kinda like how my game turn out, comparing to my two others entry ld 24 & 25, this time my game feel more complete but still not polised. maybe I need to thanks to onegameamonth & mcfunkypants. because all those experience I got when making games every month really help me in this LD. I hope my game for this month 1GAM turn out great too.

sorry for my english XD

Tags: post-mortem

As mentioned earlier, I’ll be live streaming today on Twitch.tv at 9:30 pm 11:00 pm, Eastern Time. Why the sudden one-and-a-half hour delay? I just found out I had an important meeting to attend to at 8:00 pm, so I had to delay my live-streaming.

Edit: And thanks to Mother’s Day, I have to move it back to 11:00 pm EST

I’ve setup a public Google Docs spreadsheet to list the games I’ll be playing. If you want yours played and rated, you can comment the URL to it below and I’ll add it in, or post it directly on the spreadsheet!

Tags: Let's Play, Twitch.tv

It’s okay.

Dont worry.

Challenge is dangerous for you.

We play so you dont have to….

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=19384

Whoohoo! I made it to over 100 games tried somehow! So it seems all the cool kids are putting up a selection of their faves, so I will give in to peer pressure:

Less is More by atraxgames

This is a pretty clever puzzle game, where you have to get rid of the coloured blocks with the ability to delete a limited number of the border blocks. The different colours each act differently, and getting them to interact in ways that are beneficial to you is part of the puzzle.

Revolvengarde by Andrio

Minimalist controls throughout, you use the left and right arrow keys to rotate your little orb thing to deflect attacks that match the colour of your shield(s), it gets pretty quick paced. Even the menus retain the two button controls, in a way I thought was pretty clever.

F*** this job by Casino Jack

A one-button challenging platformer, you will die a lot. Similar to Super Meat Boy you are rewarded for your victory with a “recording” of all your failed attempts played at once.

Budget Squad by deepnight

It’s a beatiful game, you control two submarines, each with different abilities and limitations, collect gems, avoid things that kill you. I didn’t manage to beat it, but I will probably try again at some point. Very fun, but the theme isn’t really present except in that the submarines have “minimal” abilities each.

Fractured by dalbinblue

A challenging puzzle game with minimal controls. I’d say more about the mechanics, but it’s more interesting going in blind

And a quick plug for my own game: Samus Regrets a metroid game where you discard power ups instead of acquire them.

Play ‘Super 1-Bit Space Arena’

So, here’s my post mortem I wanted to write for quite some time now.
LD#26 was my third time participating and it was the first time everything worked more or less as I planned to.

I started by thinking something up that would fit the theme and chose to interpret it in a visual way, in terms of color depth, so it ended up being a 1-bit game – the most minimalistic color depth. Since this isn’t limiting genre wise I had to decide that next. Although I’d really liked to make a RPG but that’s something I simply can’t do within 48 hours (yet). The only other genres I have experience making games of are platformers and generic action games – so I decided to choose one of those. For some reason unknown to me (it might be because I was re-watching Star Trek Enterprise and Firefly at the time) I wanted to put my game into space, which fits action more than platformer – and what’s more fun than an arena shooter? yes, nothing, so this was settled then 😀

What went right!

• I love Flashpunk!
  By now my workflow is tuned almost to perfection – I can make art, code and implement content at a fast pace for/with it. I already decided to use something else next time – but for this time it simply felt like the obvious right choice – and it was.
• 1-Bit graphics rock!
  It’s both very hard and very easy to work with very minimal graphical possibilities – like in this case, only two colors – since the art can be produced very fast and efficiently, yet it’s hard to get those few pixels right. However, by now I’m not too shabby as a pixel artist so this was a lot of fun for me and suited my skillset
• time management is key!
  I made a lot of breaks and was able to get everything done nonetheless. the biggest reason being that my workflow didn’t let me down and I didn’t stumbled over significant hurdles along the way
• I’ve implemented everything I planned!
  yes – this is a first for me. The game you can play is exactly what I imagined when I started making it (except for 2 gameplay thingies I’ll explain later). Having a to-do list and getting everything done in time is such a great feeling

What didn’t!

