This was my fourth time doing Ludum Dare, and I’ve written a brief postmortem about how it went.  Hope people enjoy the game.

Things that went right:

Theme:

Although I didn’t like the theme at first, it ended up working really well with my skill set.  I’m pretty bad at making art, and the theme required minimal art assets.  The final game ended up with only two sprites.  I’m considerably more confident with music, but the design I came up with for the theme also required minimal art assets.  One .wav file with a single note produces the whole soundtrack, with the player’s help.  The creativity this allows the player is one of the most important aspects of the game.

Lots of programming/design time:

With little need for art/sound assets, I figured I’d end up with a surplus of time for level design.  This was the main reason I decided to do a game with static levels in the first place; I wouldn’t have had the time for that if I were making more sprites/music.  This didn’t quite end up being the case, as programming took longer than I expected.  Still, this was a positive overall.  It let me fix most bugs and increased overall polish.

Quickly implementing key features:

Though I spent the majority of the competition programming, most of the ‘big stuff’ went pretty quickly.  The launchers, saving/loading levels, and the sound logic went smoothly thanks to past experience with XNA.  As noted below, physics bugs (and a couple editor problems) were the only real time-consuming issues.

Overlaps in gameplay/design:

When making a game on such a short timeframe, it’s important to get as much ‘bang for your buck’ with your time.  That’s one of the things I like about music games like this; the audio, game design, and programming are all tightly linked.  I didn’t have to spend a bunch of time making music tracks, because that was what level design was.  I could iterate on all three at the same time.

The same thing applies to Free Play mode.  I made a simple editor for myself, which was trivial to expose to the player.  This lets the player make his own puzzles/music freely, and it didn’t cost me much time to add.

Things that went wrong:

Physics bugs:

As many commenters have noted, there are some noticeable physics bugs in the game; the worst being balls getting stuck in platforms.  These bugs are extra annoying in my game because they can end up producing notes extremely frequently, producing really harsh sound.  I spent a significant amount of time during the competition trying to fix these bugs and lessen the annoyance when they do occur.  This did help in the end, but it was pretty demoralizing focusing on the issue so much and not fully fixing it.

‘Wasted’ time:

I spent more time not working on the game over the weekend than I planned going into it.  A surprise visit from a friend from out of town took up a few hours.  It was worth it, but there would have been many more levels if that didn’t happen.

Distribution:

Although the problem has been fixed, my initial release had a couple issues.  I didn’t include the XNA Redistributable so the game crashed for some, and others were unhappy that it required an install.  I’ve had similar issues in the past, but at least I did a better job fixing them this time.

Hardware issues:

One of my monitors failed comically early in the competition.  I spent some time trying to fix it, couldn’t, and was left with a sub-optimal setup.   Not a huge deal, but I’m sure it had some effect on my productivity.

Summary:

I’m really happy with the result of this Ludum Dare.  It’s a much stronger game than my previous attempts.  There are a few things I could have done differently that would have led to a better product, but those are just further learning experiences.  I’ve definitely improved my craft and look forward to LD27!

Just 19 and a half hours left until voting ends, here are a few games I thought were pretty cool and definitely worthwhile checking out!

Super Clutter Blaster 2013 – Homletmoo

The Parasite – jahlgren

Tiny Runner – Jarcas Studios

Square Heart Flower – JonathonG

My own game is lingering just a few ratings off a hundred, please go give it a rating to bump it closer to that century milestone if you’ve got a moment ^^

Terminally Ill

Tags: favourites, LD#26, recommendations, Square Heart Flower, Super Clutter Blaster, The Parasite, Tiny Runner

Its about music and stuff. Im going to be making my game have epic music that sounds awesome! http://ecoolsagamedev.wordpress.com/

Time for a little post-mortemy thing. I suspect nobody reads them, but in a few years, I’ll go through my old posts and find it and have a good laugh. Let’s use a chronological format for a change!

Hole in one!

Before the jam

As usual I didn’t practice for it, I didn’t do any gamedev or graphics or anything related since the previous LD :/ So I was rusty. At the end of last year, I had some time in between jobs to learn new ZBrush skills but I didn’t know how much I had lost since then. Three ludum dare per year is just not enough practice.

The theme is revealed!

Of all the themes in the preliminary rounds, there was only one I really hated, yup: minimalism.

I hate it because all LD games are already minimalistic by necessity. The whole point of participating in a Ludum Dare is to see how much you can do in a limited time. Choosing minimalism as the theme, is basically giving up before you even start. In my opinion, there are already too many minimalistic games in a regular LD. Games where the author instead of trying to work on all aspects of a game decides that colored squares placeholders are good enough. This isn’t about how good your skills are, it’s about at least giving it a try and learning in the process. Don’t aim for minimalism, aim big! It’s better to fail gloriously than to not even try!

Day 1: Anti-minimalism 3rd person shooter

After recovering from discovering that terrible theme, my first idea was to make an anti-minimalism game, I thought about a few ideas like destroying minimalist paintings and finally I chose to do a 3rd person shooter where you fight alien invaders trying to impose their minimalistic philosophy on Earth. I’ve never made a LD game where you can shoot stuff, my games tend to be peaceful, so this might have been the occasion to change that?

I spent half the first day working on the shooter mechanics and enemies and for the second half I worked on my main character.

Day 2: New game idea

After waking up, I realized that I was not very far along with my shooter game. The shooting part wasn’t really fun and I realized I would need a ton of custom animations for it to work with my character. And while I had some ideas to create a funny world, they didn’t really all fit together with the gameplay and I had no clear vision of what the game would actually be like.

At this point, I had implemented a way to push the aliens bodies once they are killed. And I realized it’s actually quite fun to just play with that and try to move them around. How about a game where you just have to push a ball around with physics?

So I already had my main character, the gameplay only required a trivial amount of work, the rest of the day was spent working on a few levels. At the end of the 48h I had something I could have released in the compo category if I rushed the final hours but I wanted to use the extra day to make the game a little bit better.

Day 3: Polish!

For the first time in a LD, I started the final day knowing I already had something that I could finish and release any time I wanted. Things I did that day:

Prettified the levels with some props and alternative textures and I added two more levels with a bit more elaborate mechanics (unfortunately the one with the bridge has a bit of a nasty bug, I didn’t notice it in my testing due to being biased as to how I expected the level to be solved. It wasn’t even a code bug, I just forgot a two-clicks setting in Unity How annoying!).

I tried to improve my character’s animation (without much success, animation is something I’ve never really spent time learning, I just fake it during game jams. I’ll work on that for the next LD).

I spent a bit more time than usual on the sounds, and even though the music is a randomly generated .mid file, I did spend some time in Reason choosing instruments and mixing it for a little extra.

In the end, I even had time to turn the code I had written for the minimalistic aliens into butterflies. A poetic way to end the conversion of what started as a shooting game in to a totally non-violent one

After the jam

I’m really glad I got lots of feedback this time. Over a hundred people played and rated my game, that was most likely due to getting an extra bit of spotlight thanks to my video compilation project but it’s nice to have my audience expand like that. That’s one good thing about making a game for a LD, you are pretty much guaranteed actual players! 😀

Also thanks to the wonders of Twitch technology, I was able to see two people play my game in real time. I don’t usually see anybody play my games at all and that was really interesting as both did unexpected things.

For next time

• Animation has to be my priority. I have improved my character creation skills so now the animation has to follow or it looks a bit weird.
• Try to work on at least another game to avoid getting too rusty in between LDs

PLAY MY GAME HERE

Tags: postmortem

Due to many ask of the music of my game, i’ve put it on SoundClound.

https://soundcloud.com/kalinarm/leak-tracks-ost

Entry here : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21924

If you like the game, please vote before time’s up !!!

I’ve been digging deep into the archive to ensure I’ve at least seen all the thumbnails.  I found some nice games which seem to remain mostly undiscovered.  One of them only has 6 ratings!

Stackman

Stackman

A puzzle game that feels like a programming game.   The first level is large and difficult.  I saw this game only has 6 ratings, which is a real pity.

A puzzling composition

A combination of puzzle and mouse dexterity game.  The puzzle element is a bit too easy and the mouse element a bit too hard, but some of the levels are great.

Gist Structure

Unusual game. It has one major flaw, which is the slow movement speed of the cells.

sn (yes the game is called ‘sn’) 

A very minimalist but fun puzzle game (as the author describes it: a 42-pixel one-button game).

Color treason

Fun and original game with interesting graphics.

Tilegrid

Complex but promising puzzle game.

After 2 weeks of polishing, crying and level designing, the re-mastered version of … is now available on Newgrounds!!

You can play it & rate it here!

Sorry for the minimalist post 😉

This is the third time I have joined Ludum Dare, and since people like post mortems I decided to write one 😛

What went wrong:

– Framework choosing. After submitting my game I realised after a couple of people tried it that the game did not work on Windows 8. This was due to that OpenTK’s input did not work on Windows 8.

OpenTK is also not updated after windows 8 came out. Luckely Antonijn’s awesome framework did work on Windows 8. I have completely rewritten the game in 45 minutes to work again 😀

– Planning. Once again I just sat down and started coding. I must force myself from now on to write some things on paper first so I can scetch out solutions to problems early and don’t have to waste time working on

something that won’t work, or scrapping a feature completely. I had more in mind for this project but I wouldn’t have made the deadline if I tried to add those features.

What went right:

– MultiPlatform. My game runs on windows xp with net framework 4.0, opengl 1.1 and up. also the game does work on linux if you have mono. This is a first for me and I can totally see the benefits over having more platforms to choose from

– Timelapse and gameplay video, The previous timelapse and gameplay video I made for Ludum Dare, which was for the LD24 challenge, was kind of screwed up due to encoding and youtube and wireless and what not.

Now both videos are crisp. The timelapse is a bit long with its 20 minutes. Hopefully the music makes up for this.

– “Thou shalt have playable quickly!”. The game quickly became playable, with all the advantages that brings.

Not that this post is written to advertise for a couple of ratings just before the rating process is over, but if you are somehow intrigued what kind of game I am talking about, here is a link to the game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15675

Enjoy!

-Metal

My last minute picks!

We Dreamers
Dig your quote in a persistent world/wall. Instant classic.

Of Guards And Thieves
 Multiplayer team-game with gorgeous graphics. ‘Nuff said.

Potato Station
 Pixel art, good music, and potato!

Voice of Fire
 Dreamy runner game
 
 

 
 
Lunar Rain
 Little great point and click adventure, with great themes and multiple choices

Less is More?
 My game 😛 Physics/sandbox puzzle in which Mondrian floods away.

Ludum  Dare 26 was my first compo even though I’ve making games for many years. It was a lot of fun and quite tiring. Though I love to make games sometimes it’s difficult to find motivation or even, sometimes, you have so many ideas you end up not doing any of them. Just like with writer’s I think the best advice is to just write anything, or, in my case, just make a game. And LD is perfect for that.

The first steps

I choose a project that would challenge me as a coder, so I went for 3D in almost pure C++/OGL. It would have been very easy to do this game with Unity and probably it would have been a better, more complete game. But that wouldn’t have been any fun to create for me, and in the end that’s what I wanted (quite selfish, I know). I think the result was not that bad and the comments have been very constructive. After all interaction with others creators is the best part of LD.

the result

But the real reason for this post was to share a post compo version of my game Please Survive. Just polishes it a bit, adds obviously missing features like collision with enemies and a few new effects. A direct link here.

With just eleven hours left before judging ends, I guess it’s time to write an eleventh-hour postmortem post, post haste!

Hadron the Uniter

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22869

Results

This was my first Ludum Dare. It’s been a lot of fun! My game is playable, though it needs a lot of tuning yet. I’m very happy with how it looks. I expect to keep improving it post-comp.

What Went Right

1. Inspiration.

I woke up Friday morning with a game concept already beginning to form in my mind. As I warmed up my tools (Flash CS4, Bfxr) the idea got clearer and more compelling. When the theme was announced (Friday night here), it fit perfectly. That was lucky, because by then I really liked it; I’d have had a hard time throwing it away and starting over. (I threw away all my prototype code and started a fresh project, though.)

2. Concept.

I’d been reading about particle physics again — trying to grok our crazy universe a little better — and I was captivated by the elaborate, almost Art Nouveau spirals revealed when particles collide in a bubble chamber. These spirals are happening ALL THE TIME all over the universe, we just don’t usually get to see them. I thought a game that simulated these pictures would be fun to stare at.

At first I wasn’t sure what the gameplay would be: trying to create antiparticles? trying to avoid antimatter annihilations, or cause them?

Finally I settled on a simple, pseudo-educational approach: you discover elements by combining protons, neutrons, and electrons in the right combinations. You just hold them together for a while in some kind of magical field constriction, and poof, you make Hydrogen or whatever.

3. Minimalism.

As a competition theme, gee, that’s not too interesting, guys. Really. But it worked well for my game. I had been thinking about how hypnotic a simple old-school game like Missile Command could be. With simple controls and a simple task, you can really lose yourself in the gameplay. I wanted to explore that Zen style of fun.

The minimalism theme suggested taking that to extremes: I would make a no-button game! You would swish the mouse around, without clicking, as the game’s only control. (In fact you do need to click sometimes, but only to show and hide the scoreboard. That’s really a pause button, not part of the gameplay.)

I even thought about making the hero/cursor area invisible, except for the way it bends the paths of particles around it. But it was too hard to control an invisible avatar, so I settled for a very subtle one: a faint targeting hexagon and a fainter rain of neutrinos.

Furthermore, the gameplay is so minimal, it’s optional! There’s no way to lose. If you stop moving the mouse, your chance of discovering anything goes down, but the game just keeps playing itself. (Indeed, it will usually discover hydrogen eventually, without help; maybe even helium!)

There’s also no way to win, exactly. You just make as many discoveries as you can. Which is realistic: the periodic table doesn’t stop, it just trails off into tremendous impracticality.

(At present the game is very tough. Hydrogen is easy to discover. Helium is neither easy nor hard. Lithium is hard, and if you manage to make Beryllium, send me a screenshot of your scoreboard!)

Though players might (and do!) desire on-screen hints about the recipes for various elements, the minimalist philosophy led me to leave out that nicety. After all, the game is about making those discoveries yourself, so really you should just buckle down and experiment. (Or you can just look it up, since I used real atomic weights and numbers.)

4. Not Stressing.

I didn’t want to spend my whole weekend worrying about running out of time. That’s not fun. I made a deliberate choice to take it easy, and treat my first Ludum Dare as simply a vacation. I knew I could fall back to the Jam if necessary, and my game idea seemed pretty small, code-wise. I would follow inspiration and let the code write itself at its own pace, and focus on enjoying the process. And I certainly did: the code was fun to write, there weren’t a lot of bugs, and the game is kind of a neat little thing that didn’t exist before.

It was also fun hanging out on the IRC channel. I don’t think I’ve done that in about a decade, maybe two.

What Went Wrong

1. Not Stressing.

Despite the very real benefits of a relaxed approach…a bit more hustle might have helped. I spent a pretty silly amount of time polishing the game’s appearance before working on the gameplay, and I did run low on time at the end. Next time I might try recording a development time-lapse sequence, or blogging more often, so that I won’t feel as comfortable without steady progress.

2. Doldrums.

Sunday was, from a productivity perspective, a disaster. For some reason I just couldn’t get moving. I knew exactly what code I had to write, and I even knew I would enjoy writing it, but I found that I was mostly staring at the screen doing nothing, and the clock was jumping ahead an hour or two every time I looked at it.

I blame the weather. It was one of those rainy Sundays that seem to dampen everything, including enthusiasm. Bad luck…I’d been hoping to work outdoors, or at least take a walk now and then.

Still, I forced myself to make bits of progress now and then; the day wasn’t a total loss. Just disappointing.

3. Tuning, gameplay, lack of, total

I spent so long making the game look just right, and then sitting around uselessly for no good reason, that I ran out of time to tune the gameplay. So the controls feel about right, but it’s way too hard to make progress. Oh well, I’ll fix it up in a future version.

4. Preloader

Of course, when I went all weekend with almost no bugs in my code, I should have known something would go wrong at the last minute.

Although several early versions had worked fine when posted online, the final game froze halfway through loading the title screen. Sometimes. I think the increased file size from the title screen itself may have contributed. (Correct preloaders for Flash games are more arcane than you might guess, if you haven’t looked into the subject. Maybe even if you have.)

I’d already switched from Compo to Jam mode, so I should have just dropped in a working preloader from another project. In the end, that’s what I did, but first I spent most of Tuesday trying to debug the problem. Sigh.

5. Website

I thought posting my game on my website would be the easy part. I’ve done that sort of thing before without any problems.

Yeah, on my old site. I wanted to put this game on my new site, which runs on WordPress.org software instead of raw HTML. That introduced some complications, both technically and philosophically. (For example, I had to decide what the URL should be for an untitled work in progress. I already have a locked private-beta page, but that’s not the same thing at all.)

Anyway, it wasn’t anything major, but when I tried posting my game and blogging about it a little, I uncovered a bunch of website-maintenance issues that I suddenly had to resolve…which is why this postmortem is coming so late.

Conclusion

All in all, this was a blast. Ludum Dare was a great excuse for a weekend coding project, a pleasure I hadn’t quite realized I’d been missing lately. I’m looking forward to doing it again sometime soon. (Probably not in August, though.)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22869

Only 9 hours to the end of LD #26!
This will be my last post for LD #26, so i want to thank all the people who have rated and played my entry: Earth Defender!
But the time has not expired, so come on people let’s rate my game, let’s get at least 130 ratings ^.^ !!

