Whoa, I’ve finally done my entry for the Jam.
It’s been a lot of fun despite some little unforeseen events that have slowed me down.

Here’s the entry, playable on web (Unity web player required), Windows, OSX, Linux & Android.

Toolset used for the game
Engine: Unity3d
2D Graphics: mspaint, gimp 2.8
Sound: sfxr

Actually I submit my game last night but I just got around to writing a post about it.

It was done in a few hours, I created the assets on my iPad using makePixelArt app while on the plane, as soon as I got home I implemented the game in Flixel in 3-4 hours.

It’s pretty short and simple (fits the theme I hope :p). Enjoy.

Long story short, I didn’t have time over the weekend to enter the main competition, so the Jam it is (although I’m 95% sure I still followed all of the competition rules other than the deadline). Overall, I had three goals:

• Make a game
• It has to be web-based, so I have to figure out either Flash or JavaScript
• Actually enter it (I missed the last two Ludum Dares as well)

The end result isn’t great. Full stop. Basically, it’s a vector graphics (that’s the minimal part) tank game, a la Scorched Earth. But it is playable / winnable and I learned a lot, so I’ll count that as a win.

I ended up starting around 1 am and finished about half an hour ago at 7am. I don’t have a title screen or anything in the way of sounds/music and I’m not expecting to do particular well in the rankings at all, but that’s really all of the time I can put into it. And technically, it does meet my goals.

And hey. I learned how to use Haxe. I’ve been meaning to do that for years. Perhaps now I can get out a few of those other ideas I’ve had.

Here are some the relevant links:

• Jam entry
  
• Source code (on GitHub)
• Blog post (more details, more screenshots)

And last but not least:

Play VTanks

Hello there,

I finished my LD26 entry : Multiplied Screens.

Once again, the experience was awesome!!

Cheers

…a little teaser title!

Almost done. Thought this screen grab of the level design was pretty.

@travischen

@shiftlesshobo

Too many things got in the way this weekend and I was barely able to make a ‘working’ game. Next time I’ll plan ahead!

You can check out Pilgrimage here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18986

I had great time making Perfect Crime and especially the sounds for it. I had already the base game working on the first day, so I could dedicate a part of the second day for Foley.

Pretty much all the Foley I do is accidental discovery, I simply try all the possible things that might produce a sound that might fit and then choose the best one. Of course for the competition I was really pressed time and could not just go out to get some materials that might have helped considerably, so I had to make do with what I could find around the house. All the recording and sound editing was done in Audacity.

The sound of dragging the body across the floor was done by me dragging the mic around my own hair. It gave a nice scraping sound and was passable as long as it was quiet enough.

The most important sound I needed for the sake of mood was the ripping sound of a body part coming off. My first though was ripping up some asparagus or lettuce head for a nice sick-sounding effect, but unfortunately my fridge was rather empty at the time. I tried ripping some old T-shirts but the sound was much too quiet and not sick enough. In the end I used velcro. The sound gave off a decend sick-factor and it was quick and easy to make.

One trick I used here to make the sound more fatter was to mix together several takes of the velcro ripping.

Another difficult sound was the blood spraying sound. A small can of insect repellant in a pressurized can did the trick for that one quite nicely.

The only sound left was the sound of a body part hitting an object in the scene. First version was me simply punching my couch, but the end result was too muted. Next I tried punching my own stomach. The result was not much better but I was pressed for time so I simply mixed some of those sounds together and made it play quiet in-game.

The music is simply me playing random notes from my banjo. Let me know what you think of the sounds now that you know how they were made!

First of all here is my entry http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=14496

What went right

• I finished on time
• Got enough sleep

What went okay

• Code structure was okay but i still got duplicate code here and there

What went bad less good

• Graphics. I can’t draw so well and i could not think of any either, so all my graphic became squares
• Difficulty. I made that the last hour and if you haven’t played the game as much as me the developer then i can guess the game is very hard
• Motivation. Lack of motivation is never fun, mostly because i could not come up with an “good” idéa.

Still i had some fun, and i learned some new things but now it’s time to rate some games.

I’m using HTML to embed the SWF with my game, and I would like to edit it to drop a couple of lines to add  a simple paragraph with the controls. It’s not part of the game per se, but it may affect the perception of the players about it, so I’m not sure if that’s OK or if it would invalidate my submission. I’ve checked the rules and there’s nothing stated in one way or the other.

Does anyone have any idea?

On a related note, would the same apply to “readme” files?

Link to the entry

Wow, this was fun.

Once again i hated the theme. And once again i had a blast either way 😀

I didn’t face a lot of technical difficulties, thankfully. Except a collision problem which i only realized after the submission opened. Doh!

It’s not all too critical, but i’d rather had it not there, for obvious reasons.

Otherwise i’m pretty happy with how TunnelVision turned out, although if i were doing a post-compo version i’d change so many mechanics. But i guess that is just natural.

So how about some eyegasm inducing bug-screenshots? 😀

I’ll just leave this here. Don’t let the collision bugs bite!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=5751

wzl out

Click here to go to the game.

I didn’t get much sleep last night so here’s a rather incoherent mini post-mortem of my game Super Neo Tektropolis.

I knew beforehand that I wanted to do some kind of platform or action game mainly becouse I wanted to play with Box2D and I wanted something a bit more fast paced than my previous LD entries.

I had planned on using clanlib (the game is written in c++) but when doing some preliminary testing I could not get cross compiling for windows (with minGW) to work. Being able to cross compile is great so I looked around for another graphics library. I finally settled on SFML 2 and looking back it feels like a great choice.

In the end I have mixed feelings about the game. It feels like the it’s missing some sense of progression. I went for infinitely sized procedural  levels but they turned out quite boring and monotonous I’m afraid. However, the enemies and the controls feel pretty good and I’m overall happy with the graphics. There are some parts that I really like and there are some parts that look pretty bad, but you can’t be too picky with a 48 hour game I guess.

The theme was a surprise to me. I hadn’t really noticed it when voting and wasn’t prepared for it at all (but to be honest, when are you ever ready for the ludum dare themes?) so I went with the lame aproach of “I’ll make the graphics simplistic and consider that the minimalistic part of my game”. Coming up with an unique take of the theme can be challenging but I had a hard enough time finishing the game anyway so I didn’t even try.

All in all I had a great time. A friend of mine also participated in the compo (check out his game, Super Monster Attack) and I spent the weekend at their place. Having someone to talk to, even if they are too absorbed in their own game to really listen, is great and I don’t think making the game would have been nearly as fun if I had been alone at home.

Anyway, enough rambling. I’ve got some Ludum Dare games to play.

This is my first Ludum Dare and although stressful it has definitely been enjoyable, and a good learning experience. “barry-cade” (I normally sneak a character called Barry into all my games… this one has no characters so….) is a basic constant scrolling avoid the obstacles thingamabob.

I hope people like it *looks nervous*

This game requires Java or OpenJDK 1.6+ to run….

I am looking forward to playing some awesome games

Tags: first-timer

MinGW forces me to quit. Can’t bugfix the compiler in a weekend (or even in a year). Will try newest version and hope it works. Otherwise I’ll be out.

EDIT: I’m out. Allready had the newest MinGW installed (and downloaded the installer for the 3rd time). Might submit hello world to be able to rate. Will ask before. Timelapse video will follow.

EDIT2: Timelapse

Tags: Failure, Im out, timelapse

I made a game “Minimal Force” this weekend, and here is the post-mortem:

What went good:

• Idea. A puzzle platformer! A reverse metroidvania! At first the idea didn’t seem trustworthy, but it appeared to be a good one.
• Level design. Hmm… I managed to make a level for every item lost, without any not-fitment.
• Graphics. I totally made some good graphics myself! I’m going to make an individual post about it.

What went bad:

• Time. I submitted the game at 0:33 AM. That’s too late!
• Planning. I had to recode several things because I didn’t plan them well!
• Bugs. I had a lot of bugs, and I still have some. I didn’t plan to release a post-compo, but I think I’ll have to release a bug-free version.
• Punctuation. Sorry about that, I just don’t know English punctuation!

What went average:

• Sounds. I included just one sound, and generating music seems a bit unfair. But who cares if the music is awesome, right? (Now I think the music wasn’t quite made in the given time. I just had a folder of music generated beforehand, and I picked one from it. But I could just enter the seed into the generator and generate it once more, so I think it’s OK.)
• Theme. My favourite was ‘Every death is meaningful’, and I was a little disappointed when I saw it’s ‘Minimalism’. I couldn’t make any idea for some time, and the one I came with didn’t seem trustworthy.
• Maths. I still haven’t found a way of calculating velocity of an arrow so it perfectly goes through a given point. But the boss wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
• Community. I was streaming the process of game making, making a timelapse and posting frequently, but it’s not more than usual. I didn’t even have a journal, unlike the previous time.

What did I learn:

• Drawing a bit better.
• Using Tile Studio a bit.

And here is a timelapse (I missed a part at the beginning, when I was drawing levels with Tile Studio, and a part at the end, when I was submitting the game):

Since I have a lot of holidays this and next week, I’ll make sure I get a gold coolness medal. I’m also planning to stream playing LD games.

Tags: post-mortem

This Ludum Dare has been a triumf for me personally, being the first time I’ve participated in a game jam. I never would have guessed how much is possible in less than 48 hours when you put your mind to it, and the community is fantastic. I will definitely make time for something like this again in the future.

I ended doing a small game called Mini Circle Wars.

Theme: Minimalism
I didn’t like the theme initally. It didn’t really spark my imagination and it seemed like a carte blanche to just do anything minimal and simple. But I quickly got an idea and started working on a minimal RTS with circles battling each other. So the gameplay is simple (build circle towers), the graphics is simple (circles in a handful of solid colors), only three sounds, and one game mode. I think it fits the theme well.

Gameplay
It’s sort of like a Tower Defense in survival mode where you are attacked from all sides until your base is destroyed. I like how you need to spread out your towers to extend the area you can build on, yet you need to keep towers close to each other to protect them. Balancing the game turned out to be hard. I think I spent three hours going back and forth between “this game is too simple” to “this game is too hard”. I still don’t think the balance is quite right, so I might fix that up in a post compo release.

Other than that, I think it turned out quite well. I especially like how you can zoom in and out and watch your creation getting attacked. Of course I can think of a lot of features that could be added in a future version, like more game modes, several difficulty levels, mission based instead of survival mode, more upgrade types, more interactive environment (like mining resource from circle rocks instead of just harvesting them out of thin air), and so on.

Tools
Picking Java and IntelliJ was a no-brainer for me, since I’m pretty fluent in Java (having used it since 2002 for various projects), and IntelliJ is so much nicer than Eclipse for general development. It’s not necesarily the best prototyping environment (I’m considering learning Lua for that purpose), but developing in Java is pretty fast if you now the language and your tools. Libgdx is also a really great framework that supports plenty of platforms. The only other tools I used was Aseprite for … well, mixing colors, and bfxr for the three ingame sounds. That’s it! And the GWT-version of the game is compiled in Eclipse since I never have gotten that to work in IntelliJ with libgdx

Implementation
I’m actually quite happy with my code quality. It’s nice and clean and I can still find my way through it the day after. Not so sure about the overall architecture, since it’s neither MWC or anything else I know. It kinda just evolved dynamically while I made the game. It might need some refactoring if the project is to be extended.

I’m not nearly as happy with my rendering code, since it’s a mix of libgdx’s SpriteBatch and ShapeRenderer. One for text and one for interface and circles. They don’t mix that well since you have to end the SpriteBatch before issuing shapes with the ShapeRenderer and vice versa. I assume the ShapeRenderer is really meant for debugging mainly and not actual ingame graphics. But hey, it works

Some of my basic helper classes resemble stuff I’ve made earlier, so I’ll most likely create a small library from them for future use. Just basic stuff like Timer, Animation, and asset loading classes that fits my workflow.

What went right

• I made a game. Succes! 😀
• Tools and frameworks just worked. I’m glad I didn’t try to learn a new framework during the compo.
• I like the sounds in the game, they fit well. Should have made some more.
• Good code quality I think. The architecture might need some refactoring.

What went wrong

• I would have liked to spend more time on the visual part of the game, but didn’t really have time for it.
• Working past midnight on Saturday was a mistake. I didn’t really make much progress in the last 2-3 hours before sleep and was quite tired the next day.
• I underestimated the process of balancing the game.
• I spent entirely too much time thinking about pathfinding until I realised that the game AI didn’t really need it after all.

That’s all I can think of now. I’ve uploaded a timelapse video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ4yL3SKeXI

Tags: post-mortem

As a bit of a quick reflection on the compo, did a quick little post-mortem write-up on my personal blog.

I have to admit, I rather enjoyed the concept – and tempted to see about revising & expanding upon it at some stage.

All right! My game TrackSurfer is up! I ran into some weird packaging errors, but now everything should work fine. I am really happy with the flow of the game and the minimalism especially in the controls. You can find my entry here.

Here are some screenshots:

Have fun surfing!

Man, look at that, REALLY! look at that!
now, RIGHT now, you can PLAY the awesome and incredible game called IIII!

REALLY, we are not joking, just click there and BLOW YOUR BRAINS!

HERE the web version
and HERE you can download the PC version

just let us know how many AEWSOMENESS did you get playing IIII posting a comment down there!
tell us how many was your incredible max score, and how many of these “strange features” (also know as bugs) did you find!

it was our first experience on Ludum Dare, so thanks everyone!

tomorrow is bug correction season, and the game is complete! =D

Here’s the game page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20494

The Good:

• My first Ludum Dare, and I finished a game!
• Version control saved my bacon a couple of times.
• Got a working prototype, and feedback from friends, very quickly.
• Made a timelapse of the design process.  Showed me where I spent too much (or too little) development time.
• The theme: it really enforced the idea of making a simple, solid game.
• Bfxr is the bee’s knees!

The Bad:

• “Developer Perspective” — I thought the game was too easy.  So far the reviewers think its too hard.
• I didn’t really have a plan for the music coming into the compo.  So I had to pick a program and learn it on the fly.

The Ugly:

• The code is rather… inelegant.  I put the source files up, but I hope people will take them with a grain of salt.
• I wanted the colors to be vivid, but I think I erred on the too bright, possibly garish, side.

Still, I had a lot of fun, and I learned quite a bit.  It’s amazing how motivating a deadline can be!

Happy Ludum,
Cahman

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

I have released my entry, which you can see here. I have been asked twice to implement click-and-hold shooting. Would it be alright if I were to add this now?

I made an animated gif of my entry…

Nyan Cubase ?

Another theme for “Shrink Shift” : Here

You can find the 5 first songs on my last post.

I’m ready for sound-effects ingame now ! I’ll do it on my twitch in a few minutes.

(Do you like the Hulk support for my cheap webcam ?)

I finished Ludum Dare for the first time, and came out the other side with XYZ, and I’m damned proud of it. It goes without saying that I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but I didn’t expect to be saying those words yesterday. When time is running out and you don’t know what to do, its amazing how erratic you can become.

Day 1

I woke up at 8.30 (UK time), checked the theme and made some breakfast. My idea came to me nearly instantly. It was to be a game about the link between power and human relationships, and it was going to be mindblowing. The narrative and gameplay meshed together beautifully in my head, and I immediately started coding. Mistake 1: Don’t attempt to create an HTML5 engine from scratch. By 5pm I had my engine at a reasonable level (I’m still damned proud of that engine), and I quickly built up the mechanics of the game. Except they didn’t work. It was a game built upon 3 simple rules; 1. People seek power, 2. People gain power by taking it from others, and 3. The powerful need more power to sustain their egos; but I couldn’t balance my AI. Power, it seems, is a freight train. The 1% effect. I learned a valuable lesson about mankind, and lost 12 hours of coding. Mistake 2: Prototype everything, even your prototypes. What now? I spent the rest of the night trying to salvage my beautiful engine, attempting to justify using it at any cost. Every 15 minutes I would alternate between a new idea and attempting to fix the original game, swinging from delight to depression like a pendulum. Mistake 3: Cut your losses. By 3am I had finally given up. I sank a couple of beers and went to bed.

All I have to show for 24 hours work.

Day 2

I woke at a more reasonable 11am, and rose feeling defeated. Bitter. Game designer ego does not take well to defeat. I couldn’t resist taking one last crack at the contest. This time, it would be different. It would be simple, concise and different. I chose Unity, my trusty silent compadre, and took a very small and underdeveloped part of a concept I had floating around my mind. Understanding 1: Work with what you know. It was to be the puzzle side of the fast paced racer which had been long ago silently converted into a fast paced racer with no puzzles (shameless plug – you can totally play the alpha of that game here). I cut everything from the idea that didn’t support the core, and carved out the perspective tricks brought forward by the excellent Fez. Understanding 2: If it can be cut, cut it; especially when the theme is minimalism. I started with a test level to make sure the concept worked. It worked. Satisfied, I started work on some essential middleware tools I would need to save time down the line. Creating and saving meshes from within Unity, that sort of thing. If you don’t know it Unity Answers is a beautiful place. This wasn’t fast, but it was worth it – I could create shapes and levels rapidly. I worked up the first 6 levels in an hour. I had 8 left, but I wanted a finished game as soon as possible. Understanding 3: Polish is 90% of your game’s appeal. I created a simple menu and a few more levels. With 6 hours left, I could spend plenty of time on sound and visuals. The style was born from effective of a single Unity filter, mimicking the beautiful world of Echochrome. I am not a sound designer, but FruityLoops makes it insanely easy to create quality sound in a short space of time (and skill). Despite all this, I submitted just 10 minutes before the deadline. I narrowly avoided the greatest mistake I could have made: Understanding 4: Allow an hour for submission. Screenshots within the Ludum Dare submission page lose their splendour and be aware that people pick games based on how they look, not the quirky name or genuinely original mechanic. Exporting and uploading too, takes time. I’m sure some Dare’ers missed the submission date by seconds, and they will have learnt this lesson the hard way.

Keeping it simple in every way but the puzzles.

That was my Ludum Dare. It had highs and lows, but there’s nothing quite like the feeling of finishing something you’re truly proud of, even if it isn’t objectively very good. But it’s not my place to argue whether I made a good game, it’s yours. You can play and rate XYZ here – I’d love to know what you think.

Tags: minimalism, post-mortem, postmortem, xyz

This entry was posted on Monday, April 29th, 2013 at 11:24 am 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.

Am quite happy with the weekend’s efforts.  I’ve been doing 48hour game jams fairly regularly over the last few years, but this was my first attempt going solo.  Up till now, a huge part of the jam workflow has involved lots of bouncing ideas off others – yknow, teamwork, communication, that kind of stuff.  It was tempting to collaborate again for this one, but figured it was time to step up. Everyone else was playing Planetside anyway.

THEME REVEALED

And I was all groan.  I know we’re all hipster indie wankers and yes obviously we all love cubes and stark Eno-esque soundscapes and empty blank canvases –  but was honestly disappointed that something a little more exciting didn’t come up.  It’s already been pointed out here a thousand times already, – we’ve only got 48 hours.  Less if you want to sneak in a quick round of your favourite MMO.  It’s gonna be minimalistic anyway.

The theme was revealed, I leaned back in my chair and sighed. Profoundly.  Then went and took a shower, soak up some steam and decide if this was something I wanted to spend my weekend on.  I almost walked away.  Almost had a regular weekend.

So I spent about four hours just sitting around trying to think minimalism.  What do I do? Cube Rotator: the game?   Circle clicker?  Line drawer?  Screen Shaker?

I think I was taking the theme too literally.  I was getting frustrated that minimalism is a design choice, an aesthetic – not something to base your game on.  After a few hours following that rabbit hole I read someone’s twitter post – sorry, I didn’t catch the name.  It said: MINIMALISM DOESN’T SUCK. YOU’RE PROBABLY TAKING IT TOO LITERALLY.

Man, you’re right. I was.

That got me thinking – take something – anything, and just do a minimalistic presentation of it.  What’s huge? What’s epic?  What’s something you love?

SPACE, obviously.

Man, I frigging love space.  And space battles. Who doesn’t?

And strategy games.

Oh man, SPACE!

…and minimalism.

THE GOOD

Once I was over the initial brainfreeze, this game started coming together really quickly.  I had a good idea of what I could expect to do in a weekend, so managed to come up with something right on scope, I think.  And timewise, it was about right – the game became playable and (slightly) enjoyable about halfway into the Sunday, leaving the rest to add sound and tinker around with bugs.

And I think the game’s got a certain charm.  I’m thinking about adding to it over the next few weeks, add a few extras that should make it faster, more fun, better.  That’s what it’s all about right?

THE BAD

At about midnight on the Saturday, I got caught up in this bit of C# that just wasn’t working.  I spent about an hour and a half just trying permutations of what I already had there.  Normally when this happens I go for a walk, clear my head, watch a movie and come back to it fresh.  But no time man, no time!  I figured I’d spent enough time on doing this with code, I’m using unity damnit, and have learned with Unity that if you’re spending more than half an hour trying to write a script, then you’ve probably missed a checkbox somewhere.  Just drag and drop it my friend.  So that’s what I did. I spent about ten minutes doing some fairly tedious and labour-intensive drag-and-dropping (if you must know, I was manually linking each grid space to its neighbours by selecting each neighboour and dragging them into the centre square’s Neighbour List. This requires very tedious clicking of the padlock button on and off).  The really funny thing is, I think this was all the break I needed – literally as I dragged the last lot in, it dawned on my where my code was wrong.  Oh, how I laughed.  It was kind of this awful,  wretched, demented chuckle that really very few experiences in life other than latenight dev can dredge up.  Anyway, it was done. I had dragged, and I had dropped. The great labour was done.

WHAT HAVE I LEARNED

So the two big hangups I had on this project were kind of thematically related.

I had a lot of inertia dealing with a jam theme I found uninspiring, and I probably spent too long on one fairly simple code problem. In hindsight, both those timespans could’ve been used much better doing something else.  I think I need to be able to detect when I’m in a loop and exit out much sooner.  Step back, look at what I’m doing, and know that there is another way.

That probably applies to a lot of things in life.

Cool huh?

Also, how good is space?

Anyway, that’s my rant.  Check out my game, and I’ll try to check out yours.

It’s this one

Well, inconsistent performance of the game has lead to some people getting stuck and quitting before the end. For some reason, running it twice makes it flow better. Game maker… you are a mysterious thing. In any case, I wanted to post the credits here as I thank some people who deserve the thankin!

So, I just published “Venture Ville!” from Visual Studio up to azure at:

http://brainslugs83.azurewebsites.net/

Be sure to log-in and check it out! 😀

Also, in the spirit of Ludum Dare’s whole Latin thing that it has going on, we gave our team a motto — wasn’t able to really double check it as apparently, my friend’s who get Latin are out of town. — But Google Translate’s cool with it, so I’ll leave it at that. 😀

I’d throw the source up somewhere, but it’s like 40 MB… maybe my Google Drive?  I didn’t see anywhere on the LD site where I could upload it.

Also, I Chronolapsed everything, so I’ll be cutting that this week and hopefully YouTube’d by Friday.

Happy Monday!
–Mikey

Tags: finish, finished, fuck, unfinished

We pretty much finished our entry: Aranami. It’s a web-based geometric puzzle game, where you have to find the path for a triangular rake across a zen garden filled with unpassable rocks.

The name is Japanese for something like “stormy waves”, and is apparently a traditional raking pattern for rock gardens (as well as a knitting pattern).

Stars are awarded based on how close you can get to the “par” score, which is the minimal achievable number of moves as determined by us, the designers. There are eight levels of increasing difficulty. Please give it a try!

My entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20636

What went right:
-I made my first game!
-I “finished” within 48 hours!

What went ok:
-Tile textures.
-Collision checking.
-Idea for a game + realization of this idea.

What went not ok:
-No particles and sounds
-Amount of fun, my game isn’t difficult at all!
-Whole code structure.
-Level design, and name of the game.

The whole event was quite nice. I plan on joining next compo if I’ll have the time. But now, I need some rest from code(I’ve ended my sentence with semicolon too many times today);

Hi everyone!

It’s post Ludum Dare Blog!

Here I will talk about went well and what went bad!

The Good:

• I finished a game!
• The Idea I thought of came into a game
• I was able to distribute the game for you to play!
• The graphics were okay but could have been better, but hey it’s simple right?
• I got to learn how to stream on Twitch and got some feedback when I was doing it!
• I was able to make ammo and health and enemies respawned into the map once you collected it!
• It was my first LD48 and I was able to finish a game I think in less than 10 hours haha

The Bad :

• I spent the first night on one idea but it turned out I wasted 2 hours on it and could have gotten more sleep as it was 12 am when I went to bed. I came up with a new idea the morning of the second day which worked well!
• I couldn’t get multiple waves to work for the Circles making it harder for the player
• The music could have been better
• I wish I could have spent more time on it but Other stuff got in the way so i had to finish it early
• I wish I thought of a better name for the game as it was pretty bad haha
• I think I could have thought of a cooler idea for a game after seeing what other people have made which some were awesome 😀 (Good job to everyone btw)

What I learned for next LD:

• I need to spend more time on the idea so it will be a better game before I start coding!
• I need to think of a better title and overall goal of the game.
• Make more of a story for the game and not make it so simple.
• Next game I will be doing it in html5 so it will be easier to distribute to people to play since not everyone just has a windows computer and it helps those who are lazy
• Don’t spend too much time worrying about people watching you on twitch, it can be a distraction so I may do the next one with just a longer time lapse.
• Eat and drink water while you program to help you stay up later haha
• Make sure that you have fun playing the game! Even though I had fun playing it I still got bored after a while!
• Make it harder for the player to beat for my next game

Conclusion

I’m really happy I participated in this LD it’s cool to be a part of something like this and finish a game! Which I rarely do because I don’t have a time limit or deadline and just get bored of making it and think of an idea that seems cooler! I want to do better for the next LD so I will definately learn HTML5 and try to get that to work!

Questions:

Is there a good place to host HTML 5 games on the web that everyone can access like a portal website for games? Or can you get a free website and host it there? I know you can use dropbox but sometimes it may be hard because everyone’s trying to access it.

You can play S.C. Space Hunter here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20776

Rate it and please give me feedback in a comment so I can improve!

Have a great week of judging!

I will be making videos of me playing your games on my YouTube channel starting tonight! www.youtube.com/cableplays

I will probably do a few games per video! Will give links to the games in the descriptions!

Subscribe if you want to see me play your game can’t wait to try it out!

Peace out!

CablePlays

Wanna see some awesome geometric action!?

HERE you can play, web version or PC downlod! ;-D

Im very happy with your Feedback.

A lot of users liked the sounds, and asked me if are originals. I make all sounds with my voice and some GarageBand filters.

The game mechanic decision of the fireball is not very popular, it makes game harder, and many people tell me to change it. Summoning of fire powers is not easy !! 😀

Thx for playing and your comments!

So this was my third Ludum Dare game, “Less is More” – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=8404

Good:

• Streaming: I didn’t get many viewers, but having the sense of people watching over my shoulder, and not using a microphone made me write more comments and gameplay notes so people could see what I was thinking.
• Time-planning:  I finished 90% of the features I’d planned, working at an easy pace for all but the last three-four hours. I usually plan epic masterpieces which just won’t fit in a weekend, so that’s good progress.
• Music: This is the first game I’ve written which included a soundtrack. It’s nothing amazing, but the theme helped me start simple, and I’m really excited to have jumped this hurdle.
• Graphics: While I didn’t like the theme, it allowed me to do less work on the graphical side and focus on writing game code.
• Code Structure: I’m learning lots about writing code that runs in the immediate-mode environment of typical games; definitely valuable experience for future projects.

Bad:

• Theme: God, I hated the theme. I guess it feels like the artistic equivalent to a game mechanic theme, like “FPS” or “2D Platformer”; I really struggled to come up with an idea and whilst it may just be “developer’s perspective”, I don’t think the final game is much fun. In the end, I learned more about the grunt work of making games than any game design insights, but that’s as valuable as lesson, I guess.
• Interruptions: I never seem to have a whole weekend off; guess I just have to work on that Work-Life balance 😀
• Time: Thanks to timezones and daylight-saving, the jam started & ended at 3am – that means staying up late on a Friday to find out the theme, and then staying up late before going to work on a Monday, which gets rough.
• Focus: On top of interruptions, I can’t seem to focus on a task till the last few hours, but that’s a personal flaw I’ll just have to work on.

Hi!

It has been a very nice weekend to design and code this game. I was to tired to post an article yesterday, so now is the good time to do it.
It will be a brief overview of the idea and a presentation of the tools I used.

Play here.

Description

It’s a survivor game, top-down view.
You control the hero, who is totally tired of carrying so many items each time he leaves for a quest.
There are several ancients who keep trying to give you a bunch of useless items, that of course you don’t want. They are rushing all over the map and you should survive as long as you can before getting full of items.

Screenshot

Tools

As mentioned in my first post, I wanted to do something playable in the browser, and also use pixi.js for the rendering.

• Rendering: pixi.js
• Play sounds and music: howler.js
• Art: Inkscape
• Music/Sounds making: lmms

The music was made during the last 2 hours, using lmms pre-built samples, so it might sound a little bit simple and repetitive!
For my first participation it was very fun! I’m happy with the results even though the game may need some additional tweaking with the AI.

Here is the page of the submission: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22254

Here’s my entry for Ludum Dare #26, on the theme Minimalism.

It’s written in pure JavaScript and a “library” I cobbled together a few days before the competition. I also snuck in jQuery for doing the ajax requests when loading level data.

The sounds (my favourite part of the game) were made in Ableton live with various VST plugins. The tiles were actually made in Blender. Blender! And edited with Pixelmator.

The result was… alright. I was really looking for a nice puzzler, but ended up running out of time. Was good fun though.

Test you in AbbrevsMaster over 4 categories x 10 levels : smiley, gaming, forum, chat

Share your score on AbbrevsMaster !

I ended up jamming, and don’t regret the decision. Best to get something done after all, and it might even be kind of an interesting experiment. You have to connect a bunch of floating platforms by tending to supernatural plants. Keep them watered and collect more water from their droppings.

It’s quite zen but still puzzly. Not in the sort of obviously designed way as my puzzle games usually are, but in the way that you’ll naturally come across problems with your resources, and have to plan ahead. You’re just given the game board and some simple rules, which you’ll have to get the most out of.

A water pulse going through a plant. Not pictured: me haunted by ugly race condition bugs again.

(I’ll change that plant texture, don’t you worry.)

Tags: stumbling towards the finish line

The last version is available ! With some tutorial levels

Click to play !

Controls:
– Drag and drop parts to create a thingy,
– Right click rotates parts in place,
– Click “LoadLevel” in the bottom to throw your creation into the wild.

 
Well, it’s finally done I was having some troubles last night with the jar so I didn’t make a post then as few people could have actually played, but it’s all been sorted out now.