• Although I’m quite pleased with the audio of my game – it’s far from great. I’d really like to get a less repetitive, more funky music track but simply wasn’t able to achieve that. mainly because I suck at music. I’ve known for a long time that the first person I’d hire for a dev team of my own would be a music guy.
• Sound effect variations are incredibly awesome – yet I didn’t implement them. As many comments pointed out the weapon fire sounds are very repetitive and although this  leads to a nice retro feel – it also doesn’t sound that great after a while. One of the things I learned this LD is to always produce slightly mutated sound effect variations and play them randomly.
• I’m not happy with the AI – but I implementing some nice A* pathfinding seemed unnecessary at first – yet as my game progressed it became clear it would improve it a lot. So I started hacking it together but couldn’t get it to work without screwing up my time schedule – so I dropped it
• I should have introduced the different monsters step by step instead more or less all of them at once (although there’s some nifty background algorithm going on determining the quantity and quality of monsters to spawn), but didn’t think of it until it was to late to implement
• my original idea was to get exp points for “killing” monsters to level up the currently used weapon (in terms of knockback and frequency) but I somehow changed that plan – that’s the reason why you already start with those 3 weapons. I should have stuck to that plan – since I feel it would have improved my game (never ever cut a feature if you’re not completely sure it would make the game worse or would cost too much resources)

So – what now?

I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll eventually make a post-compo version but chances are I won’t. However, I had a lot of fun and am proud of my game and it’s a delight to see what you guys have come up with and play your games. being part of LD is a wonderful experience, every time

Post Mortem

Duran came over. Theme came out. We hated it. Went downstairs and started brainstorming on a piece of paper aptly titled:

Gaem 1:

Evolving-through-the-ages game where you’d start out at pong or breakout, then when the ball leaves the ceiling mario would jump out the other end, representing the transition through video game ages. It would end up at some sort of shooter, I suppose, as that’s what we’re at now.

Gaem 2:

PowerPong: Some sort of MMO pong game that would include a ton of wacky objects like giant chomping heads and blocks for your paddle to place. It would also take place in space… This game was more of a big “screw this” to the hated minimalism theme. Good thing it didn’t get chosen, I guess.

Gaem 3:

Portal knockoff: Some Portal game. Eventually ditched, as it was too unoriginal.

Gaem 4:

This looks familiar. Duran drew this one: it’s an ASCII guy holding a pickaxe and wearing a miner’s hat. This was actually a continuation of an older idea by me in which you’d try to survive in a canyon while finding out what’s at the core of the Earth (by digging and stuff)

Then, this mockup was drawn:

We settled for it, headed upstairs and began working. And by working, I mean jacking around. We sat around kinda doing nothing for a little bit, then our first plan of action: download a character set of ASCII characters so we could actually start making the game. This proved troublesome; finding an ASCII charset in BMP or PNG form was INCREDIBLY hard. We eventually found one on a Dwarf Fortress site somewhere, and split it with this fantastic tool: http://www.mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb&param=02&c=6&id=8921

We made our main character, named him Richard, and got the basic engine going within the first day. We slept, then resumed progress the next day, and that’s where the “good and bad” comes in.

The good

• ASCII characters made it fantastically easy to make good art! Most enemies are just a simple character, and the final boss and some other stuff was drawn in Asiekierka/GreaseMonkey’s 64pixels game. It doubles as a nice ASCII art editor, but also a fun game.
• MMF2 was a great tool, and surprisingly managed to handle all of the diggable ASCII tiles without any lag. Yay.
• We made the final boss first, before any levels. That way, the rest of our time could be devoted to just making levels so we could just stop at any time and still have a complete game with a beginning, middle and end.
• Exported as Flash, so everyone has easier access (no downloads) and the Linux and Macintosh users can play too.
• Charles Flint’s animations look great.
• Hidden story was cool
• We also included THE MOST GLORIOUS TREASURE OF ALL! And I won’t tell you what it is! (it’s really secret)

The bad

• Game was really hard. Anyone that’s played it so far hasn’t beaten it (except for one, who was invincible from a bug)
• For some reason, we just decided to make  you restart at the title screen if you die at all, so you’ve got to have some extreme perseverance if you want to see the ending.
• There were some buggles in the Flash version, but I patched them.
• One of the hidden signs isn’t hidden. Not that big of a deal, but eh.
• Enemies kind of ramped up difficulty into crazytown once you get to the Dark Zone. Everything was kind of a deathtrap if you didn’t avoid it.
• Enemy hitboxes required you to actually click on them (you can’t hold your mouse down on them) contrary to the blocks, so most people can’t figure out how to kill them.
• The blocks can be held down the mouse button on, but everyone likes to just click them for some reason.