This is my first Ludum Dare that I’ve ever entered, and it’s been an amazing experience. I came out of it with a finished game, and some really supportive comments that have inspired me to make even more!

The voting period is nearly at a close, so I’d just like to invite everyone to a last chance at rating my game “ASTEROIDS! (the side-scroller)“! I would really appreciate it if you have a few minutes to kill. 😀

Other than that, see you all next LD48!

Thank you to those few who played my game, I don’t expect to do very well since i wasnt very active. But thank you anyway, doing the competition was very fun 😀 To anyone who hasnt checked out Flame Quest yet feel free to do so, I look forward to reading my ratings [If i get any XD]

Hello… I didn’t write my post mortem yet, and it will be brief.

Here is my game – In the end it didn’t get too attached to the theme (minimalism), specially the post compo version.

I plan to add more things (stages… I need stages, and some enemies), but I don’t think I’ll be able to release anything like that before the end of voting. If you didn’t check it, please do.

The compo version is really buggy and you can’t actually beat the stage… Play it, vote and then go for the post compo

This video is not the last post compo version… Now there are lives scoring and a new “dying” animation (very simple). I might upload a video when I get home.

The ludum dare experience:

I decided to sign in less than an hour before it started… I was flirting with the idea for about a week. I was doing a top down shooter before that just to test SDL 2.0, and it served me as my “code base”.  A shooter as a code base for a platformer :D.

I just can say that I actually started to code a game many times… and I never finished them. Perfectionism, changing of mind, thinking too big and stuff. It was very nice to start and finish something (it’s not finished yet, but I have a plan to finish it).

I don’t think I went well in terms of compo, because the compo version was very raw. But I like the post compo!

What went wrong:

I’ve spent some time with stage reading and loading. Did a optimization code that wasn’t used in the end, and I submited the compo version with just one stage that couldn’t be beat (in the end you jump and your jump is higher than the spikes). Then I got obsessed with jumping mechanics and improved it preety well – but that was post compo!

I did everything in my mac, and when compo ended I didn’t have a windows version. I thought it was just about compiling it  (SDL is multi platform), but I had a bad time trying to make SDL 2.0 work. I had no PC at home because my power supply was burnt and This was the story for a week and some days. I tried to get a working version in my wife’s father PC. That PC is old… slow… has any sort of spyware and crapware you expect a non-Geek guy’s PC to have. In the end I couldn get it…

Post Compo talking – Many releases came out with (bad) msv*dll or without them. I think the last one will run everywhere, but who knows…

What went right:

The first thing that went right was: focus, getting it done, finishing a game. It was a raw experience. Editing cpp source files in Text Mate and compiling it with a makefile. After some time I got mad with textmate and went to Mac Vim. Sprites were edited in pixen and all sounds were made at bfxr.net.

In terms of Post Compo a good decision was to ditch SDL 2 and porting everything to SFML 2.0. SFML 2.0 is very nice to play with! I can call it “beautiful”.

Final words..

So that’s it. It was really a pleasure to code my game and to play lots of games… A guy there made an Atari ROM! I never expected something like that (I guess it’s called Tilt). There are lots of good quality games here. Many people could really follow the theme. I’ve played more than 40 games and really enjoyed many of them! I actually finished two or three of them!

Thanks and see you later!

I’m going to be available this afternoon so if you swing by my game and rate/leave a comment, I will do the same for you!

Play and Rate My Game!

I’m going to be rating as many games as I can in the next few hours and am already at a 100. Didn’t have as much time to rate in the last week as I wanted.

What went right?

• Super small scope. Picked an idea that was easy to do but left ample time for polish and iteration
• Played with tools beforehand like the autotracker.py script to randomly generate music. You should get stuck on a bug during the compo but never “how do I do music?”
• Had a better set of base code this time for doing text and basic housekeeping things like screen fades etc. More time to focus on the game/idea vs grunt work.

What went wrong?

• Still ran out of time and as a result there isn’t a nice ramping difficulty curve. End result is that the game is hard right off the bat. I kept intending to do it but as it was nebulous and not a 15 min task I let it slip. The fact that it wasn’t a 15 min task is precisely why I should have gotten it in as a major priority.
• Was pretty anal about submitting before the close time, but there’s a 1 hour grace period to submit. In reality I could have saved off what I had, and worked another 45 minutes and done more stuff and submitted, or fallen back to the saved / safe version. Next time

Overall, pretty happy with this LD.

Adhesion from team RADMARS here, with extensive battle reports for this fateful compo from all of our trusty team members. We all have grizzled war stories from the development of our entry Tessitron, a 3D, minimal music game – play here! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18627 – but first I will entice you with a screen timelapse and the entire (single-track) soundtrack from our entry:

http://adhesion.mu/sic/Adhesion-Tessitron.mp3

And up first we have tokken’s postmortem:

It’s pretty incredible to be a part of a group that meshes so well and yet our ways of thinking contrast yet compliment one another. Although we’re all able to come up with off the wall bizarre ideas, it’s the way we think that’s pretty special. Spacemars is really good with generating nuggets of ideas; I tend to build off and branch from those. Adhesion has great depth as well as the analytical aspects that help ground ideas. Eugene is usually quiet but when he puts something out there it’s generally to lay down something important. Brendon has a great way of conceptualizing play and teasing out interesting mechanics from our vague notions.

This time around, although we weren’t entirely certain how we were going to apply the theme of minimalism, we had some basic constructs we wanted to adhere too. With three games under the Radmars belt we looked at our history and pondered where we were going and where we wanted to go. Two of the Three games had been 2D pixelated sidescrollers, with the third being a 2D pixelated top down adventure game. Although a theme was never intended, one was starting to appear; partially due to ease and speed of development. Between Spacemars and I, we had some fairly substantial 3D chops if we ever wanted to go in that direction.

Previously, Spacemars and I would generally do the brunt of the graphics work which placed much of the development onto Adhesion and Eugene. The secret sauce for Radmars has always been the great music Adhesion produced (also the dark humor imbued in each game). When he’s loaded down with code, music was pushed off to near last minute or at a lessened capacity.

This time around there was a definite consensus amongst the group to embark on a different journey from the previous games. We wanted to utilize our broad skill set without losing any piece that was vital to our current dynamic. We looked at each other and evaluated how to potentially build something that played off our individual strengths while compensating for each’s weaknesses.

Spacemars is a Jack of Most Trades Master of More Than Should Be Possible. He’s foremost a great developer, with serious pixel skills, 3D abilities to rival my own, and an eye for design. He’s also one of the most dedicated on the team and probably dumps the most time into the projects. His major weakness is time; he can’t do it all. Luckily with a team like ours he’s super malleable and is able to pick up any aspect that needs assistance. Certainly the cornerstone of Radmars.

Adhesion is Spacemars’ right hand man. His greatest asset is his mind and depth of thought; he certainly has a head on him that allows for quick concepting and speedy explanations; his dry sense of humor meshes perfectly with the team. Oh, and he’s a bad ass music man.

Brendon certainly has an eye for design and a great ear for music. Maybe his most important asset is the thoughtfulness he brings to our game designing. He has a very analytical thought process that allows him, and by extension us, to break down games and gameplay into more compelling pieces. His ability to find and create mechanics is something that always boggles my mind.

Eugene is a quiet thunder that weighs in on ideas and directions while being a heavy lifter on development. Unfortunately he is also somewhat mysterious, like a ghost that haunts your brains and whispers genius into your ear.

Myself, I have a robust working knowledge of Cinema 4D, texture and matte painting, and am a UI / web designer. My skills in development are limited to some as3 and Unityscript. My biggest flaw was my parsed time allotment.

At this point you may be wondering what all this BS has to do with the actual game, but I assure you this was not just some ego horse shit. Knowing each person and what they bring to the table helped us shape Tessitron…

Our initial goal was to create a game that was more audio based, possibly music, possibly ambient. Visually we wanted to diverge from the 2D perspective and embark on at least some limited 3D. Right off the bat we were able to see who could be assigned to what.

With the visuals being minimal, to both match the theme but also for time’s sake, I could handle all the 3D myself. This allowed Spacemars to potentially take over lead development as he had previously played with three.js before. With graphics and dev mostly taken care of; Adhesion would be free to do his thing on music. Eugene would work in tandem with Spacemars to kick some development ass. We knew Brendon would be working on level design / flow but at this point we didn’t have enough of a direction to start.

At first we wondered if we wanted to build in story, at least overtly, and have the game themed visually as well. After some discussion we figured gameplay would be the star, with a skill based audio / visual “ride” almost. A strange meld of guitar hero with a SHMUP. This turned out to be a great plan as this allowed Brendon to team up with Adhesion to come up with a flow based enemy system that synced well with the music and scaled with difficulty. Not to mention come up with the enemy string that needed to be hit in sequence to destroy it. This worked perfectly for the final boss as well.