ANYWAY, meet Lead (like a pencil) the Bunny, whom you have to lead (the opposite of follow) through a series of treacherous levels, with dangers waiting at all corners. Jump, dash and hop your way to victory as you traverse the 14 levels I managed to finish.

What went right

• This was my third attempt at Ludumdare and the first time I actually finished!
• Everything I tried to implement worked
• My idea came fairly quickly
• I actually managed to get through most of the game making process with few bugs!
• I am very, very proud of my bunny. I am no graphics pro but my bunny is lovely 😛

What went wrong

• I was away for a lot of the weekend so I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked
• In the end, I only had 2 hours to finish up and start making levels, so there’s only 14 levels. But they’re easy enough to continue making if I feel like continuing
• I never had any time to implement any sounds, not even simply ones from BFXR like I planned
• When I went to upload, the jar simply would not work. Turns out I had an extra slash when loading images, which Eclipse was fine with, but windows was not 😛

Final Thoughts
I had a lot of fun. It was great sitting down and coding and watching my game come together so quickly. I’m only in grade 12 and just finished my Computer Science course last semester, and the game I made for that took forever to get through. Admittedly, it had a lot more but this is still a full game and really well done (in my opinion) for my first java game outside of school.
If you’d like to play, the link is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=5827
And I have a couple screenshots below

I was browsing through the games and started wondering what is the popularity of various game development frameworks.

So I made quick poll: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6RXTKBY I’d be great if you could answer, it’s just this one question

If you think some major framework is missing from the list let me know.

[EDIT]

The “Other” option should now work fine.

Sorry for no update post yesterday but I was extremely busy! Here some screenshots to make up for it…

Paradise is not all it seems

There be Zombies here!

Light ‘em up. Watch ‘em burn!

[Play and Rate here]

Worked right up until 10 minutes before the deadline last night to finish this little game that I have dubbed Tiny Runner.

It’s only 20 pixels wide (scaled up to 40 to be a little more visible/readable on modern displays) and it fits squarely in the “endless runner” genre of games.

I used the Unity game engine and two free add-ons from the Unity Asset Store: Orthello Free and RagePixel. I actually drew the art in Unity using RagePixel, so I didn’t have to resort to any external art tools. I thought I was going to be able to use RagePixel for everything, but it doesn’t support any kind of font rendering and I wanted to display a minimal bit of tiny text. So, I had to break out Orthello (a nice free 2D toolkit for Unity) to handle the font rendering.

Code-wise the game is made up of only 4 C# classes (not counting Unity and the add-ons I mentioned above) – Runner, Wall, Zapper, and EndlessRunnerManager. I wrote about 350 lines of code for the final submitted version.

This was my first attempt at ever making art for my own games. I ended up drawing the little guy and giving him 4 animations (run, jump, duck, die) in each of 3 colors. It was actually pretty neat limiting myself to such a small number of pixels. In the end, it ended up balancing out my utter lack of art skill I think.

I had a busy weekend so I wasn’t able to do everything I wanted to do. I especially wanted to add sound and tweak the difficulty curve. All in all I spent maybe 7-8 hours in development time. I’m overall very pleased with the result since this was my first ever Ludum Dare entry.

Lunar Rain is a short Graphic Adventure set on the surface of the moon. Unfortunately the game is only available for Windows. It was made for the Compo in 48 hours with Adventure Game Studio. 

The player controls Rain, who has come to HPE Lunar Facility #26 in search for answers to many questions. Surrounded by a great vacuum her only companion is an AI. It helps her get through the days under a black sky, and the nights under thousand silent eyes.
Two months into her endeavor a call from Earth…

I would appreciate if you took the time to play and comment on it, it’s really short. I would especially be interested in whether Rain and the setting are something you’d like to see more of. I’m excited for the character and the setting but since my time is limited I’d like to find out whether people would play it.

Be sure to check the game’s page in the next few days as I am trying to put together a timelapse as well as a gameplay video.

– LeafThief

Tags: adventure, adventure-game, AGS, LD #26, leafthief, lunar rain

Nanomaly is now as we expected it to be. 😀

Game

Ludum Dare entry

This is the postmortem of my first LD entry, “Exit”. I worked a lot on the game and the result wasn’t as bad as I expected so let’s see what went right and what didn’t.

What went right:

• I finished the game
• I had time to do enough stages
• The animated background was a good idea and makes the game nicer
• Plenty of planification before starting
• I took breaks that allowed me to work more focused, not more than the necessary, I didn’t loose much time
• The “thing” that talks to you through the game, it was going to be a different thing and ended up being a jerk that makes the game better
• Level design, I was afraid of not being able to come up with ideas to create the levels but I was inspired
• Friends support, raising my morale and giving me realtime feedback

What went wrong:

• I panicked a bit in the last hours
• No music
• I’m not very happy with the block graphics
• Some collisions and minor bugs
• I forgot a bit about the theme as I had new ideas
• I feel like I should have been more creative
• Maybe a simpler idea could have been better
• Some problems that made me spend time and end up with a messy source

Tags: postmortem

So, Sly. made me make an editor for him to do the maps, I’d tell you he is a bitch, but everyone knows that.

Left to do:

• Program game-play
• Touch up the editor
• Make music

I think we’ll make it.

Also, we have another member on our team, Baryonyx. He make the sound effects for the game.

Just a personal epiphany about learning and improvement I wanted to share with you. I think sometimes we need to step into other people’s worlds for a while and think about them, why they were made, how, and for what reason.

All done with my fourth Ludum Dare!
My entry this time around is a minimalistic arcade game called “Motion”!
It’s a game about adaptation, memory, and control!

Play it and let me know what you think!

So I finished my game called ‘Colorblind’ yesterday at 23:00 CET and I think it turned out alright. I wanted to add more content but due to some non LD26 related events I lost about 7 hours of time to work on it over the weekend.

This was my first time entering the Ludum Dare Compo and I am already looking forward to the next  time.

PROUDLY PRESENTING MOONDAR

You’re stuck on a runaway moon buggy speeding across planet Moondar. Enemies attack from above while obstacles come from ahead. It’s your job to stay alive by steering the moon buggy out of harm as you destroy the alien invaders! It’s got cool dual mode gameplay, awesome soundtrack, and sweet minimalist graphics (lol).

Click here to play and rate Moondar!

Tags: love2d, lua, moonscript

So my final LD game is called MOTHBOTS, check it out here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18980

I was a bit stuck at the start, so I just took an idea and ran with it. I did a lot of things I had never done before so that was great, and was happy to finish it in time. I also made a timelapse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Zke1DTujA

Seeing it now though, makes me feel like I’d rather work on stuff with cool characters and interesting universe then arcadey action games. I feel like I should start practicing writing, I’d love to work on something like a point n click adventure or something similar. Coming up with ideas is easy but fleshing them out, to me, is really difficult.

I learned quite a bit of technical stuff working on this Ludum Dare, but I feel like this direction in terms of the type of content I want to create is the most important thing I got from it.

Here is my entry: Beyond Minimalism

P.S. This post just for participate in potato challenge and lolz =)

Tags: potato, Potato Challenge

It’s been a blast!

We look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Play it here:

http://jimbobaby.com/hatguy

Rate it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13308

We are excited to play everyone else’s games over the next few weeks! See you out there!

Really struggling to nail down the weird mechanics in this game.

Going to take a short break and focus on getting the general game structure in place. I’ll have to review it later in the day and make a decision whether I can submit this to the jam. There’s some cool stuff in here, but it’s a bit of a weird concept.

Hi,
The first time I made something useful for Linux and it is even a game!
So go get it, you sweet little Linux users!
I know a few windows users had difficulties with this game, I uploaded a patched version, with the OpenAL runtime binaries directly within the archive instead of providing the official installer (lesson learned!), and no OpenGL extensions (like the lovely GL_EXT_framebuffer_object) are needed anymore.
Would be nice if you could check out my game – Chameleon
Have a happy judging
Helco

I.

Here is my entry to the 48h compo entry : Play DoubleW !

This is my first entry at LudumDare. And kind of my first self-computerized game.
Play DoubleW, try to understand it. It will bring you to warm, new, unfamiliar, obscure, dazzling, torrid, antediluvian places.
Escape.

Things to fix after ludum dare!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11500

So far  the major things people have complained about that need fixing are:

• More clear game play instructions
• Tighter controls
• People seem confused and thing the arrow keys are the only way to move, need to make it more obvious that WASD also moves that character
• Game is too fast. This is a tough one because it isnt the game is to fast but people are to slow/ or they don’t understand they can move fast. I will need to make it more clear that you can move fast.
• Inverted controls

Things I am excited to add

• I really want to make it so people can upload/choose there own custom songs from the pc. This will probably only be for the windows/mac versions.
• A world that re-acts to the music. So far I am thinking if the volume is low all the blocks are flat  & black and white. Then when music gets started the “come to life” and become more colourful.
• More gameplay options, and obstacles
• More tunes.
• Tutorial.

Hopefully I will stay dedicated and add these features.

I would much appreciate some feedback on my Ludum Dare entry. You play as an angry Video Game Reviewer and get points for Negative words. It was entirely made in Batch.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=23036

For future updates and more games, follow me on Twitter; @MrNashington

Or go to www.VintageGamesCo.wordpress.com

Tags: angry, batch, DOS, reviewer, text

Yes, a submission has been achieved!

OK… went over time… so it’s entered as a “jam”.

The initial Mondrian-esque vision was abandoned.

A last minute “Twine” creation is the final project.

Play It Here.

I normally write this post immediately after finishing and submitting a game to the compo, but I fell asleep. 😛 This was the closest I’ve gotten to the deadline (Half an hour remaining); I often finish with a few hours to tweak minor things.

Anyhow, my take on the theme was to take an often complex/overwhelming game genre and strip it down to its core elements. Antarctic Skirmish is a minimal real-time strategy game featuring just one type of unit, and two main objectives: farming resources, and fighting the enemy team.

Penguins may to farm fish at fishing holes, and said fish can be used to hire more penguins. Due to only having one type of unit, the strategy is primarily in positioning and disruption of the enemy’s farming.

I’ve had mixed feedback regarding the difficulty of the game, but unfortunately couldn’t spend as much time as I would’ve liked to with regards to balancing the AI/overall game. I hope it’s enjoyable, regardless.

Entry page

What the world looks like after too much Vectrex gaming.

Minimalism. Quite a tough theme in my opinion. I tried to come up with an idea that utilised it in gameplay as much as possible, instead of just applying a minimalistic graphical style.  After several scrapped ideas I decided to create a game in which two worlds are visualized at the same time,one being in 3d and one being simple and minimalistic 2d, and in which objects in both worlds could travel between these worlds. I thought about making some kind of puzzle game in which the player could “construct” the 3d world from the 2d representation. But as puzzles are not my strong suit, and feeling the amount of work grow too fast, I decided to condense it down to having an enemy which could travel between the worlds and which had to be destroyed using an object which could be “sent” to the 2d world.

The way I solved it was to have the world in which the player exists to behave a little like the later Animal Crossing games, ie. the world curves abruptly near the screen and in the horizon. While the 2d world(the astral plane) behaves a little like Tetris, and when a 2d representation hits the 3d world it materializes. The player can not move to the 2d world but instead has its position in it represented by a sun-like circle. The player can then use the circle as a marker to interact with the 2d world.

I’m still fond of these ideas and concepts, but I’m not sure how wise they were for me to try to realize in 48 hours. Lots of experimenting were done and a lot of stuff were scrapped, my priorities on what to spend more time on might have been a little skewed as well. And I feel that there are still a lot of stuff missing from the final product, especially in terms of tutorials and visual feedback from actions in order to ease the player into the gameplay. I do feel however that it’s a lot more interesting than my previous entries.

If the game and the concepts seems interesting, give the game a go and tell me what you think!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11939

(Timelapse and more ports coming soon)

Also, there are evil potatoes in the game.

Tags: animal crossing, astral offset, dual worlds, LD#26, mini post mortem, minimalism, potato, tetris

Dropblocks is a game. I’d write more about it but my brain is warbled.

You can play it here!

Your plane has crashed in the middle of the winter. In order to survive the wild you will only need to bring what you NEED. However, what you need will be your decision to make.

I want to balance out the important parts of surviving in the wild. For example, it will take time to set up your tent, if you don’t set it up before daylight goes out, you will have to sleep outside in the cold. But your also going to need to reach safety, so how long do you wait till you set up camp? And what about gathering food and starting a fire? I think this will create some interesting choices.

There so much work to be done, hopefully I can get the basic mechanics working for the deadline.

9 hours to go jam entry!

It will be hard to finish in time, there will be probably a post compo to polish things not finish in time

I have to implement many arts, make a menu, correct bugs, balance the difficulty, highscores, polish… And alone to finish it :'(

Here is our last playable demo :

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63045496/LD26_demo_Webplayer/webPlayer/WebPlayer/WebPlayer.html

after many hours of works i have finally completed my game

it feels awesome because it is my first game using flixel and my first entry to LD

you can check it out from here ———> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21553

Hey!, I came here for show you all the process of creation of the game I created for this ludum dare (yeah, my first ludum dare :)! ).

(click on the picture)

The name of the game is Nothing Is Impossible and you can vote and play it here.

Don’t know why, but I can play it very well.
My friends not, if they select the level, which they want to play, the whole JVM crashes… -.-
Google can’t help and every try to fix this problem doesn’t fix it, too.

The timelapse for Linewalker has been uploaded. Enjoy.

Tags: LD#26, linewalker, timelapse

Earth Defender is also Potato-proved!

Try to find the potato in the game (It’s the Easter Egg ^.^) and enjoy it [+1 ]!
Click here to play the game!

Tags: #votepotato, Earth Defender, minimalism, potato, potato-proved, vote

Our strategy game is shaping up!

Still needs buildings & lotsa things but we’ll see what we can cram till the deadline!

Okay guys, I’ve managed to finish before LD48 deadline. I post it that late because I had some problems with compressing timelapse video.

That is my third Ludum Dare in a row and, I think, progress is noticeable. Which please me a lot.

But still, I have a lot to learn – I’ve fallen again in that pifall with shortening my game just before deadline. I had prepared much more things than I was able to implement. Again. But this time I’ve managed to provide a PLAYABLE version. That’s something!

What is also great is that my code is neat. I really like it: it is easy to understand, clean and flexible. I’m proud of it!

The other thing is that, besides code, there’s nothing more in the game – because of concept, there is literally no graphics. And no music either as I was afraid to play with it on Ubuntu (I’m still not familliar with this system).

But, after all, I made a complete, working cRPG with character development, fighting, dialogues, history and its universe, closed in 4×3 pixels. Beat that! 😀

Mini Epic Adventure

timelapse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgxwTh4-UlE

Also (I’m curious if anybody finds it):

But we are still going to work on it, and probably take it to the android market.

Here is the entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12316

There was an earthquake before, kind of weak but long… I had forgotten how earthquakes felt in japan.  Anyways, it’s 2:45 AM here, so the post-mortem will have to wait until later.

It’s funny to see how much the game idea has changed since the start

Well that was a wild ride!  Now it’s time to check out some games!!

I’m really happy with my end result: squarespace : A 2D “build your own ship” shooter/miner game. It’s definitely the most ambitious one I’ve done to date, and hopefully the most fun to play!

From the Play Guide:

“You start off as a captain in charge of a small spaceship. Over time you are able to upgrade the ship (adding new components) if you gather the necessary resources. You’ll also be given missions to carry out by mission control. You will encounter a number of hazards along the way and be set various challenges, finalizing in a major
mission that will test your piloting, mining and construction skills to the max.”

I started off with the idea to create the most minimal space exploration game possible that was still fun to play,with heavy re-use of gameplay elements in different settings. For example the ship which you build in space should also land, travel along the surface of a planet, and mine down into the ground. The idea was to cycle between flight –> surface exploration –> mining –> flight, all with a similar look and feel, but subtly different mechanics. It would use an “always forwards” approach – no turning back or slowing down – so decisions are deliberately constrained, and have a high impact on the outcome. However: somewhere along the way things turned complex! This is mostly due to the ship construction and resource harvesting mechanics. Everything is based in the flight phase only (though you can see aspects of the surface exploration / mining ideas in the level design). Finally, the “no turning back” concept is covered partly: it’s not possible to stop the ship, but the levels do loop vertically so you can continue until you reach your objective.

The music is my attempt at a minimalist composition, whereby the core pattern is repeated and overlaid in different ways to create an interesting texture.

Inspirations: Elite Frontier, 0x10c, Minecraft.

I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed creating it – have fun!!!
~berkano

Here’s the last 48 hours compressed into 4 minutes.

Click here to play Maximalism!

Tags: timelapse

Finally done!
Now Sleep….

Play here

Post mortem and timelaps will come

EvaD

Tags: Cubic, EvaD

Timelapse and html5 version of my game “The epicly short adventure” are finished!

Note that in the html5 version you cannot save, and the graphics may be blurry (depending on the browser, chrome and firefox should be ok)

The timelapse also show the two hours I wasted on a different concept, so you get a glimpse what could have been. Not that it will make any sense.

View game here:

Playable Java jar:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sfpobdlcsmgtfp3/FengShooey_v1c.jar

So the 48-hour compo is over and I had a lot of fun making my game. So now I’m going to be playing a load of your games on Livestream.

Come and hop in if you want to watch, maybe suggest your game, whatever!

www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1

Tags: compo, game, LD#26, livestream, stream

I really want to thank everyone for the great feedback I’ve received about Pïxl! I was my first time at LD and the experience has been amazing.

Here is a timelapse of how it was made: http://www.youtube.com/embed/nY4SEY_VBN8

If you haven’t played it yet, you can do it here.

Here’s my screencap timelapse movie for my game ‘m’:

It’s not as interesting as my previous ones due to the lack of graphics in my game. Watching the timelapse of the graphic creation is usually my favorite part.

Play ‘m’ and let me know what you think.

Tags: timelapse

Click here to play/view my ENTRY

What do “Reich 18” means? Well, it’s from a minimalist music masterpiece:  “Music for 18 musicians” (1974) by Steve Reich cf. http://youtu.be/zLckHHc25ww  There are only 4 musicians on the game screen because the screen is small; … I’m wondering if controlling 18 buttons/musicians  could be possible! So you have to press the right key (X,C,V or B) when the range of notes is full; 5 bonus points if the maestro is vertically above.

It’s not the greatest gameplay (it’s pretty boring after 1minute…) but I think the feeling is similar to the old 1980s game & watch.

Tags: Construct 2, Game&Watch, html5, jam, retro

I tried to create a minimalistic jump and run called “The Box in the Box”. The visuals are similar to LIMBO and I also worked pretty much on the physics.

I used an older project of mine as a template which was made in September and tried to built on top of that. Unfortunately I couldn´t finish the game.

It would be great if you tell me how you think about the game and if you experienced any bugs.

And here is the link to the playable build:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/PiotrMi/the-box-in-a-box-prototype

Yeah, I decided to make my game simpler.
I’ve made the fade effect to red blocks, so it is more comfortable now to remember the map. Also, the speed has got the limit now.

—CONTROLS—

The main feature of the game is the irregular controls. So, there is the scheme:

W – left-up

D – right-up

A– left-down

S – right-down

INO – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10839

This is the second time we do a Ludumdare and this has went much better than last time !

Presentation :

This is a competition inside the LD26 competition !
Are you ready to test, brutalize and paint the other LD26 games minimalism ?
Are you ready to become the artist of this upcoming influence ?

FOCUS
We tried very hard to not do simple, but try to integrate a minimalism idea from the painters, arts,…

THE TEAM
Flash developper : Francois Provansal, from Lotusgame
PHP developper : GUNNING Sky, from SkyWEB
Designer : Phlox
Beta tester : Yukister (Many thanks to him !)

WHAT WE USED
Flash (AS3), Box2d
PHP, Apache, HTML5, Jquery, MySQL
Photoshop, Premiere, Audacity
All Ludumdare 26 games primary screenshot

PLAY THE GAME

YES, we’re done! “Stargazers” is out and ready to be rated and played.

Here’s the link:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10976

“Stargazers” is a simple game of drawing constellations using your little stargazer. Fill up your gallery log with all of your perfect completed constellations and have fun!

Click here to PLAY and RATE MBlok

At the beginning of the project I set myself a goal, like I did in the three Ludum Dares I have participated in prior.  In my first, my goal was to finish.  I was disappointed with what I made, as I focused so hard on finishing my game, that I stripped away polish and ended up with something that wasn’t very fun.  In my second, my goal was to make something simple.  I ended up with Stargazer and was very happy with the result.  In my third, my goal was to do something I hadn’t done before.  I chose perlin noise generation, and randomly generated my terrain for A Villain is YOU!  Again, I was rather happy with the result.

This time, my goal was to make my game polished and fun above all else.

I chose HaxePunk for my platform of choice, as I wanted to be able to easily compile for multiple platforms.  I would have gone with Stencyl, as I had for two of my previous entries, however the longer I use Stencyl, the more I feel limited by it.  It is a wonderful platform, but it lacks meaningful class structure, and the interface makes it slow for me to develop in.

That said, I love the concept of haXe, and the syntax is familiar, and so I chose HaxePunk over Haxe Flixel.  Why?  It’s quite simple really.  Haxe Flixel’s API listing page is broken, and HaxePunk’s isn’t.

That said, I had a few moments of frustration with HaxePunk early on, but overall I quite like the library and would work with it more in the future.

So, let’s tackle this whole scenario in chronological order.

First, the theme.  Minimalism.  I wasn’t too hyped about it, but it wasn’t Alternate Physics, so I was happy ( though in retrospect I could have made the exact same game and it would have fit for Alternate Physics as well ).    I brainstormed for about an hour and settled on two ideas.  First, a one button game where you played a planet at the center of a radar system, and you hit the button at the right timings to fire on enemies that are revealed by the rotating radar blip.  Second, a game where you click to remove blocks, and gravity changes to rearrange the mess of blocks into new and interesting patterns.

I chose the second, as it seemed like much more fun to make.

Originally, the goal of the game was to reduce the blocks from multiple colors, to a single color.  I also wanted to make blocks fall down off the screen when they were no longer supported.  This never made it past the planning phase, however, as I couldn’t come up with a good ( read: clear ) set of rules for when a block would fall.  So development continued, assuming that the block had a bottom, and everything fell according to the gravity.

I then encountered my first frustration with HaxePunk: there is no true camera.

I originally wanted to rotate the block when gravity switched.  The stage would have been magically dynamic and interesting to look at.  Rather than rotating every single block and their positions around the center of the screen, I had planned on simply rotating the camera 90 degrees.  Unfortunately, the camera I found in the API was just a reference point for where it should be, and I could find no way to apply a rotation to it.  There were mentions of rotations elsewhere in the API, however there were no resources or examples showing their usage, and my tinkering with angle properties amounted to nothing.

If there was a proper camera, I could not find it.

Instead, I worked around this restriction, and came up with the square stars in the background.  They fall like a normal field of stars, with their speed proportional to their size so as to add depth, and they fall according to whichever direction gravity is currently set to.  I’m rather happy with this workaround, as it retained a measure of the dynamic feeling I wanted for the gravity, and was also incredibly simple, much like rotating a camera should be.

Around the 4:30pm-5:00pm on Saturday, my game was shaping up and graphically pretty, and I was working on adding actual levels.  However at this point in time, I had changed the goal from one color only ( which was far too easy ) to one BLOCK only.  Gravity was moving automatically at set intervals.  I wasn’t happy though, as the game didn’t feel fun.  It was a mechanic with nothing to drive it.  There was no challenge, very little thought, and the level design was unclear.

So I whiteboarded for a couple minutes.  My train of thought went something like this:  Minimalism as a mechanic.  Reducing the complex to the simple.  Combos are good, gravity is good, the block is dynamic, the mechanic is simple.  What makes it challenging, what makes it a puzzle?  What if I let the player control the gravity?  Could work, adding control can add strategy.  One block is pointless, one color is pointless, the former is too easy, the latter has no pitfalls or strategic feeling…  What about no blocks?  Easy to do…oh.  OH.  As few moves as possible!  Maybe as little time too!  Minimalism isn’t the mechanic, it’s the strategy!

I had it.  I knew it would be fun, and all I had to do was make good levels.

I added level select, a good level config system, five levels that I sorta threw together and calculated pars for based on running through them a couple times myself.  I have terrible problem with making games too hard, so I raised the pars a little, and almost doubled the time limits.  I probably shouldn’t have, as it resulted in the game lacking in challenge.

I’m also terrible at making puzzle levels quickly, and having them be fun.

Around midnight, I had five levels, a level select screen, and a results screen, and it all flowed well.  So I decided I deserved to sleep more than four hours, and took a good long break.

Woke up Sunday at noon, and started on the title screen and music.  I’m terrible at music, but it seems to have come out decent at least.

Then I ran into my second issue.  In cpp targets, I can only have one mp3 play at a time.  I had originally planned on only using mp3’s for sound, so I wouldn’t have to conditionally compile my sound code.  I had to use OGG files for cpp targets, which to be fair are far better, but it was a tad bit annoying.  Sound also doesn’t loop, and seems to cut out on Windows.  I’ll deal with it later though.

Then I had a fun little nightmare trying to build for windows, when my haxe install broke apart.  But in the end it worked more or less.

So, I finished and submitted my game, and I’m rather happy with the result.  For the third time, I feel like I’ve accomplished my goal.  My game is fun, if easy, and polished.

Lastly, I looked into itch.io, which is essentially bandcamp but for indie games.  I think it’s pretty awesome and I’m going to keep using it in the future to distribute games.  I’ll be posting updates to it, and possibly updating this blog when my post-compo version is done.

Oh, and I also did a timelapse for the first time.

I had a great time with this project, and look forward to LD27 in August.

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

It’s an odd thing that this turned the best game I’ve made so far, and yet this time, I was able to do it in 48 hours.

I feel like, somehow, I finally got the Ludum Dare right.

In Ludum Dare 23, I got through it in 48 hours, but the game that came out was terrible in every way possible.

In Ludum Dare 24, I disregarded all the advice you’re supposed to take during this competition, including my own, because I was obsessed with getting my way too over-complicated idea done. I ended up doing the Jam.

In Ludum Dare 25, I barely focused on doing the work at all, and had to do the Jam again just because I spent too much time on Saturday watching TV.

In Ludum Dare 26, something felt different. I was just tired of not getting anything done that I was actually proud of. So I shut myself in my room for the weekend, followed the tips for a succesful LD, and actually got something done that was good.

You can just look at the top of my LD page to see it. Compared to all those other game screenshots, something about this one just feels better.

Tell me, which of these most draws your eye? If it isn’t #, you might want to get your eyes checked.

In short, I feel like a completely different person. And not just because of the new profile picture. (Although it’s pretty sweet, if I do say so myself.)

In fact, this game is the the first one that makes me want to do a post-compo version. So I likely will.

So, come play my game, #. Welcome to a new Puzzlem00n. Better yet, a new Tim.

Just want to thank everyone for having another fantastic event and can’t wait to play everyone’s games!

Check out mine here

7 hours and the clock is ticking! Still so much to do, let’s go!!! Yeah!

We’re back from work and are streaming the final development chapter on Twitch again: http://www.twitch.tv/udnozor

I added the awesome music that Łukasz Langa made, touched up the backgrounds made by Joanna Piechowiak, added the death and victory screens, packed it all up into an .exe file and a .zip.py file, and uploaded. Please play and rate it.

Now is the time of a couple of words about the making process. I planned to make a beat-em-up from the start, and was hoping to reconcile it with the theme somehow. I talked with Łukasz about the music and with Joanna about the backgrounds in advance, hoping that they will make some awesome things. And then the theme was announced, and I was crushed. For the first time in my life I had the team to do some really really awesome and elaborate stuff, and the theme had to be “minimalism”. Also, isn’t that a kind of a non-theme in the context of Ludum Dare? I mean, it’s implied in every LD! Not fair! But we went with it, and I think that both the backgrounds and especially the music turned out fantastic! This may be our best Ludum Dare game so far, but that is up to you to decide.

Not having to worry about backgrounds and music, I proceeded to thing about the gameplay. Initially I wanted something that would give you a sense of great agility and freedom — think about jumping around on the monster’s heads, hovering in the air with the sole force of the blows you inflict on them, and swiftly dodging their slow but powerful blows, until one hits you and sends you flying across the screen, smashing everything in your path… Yeah. I wanted a top-down view and gameplay similar to Rakugaki Showtime, but perhaps not as chaotic. Then I played a little of Advena on my phone and realized, that managing 2d movements *and* jumps on top of that is beyond human capabilities. So I decided to limit it to 1d and jumping — that should make it more manageable. I still wanted to have gigantic monsters and jumping on their heads, but it was hard to control the jumps. I experimented briefly with making it a mouse-controlled game — you would basically click where you wanted to have the highest point of your jump — but that turned out too hard. I needed something simpler. Then I remembered an old arcade game titled Ninja Kid (and its sequel, Ninja Kid 2) and thought that they had pretty fun gameplay, so why not use something similar. Except I didn’t have the platforms and the hero or the monsters didn’t shoot — so I made some tweaks to account for that. What was left from my original idea is the massive chaos and stuff flying around.

Latest image from my stealth game in progress.

The game is coming along at a speed I never knew possible, but even with such a late beginning, Fearless might make it in time for the Jam! I finished the player and enemies, now it’s up for the items.

I lost the first day to an idea that I wasn’t really happy with, progress was slow, and my motivation was disappearing quickly.

Got up on the second day, scrapped the original idea, and had the first playable of a different game in only a couple of hours.  I could’ve pushed myself to get it in for the compo, but I took the extra time and got some more work on it during the jam day.  What I ended up with, I’m quite happy with.

It’s quite simple really. 2D top-down arcade game where you mash the keys, run around picking up coins, and get to the exit. There are some enemies as well, and each level has a timer on it.

Anyway, here it’s here: AYUG V0.3.0 Submission

For anyone, who wants to help and maybe needs it:
I uploaded the new source code.
But the horrible bug is still remaining… -.-
Die, mystic bug!!! 😀

QUANTA

Here’s my very short, very minimal entry. The title is ‘quanta’.

The aim of the game is to cut the block into as many pieces as possible. Avoid the flying pieces as you go.

Arrow Keys move, WASD shoot (is that the wrong way round…?).

Enjoy!

This jam went surprisingly well for me! This is the first time that my project has come together and is actually playable! Yay!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=23016

and….

Timelapse!

=)

and pics!

We are giving it one more hour! Then we build, upload, and PLAY :D….

… and SLEEEEEP.

Squibble is now online and playable so please check it out this is my first entry in a ludum dare though i have entered the mini ludum dare before all comments are greatly appreciated, i have really enjoyed making this game and i will be add lots more content once the judging is complete. i have thoroughly enjoyed  the experience and look forward to entering in the next competition.

Link To Game

I was reading this post from last year:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/05/14/are-the-results-fair/

So how do things stand now?