Overall, we’re both incredibly happy with the result, and it might be our best game yet. Happy Luduming, everyone.

Rate it here

Well, better late than never, huh ?

So here’s my game, The Minimalism Quest.

What went right :

• I did manage my time well enough. In the end, I had half a day just for polishing (and extra sleep). That was nice.
• The game itself is fun and clean ! At least that’s what I’ve been said. Plus it is fast, so people who tried it went to the end.
• Anyway, I am satisfied with it and that’s one good point. And I had a good time making it!
• EXPLOSIONS AND SCREENSHAKE §!!!§§!§§

What went wrong :

• The idea itself came late.
• Players had a hard time figuring what to do in some of the scenes – mainly the computer one. Needs moar feedbacks  !
• Also, the time challenge and the “figure what you have to do” challenge didn’t go well together. I thought about killing the timer thing, but this is what gives the game some replayability, so I finally kept it. Maybe I should have activated the timer only at the second playthrough, rather than right at the first one.
• Nobody understands the idea behind the last scene… I wanted the character to get rid of everything he doesn’t consider strictly “necessary”, until he decides his limbs aren’t and mutilates himself. Maybe I should have made it more explicit – he could have litteraly said it or something.
• I really need to get more skills with sound design. REALLY.

What to do next :

• Learn about music and sound design. GODDAMNIT.
• Stick on concepts with more focus on graphics than programming skills – as it is both what I enjoy the most and what I’m the best at.
• I may also want to give the jam a try with some friends of mine – and go further than ever with the pOwEr Of LoOoOoVe ~･✧♥*

PS : my timelapse should soon be online. Link here.

Hey there!

I made this

Written in Lua for a bastardised version of Löve2D (fixes audio and optimises some thingies in 0.8, but is redundant since 0.9)

I used Sublime Text 2 with a heavily customised Arch Linux setup (AwesomeWM loaded with some funky scripts and a nice little dmenu kerfuffle which takes care of my workflow, YOU DON’T KNOW ME, DON’T JUDGE ME!)

For content, I used GIMP for graphics and Renoise for audio.

I am

and I’m one of the founders of

and we organised this

with help from the awesome people at

So here goes for a DUAL Post-Mortem, commenting on the game itself, and the gathering we organised.

THE GAME
The theme really wasn’t an inspiration at first, and I found myself quite angry at it. After all, minimalism isn’t really a theme, but a quality. I laid down with my headphones, and played some Burial (a pretty awesome London-based artist) and halfway through Prayer (listen to this track for the next paragraph or so), I had this idea of a game where you find yourself as the last remaining human at the end of the inevitable yet inexplicable downfall of civilisation, and life itself.
I didn’t see this as a particular violent or depressing idea, simply the notion that nature just ends up overpowering order through it’s simple existence.
This kind of feeling is something that I come back to often, and sometimes I imagine characters fighting to their very last, terrified at the idea that their families, memories and belongings will simply fade away. Other times, I see a character accepting this fate as inevitable, and instead deciding to exit existence solemnly, discarding their fears to lay down and pass into the void.

This latter feeling is hard to explain in words, and I felt that maybe a simple yet powerful visual and audio experience might be able to impart it to another person. So with Burial’s soundtrack playing, I went to work.

This might be a good time to reassure you about something, I am a particularly extroverted and happy person, guided by my sense of humour and my ability to make friends anywhere and everywhere, so please don’t worry, I just like to explore various emotions in art.

Now, on to the actual MAKING of the game.
I’m a big fan of Löve2D, it has all the bits and bobs I need to load content, and throw it on the screen and through the speakers in a nice, tight, no-fuss package. It uses Lua, which is the juiciest language out there, it’s fun to program in it, it’s fast, and it has a bunch of features which give me nerd boners. It’s no wonder that it has become my framework of choice for jams, prototypes, and maybe even production code when I get round to that.