With some solid game mechanic ideas down Radmars took off and began production. Early technical hurdles slowed some aspects down, which others can speak to better than I, but they were surmounted. As for my role, I began producing the simplistic 3D models used for enemies. I pumped out a series of mix and match pieces that could be pieced together to make interesting new enemies. I also did some rough paint-overs to lay in the color pallette and UI, and then built out the pieces to implement the UI.

The other team members will no doubt be able to express their parts better than I. Overall the final product was a pretty fantastic endeavor that came out extremely well and is more fun than I could have imagined. I am most proud of the breadth of skills utilized to bring this to life and the passion the team exhibited is always inspirational. Definitely pushes me to work harder, to learn more, to continually get better, and keep up with the team surrounding me.

And now emarcotte’s:

As usual real life is always chewing time. I managed to contribute a bit, but each time seems less. I think my most useful contributions are on the slightly more backend side, eg loaders and core utils as Adhesion is busy doing music and Spacemars is more focused on mechanics.

Three is decent. API docs are lacking but functionally powerful and easy to use. Definitely worth using again.

Design wise I am not as interested in this as previous entries but the product is more polished since it is smaller scope.

Graphically it looks great as well, absolutely not because of anything I did as well. Good work team!

Here’s brendo’s:

When I looked at the list of possible themes for this Ludum Dare, I really hoped that Minimalism would be chosen. Before the challenge, we as a team had done some reflection, and wanted to go a bit more abstract than our previous entries. That’s why it was surprising that when Minimalism WAS chosen, we had a super hard time coming up with a solid idea. Friday night was rife with floundering thoughts, long silences, and my increasingly nervous feeling that we weren’t going to think of anything. Then, at some point past midnight, Spacemars switched up the brainstorming style by straight-up demanding what kind of game we each desired to make. When it came time for Adhesion to answer, he just said a music game, and somehow the core mechanic of Tessitron leapt right out of the resulting discussion. Sometimes it’s good to just let your desires be known.

Even though my role is “game designer”, I don’t own the concepts of the games; they belong to the group as a whole. What I really enjoy is taking whatever crazy concept the group comes up with and developing it into fleshed-out features and mechanics. That’s what I spent most of Saturday doing. While the others developed the prototype, I concentrated on expanding our basic mechanic into ideas for engaging interactions, then pitching those ideas to the group. This process resulted in a lot of great features for Tessitron, including the linked enemies and the boss fight.

Sunday was when I got to dive into some nitty-gritty level design. Spacemars did a great job providing a nice level design framework. I could spawn enemies, change the camera angle, and move the boss with simple lines of code. Perhaps the best feature was the ability to disable/enable specific sequences, which allowed for me to easily test and re-test whichever part I was working on. Adhesion was another key player in the level design process. His intimate knowledge of the music allowed him to suggest the “mood” of each major chunk of the game. He also provided specific sequences that fit with the music which I could drop in at key points. I have a bit of a background in music, so it was really fun to collaborate with him on those parts of the level design.

Sunday night and Monday evening were my times to refine the bejeesus out of the sequences. I didn’t get to this point as soon as I’d have liked. I spent too much time on the beginning sequence, trying to build it perfectly on the first try. Spacemars reminded me aptly that I needed to do the broad strokes first and refine later. Throughout the process, the challenge was to balance three aspects: learning, difficulty, and musicality. I had to choose which aspect to concentrate on and when, attempting to create moments that touched on two or more of them for maximal fun.

If I could change anything about the game, I would tighten the relationship between the enemies and the music. Adhesion’s musical sequences were great, but I felt the ones I added between were inconsistent in quality. With more opportunity to refine, I could tweak those sequences to mesh better with the overall experience. That said, I’m very pleased with how Tessitron turned out. Everyone on team RADMARS is insanely talented, and I feel really privileged to work with them!

And of course we have the illustrious Spacemars:

Everyone else wrote a mountain of text so ill keep this one short~

good:
Development went smoothly for the most part, no major snags.
Three.js is really an awesome (all be it poorly documented) library.
Teamwork, mumble(voice chat server), and git(version control) is a must.
Simple core idea, made gameplay simple, which kept the game engine simple (for the most part) KISS to the max.
Planning ahead pays off, we thought through things very carefully (thanks brendo)
(as a result) very minimal feature creep while developing.

bad:
time time time, never enough T.T lots of polish i never got to.
want a better control setup. ( Just not sure what it would be ?_? )
should have had color blind-friendly version *_*;

Really proud of this one, I think its the best radmars game we’ve made so far, was hella fun to work on. 😀

And last but not least, mine:

Another Ludum Dare, another chance for RADMARS to flex! After 3 consecutive 2D pixel art games (using melonJS, a great HTML5 game engine which we would highly recommend) we decided to do something at least a little bit more experimental – we wanted to do something in 3D, and despite not preparing enough before the compo (as per usual) we still nailed it. Plus it was a music game, something I’ve wanted to try my hand at for a long time. So!

The good:

-Audio! Of course. I’ve always wanted to focus more on music & sound design for Ludum Dare (previously I had to pick up most of the coding), and this was a great opportunity. I spent most of Saturday working on the song & doing sound design – the latter is not something I’m super experienced with, but it was really interesting to have the chance to try my hand at it in a more serious way, and it was a lot of fun too. Being very familiar with my tools (Ableton Live, NI Reaktor, Massive, Pianoteq & of course iZotope Trash 2 & various other iZo plugins) was great of course. Plus it was a really cool experience collaborating with Brendon for the enemy sequence melodies – an interesting challenge trying to come up with melodies that fit into particular sections of the song as well as being appropriate difficulty-wise for progression in the game.

-three.js – an awesome 3D library for the web. We didn’t lean on it too hard, but in terms of basic features and performance it was awesome, and it looks great (I wish we had time to do shaders!). A few rough edges in the API though.

-Team resourcing – as usual everyone had very clearly defined roles, and good tools to support working together (git, google docs, mumble) so we never really stepped on each other’s toes or blocked each other.

The bad:
-Browser audio still kinda sucks – this is really annoying. It’s good enough to make a decent music game, but I still don’t trust it enough to make a proper strict-timing rhythm game – I don’t think it’s low latency enough. In some sense I wish we were more ambitious and maybe tried to do it anyway, but that might’ve been a disaster. Plus there are still random bugs like the music cutting out super rarely, and looping that never works (why can no JS audio library do this right? ARGH). Sigh.

-Brainstorming – we came up with a good idea eventually, but coming up with it was particularly difficult this time around. We didn’t find the theme particularly inspiring at first, though it did help us pare down some of the details later on, which was nice.

-New tools/frameworks – even though our idea was pretty simple and not too extensive as far as 3D engine requirements go, there were a few issues along the way. We ended up having to write some framework/enginey stuff like a loading screen and proper animation timing towards the end of the compo, which was pretty frustrating since those had some scary bugs at first. Definitely something that should be separated out into common code we can use next time.

All in all I’m really happy with how everything turned out. We took some big risks but they definitely paid off, and we made a great game in a genre I’ve always wanted to take a crack at. As always, can’t wait until next time!

Tags: because it's more fantastical, Ludum Dare 26, postmortem, timelapse

Hmmm – Google Search ‘Robotater’ .  I guess this is appreciation of sorts, though it would be better if the people yanking the source and plugging it on their websites for ad revenue would at least buy the full version of the game creator so the ad didn’t show.

Ganking

Tags: Construct 2, html5, robotater, scirra

If you’re anything like me you really want to know how the voting turned out. I know it’s all rather irrelevant – but be honest, would you take part without the voting/rating/top-games stuff?
I know I wouldn’t 😀

Competing with others is a great source of motivation and therefore surely an important aspect of Ludum Dare

So – bear with me as you count down the last hours and make sure to check out all the roundup posts available, like both of mine for example:

Roundup part 1

Roundup part 2

I was trying to think of a joke involving thousands of potatoes and Ludum Dare, but 2346 games is nothing to joke about. That’s incredible. I’m at lost for words. Lets just get to the results:

How did I do?

You can view your results here:

My Results: ludumdare.com/…/?action=me

The individual category results are just above your comments.

Top 100 Games

Check out winning competition and jam games here:

Compo Top 100: ludumdare.com/…/?action=top
Jam Top 100: ludumdare.com/…/?action=top&cat=Overall(Jam)

Winners are decided by the Overall category.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Categorical Top 25s

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

Categorical Top 25s: ludumdare.com/…/?more=1

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 100 style lists per category.

Ludum Dare 27 – August 2013

Whew! What a dare! You had a good time right? Great! We’re doing it again in August! We don’t have a specific date chosen yet, but stay tuned for that. Follow us on Twitter or join the mailing list to stay informed.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for us (website, observations, etc), we continue to collect them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/01/09/suggestion-post-2/

Thanks everyone for coming out and kicking off an amazing new year for Ludum Dare!

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)