I have a bad habit of playing around with the visuals and feel of my games, and losing track of the core gameplay mechanics, which can sometimes lead to some fiascos (Crobal and Friends for LD#25, Robot in the Garden for LD#23), so this time I forced myself to have all the mechanics nice and solid, and a good level editor, before even THINKING about the visuals. This turned out to be a good decision, I know how long it takes for me to make things look nice, and I can kludge some nice feeling into a game quite quickly, and with about 18 hours to spare, I had the tools I needed to start designing my levels and bringing them to life.

PRO-TIP: I made my level editor in the engine. There’s a global variable (GLOBAL.mode) which I set to either “play” or “edit”, and gameplay code checks for GLOBAL.mode==”play” before updating and the editing interface checks for GLOBAL.mode==”edit. This means that when I press the hotkey to toggle, the game pauses, I can edit the level and then toggle again to see if the changes I made were good.
Also, the levels were built on three “layers”:

The collision map is the only part that the player character directly interacts with, and uses a (clumsily written) platforming engine to provide the core gameplay.
The hotspots are naked objects that I override with context scripts, the obvious ones are the particle fountains the player can stand near to pray, but there are others for respawning the player after death, changing the colour scheme and making sure the player dies reliably when hurling himself into a hole.
The decorations are static objects that only draw themselves to the screen, the implementation is also quite clumsy, but it’s good enough for the purpose.

The editor interface was mostly mouse-driven:

This simple yet powerful system allowed me to design the world very quickly. Adding new sprites to use as decoration was simply a matter of drawing a new sprite in gimp and adding it with the correct name and number to the image directory. Adding new hotspots was only a tad more complex, in edit mode, hotspots draw to the screen at their location and display their number, I would jot down the number and the intent on my notepad (e.g: 12 – respawn point), and then I could add the appropriate behaviour to the level initialisation script later.

All this added up to a fun development process, and allowed me to pace my time quite well. However I had quite the struggle getting my platforming physics to work, and the end result is a very hacky and dodgy system that doesn’t hold up all that well.

The Gathering

I live in Montpellier in the south of France, it’s a nice placed to live, steeped in centuries of arts and science, a short tram ride from the sunny mediterranean beaches. Full to the brim with interesting and motivated people, Montpellier is an ideal place for budding game developers to meet and work. With this in mind, we’re working with various companies, schools and associations to bring all these beautiful people together and get them making awesome games.
Last Ludum Dare we had 14 people gathered in the computer science building at the Université Montpellier II, the faculty paid for food and security, and allowed us to use their workshop. That was the first Baptême du Jeu event, followed fairly shortly by Global Game Jam.
Global Game Jam was organised at Kawenga, a media lab in Montpellier, at the initiative of the students from the Master Fictions Numériques (Digital fiction) from Université Montpellier III.
And now we organised our second Ludum Dare gathering, again at Kawenga, which brough 35 people together making games.

We also have plans for our own game jam which will be called Fu(nky|ture) (the interpretation of this regular expression is left as an exercise to the reader) which will be focused on imposing genres and techniques, or maybe some strange rules (e.g: “you make the art for the person to your left”). We’re hoping to have this ready this summer, and you’re all welcome to come hang out with us.

If you don’t have plans for this summer, consider coming to Montpellier, let us know on our Facebook group or Tumblr and we’ll do our best to get you a place to stay and people to jam with.

I just hit a hundred ratings, and I thought I’d post some of the best ones.  I took all ratings I gave (including all categories, even the weird ones like humor and mood) and averaged the score.  So, these aren’t necessarily the best games, but they have the highest average score of the ones I rated.

Here they are:

PHILIP KLAS — neight

SDFJKL — Dining Philosopher (50) *

XYZ — ataxkt

Be Still — metadept

Art Critic — sanojian (38)

Title: Subtitle — LizEngland

Hito — lucas_gaspar

Union — theplotlessplot

Minimalism Tower Defence — Dew

Join — Perry

All of these caught my interest for one reason or another – mostly just picking off the default list, but I tended to focus on JavaScript or web browser games because that’s what I’ve been into creating recently.  I also rated many of the people who commented on mine – still catching up with that.  And some I saw mentioned in the forums or by others.  It’s been fun seeing what everyone came up with.

Free to check out my humble offering, Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue: