Finally got this done. 34 hours, and 10 minutes down to 16 minutes. If you want to play it yourself: <click me>

Tags: timelapse

I wrote a little crawler that scraps pretty much all of the data for each entry of ld26 (compo and jam). I provide a simple search-interface and an API if you want to do data analytics. The search interface let’s you do simple keyword search in the title and description, filter by user, filter by link label (e.g. web, desktop, etc.), and other fancy things. I’ll provide info on the API tomorrow, to tired…

I wrote this for various reasons. For one, i wanted to know how many entries are using libgdx. I also wanted to be able to track comment count history for individual entries. My gut feeling is that one can predict the winner of LD48 within the first few days of voting merely based on the comment count. Finally, i have a little research project going on where i’ll try to rank LD entries based on various characteristics, then evaluate the ranking with the actual voting results.

In any case, maybe this is useful to someone else as well. Source is available here (JSoup, Jersey, JQuery, Bootstrap).

PLAY THE GAME HERE

Happy Gaming, Ludum Dare!

Tags: timelapse

What went right

I did it! I actually completed a game. I’ve tried making Flash games in the past but always stopped short for one reason or another – and that was my biggest motivation for joining LD, to complete something, and I did that! The fact that it only took a weekend is icing on the cake.

The environment. I used to be a Flash developer in the past but never tried doing anything outside of Flash Pro – after preparing for this competition by reading some game tutorials, I decided to try building something with Flash Builder. FB gave me very few problems and as I expected it was infinitely better for making games.

The concept. Midway through the development I sometimes wondered if the concept I came up with (a puzzle game with awake/asleep mechanics) was good or not. But after I had the mechanics in place and the code that let you interact with things I started to feel that this type of game has a lot of possibilities that I only scratched the surface on. I’d definitely like to make this into a fuller game at some point.

What went alright

My coding. I never really ran into any difficulties while writing the code – no showstopping bugs at least. The only real problem I had was realizing that I was basically trying to write the mechanics for an adventure game from scratch. I figured I’d spend 12 hours writing the game engine and could use the rest of the time to make the game levels and to add to the presentation. Sadly it took about 25 hours to get the game engine in place which left me with only about 10 hours for everything else.

What went wrong

Graphics. The graphics are ass. I thought I would have enough time to make sprites for my character but ran out of time. The rest of the graphics are way below of what I feel I can make. I even came to a stunning realization that I had no idea how to make good looking floor tiles – also I did not understand how tile systems work in games at all.

Presentation. Just another thing I didn’t have time for. The game just kind of sits there and doesn’t do anything to bring the player into the world. I wanted the things in the stage to do things when the player interacted with them – the sink should spout water and make a continuous sound when you turn it on, the toilet should flush etc etc. I also ran out of time for sound and music; having the game be absolutely silent is very unappealing.

Time management. This being my first kind of game jam of any kind, I figured right off the bat I would have to submit to the jam and not the competition. Even with that though I am not sure I spent all my time correctly. Going out drinking with your buddies is probably something I do not need to do when given only one weekend to make a video game from scratch. I also spent like an hour trying to figure out how the UI should look – only to keep changing it during the course of development.

What I am taking away from this

Game development is fun and extremely challenging. I feel like the next time I do this (and there will be a next time), I should come into it more prepared. I am already familiar with my environment to a degree but I would like to have bare-bones code templates for basic games like side-scrolling with jumping, multi-directional overhead scrolling, adventure, scrolling shooter, etc. Maybe this is a bit against the spirit of the competition but I think how interesting a game is can be how it plays with and makes changes to those engines. I also need to learn how to make pixel art and should probably mess around with some sound generators.

In the end I think getting better at game development is just a matter or doing it until you are good, just like anything else. With more practice I think I can improve on things like time management and presentation.

www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1

Tags: cakes, games, jelly, jellycakes, LD#26, livestream, stream, video, video games

Do you want to become mankind’s Messiah or a strident Singularity that wipes out the Earth?

Voted best game of competition that allows you to resurrect your wife and then eat her!

Time for Ascension!
Play Online Now

Please join me today on my stream for the follow up around 6:30 pm PST (-8 GMT) on 5/1/2013 an hour and half from now.

I will play your Ludum Dare game or one requested, just as I did during previous Relax Streams and follow up during next day.

Tags: #26, game, games, LD#26, live, Ludum Dare, Ludum Dare Relax Stream, play, Relax Stream, stream

Besides being the premiere minimalistic puzzle platformer featuring a spherical protagonist and submitted by a user whose name begins with “c” and ends in “ahman,” my game MIN(Ball) has a per level high score system.

Looking at my server access logs, I realized the game makes a database access at the end of every level.  A little filtering later, BOOM!  A plot of showing how far players get in the game.  In case anyone likes data, or funny looking plots, I thought I’d share the results:

1May2013

I’ll try to update this picture daily.

2May 20183

* Astute observers might notice more people beat level 9 than level 8.  How could that be?  Well, someone beat level 9, then decided to play it again.

3May2013

7May2013

Daily updates might have been a little over optimistic.  Especially since the play numbers have started to level off.

Data, of course, begs for interpretation.  Most people wash out on Level 4.  Is that level too hard?  Does the difficulty ramp up too quickly?  Is Level 4, about 5 minutes into the game, the typical LD review time?  Or am I looking for trends in more or less random noise?  I’m very curious to hear others’ input.

Cheers!
Cahman

Tags: analysis, data, graphs, ramblings

i feel bad for you, it was awesome, we did a live lets dev. join tomorrow, we might add bullets and stuff. seriously, it was fun.

Ludum Dare 26 Entry – NightCap.  That’s our game.  You can see it HERE<—  And by “see” I mean “Play” of course.

(originally posted on www.shuddahaddalottafun.com)

I sit, eyes focused on the once pristine white mac keyboard, now soiled by ramen noodle juice and finger smudges.

It’s hard to describe my feelings after this experience.  Perhaps I’m still too close, having yet sorted though all the data in my head.  I think an even balance of the pride and satisfaction creating what we did, and the disappointment with the things that didn’t make it, or just bugged out for whatever magical ‘the world is against me’ reasons caused the feeling I have.  But this is jumping the gun…  or shark… or shark guns… what about the beginning.

Our background is in video production, sketch comedy.  Video game development is an entirely new venture for us.   When it all boils down, Ludum Dare, although incredibly challenging was probably the best way for us to start.  It forced us to learn new programs, technics and theories for game dev that otherwise we would’ve been very slow to get into.  We started with the warm-up weekend, making a game about a penguin that throws corndogs (may very well be a WIP still).  On the Thursday before the Jam, we finally had a build where you could move the penguin and throw a corndog (with some minor bug issues including Infinite CornDog Syndrome).  The head hits the table.  How do we make a game in 72 hours?

Infinite CornDog Syndrome. yeah, it’s my indie prog rock band. We’re kinda huge in Europe.

Our start times are 9pm and 10pm, our team living on the east coast and the mid-west (US).  We started a skype with a third team member (Drew… Oh by the way, I’m Alex (programmer/music).  This is Mikhail(art).  Nice to meet you.) who we knew had a busy weekend ahead, so we wanted to make sure we got his involvement in the idea phase.  Eagerly we wait, shaking with anticipation of what creative juices would be… juiced… from the inspiring theme.  Refresh.  What’s the theme?  Minimalism… Minimalism?

… Shit.

Who’s idea was that!?  We were so excited about doing the LD, then the theme was announced, and we didn’t care anymore.  It just didn’t inspire us.

Side Note:  Before when I said video game development was an entirely new venture for us… I lied.  Well, slightly.  It is a new adventure for us, just not for me.  I’ve made one game before, and it was a minimalistic platformer made with GameSalad.  I chose to make it a minimalism style game from the beginning because I knew I didn’t have an artist, and I wanted to be able to say, “yea, no, it’s supposed to look like that.“ I didn’t want to do another minimalism game.

We started the Google image search, trying to find ideas and art that would inspire us, but not much luck there.  There was inspiration to be found in our skype meeting however.  You see one of us, and we won’t name names, apparently thought that the human body turned beer into oxygen, making it necessary to drink a lot of it.  So the idea started to get thrown around.  How about if you are drunk, and when you drink things become simpler and more minimalistic, making it easier to get around?

But we really didn’t know how we would go about doing that; it seemed complicated.  Moving on.  Idea after idea was pitched, but none of them were really games.  They were art styles, themes, but not gameplay ideas.  So we went back to the drinking idea.  Let’s do a bit of that…  then do a game.

Initial concept art. Step 1.

After 4 hours, we had an idea and a plan to make it happen.

Saturday morning things seemed to go well, getting a temp character in, and the flow to change drunk stages.  But then it seemed like issue after issue.  Player spawned super high off the ground. Drinking animation wouldn’t play.  Player location wouldn’t stay correct between scenes.  But I’m sure all of this is common in game development, and this is the middle of the story anyway.  Who cares, what’s important is the beginning and the end, so I’ll skip to that.  The end… we already did the beginning…

blocking out the scene… tehe… get it?… cause they’re blocksohnevermind…

Sunday is done, we are at work on Monday, and there is still a lot to do.  I left a couple hours early from work to start doing music and sfx.  Luckily Drew was around and able to do the VO work.  By the late afternoon, we were pretty aware of what was and was not going to make it into the game.  After cutting out some art, a puzzle, we were ready to upload it to the web and call it a day.

I fink, I shuld drink summore…

Then we realized audio was missing.  It worked well in the engine, but when publishing the game, they disappeared.  I fiddled with it for about another hour without any idea what was wrong, and finally called it a day.  Go to bed.

In the end, of course we are disappointed in the incomplete art and the missing audio clips.  That audio really tied the room together.  But what we did was pretty awesome; we made a game, beginning to end.  We took a theme we hated and created an idea that wasn’t just squares and circles.  Mikhail made some great art, even though he’s never done pixel art before and didn’t have any sort of drawing tablet.  He’s going to be doing more pixel stuff in the future.  Count on it.  I said Count!

So where do we go from here?  Well you’ll want to continue down this road and take a right at the Old Creek Mill.  If you pass the schoolhouse, you’ve gone to far.  What?  Oh the game stuff, right.

Will we complete NightCap?  Well, a bit early to say, but if we don’t we will still take a lot from what we learned with us.

Will we do another Ludum Dare? I think most definitely we will be joining you lot again down the road… but not past the schoolhouse… that’s too far.

What about that penguin game? You mean, “Corndog Tuxedo”… we’ll see… we’ll see.

I want to thank everyone for playing the game!  And the comments, they’re great.  You all have a wonderful day.  Guns Up!

Tags: jam, LD#26, LD72, post-mortem

Come to my livestreem i will be playing and rating games. Just post your games in the chat and i will play it! www.twitch.tv/ecool377

Hiya folks. This is my unfinished and late game, pksl. Even in its current state it is quite fun!

Use the arrow keys to collect pixels before they reach the origin!

What’s the highest score you can get?

http://arcade.xandorus.com/pksl/

Tags: gameblaster64, minimalism, pksl, rocky1138

If you found the screenshot provided was a little un-enticing, here’s a screen shot beyond the gag intro.

Click here to play.
Controls:
WASD – Move
J – Hold to attack
K – Jump

Cat’s out of the bag on the joke anyway.  I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as it was a blast to make.
Thanks for all the encouraging comments so far.

Do it guys, I will also be streeming the games here www.twitch.tv/ecool377  Watch your game be rated.

 http://www.frivgame.co

Frivgame.co is one of many sites are good games to play online.

As soon as you enter the website, you will find a variety of games with different genres. It would be very easy to you can choose a favorite game to play.
Above the bar menu includes: new friv games, most games friv, friv 3, Juegos Friv … On the left is the game categories to choose from: Bomb games, shooting games, adventure games, puzzle games, strategy games, girl games, dress up games and more.

Just click on the image of each game you will immediately be redirected to the page and start playing free; www.Frivgame.co has the advantage that many other sites do not have the game. Nice graphics, games load faster, games genres with about 10,000 games.

All games are in www.Frivgame.co be done with Flash, so you need a browser that supports this program, no matter what version of Windows using the www.Frivgame.co it is one of the best sites in that game, as the collection is extensive and interesting game, so it is highly advisable to visit.

http://www.frivgame.co

Tags: friv, friv 3, friv games, Juegos Friv

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 2nd, 2013 at 1:03 am and is filed under LD #18 - Enemies as Weapons - 2010, LD #00 - Indirect Interaction - 2002, LD #01 - Guardian - 2002, LD #08.5 - Moon, Anti-Text - 2007, October Challenge 2012, Uncategorized. 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.

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Danielpotter/3299625

This is my first Ludum Dare competition entry that i created on Scratch. I tried to make the game with an interesting interpretation of minimalism, so i used the definition of minimalist (a person who favors a moderate approach to the achievement of a set of goals) as a basis for my game. You play as the Minimalist in a seemingly normal platformer with very difficult or impossible levels. You must think of simple ways of beating the level with the least amount of work involved. You may attempt at beating the levels like a normal platformer but to win you must think outside of the box!

Hi Dare devils,

I’ve just release an OUYA port for my Ludum Dare #26 entry.

I myself don’t haven an OUYA but I’ve been told everything works besides the music.

Hi everyone ! Leon speaking,

We have so much fun at the game jam taking place in Kawenga, a very cool place, hosted by passionate people, making regenerative and lovable nourishment. And the jam results are pretty exciting ! We will keep working on the game when we will get time.

About the Team

• Adrien Albertini, Developer
• Aurelia Binetti, 2D Artist
• Hannes Delbeke, 2D, 3D Artist and ‘codeling’ (hannesdelbeke.blogspot.com)
• Leon Denise, Developer, 3D Artist (poly.gonum.free.fr/)

About the Game

Atom That Matters is about controlling with only the mouse movement a physic body in a zero gravity space with physic elements that influence each other.

The camera orbit around the player body, and give him a continuous force in the forward direction. The player explores an environment filled with “floaters”, physic objects that you can grab.

Those two features, player’s control and floating object’s behaviours, were the main goals at the beginning of the jam. We interpreted the theme in the game mechanics, minimizing inputs. Minimize game design means that the basic game experience must be fun already even if there is no real goal. We spent a lot of time doing development and research about ideas and the space context has been chosen to make things easier. But we interpreted physic behaviors like crazy scientists making space experiments.

What happens in the game? Camera leads the player body, lightly influenced by nearest planet and sun.

Floaters are attracted by 3 forces leading to: the sun, the center of all planet positions and the nearest planet. When they are in player’s region, they have only one force applied, leading to the player. This may change in new prototype.

The torque of the object create variations and participate to the good looking physic behaviors.

The player’s goal is to minimize his resources. It was meant to fit in the theme, but we can say it’s fun to get objects. In early prototypes where graphics were abstract, resources accumulated by the player were orbiting physically around the player and it was pretty easy to lose weight. So a decision have been made, and we choose to snap objects on the player.

In the space context, random trashes and the fact that you can glue them, seems like a good and ecological thing. And those who already played Katamari Damacy know how much it feels good to grow by rolling. Player’s goal may change in a post-compo version.

For the aesthetic part, artists couldn’t minimize their desire and work on minimalist details.

A handmade parallax skybox sculpture by Hannes

The project really encourage us to develop further the two main features, certainly in an abstract aesthetic, because wild painters like Hannes doesn’t appears from tall grass. And abstraction allow us to make more game design decisions.

We’ll keep you in touch if we get time to make a post-compo version.

To play the game :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22982

Thanks for reading, playing and making games!

Many many thanks go to Kevin Gadd for implementing panning support in JSIL, despite my feeble and failed attempts at implementing it myself. And not only doing it, but doing it in three days! You can now play Conversion in Chrome at least. It may work in Safari (I do not have a Mac to test it on). It does not work in Firefox.

So for anyone who skipped this amazing(ly short) audio experience because it required Windows and XNA, go rate it now! Unless you’re a diehard Firefox or IE fan who refuses to use any other browser, then, err, have a puppy.

Tags: port

Logos from first LD day, second LD day, final compo release and post-mortem release respectively

Haven’t played yet? Give it a try ^-^

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11711

Hey guys,

This is my timelapse video from 3 days jam.

I was mostly develop level editor and design levels.

During this jam we made amazing game The Particle Swarm.

Feel free to check it out.

Game Page

Hey, as you may know my game is a multiplayer game and making a 10 second video playing alone is not so much fun
If someone want to enter in the server here is the link of my entry. When we are at last in 4 I start recording.

Thanks everyone who wants to help me =)

Hi.

During the LD 48h compo I made a game “Farmer Joe Sheep Farm” http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=9486 I only worked 12h straight from 24h, because on Sunday I had a Math Competition that took all the day.

On Saturday I managed to make everything except sound effects, which I completed on Sunday.

I managed to try out Flash game framework that I have never used Flixel. The framework itself was ok, but it lacked Documentation. As of everything else somehow managed to not make many errors and crashes, except one that took me an hour to solve. It was due to the lack of Documentation, so I had to hack it my way – the dirty way.

I think I did well in the compo, better than all the previous times, because back then there were a lot of distractions, so I did not submit anything. Here is my timelapse. 12h livestream compiled into 10 minutes, with hopefully good music.

Tags: post-mortem, timelapse

At last!

After hunting a bug for three days. A bug which caused the pre loading of assets in Haxe/NME to fail, which caused an eternal white screen of death to some of the players who tried to play my game. Now the game is ready for action!

Labyrinth Run

Not the funniest game in the world, but hope you’ll enjoy it!

On a side note. If anyone recognize this problem where the pre loading of assets fails in Haxe/NME, feel free to explain the cause. My solution now is just a hack around the problem.

Fading is a simple stealth game (you can play it HERE) i made for my second LD participation. On one hand because i love stealth games and on the other hand because at my first LD i tried to make one too, and i crashed and burned. So there was a score to settle

As the guard in Metal Gear Solid once said: “!”

What went right

I managed to come up with an idea quite quickly, after 1,5h the game design was roughly finished. The plan was to tear the stealth gameplay elements down to the bare minimum. The player should be able to hide behind one type of object, which happens automatically when he is near such a hideout. And that is it, no shadows, no destructible light sources, no footsteps making sounds, … you get the gist.

Player is shown grayed out when in hiding.

I got that main element working fast and i am pretty happy with it.  At some moments there even comes up the stealth game feeling i was going for, when a guard becomes suspicious and you see a “question mark” above it, but you still manage to barley make it to a hiding spot before the alarm sounds goes off.

I am also satisfied with the look of the game, although i do not consider myself a good 2D Artist. I hope i managed to keep the look consistent while creating something that looks minimal without making the impression that there has been no effort to make decent graphics.

One last thing that i consider going sufficiently well is the fact that the game overall, looks quite complete. There is text intro, main menu, pause menu and a short outro. All those little things make the game feel complete, although i did not managed to finish everything i planned.

What went wrong

Oh dear, where should i begin … I think i start with the infamous “WALL”. I did not hit it once, but 3 times:

1. Right after: “It is starting to look like a game!”
2. Then came: “It does not look like i make any progress at all!”
3. And: “Dammit! I did not think of that!”

I spend an insane amount of time trying to get the main mechanic to work somewhat decent. Although it turned out ok in the end, it still was very discouraging to work on. And it does not work perfectly, because it is to easy to just jump over the guards and vanish into a hideout.

One thing i intended to implement was a small save-point system, where the player is reseted to the last save-point he passed. Although i did have some experience in implementing such a system, i simply ran out of time.

The biggest thing that went wrong, where the doors. If the player passes a switch it should automatically open the corresponding door. They are in the level design, in the actually build level and their logic is implemented in the code. BUT i could not get it working for more than 1 door, and after working on it for 3h until 2 a.m. i decided to scrap it. Otherwise i think i would not been able to submit the game in time at all.

Doors, why Did It Have to Be Doors?

Because of this the level feels quite boring, it was build thinking this feature is already working.

Conclusion

Although not all things worked out as planned, i still had a great time participating. And now i am off, to play some more of the many great entries!

Looking forward to the next time.

And no, i have no explanation why evil robots would need that many water dispensers …

TunnelVision achieved visual parity on nvidia and ati chipsets now!

It was quite the piece of work, but thanks to you guys and your detailed reports and help i managed to fix all the problems to run this game! (if not let me know!)

Now you can have this on NVIDIA cards! :D

Special thanks fly out to these guys for providing detailed info on the problems. Make sure you play their game aswell!

Perry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15778

Hyaku: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=7393

wonderwhy-er: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=232

Pighead10: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=8539

Special thanks fly out to MetalCanine who didn’t make an entry this time and to NeiloGD (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=1154) who helped me a lot figuring out whats wrong, aswell as providing a solution!

The fixed version replaced the old broken one, so you can play it at the usual place: ://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=5751

Thanks to all you guys, and enjoy the game! 😀

wzl

Thank you all for voting and kind comments! .) Special for you here are POST-release version.Rate main entry, then be free to play post-release. It is ALOT easier, you can control demon with mouse(“new-age modern”) or with keys (“old-school hardcore”), also when you die, you restart at the level you died.

Here’s little post-mortem.

What went right.

Timing. I did realistic estimations how much can I do in 48 hours.  Tried to keep it minimal, preferred hard-coding to soft-coding and sticked to the plan. It turned out well and I had spare time to add few features.
Using Box2D. It saved a lot of time with it’s pre-baked collisions and physics.
Had slept well. And it has a great boost on my productivity.
Using png images. At first my idea was to use Qt vector graphics, but I discarded this idea early and it greatly simplified content pipeline.
Community! I was afraid and insecure about my first entry, but got really positive comments. Thank you guys, you are great!

What went wrong.
Ui. It was a last thing to add, and integration of the level switching and different ui screens and buttons was a great hack. I wish I thought of it in the beginning.
Not many levels. I haven’t done level editor and hard-coded levels. With editor and level-switching framework it would be possible to add more content.
Game mechanics. In the beginning my idea was to use only demon’s impulse to slow down molecules. After first play-tests it became obvious that it was way to hardcore, so I was forced to rethink mechanics and to add the force-field.
Lack of design. You know, learning curves, difficulty progression, that kind of stuff I completely overlooked.

Well, It was great experience and I hope you had fun playing my game!
Thanks to ludum dare staff for their hard work, and to thousands of creative artists, developers and simply good guys out there!

And the winners of the 26th LD,

is.. EVERYONE WHO MADE A GAME

And the winners of the 26th @ludumdare / #LD48, is.. EVERYONE WHO MADE A GAME

— Olav (@Cellusious) May 2, 2013

(instagrammed screen from the game because YES, that's why.)

– Play Here –

It’s been a great pleasure to take part of the Ludum Dare compo for the second time, the game I submitted is called “Ten Levels”. Its a simple avoid-the-enemy-collect-the-something-to-pass-to-the-next-level game that I hope you will like/have fun with.

I voted and really hoped for the theme “Minimalism” to win but without a real reason () and when it came out I had no clue at all for the game..

Also i had to spend all saturday away from home so I spent most of the time thinking about the theme and what I could do (while everyone else around me were having fun).

It was during the trip back home that I realized that it didnt need to be closely related to the art movement or the kind of graphics, the game elements just needed to be taken to the minimal possible point.

So I decided to make a game that was playable inside a simple title screen, or better, inside the loading-level screen. It was just when i wrote down “LEVEL I” that I realized that V could have been my hero looking for I and avoiding evil L and E.

I’m a big fan of classic games like Robotron and Berzerk and I tried to put all my experience on these two games on my title, and i think somehow something went into it. I wanted it to look like a minimalist Robotrozerk that sounded like an Atari 2600.

My laziness fotunately found in Construct 2 a good friend to fast prototype and design the game, so I have to thank once again that little incredible piece of software to let my imagination turn to reality once again.

I closed the game in a real hurry during Sunday (I also found the time to watch a football match in between) and I didnt realize at first that it was so difficult to win. Almost impossible!

So I spent two more days to try and win it and finally I made it so I can show you that it is possible!

Have fun(I hope!) trying to do it yourself !

I’m still playing, voting and commenting as many amazing games as I can.. I really love this competition and I already can’t wait for the next one to take place!

Bye!!

This was my 3rd participation to the Ludum Dare, and until the end I wasn’t sure to submit something. Here are the key points of this weekend.

Background: On Friday I published a game called Laitida, and I don’t know how it is for you, but finishing a project always put me down. So I wasn’t really motivated before the compo started.

Theme: Waow! Minimalism, this was a tough one. I know nothing about minimalism in graphical art, surely a bit more in music, but I didn’t feel like I was able to make a good music game in one week end. I wanted to use minimalism on an artistic point of view but also regarding the gameplay.
Lacking ideas, I finally googled “minimalism art”, and the first result was a Piet Mondrian’s frame. I guess Mondrian inspired a lot of participants this week end, which is funny when Mondrian seems to not even be a minimalist. Anyway, this separation of colors made me think of a battlefield with units, warzones, fortifications. The idea seemed a good one.

Can you see the battlefield ?

From scratch: Maybe one day, I will learn to be a good developer and stop wanting to write every single line of code. Writing everything gives you a complete freedom, but what a lack of time when you have to code GUI. Another advantage is that you think differently, you don’t ask yourself “what can I do with those tools?”, but “how can I shape my tools to do what I want?”. The problem is that you’re quickly trapped in unstable solution if you didn’t anticipate problems.
That’s what happened to me. I lost two hours trying to write an algorithm which should give me the resulting rectangles of the intersection of two rectangles (btw if someone has a solution, please tell me, I’m still looking for). I had to change a bit the gameplay since I wasn’t able to find an efficient solution.

A.I.: At the end of the first day, my prototype was ready and working, but only for two human players. I know that people usually don’t have the opportunity to play a game for two players, I definitively had to write an AI, even stupid, but something the lonely player could interact with. On Sunday, I started working on it, and I spent 6 hours. It was way too much. I should have stopped before, but a lot of small errors I made, resulted in a non working AI. Still in the compo version, the AI is buggy but at least, it acts like an opponent.

Tutorial: Even if the game is pretty simple, the rules are not straight forward, and without any explanations people doesn’t catch it. Hence the tutorial was an obligation. Therefore I decided to use the remaining time to work on this important point and sacrifice all other ideas.

M.I.A.: Since I lost a lot of time on the AI and I decided to choose the tutorial over the rest, some points are missing. I wanted to enhance the graphics, use some small animations to facilitate the understanding of the action, allow the player to save a picture of the final battlefield as a resulting minimalist frame, and finally add some ambient minimalist soundtrack.

Play Drimonna, a minimalist strategy game.

tl;dr: I wasn’t really in the mood for this LD. I got inspired by Mondrian and decide to make a minimalist strategy game. I lost ~10 hours over 23, on algorithm issues. I finally decided to prioritize the tutorial over polishing, sounds and extra features. As usual LD was a great experience which taught me a lot.

Click here to play Drimonna !

Tags: post-mortem

Someone commented that they could not play my entry into this LD due to an error stating “Not A Valid Win32 Application.” or something like that. I recompiled a version that should run on Windows XP machines as well as windows vista +.

I hope this solves the problem, and thanks everyone for your nice comments and constructive feedback

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yip3kh3ydgnqr47/LD_26_winxp.zip

I’ll post a pic too because it is more obvious what my game was then just the name so you can see if you were effected by this.

My game (it’s called COLORUS) on the main page of Newgrounds. Again!

I never slept with Tom Fulp but I love him. Thanks for LD promotions every time.

I can’t descripe how it is awesome to get positive reviews. I never had so many good reaction. It’s like my little triumph.

I’m already started making of mobile version of game. I hope it will be cool.

And now I made chronolapse of development on LD. Here it is:

My game’s page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16034

I’ve been going around trying to test and rate some of the games. One thing that I like is how this competition heavily encourages you to rate games, so your own game gains visibility. I feel this helps create the great community for this competition.

I’ve personally been checking my entry page every once in a while to reply to every comment and thank them for checking out my competition, and check out their game if they have a submission. I feel like I really want to give back to the community, and really like getting constructive criticism.

I remember there being a lot of complaints on the IRC chat after the theme was announced. I personally really liked the them, because it forces you to cut out unneeded elements from your game until you get straight to the core of the game. That, at least, is my interpretation of the theme. I feel like if you really embrace the theme, you can get a lot out of it, no matter the theme. It really gets you to think outside the box, and outside your comfort zone.

Tags: compo, first compo, First entry, First Ludum dare, journal, minimalism, post-compo, theme, thoughts

You can play the minimal RTS game here

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22273

What we did

Eric Lewis – Art & Nap Design

As the Art Lead, I designed the assets (art and geometry) for the game after doing some concept roughs of our idea. I used 3DS MAX for the models and Adobe PhotoShop for the credits and titles.

Sonny Mcknire – Code & Evil Design

As a Programmer & Designer I helped define the concept and game play.  I designed and created the monster with a combination of a model I asked Eric to make and lighting effects and particles built into Unity.  I also programmed the creatures behavior and assisted Brad with character control and scripting the key placement.

Damon Frankfurth – Code & Light Design

Bradley Erickson (Mesidin) – Code & Level Design

I laid out our level plan in Unity and I placed/play-tested almost all of the beautiful assets Eric created.   I had my finger dipped into 100 other pies as well, such as item interaction/selection, candle melting, cameras, scare triggers/scripting, menu setup, etc…

What went right?

Eric

We initially planned on The geometry in the game to have simple textures but after some tests, we all agreed that the untextured, raw geometry looked awesome in the Unity Engine with default shaders. This made it a whole lot easier for me to build more assets (50+) to make our game even better. Also – we planned the game well –  the sketches and idea were very simple. We ran out of time and were forced to leave out some sound effects, which turned out making the game even scarier – the lack of sound between scares makes it more exciting.

Sonny

 I think a lot went right.  The mood was perfect thanks to some sweet lighting work, the monster works well, the theme was adhered to, and I like how the game controls.

Damon

Brad

We finished a game!  That is exhilarating.  As a cherry on top, people played it!  During development the thought had never occurred to me that strangers would be actually playing this.  The comments and feedback have been incredible.  I am proud of what we accomplished for our first game.  As to development, grayboxing was surprisingly beneficial.  We had a plan on paper for the house as well as a design with measurements I worked up the first night for the layout of the house.  We ended up changing quite a few things when we could actually run around a graybox of each floor built with unity cubes & planes.  This allowed us to change things quickly before Eric had put any time into it at all.  Finally, I exported the final layout as an .obj file so Eric could build the actual geometry in 3DS Max using my layout.

What went wrong?

Eric

Some really good ideas were dropped because of time constraints. We had a shadow that would pop up in a window with light behind it, like lightning… spiders and rats that would fall on the player or run out from under furniture… there were quite a few good ones.

Sonny

 The candle burning out didn’t work correctly. I wish we had more time to implement more scares, and there are issues here and there like getting stuck in the attic,  lights poking through the level, the rocking chair not working correctly, etc… that we couldn’t address due to the time constraint.

Damon

Brad

Since I was involved in a lot, most of the bugs lie at my feet.  This is frustrating, but I am just glad at this point that the game is playable.  For post-compo, I plan to fix the raycasting on object highlighting, the candle melting sideways bug, plus hooking up all the drawers with the interaction system, adding the doors upstairs, and adding all of the scares we originally planned, including more sounds.  Eric built some incredible assets that didn’t make it into the compo version, so I would like to add those in.

We had a great time participating.  Thanks for checking out our game, commenting, and being such a welcoming community to newbies like us!  We will continue to enjoy your great games over the next few weeks!  There’s some incredible titles in this competition!

Walthrough(spoilers):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWF_Q06_pzw

Before I begin to explain all the process we have gone through as a team,i would like to point out that this is our fist Ludum Dare , we are a spanish team formed a few months ago and we are in full attempt to grow, trying new ideas and get better.Our desginer started 3 or 4 months ago with pixelart.I , the programmer,learned to code about 3 years ago , I’ll tell you our experience this few days.

Before LD26

In the beginning my idea was to participate alone in the 48 hours LD , it was more achievable given that I worked on monday (Because of the time zone ,for us the LD started the 27 at 3 in the morning). Talking with the designer in my team he told me : “Don’t you dare going in alone!, I’ll handle all the graphics” .Truth be told I really liked him telling me this but I didn’t want to involve a person to be 72 hours of his time sitting in front of the computer suffering the presion of this hard 72 hours ,yet I let him in.As long as we were participating I started talking with the rest of the team ,the musician and the co-designer(he manages to improve my ideas and the leve design, he is something like my right hand) agreed to help .So we created the account of the team and started to work , voting much interesting subjects. The time came were the announced the theme of this jam

Theme

The truht is that when they announced the theme I was already sleeping ( it was 3am here in Spain) , I woke up at 8am ,went to the LD page and BOOM there it was , the worst theme for me :“ Minimalist”.For 5 min, I felt a bit of rage , there were very interesting topics like “Aiming to the starts, useless gods” , topics that without a doubt could have done better for my game , but I decided to take some coffe , take it easy and start the design of my game , at 9am my team showed up and we started to think the idea.

Making of

A lot of ideas came trough our heads , we thought many crazy things , we propose ideas like making a grapich adventure , a puzzle game , mazes and many other things.After a while exposing some ideas and voting we created what it is now “Life in a nutshell”.In this game the idea was to create a game in which a person feels aflficted with the life they lead and wants to break the chains that stops them from searching another life style .The game would consists of 2 gameplay styles.The first one , a very dark one, in which there were practically no vision of the enemy and you have to sue the light to hide.With this , we wanted to send the message that happens to many people , sometimes we sink in our bad times , fight against them and sometimes you can’t win so we need a “light” that guides us. It was more or less what we wanted to show.In the second gameplay we wanted to make a part which consisted only of “taking punches”.We wanted to give the idea that “As many times as you fall , as many beatings life gives you , you have to hang on and move on and don’t let anything stops you”.

Day 1:

The first day was the best with lead , it was our first day , there were many laughs in the streaming , I devoted my time to the creation of test PJ’s so I could test the gameplay , here you have an example of what you could see in the stream:

Day 1 was all about the “dark part” , I was able to create a decent gameplay for the character , fixed the camera so it wouldn’t show unnecessary things , I created an alert system for the enemies, the incognito system , it wasn’t a bad day , everything was going good.

Day 2:

I dedicated this day to the “taking punches” part , I created a mob that prevented the pass and didn’ attack , it just stood there ,blocking , say that we were gonna create an archer and give it a parable attempt but I didn’t get the result I was expecting , we finally transformed the archer into a wizard that threw fireballs by the floor.There is nothing like a bug becoming a feature.

Day 3:

It was monday already , I had to go to work from 8 to 15( I work as a programmer).That day I kept receiving messages in skype about bugs in the game , big errors, I felt panic of what I could see when I got home.I arrived home at 15:20 , ate ( the food burned and I had to eat it like that , there was no time to waste),my team told me my alert system didn’t work , enemies didn’t detect when you were hidding , I didn’t understand anything, everything was working okay day 2 when I tested.I started to check in my friends computer and nothing was working they way it should .I looked how I put a guard and I went straight for the character , good, yet when the character hid , the guard kept hitting him, weird.I realized something , when I tested the game I only put 1 hidding zone and they were 3 now and I thought “It can’t be that this doesn’t work if I put more than 1” so I looked and yes , this was the error , for a while I fought and I found a way to fix it , then I tough “if I put more than 1 enemy then , this will fail” and yes , I put 4 enemies and It didn’t work only 1 went for the character and the other 3 remained bugged , I lost at least 4 hours in this , the time was ending , I wasn’t making any progress , I was frustrated so I decided to take out the alert system and everything worked fine but I lost my alert system.Then it was the mob in the other gameplay part , the “taking punches” part , if I let it be ,it attacked non stop, it killed the hero in less than 10 sec, I tried to make it better putting a limit of 2-3 seconds, errors came , there were a few hours left and still much to do , so I put a random and now it attacked randomly.Moving on there were only 4 hours to turn in the game , I even consider not turning in , the music was good , the history was good , graphics were good but the gameplay hadn’t turned out they way I wanted ,what do I do? Tell my team they had suffer and worked for 3 days straight for nothing?, that it was my fault for not being able to solve the problems? No , I couldn’t do that , I decided to move on and finish , give it all the necessary tweaks and leavit as much “finish” as I could and prepare my self for the shitstorm I was about to get , even so it didn’t matter because I really enjoyed and I’m really happy , I learnt a lot in this LD and I wish with all my heart I can participate in the next one.

“Life in a Nutshell” in Ludum dare

We ended up turning in the game at 2:30am (Spain time zone), next day I had to work from 8 to 18:00.I slept 4 hours that night , while I was at work I wasn’t able to concentrate thinking about the things people could say and that the message we were trying to send with the game wouldn’t get to the people.When I got home I started looking the things people said , not all where good but not all were bad either , I liked the set up and any received criticism.

To end

I’m really happy for some things we did and not so happy for others , I hope I can fix the game in its complete and get a new version , I wanna thank everyone that tried the game and leave a comment even if it was bad , any criticism is well received as long as it is constructive.If you haven’t tried it yet you can try it HERE and leave your opinions , you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter

Here’s a list of my favorite games with a short description. I really recommend everybody to try, play and rate the following games, they deserve it.

Piet Mondrian – Best game ever, seriously. Go play it right now. The humor is seriously off the charts.

1951 – Join together multiple atoms trying to keep the reactor stable. I could go on playing this for hours without getting tired.

PRISMA – Great soundtrack, amazing mood. Solve the puzzles and combine the colors with the music to advance levels.

Refracted – Really weird and ingenious game, change color to pass through different layers and parts of the level.

Edward Was Human – Amazing story, amazing mood. Really great game with simple mechanics. Fit very well with the theme.

hru – Really soothing and calming game to play. Bounce the ball to reach the top. Really god sounds.

Linewalker – Weird game, interesting mechanic. The mood is very nice in this entry. Good choice with the theme.

ORM – Best minimalistic management simulator ever. In a league of its own.

Between the lines – Amazing graphics and theme adaptation. Gameplay is very smooth and polished.

BLoX – This is certainly one of my favorites. Such simplicity and minimalism, managed to grab my attention for hours. It manages to catch the essence of hack ‘n’ slash games, so simple.

I’ll keep playing more and more and more games, lots of good submissions this year for LD. Thanks to everybody for making all these nice games. Let me know if you have your personal favorites, I’m dying to try them out.

If you feel like it, try out my game as well, I’ll appreciate it

In order to make my entry more accessible, I decided to port my game to the web using JSIL (check it out, the project is great: https://github.com/kevingadd/JSIL).

It even supports an Xbox controller (at least in Chrome), so give it a try: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12344

Oh, and if you also want to port your XNA game and get stuck, don’t hesitate to write me a message!

Tags: JSIL, xna

Last week-end, I made a game for Ludum Dare 26. It was the first game I ever finished, except it wasn’t really a game.

The theme was “minimalism”, and I had absolutely no idea how to exploit it. But it clearly was the best theme ever for a first time.

The first idea I came up with was about a path leading to some kind of monolith. Maybe it was because I’ve been playing Xenosaga Episode I, but I just couldn’t forget this almost clear image, so I had to use it somehow.

The first iteration consisted in some sort of platform game, with moving and rotating platforms that would lead to the monolith, but it was really classic, and boring, and I thought it lacked of something… so I threw it all, and I worked on the second iteration all saturday afternoon. This one was waaay more simple, but it was the almost exact expression of what I had imagined in the first place.

I’ve always had imagination, but I was never able to express it. I’ve tried writing, drawing, painting… but nothing would ever come out the way I imagined it. So, you can imagine how happy I was to finally see something that matched what I wanted.

But then what? Well, I must say I don’t really know what happened, or how it happened, but I came up with this abstract experience that would represent life, or at least my way of seeing it.

At first, you ended up being on this platform, with those forms on the sides and this monolith, you could walk everywhere (and fall… so I add to add collision walls), the sphere and the cube would start to get animated, and that was it. So I added messages.

The first one was “You must leave everything”, and the cube would go up and down, as if it was endlessly falling. This was meant to represente physical posession and some other things.

The second message to appear was “You must forget everything”, while the sphere would start to pulsate and a heartbeat sound would appear. It represented the feelings: love.

Then you’d continue to walk towards the monolith, and it would end with you looking up with a last message: “Press Enter if you are ready.”
Doing so would make the title screen appear with the title: “Life”. An indication to “Press Enter to continue” figured on the bottom center of the screen, and pressing enter would restart the game. That was it.

But being able to move and look around felt wrong, so I ditched the Unity’s default Character Controller package and I wrote my own script, deciding that the player would only be able to go forward. I thought it would be useful to give some indications of what the player can do, even if the game was awfully simple, so I added a message at the beginning (“You can only go forward.”) and with that my “game” was finished.

That’s only a day later that I understood that adding that message was the best thing I could do. When you play the first time, it’s just a simple tutorial message, but when you play a second time, it can mean something else: “You have to move on.”

That’s exactly what I wanted my game to reflect, because no matter what happens in your life, moments will always replace other moments; you’ll have to leave places or objects you hold dear in your heart, you’ll love and you’ll leave or be left, but then you’ll do it again, and again, and again…
Discovering that, I knew I had put myself into this thing in more ways than I had thought.

And some people seemed to understand it; or at least understand something in it. But mostly everybody told me that my game was lacking of gameplay or that it wasn’t really a game (which I totally understand), so I guess it’s more like some kind of interactive experience.
But yeah, some people seemed to like it, and my game even had the honor of being listed on Indie Statik, the author of the article referring to it in rather kind and positive words.

So, in the end, even if my interpretation of “minimalism” wasn’t quite what people seemed to want, and if it’s not even really a game, I’m proud of it. Plus, the message it carries is exactly what I needed myself, so it unexpectedly managed to help me.

Making games as a therapy, why not? So, thanks Ludum Dare, and congratulations for everybody who won just by making a game! :]

Remember: you can only go forward.

(Originally posted here.)

Hi

The other day I found teespring.com. It is like kickstarter but for t-shirts only. This blew my mind, because I think that’s something everyone has ideas for all the time, right? I mean, how many clever t-shirt designs did you come up with last year? Probably not zero, eh?

So this is a call to arms: I want to wear commemorative t-shirts from your ridiculous 48 hour games. I have decided to lead the way with the Mandala Commemorative t-shirt, but I demand that you follow! To arms my fellow game jammers, make memorabilia to please my hipster sensibilities. If you do make a t-shirt, send me a link: I want your game on my chest.

z.

PS I made Mandala! Go play it!

• We didn’t waste any time moaning about the theme, even though we all knew it wasn’t what we were hoping for. We took the theme as a challenge and tried our best to match our skill sets to what we thought would be a fun game.
• We agreed upon a deadline for a game idea. This prevented us from wasting too much time throwing around crazy ideas, leaving not enough time to implement them. We quickly formulated a few ideas, and took a vote. From there, we did a good job planning out what we needed from just a handful of game sketches and quick chats.

• Once we had a plan, we kept a very close eye on our priorities as the project progressed. We did things in the right order, and built up the game in logical chunks.

• No feature creep! We were ruthless on feature creep. Did the game need a particular feature to be a game? If it didn’t, it was quickly culled.

• Our music guy was excellent – with only the smallest amount of direction we got a perfect track in a small amount of time. Easily the single biggest ‘bang for buck’ in the project.
• We worked hard to get a playable build up and running as soon as possible. The game was fully playable on the morning of day 2.
• While we did work hard, we were also careful not to get too stressed. We ate properly, took breaks and had a proper sleep pattern. We knew we’d be more productive this way.

• Unexpected sickness! Our lead coder was hit with a serious migraine on the final day. This meant we had to cut some features that we considered essential. Naturally this was very disappointing, but we’re still proud of what we achieved in the time. The only way to mitigate this is for other members of the team to become more multi-skilled – leading to our next point.

• The original intention was that our designer, Chris, would be able to pick up some of the slack coding simpler ancillary features in the game. However, due to the nature of the game, Chris wasn’t really able to do much code wise in this project. Hopefully in a more ‘traditional’ game, and with more experience, we hope this will balance out in time.

• All of the team were in the same flat in Sweden, except for Chris who is UK based. While Skype, Google Drive and Subversion make it pretty easy to work this way, there are limits. The most obvious example being the limited interaction between Chris and Anton, the artist on the project. If they had been in the same room, ideas could have been conveyed much faster, and it would have given them both more to do during down time, while waiting for critical features to be implemented. Next time, we will make sure to all work from the same location.
• Not enough blogging! After finishing the game and looking back over what we had done – we realised we had documented nearly none of the creation. While this didn’t directly effect the game, it’s a real shame we don’t have more to look back upon during the creation of the game. Next time, we’ll make sure to make much more frequent updates, take pictures and generally contribute to the community at large.

• Not everyone in the project had Visual Studio, meaning one of the coders would have to copy out builds every now and then for testing. The project was small, and this wasn’t a massive hardship. However next time it would be worth the time automating the process to maximize time spent actually developing the game.

Until next time!

/TriBeard

Tags: LD #26

My second Ludum Dare, and a more planned try this time around! So what was different, what went deliciously right, what went distastfully wrong and what would I do different? Lets look at it chronologically. And then by pro and con-points.

The Pre Mortem

The Theme

“Minimalism” – Jod texted this to me on Saturday morning, and as the first thing I say upon awakening, I was not immediately enthused. Quite the opposite… my first reaction was “Really? Isn’t that Ludum Dare by definition? You numbskulls!”.
The next hour and a half I mulled it over in my head a while, and tried to dig into that feeling it was giving me: “Minimalism is bleh, you should try for rich things and worlds!”… and in the end I decided to give that feeling shape in a game. Inspiration through opposition!

The Planning

My last Ludum Dare was marred by the fact that I didn’t finish it. A sound theme, an interesting concept, and enthusiasm does not necessarily a completed game make in 48 hours. So this time around I decided to take one day to build the game, and one day to polish it. (That is as far as my planning goes. Two items, two days. I was quite proud – progress!)

Day 0.5

(A programmer wants to think in binary, and perhaps, if pushed, in decimal. Hours? Silly things.)

So after half a day, I had my concept written down. “Reducing to X”, was a game where you start in a Rich, Lush world and then supposedly reduced a game to one concept, which was given at the beginning. “Death”, “Fear”, “Glory”, “Fun”. You know, dem feels. At the end you would make a screenshot and let it be judged by others.
A bit lofty, unspecific, and rather non-traditional-gamey, indeed. But it was the only idea I had. And it let me play with procedural stuff, which I like.

Day 1.0

Halfway… and halfway the halfway (0.75 day, if you’re keeping track), I was thoroughly displeased with my progress, and the concept in total. “Jod”, I said to Jod, “I think it might be best just to scrap this entire idea.”, quite misanthropically. “Well what is it you are stuck on?”. “Everything.” “Ok, lets get some groceries then.”
We went out to get the necessities of life, and got some noms. “I’m going to see what I have one more time.”, I declared after dinner. Sullenly I poked and prodded my achievements so far, trying to get that ‘Rich world’ going. After a but I got my ‘skybox’ going, I finally had some movement, and color, in my world which I was satisfied with. And a new concept!
Reduction not to a one ‘word’, but just reduction on itself, as something bad. My renouncement of minimalism. Gleefully I added a black floating Monolith to the center of my world, representing that Evil. Ha! I saw an opponent to the Monolith too… The Wisp, a glowing ball of ‘Creativity’, light, color! Happy with my concept and quite optimistic on my chances to finish it, I went to bed.

Day 1.5

Arise and shine! Jod, my co-ludum-dare-patriot, prepared some delicious breakfast, and I set of programming fanatically! I experimented with the behavior of my worlds critters, and how they would behave when ‘resisting’ the player. Progress was being made, but but quite fast. So I looked at my concept one more time and said “What could go, if really need be?” Well I need an ‘end’ so I need to reduce. The player was supposed to have a choice in the middle of the game: Go Minimalist and fully join the Monolith, or go Creative and join the Wisp? Ok, maybe I just do the Monolith part, but I probably will be able to do both! (yeah…)

Day 2.0

I just made a nice “Close encounters of the third-kind gone evil” sound for my Monolith. I look at the clock. Ohhh damn 1.75 day o-clock already?? Ok, so maybe creating ‘two sides’ of everything might take a little bit too much time. Actually, I might not be able to add music. Or get an ending? Or handle all what the player does? PANIC!?
First things first – Reduce! I add walls to the world. I make sure something happens when the player jumps off the edge. I strike all really fancy terrain height-decreasing. Scrap behavior for the Wisp, and for the Big Cube.
Then Playtest Playtest Playtest. I like my white text-in-the-sky, but it might be unreadable at times… with a great sigh I make it black. Not as pretty, but, you know, always readable. Oh, just 2 hours left? I need to balance the player progression real quick! And compile this stuff? Oh yeah that too. A menu? No time. A name, err ok. A title screen? Two lines will do. In short, I needed all the minutes of the night. But it looks nice. Ending on a rush, I look at the clock… 5 AM? Great. Work in 3 hours. Lets take a “nap”, and engage zombie mode…

The Post Mortem

 What went right?

• The engine – Unity3D gave me a lot less hassle than my previous engine, used for LD24, Moai. Ok it is not perfect or non-crashable, but it has docs and heaps of player usage. And a terrain engine I could really abuse for this game.
• The concept – Ok, not exactly what I envisioned, but it does generate a ‘feel’ that minimalism is not a ‘good’ thing. And that was the goal.
• The behaviors – I was really satisfied with how all the critters in the world moved. Powered by the Unity3D physics engine and some creative restricting thereof, they feel wild and random, but structured too.
• The colors – I dig procedurally generated stuff, and picking the right things to make that way, and the right things not to, paid off. No-one will notice the purple trees are always in the same space if the terrain height varies. Giving all critters one color gives consistent identity.

What went wrong?

• The planning – Ok, not as badly as last Ludum Dare, but I really should have started cutting earlier, and place some priorities.
• The music – What music, you ask? And I say indeed. A golden opportunity to give a rich world more ‘body’, pushed to the end and then struck.
• The progression – I did not play the game often enough to have a balanced feel of how long each ‘part’ of the game would last for an average player. Due to last minute changes there I even broke the game by ‘skipping’ a quarter of it, I did fix that in one subsequent update.
• The controls – This is a bit of a dubious one, since I had no problems with them. It was a physics based FPS-like feel. But I see enough people complain to understand that it is not ‘natural’ enough. Maybe I should have added a ‘jump’ option to give the novice player more possibilities to maneuver.
• The name – Seriously, think two seconds more. I did not. It doesn’t fit as nicely as a million other names. And hardly unique.

The verdict?

I am satisfied enough by the end-product, from a realists’ viewpoint. But in the end the players will decide. Will you?

Play : Less is More!

Tags: post-mortem, pre-mortem

www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1

Also if you comment here I may not reply right away, so instead comment in the stream chat!

i love trophies, it’s something that i have decided right now, to love trophies.

play and win my games! make me happy! get the trophies!

#LD26 minimalistherain

#LD24 you are the rain

yesss, i guess i have a fixation for rainy games.

wordhunter v100 in-game

WORDHUNTER is a twin stick shooter (like Geometry Wars) where you shoot at characters. If you get a word together your multiplier rises. Well, that’s it. Two sentences for two days work. I started late at about 12 PM (GMT+1) Saturday. I had the idea of shooting characters early, but three different concepts to make a game out of it. One being a space invaders clone. I choose the twin stick genre and got started. I worked with black squares and a triangle as temporary art. The explosion was done by hand in Gimp because I wasn’t happy with the results of explosion-generators. Spent some hours with my girlfriends Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Got at coding again at 12 pm. The stress was building up and my head started to tell me that I could just quit, but I wasn’t going to quit as I had a working prototype at that point and I NEEDED to finish. But no game over event, no high-scores, menus or music. I started with the menus, trying to get them right at the first time (which I did), then the game over event. After a (late) lunch I wanted to compile a demo for play testing  That’s where the terror started. I used Slick2D before, in other prototypes, but I did never reach the state to actually export a game. In that moment, high-scores were cut and the music fell a bit short. I was aiming to enter the game at 12 pm (because I had to work on Monday) and entered it at 2 am I guess. Cooled down a bit after that. Viewed other submissions and finally got some sleep. I’m happy with the result, well, if you get over that fact that it get’s too hard too soon. And the hit boxes have a slight (8 px) offset to the right. And words are hard to get. But well, it was my first time and I loved it. I already fixed a lot of bugs for a release the next days on my website.

What went great:

• I had a Slick2D  template ready
• Used OpenMPT, Gimp & sfxr before
• Some experience in game writing from a couple of prototypes/demos
• Went out with my dog a couple of times to get fresh air and free my mind – That helped a lot
• Setting myself a deadline was good
• Trying to export a play testing demo was a good idea

What went no so great:

• Exporting – You should figure out what you need and have to do BEFORE entering a contest 😉
• If you need pixel explosions – do them by hand. Don’t try out 3 different generators for nothing
• I thought my idea was small enough to get everything done – it wasn’t. Next time: Start small – Use the time I have left to add stuff.
• I had to cut some stuff in the end: High score lists, better Music, more types of enemies and better balancing of waves.

For the next time:

• Take Monday off
• Get to bed early on Friday and start directly at 4am

Thank you for reading and enjoy the game. And if you liked it, rate & visit my website soon for a better version

PLAY WORDHUNTER NOW!

Tags: 2D, LD#26, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot

It was a fun weekend, and I’ve not done something like this before – some lessons were learned –  and relearned, including but not limited to remembering to save often.  I lost about 2-3 hours due to crashes and not having saved backups.

I think I also probably misinterpreted the theme somewhat, having played 40 of the other entries now-  some people really grasped it, having the chance again I’d probably do something less complex and throw in more levels.

Getting too hung up on game mechanics like wall jumping  meant I didn’t have time to do additional levels or polish.

I didn’t do a timelapse as I hadn’t figured out how , but I uploaded some of the stream showing the construction of the project , sound and graphics.

TL:DR  Click to play :

Press the six key on the title screen for a bonus surprise.

“B0xPa1Nt: The Adventure” The full version including:

15 new gamemodes planed.

Multiplier

level editor

mod support

over 25 new story levels planned

15 new toy-box maps and modes planned

Cool new shaders

AAA mode, explained on blog.

http://ecoolsagamedev.wordpress.com/

PLAY :: RATE :: TIMELAPSE :: WALKTHROUGH

Minimalism exposes the essence of a subject, through eliminating all non-essential forms…

Essense is an atmospheric serene first person “puzzle”. Really cool for a relaxing moment before going to bed.

In this post-mortem, I’ll try to explain what things of the development process made me mad, what made me sad, and what made me glad.

I Suck At Making Levels

Yeah, now I know. Usually I don’t play puzzles, so it was a real challenge making one. I was trying to figure out good puzzles to include in the game, levels that would be fun to play. I guess I didn’t chose well, because…

Levels Are Really Hard

I think it’s a problem of communication. I wasn’t able to find an effective way to communicate what the puzzle was about. Sure, you have to grab the red cube, but what’s the mechanic of the level? That and some difficult controls (which I modified now), has led my game to be almost unbeatable.

Power Outages And Plain Bad Luck

I guess the world didn’t want me to participate in Ludum Dare. I have gathered a list of things that happened to me this weekend:

• 3 power outages of about 2/3 hours each.
• Computer broke the first 3 hours. I had to waste 2 hours fixing it.
• Laptop has temperature issues and I couldn’t use it to develop at all.
• Internet went down for about 3 hours.
• One of the outages corrupted my Unity project so I had to start again.

Lot Of Time Testing

If you watch my timelapse, you will find that I was spending lot of time testing my game. That surely was one of the reasons why my game is difficult: the more I tested my game, the easier it was for me, so the more I increased the difficulty.

But why I tested it so much? Well because the atmosphere was really cool so I played lot of time to hear the music, read the messages, etc. That’s because I was…

Not Organized At All

So I had to make lots of things, but I couldn’t make a list like my previous Ludum Dare. I don’t know why, I just didn’t think it was necessary. So I wasted a lot of time working on the atmosphere first (I had the music very early on), and not much time in the mechanics.

Unity3D Editor

So one of the wonderful things about Unity3D is that you can extend your editor to make custom tools. I created tools for the logic puzzle and the jumping puzzle, which allowed me to modify them quickly.

Parser

For creating the blocks in the dodge level, I made a parser that reads a simple script, describing how the level should be created. Then Generate creates all the blocks in the corresponding positions.

The first letter correspond of where the block will be coming from, North, East or West. The second letter correspond of what position the block will have, Left, Center or Right. If there’s an X at the end, then a Checkpoint is created instead. The special letter S is speed, and O is offset, both followed by a number.

Visual Handlers

For the logic puzzle, I needed something to tell me how was the level being connected. I figured I could do it using the Handles class, using a white arrow indicating a floor that turns on another, and a black arrow indicating a floor that turns off another.

Visual clues helped me know what’s happening. Click to enlarge.

Unity3D Pro Effects

So with Unity Pro it is really simple to add fancy post-process effects. I added vignetting and reflection, which lot of people told me it was really cool looking. I was about to add more effects, but that wouldn’t be minimal.

Easy Way To Make Music

I used Paul Stretch along with Audacity to remix a version of Four Seasons of Vivaldi. It was an easy and hacky way to have a beautiful dreamy music. I also was worried that it would be against the rules to remix a song, but I asked in #ludumdare and it was ok.

Tags: 3D, final, LD#26, post-mortem, postmortem, unity3d

It’s been almost a week after I’ve finished the game, so I’m posting on the things that I like and what I don’t like from making the game… Maybe out of boredom.

What went right:
1. Output of the audio
I really got surprised on the output of the audio, because while testing the game, I’m starting to like my own music made with FL Studio. Well, sounds made with SFXR are just easy but also awesome. To be honest, I really suck on composing music and this was the first (serious) music made by me to use in a game, and yeah… 4 short-loops that is. After years of using it and get frustrated on my past outputs, those music used for MinimalFive is a sign… And I’m seeing that a lot of people who played and heard the audio likes it too… I thank for those people who commented the game in terms of audio, because I never expect to have those kind of output even I’ve composed (and even modifying them) for just 2 days.

2. Effect of “Minimalism” theme
Before the theme was announced, this theme was one of my expectations… Because as I read the themes, I got a lot of ideas when I saw this theme… Not just because of simplicity, I also love trying different art movements for me to see my games in different looks… And it did worked out like how I expect at the execution of the game in terms of the graphics. The effect of the “Minimalism” theme also made me go random… It goes like some random gameplays and some random texts (Yes! This was out of boredom! xD), and I made them as simple as possible… And I was glad that some people get the game and also some even finished it until the end. Thanks to some simple instructions I’ve typed in the game.

What went wrong:
1. Laziness at the 1st day and summer class
I got some advantage when it comes to the time, since the theme announcement here in the Philippines is at 10am so I probably have a lot of time to think and sketch the ideas and somewhat far before I sleep so I stay awake for hours and hours until night. But unfortunately, laziness just hit me… I knew it when I keep on just looking around or just chilling for hours (well, I took breaks, including on eating, breakfast, lunch and dinner… for just an hour) which made me wasted a lot of time. And I also expect to finish the game before Monday because when it comes to my studies, I started to get even lazier on game development and instead doing my studies (as a Multimedia Arts Student at college)… All of this just caused me to cram and stay until somewhat 1am at the 2nd day… And yeah, I was sleepy when I was at class LOL…

2. Limitation of Construct 2 (Free Edition)
To be honest, I hate the 100 events limit on Construct 2 (I’ve used this to make the game)… And that’s the only con that I want to say on this game making software. Anyway, after finishing the 4th game, I only have a very few events (I think around 10) left before reaching the limit. And this made me think that I might not put that shooting part because of it but I don’t want that to happen because for me it will be a boring game all-in-all without it. So I’ve spent an hour to short some events so now I have around 15, and tried to do the shooting part. I wasn’t apart of my expectation of the output but I think I made it simpler than what I expect, but still… It’s wrong for me to change the idea because of the software’s limitation, even around the last hours before deadline…

Conclusion:
I therefore conclude, that I’ve made a simple game even some things gone wrong, I still learned to be conservative. It was still fun making the game and not to forget mentioning this, on the first day, I’ve worked this game outside my home… At Starbucks and at School (thank God the guards allowed me to get in because I just left Starbucks to eat lunch but when I get back all the seats were occupied), and that gave me an experience of a Ludum Dare outside home haha. It was fun after all… And, I also conclude to myself that I’m getting a hang on composing music, for that I’ll learn and practice more and more on it 😀

Oh yeah about the game, I’ve entitled it MinimalFive because it has a guy who thinks of 5 mini games to work on, and it was visualized in minimalism… Weird isn’t it?… xD

That’s all, oh and for those who want to try it… Here’s the link:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=2043

And I also uploaded the short-loops used in my game (I might make a longer version of those music, if I get more motivation) if you want to hear them:
http://toadietechnika.bandcamp.com/

Thanks for reading…

Tags: postmortem

Hey I made some changes to my LD26 game. It’s a bit easier.

Check it out here:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/616819?updated=1

Ok guys, it’s time to do a first small post mortem after that Ludum Dare 26

I’m proud of what I’ve done during this week-end, not only because I finished what I wanted to do, but because few month ago, I was already working on a shmup like the one I did. The main problem was that the main logic and a shitload of programming errors. No inheritance at all, bugs, optimization problems, etc. I worked something like 4 or 5 month on that crap before giving up. So doing MUCH better during only a week was a personnal challenge for me. And I did it!!

Now, about the 48hours: I learned some usefull stuff, like using states in the main class to now the progression in the program ( like if I need to display the main menu or run the gameloop ), or like thinking a lot about the text structure I’ll use to create describe the levels. There’s actually only 2 levels in my game, because the structure made the creation/filling of the levels something horrible and I lost a LOT of time doing that :/

I know there are still bugs in the game, but with the base I own now, can think again about doing my danmaku ( and doing it for windows, linux and mac ).

So, that Ludum Dare was a great experience, for the second time I did it, my game was really better I know I’ll do the LD27 😀

And for you:
A video of the stage 1 of Minimal Shmup:

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter I’m now working on the linux “LD” version of it And after that, I’ll work on the REAL danmaku

I have looked all over the site and I can’t seem to find how to change your profile picture. Could someone please tell me how to do so?

Text adventure is still under development

Currently done :

– Bug fixes for most browser.

– A most readable source-code.

– List of available directions.

To do :

– Fix the backspace “bug” … if someone has an idea on how to solve this problem, thank’s

– Edit the last part of the code ( “take” command ).

– Add auto-completion and history.

– Add some events.

– Add a real goal.

– Add a lot of rooms and items.

Don’t hesitate to try the compo version and to add your suggestion.

Thank You.

Never be frustrated by difficult games again.

have a pleasent parent friendly minimal gameplay experience.

we at W.E.T care so you dont have to….

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

After my game was released, some users were reporting crashes. I found  memory leak and fixed it. Users of chrome were still reporting crashes.

A couple hours ago I discovered that Unity was failing to export the web version of the game because of some issue with templates. My laziness in not manually copying the new game over ruined many player’s experience. I am deeply sorry.

The game is fixed now.

I have written my postmortem for loot run. The link is http://blazinggames.blogspot.ca/2013/05/loot-run-postmortem.html

Quick summary for those who don’t want to read the article:
What went right – Keeping to the minimalism theme
What went right and wrong – Text and the garbage issue
What went wrong – 150ms keystrokes.

Let’s play of Minimal Theory!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osAkY-CJ_Pc

http://ecoolsagamedev.wordpress.com/

the trailer will include:

Dubstep

lens flare

360 headshot no scopes

shaders

and some extra stuff.

I just published a postmortem about my experiences developing Hell Hole for LD48 this past weekend.

Ludum Dare — Hell Hole

The thing I am the most proud of, coming out of this weekend, is that I finished my first game.

I learned a lot during my entry. I survived to say the least. I was very frustrated during the compo in certain ways. But!! Lets move on!

What went well:

I liked the rocket implementation.

rest of these are firsts:

I made a pause screen, and it works! “esc”;

I made an inventory screen to track your progress in the game. “e”;

a non-destroying style HUD. (not create and destroy every frame);

I made groups of NPC’s scattered all over the map in a fairly even pattern;

Bouncing shadows, fairly well.

Melee fighting!

What didn’t go so well:

the purse was the reason i had such a difficult time with this entry and ld.

I got eaten alive because i was trying so many new things. I’ve never done a Physical hitting game. I felt my collisions were off, my items flew out of bounds, and my bosses were weak. I learned a whole lot about time, vs ability, vs doing too many things at once.

(since that time I’ve implemented about 9 bug fixes into the version i have at home.) xD better collisions, better hitting and knock back, etc.

Boo!

Plans for next time;

smaller scope of a game, not so many bosses.

using the level editor and preloader code predone as it’s the same every time, can dedicate more time to the actual game.

Overall:

I thoroughly enjoyed myself and learned many new things!

Special thanks to oldtopman, araneae, chevyray, sos, pov, adventureloop, dezzles, djduty, voxel, andrewBC, and others in the Ludumdare community that have made my time here very instructive and enjoyable. <3

Keeping with the spirit of Ludum Dare and #1GAM I decided to take on the challenge of making a release trailer for my game Life!

Check it out:

Play it here:

http://www.chriswilloughby.net/life-april-1gam-ld26/

And don’t forget to rate it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18255

Thanks,

Chris W.

Hi,

here’s a list of some great games I’ve played and enjoyed a lot. They still seem to have undeservedly few votes, so I thought I’d link to them.

Feint Signal

Circles

Zip

Better Triangle

Kriok

And while you’re at it, why not play my post-apocalyptic homage to minimalist cinema: Stalker

When I thought of minimalism, I thought of removing the entire visual experience and leaving only sound – essentially making you blind. It turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought of minimizing graphics to near non-existence without going the text adventure route. Here’s a rundown of the games I’ve found so far in which limited vision play a role. Feel free to link in the comments more games in which limited vision is a mechanic, I’d love to play more takes on this!

• You Must Escape
• Out of Darkness
• Blind
• Come No Closer (this one’s a bit on the edge, since you do get a flashlight and there’s no downside to using it)
• The Blind MazzzZZZZe of Colors
• Blind guy Vs Zombies
• BatWorld
• BlindSight (another flashlight game, but the flashlight does play into the mechanic)
• Escape
• Conversion (my game)

dieter rams memory logo

To all who have played my game Dieter Rams Memory:

Sorry. The sound was quite high.

It’s fixed now.

Thanks to all.

I have been working nonstop trying to get a steady fanbase so i can finally announce the realce date, Alpha is 2.20, Beta will be 4.40, and full will be 10.60. The announcement will be live on youtube, twitch, and ludumdare! we hope you will check us out on saturday!

Hey,

So normally I’m not that into making post compo versions of my games but I really liked my entry this time around so I made a few tweaks to the game to hopefully make it a better experience. I’d love it if you checked it out, just don’t rate based on that version plz 😀

LINKY

– Tweaked the camera. It should follow you on the x coord ( I want to do a post about the code behind this later )

– Some difficulty tweaks.

– I may add a few more levels in the weeks to come.

What’s the minimum time in which you can make a game that looks reasonably finished and attractive and is fun to play?  In an attempt to answer this question, I decided to spend this LD48 creating as many games as I could.  I wanted them to be classic arcade-style in a varied mix of genres, so that each game really provides a different experience.  To shorten time, I decided each game would have only one (hard) level, one enemy type, and one goal criterion, based on which you get a bronze, silver, or gold rating.  Art is always a problem.  However, with my new sprite generator I can create lots of sprites, and combined with Evolvotron, I have a “psychedelic shoestring” art style of my own   I managed to churn out 8 games, taking a little over 2,5 hours for each game in total.

I consider the project altogether succesful, and I am quite happy with some of the games, which I think could be made into stand-alone games with only a little extra work.  However, I did get carried away with the technical achievement of creating games with very different mechanics.  Next time I should maximise even more on fun, even if the games would be more similar to each other.

I also made a timelapse, which I will post later along with a graphical analysis of time taken, hopefully shedding more light on the biggest time wasters this time round.  I tried to create all graphics and sound in a single batch to save time.  However, my impression was that I’ve been fiddling with the backdrops a little too long for comfort, in order to get reasonable colour schemes.  Also, just typing in the code seemed to take a lot of time.  I produced on average about one line of code every 40 seconds.  What was definitely better than last time is that I didn’t need to playtest and tweak the game and controls for ages.

>>> Play the games here <<<

NOTE: there is a postcompo version with a restart game option.

Tags: minigames, postmortem

Before I start this port-mortem I would like to thank the staff of Ludum Dare as well as the staff of one game a month for bringing up such initiatives. You guys just opened a new era of game development.

I remember all these prototypes I never released when I was younger just because I had an idea and then would just jump on another sexier idea.  I think it’s all right because when your’re young you just follow some trends and that’s not very important. But later when you want release your own projects and make a living you need to build-up strength, that is: motivation. Now if you consider that motivation is 50% based on personal will and 50% based on other people feedback/interactions  – and that’s my case because I release ‘personal’ games for other people  – I think feedback is one crucial key. Today there are so many games out there that getting people other than friends and relatives to try and make critics about your games is tough. Here comes Ludum Dare with all these fellow developers who are there for you as you are for them for a few days. And they are ok to try out your somehow weird game because that’s part of the deal. And then you happen to tweet them and then you start to exchange ideas and so on. So you now got feedback and so motivation is easier to build during these times when you lack some personal will. Of course if you’re already part of a team then you may not need that kind of feedback. At least not as much as a lone developer would need.

Now that you don’t lack motivation, you need a goal that you can reach. Not something far far away. Here comes the One Game A Month initiative that pushes you to release things.  But with such a short time window – a month – you need to let your ideas flow like water and stop to constrain them. I mean you have to release that personal concept you came up with. That’s what creativity is all about. Then you can elaborate. You always have time to elaborate if you feel that your idea can transform into a more ‘serious’  project.

So now we can see so many ‘games’ released for so many different people.  This is an era where you can make your very special game and you will find someone who may love your game. Players are not there to condemn you but to spend time have fun with your game. And fun is a highly subjective matter. No matter what they say. There’s absolutely no rule for fun. And when I am speaking about fun I am not speaking about I find a game fun because everybody else says it is. No it’s : “I find it fun because this game seems to have been made for me.”

You may agree with me or not, but anyway thanks again to #LD and #1GAM and of course you my fellow game creators!

Ok so now let’s continue with the “post-mortem” of may Ludm-Dare Entry : Seed. ( weird since the game is actually getting alive and development is certainly not finished. 😉 )

What went wrong

———————-

Music and SFX: Right from the beginning I wanted to make my seeds pop following some rhythm patterns and flowers add new layers of music. But I postponed that until I ran out of time that is 1 hour before the deadline. So I came up with this highly repetitive tune. As for sounds there’s only one. So this part is a complete failure. Ok it’s minimalist.

Scoring:  I think my scoring system is good. Because it is dynamic and allows for very important scores if you decide to take risks. But the sad fact is that when you’re playing you don’t have time to check your score so it means that the whole system just does not seem important at all. There’s an evident lack of visual / sound feedback that would push the player to try to push the limits.

Tutorial: the game although minimalist actions holds in fact complex scoring rules. And I didn’t have time to make a good tutorial that would explain the system. Somehow I feel that’s kind of ok because people seem to like to explore the game and try to understand what’s going on. That’s part of the fun factor. But it’s not enough.

What went Right

Brainstorming : at first I was wondering how I could fit the theme. Going to wikipedia led me to architecture matters which led me to gardens which led me literally to the roots. So I made a game about seeds, watre, roots and flowers. About life Minimalist concept but so rich! And then My universe just unfolded in front of me with every new version. I started with the seeds and the water and the central line (earth) and right from the beginning with the visor. Then since I had water why wouldn’t it go up? Then if I have seeds why wouldn’t they grow and release flowers? And what if flowers would release new more powerful seeds? And then the basis of the scoring system was there.

Overall Development : using Haxe + NME I could build the game from my ideas like I would paint a painting or carve a stone and then release it on every platform ( I could even push it to iOs and Android if you wished). And this time I forced myself to stick to the engine and the balancing in priority. My last LD project went somehow wrong because I spent to much time with the GFX instead of tweaking the game engine / balancing.

GFX: I wanted a game that literally throw life trough colors and particles. Something that would make the player just have fun by seeing things happen. I think I succeeded.

Controls / feedback: I think the game works well because it’s easy to play even if you don’t understand what’s going on. But since you have time you can try out things and that’s ok.

Overall polish: I wanted a complete game something you could actually buy. I think the game is well polished. It’s complete. There’s just one bug (when you start a new game without restarting the settings are not initialized so your second game will be harder) . Moreover there’s a beginning and an end and it even saves your score. It’s not that it’s hard to come up with all these features but it takes time to get things polished.

So I am very happy with Seed. And I am very happy that I could join this LD and that I could add this game to #1GAM

Thanks for playing and taking time to write your critics and comments.

Our Ludum Dare game Hakuin’s Challenge is now available to play as an executable .jar, if you like the idea of zen rhythm game then have a go and vote for us if you like it!

Downloads at:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20437

So I finally got around to compiling and uploading the timelapse videos for my entry in Ludum Dare 26. There’s one video for each day but somehow the day 2 video is twice as long as day 1. Each day was about 16 hours long, so it really doesn’t make sense. Oh well – day 2 was arguably more interesting 😛

If you haven’t tried it yet, you can give my game a shot here.

Day 1:

Day 2:

I’d also like to say a big thanks to everyone for the great feedback and support – it’s made my first Ludum Dare experience absolutely perfect

At the beginning of LD26 I pointed everyone to a suite of creative tools I had made, one of them being a card deck that helped you brainstorm a game, starting from its most basic gameplay. Did anyone use it? How’d you find it?

I’ve had several requests for a professionally-printed version of those cards, and here they are! I call it PlayThinker, and it is US$10 plus postage. I’d be awfully happy if you gave it a look.

I have to be honest, I mostly didn’t participate in the last LD because I wasn’t a huge fan of the theme. I know, I suck, but it’s the past now…

….. But now, to make up for my laziness, I am bringing the past back!

Starting this Friday, I’m having a Quarter Quell (#HungerGamesReference). For a week, I will make a game based on one of the 25 first topics, and it would be cool if you guys joined me in this effort! If not, it’s cool lol.

You can pick any topic (or topics) from the random list below. I went to www.random.org/sequences/ and randomly selected 10 out of the 25 numbers:

So the topics are:

Advancing Wall of Doom
Swarms
Build the level you play
Evolution
Preparation — Set it up, let it go
It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!
The Tower
Infection
Growth … <– “Grow”, also this May’s optional theme for One Game A Month
Roads

I think standard LD rules should apply, minus the week to do it. I plan to do this alone, but you can be in a team if you so desire. If you want to participate, post in the comments of this post your intent to do so… and share your finish products when you’re done!

If any of you decide to participate with me, let’s see what awesomeness we can create!

Tags: Quarter Quell

I’ve really enjoyed adding to Seed Life.

SeedLife 2 minute demo video

Windows | Mac | Source links

I’ve already received great feedback from friends and LD comments. I’ve implemented some of them:

post-compo additions:

• Display currently selected seed
• Reworked how drag planting works (with shift-dragging for straight lines)
• Better performance on longer runs
• Can now harvest any type of seed with right-click(watch out, they’ll grow back)
• Clouds (disperse them with mouse motion)
• more to come..

future plans:

• New types of seeds (I’d love some ideas from everyone)
• Critters that only come out based on your garden
• feedback wanted

Thanks for a great LD! Keep playing those games.

Tags: gamebox, games, LD#26, ruby

Yesterday evening was a big time for Rad vs Blae. Jellycakes streamed himself playing the game and at last 10 people joined and played together.
It was big fun, the server was running smooth and the feedback about the game was really positive. I can still optimize by A LOT packets size and some client side optimization too.

I’m working on something bigger =)
Thanks everyone for the support. I really appreciate it

Entry link

Hello,

It was my fourth participation to the Ludum Dare, and it’s a great experience every time ! Here’s the game I did for the compo :

About the game
It’s a platformer – adventure game. You play a warrior in a medieval fantastic universe who does quests for various NPC. Suddenly the world changes. It has no more colors, no more details, and the people are talking rectangles.

The theme
At first, I had minimum inspiration for “Minimalism”…
It made me think of Mondrian, but also of Magritte (“This is not a pipe”, “This is not an apple”). I like Magritte’s work, so I wanted to put a reference to it in the game, but I didn’t know how.

Then I had this idea of a basic character from a medieval fantastic game who finds himself in a minimalist world. I tried to imagine what a minimal NPC would be like, then I thought of this rectangle who wants squares and tries to use the minimum of words to interact with the player. And I started from there.

The development
I roughly had the whole story in mind when I started to code. In my timezone, you discover the theme at 4 a.m., so you can really sleep on it.
I was convinced I’d had to make cuts because there were so many scenes. In my previous LD, I was never able to do everything I wanted. For Tinysasters (LD23 – Tiny World), I had to rush the graphics and the sound during the last hour, and the gameplay was not working. For Lucas’s Quest Backwards (LD24 – Evolution), I had to abandon the compo and go for the jam. And for Crime in the City (LD25 – You are the villain), I couldn’t work on the graphics at all.

When the first day was over, I had 6 scenes left. No work had been done on the graphics or the sounds. Although, what was very convenient about this theme was that all my prototype-looking graphics for the minimalist world could almost be considered as final
Fortunately, it only took me 1 hour by scene, so I had plenty of time to finish when he gameplay was done.

Tools
For the code, I used As3 (flash) with the framework Flixel. I never use Flixel or heavy frameworks outside the Ludum Dare, because I like to code more freely. But it was great for this LD and it saved me a lot of time.

For the level design, I used DAME. It works great with Flixel. It’s nice to be able to draw the maps so easily with a set of tile.

For the graphics I used Photoshop CS2. It’s not the best tool for pixel art but it’s the one I’m comfortable with. It’s also good enough for animations, although not very handy.

For the music, I used ThumbJam (iOS). This is a fantastic app that lets you compose music like you were playing an instrument. And the interface is so simple !

Things that went (a little) wrong

Flatland
A lot of people on the comments of Kongregate and Newgrounds said that the game was inspired by Flatland. It’s not, I’ve never read this book and I hadn’t heard of it before I released the game. But I will probably read it now, sounds interesting !

The puzzle aspect
The game looks like a puzzle game, but it wasn’t supposed to be one. Actually, there are only two puzzles in the game… The mirror one wasn’t even planned, it came to me when I was developing the scene.

The idea is that the character brought the change with him to the minimal world. He doesn’t make the change happen, the change is already there (the red squares, etc.). The character is only the spark that lights things up, he’s not really active in this. That’s why things can feel a little random to people used to puzzle games, This is not a minimalist game is a story before everything. If I had more time, I would have made more dialogs, NPC, choices and alternate storylines.

What went right

Time is on my side
This is the first time in a Ludum Dare that I didn’t run out of time. I had 7 hours to do the graphics, the music and some polish. It was very comfortable. I’d definetly like to do it again ! But I wonder how much it had to do with the theme…

Lots of plays
The game is currently featured on Kongregate and Newgrounds. I’m very happy so many people get to play the game !

Thanks for taking the time to read my post-mortem.
Here’s the link to the game : This is not a minimalist game
I hope you’ll enjoy it

I’ll make a post in a few days about my favorite games. I’ve rated 60 so far and saw some great entries !

(Mostly lifted from my blog here)

I’ve threatened to make a roguelike a couple of times before. In fact one previous effort got quite far before I abandoned it. So what better time to finally get one out of my system than a game jam about minimalism? Roguelikes have always gone for a minimalist graphical approach anyway, right?

My fourth game of the year, then, is Pyramid: a minimalistic roguelike. Things went quite well on balance: I actually went with my first idea, which is often a bad move but it allowed me to get good and focused early on. The pyramid motif comes from the level progression: level 1 is merely 2×2 squares, and indeed looks very minimalistic! Each subsequent level expands the size of the layout by 1 in both directions. Gradually a vision fog comes into play more and wandering spirits (the coloured blocks) appear and will attack you without a second though.

I’m quite pleased with the clean visual style. It certainly helped having the simple graphics (although getting that highlight on the top and right edges of the squares took far more investigating than it ever should have… there’s always something).

Undoubtedly there are bugs – the occasional incompletable levels are a frustration (and the reason a reset feature was added). It’s also too hard, really. But generally from this one I have no regrets, and look forward to trying something entirely different next time out!

Play “Pyramid” here

And I almost forgot – I’ll stick a timelapse of development up soon but I just haven’t got around to compiling it yet. Busy busy…

After almost a week after the competition, here’s the postmortem for “Particles”, my LD #26 entry…

What went right

– Again, my wife helped me with the brainstorming of a simple idea that was doable early on, which let me focus on developing soon, instead of just dicking around with some concepts

– Theme… Although I wasn’t a big fan of the theme this time, the fact remains that it restrained me a bit and I managed to pull a very complete game.

– Time for level design: this time, I budgeted and got to work about 3 hours or so in level design, which was great for the overall feel of the game, making for a more interesting and cohesive experience.

– Development plan: making a development plan early on really helped me keep the game on track… Although I could only “finalize” it later in the first day, it really gave me a good perspective on what I could achieve

– Focus on gameplay mechanics: I’m more of a story guy, but that usually lead to games that require a lot of content, which is kind of a no-no in 48-hour compos… This time, by focusing on the gameplay, I could fine tune the game and add the extras I wanted.

– Motivation: since I was seeing cool stuff happen on screen (and I did it fast), it started getting my creating juices going, which helped me keep me motivated for the 20+ hours it took me to actually develop this.

What went wrong

– Music: I usually use Wolfram Tones to build the music, but someone pointed out in a previous compo that their user agreement doesn’t allow to use it in this way, so I had to find another way to make music… But I don’t have any decent tools for it and I couldn’t find anything that really allowed me to create something fast that I could master easily… I tried out iNudge and some other stuff, but I ended up resorting to a friend of mine that’s a musician. He has all this gear so he was kind enough to teach me how to use it and leverage it to make at least one music for the game… although it took me 3 hours to get it right!

– Particle physics: It took me forever to fine-tune the particle behavior, since the standard “magnetic” equations weren’t making for a fun game, which is kind of more important than actual being physically correct… I ended up by having lots of small parameters to adjust and specialized code to handle some circumstances so that the game felt right without being right.

All in all, it was one of my best entries ever, and considering the feedback I’ve been having so far, it seems people are enjoying the game…

This is why I intend not only fixing some bugs reported, but also improve the graphics a bit (get rid of Comic Sans, for example!), besides adding levels and new mechanics to the game in the near future…

You can download the game here, and the source here. If you took part on the Ludum Dare 48-Hour competition, you can go here to vote for my entry.

If you’re too lazy to download and play stuff, you can always check the video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgRfgHjTalA

(would love to find out how the hell I embed videos on the posts)…

Tags: postmortem

This was my second participation in LD, and while I don’t consider it a great success, I’m happy I produced something. Here’s the link to the game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18395. It is basically a minimal (non-digital) painting simulator. You use your brush to spread and mix colors given in the palette on the right side. The palette is part of the painting and shares the physics of the whole paper. You can paint over any image files and see how well you are matching the image guide.

The theme minimalism didn’t really get me excited, so I initially ignored it and thought about what would be interesting to code. I came up with the painting idea, thinking I could make it into some kind of game in which the painting lives and the player interacts with it. However, in the end, I never got a good idea for such a game, and ended up just improving the painting simulation.

I used the theme as a guiding principle and managed to reduce color painting into just mouse movement with left-clicking. So unlike in an image editing program, there’s no “toolbox” or any kind of abstract settings that let you insert into the paper arbitrary stuff brought from “outside”. In this game, you are confined to work inside the painting itself (excluding the water-button, which is actually optional).

In conclusion, I think I managed to use the theme okay, coding went smoothly, but I just had no idea what to actually code. I started programming before planning the game and that didn’t work out. On the other hand, if I had just kept on planning unsuccessfully, I might not have finished anything. I’m looking forward for next LD!

Tags: postmortem, pygame, python

My LD26 game, Dehumanizer, got featured on the awesome blog at Indiegames.com!  People’s enthusiasm for it spurred me on to complete the post-compo version, which is now available on my website.

The main feature of the post-compo version feature is WAY better (less buggy) corpse-pile physics, but it also includes gamepad support, and an extended background, pictured below (spoilers!).

If, while playing the post-compo version, you were to type a certain “secondary theme” to this Ludum Dare competition, something interesting might happen…

Reading some of the comments on Less is More? it seems that some levels can be difficult, so I made I walkthrough video.

My entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15195

Tags: LD #26, less is more, video, walkthrough

Yeah, I didn’t like my original idea for Ludum Dare so I dropped it, I wish I continued working on it to see if it was going to end well but I didn’t. All of the entries look pretty good and I hope I make a game next time, it was fun working on it while it lasted.

City-States Lives

 
:: Play and rate City-States here ::

City-States in action

The first hours, after theme selection

Minimalism?

Really?

What is a 48 / 72 hour jam if not minimal already? As themes go I felt this was an incredibly poor one as it offers no particular guidance. I didn’t think there was a theme in the list that would have been worse than Potato until I saw the actual winner. My very first instinct was “I’ll just submit an empty page with a link to a 404. Total work time, less than 5 minutes. Minimal to the core.”

Fitting as that would have been though, it’s not the reason we take part in these jams. So I asked myself what I could do that would be minimal in the context of a video game. Then I realized that it probably shouldn’t be a video game at all.

Doin’ it old school

My original thought was to make a card game based on the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, but as I started to come up with ideas for gameplay I realized that the cards simply had too much personality and too many pre-conceived associations tagging along with them. The game was shaping up to be a narrative guided by random card draws, and I realized that I’d be spending all my time writing up how narrative flows for a ridiculous number of card scenarios.

That wouldn’t be minimal.

So I took it a step backwards and picked up a deck of 52 playing cards at the store. I looked at them and pondered the suits. I realized that there are a number of similarities in playing card suits and Tarot suits:

Diamonds easily translates in meaning to Pentacles
Clubs easily translates in appearance to Staves
Hearts easily translates in meaning to Cups
Spades has linguistic connections to the Spanish “Espada”, which is a Sword.

So I laid all the cards out in front of me and imagined what each of these things could really represent. It occurred to me that they all were elements of a State:

Diamonds / Pentacles : Riches, Treasury, Natural Resources
Clubs / Staves : Knowledge, Power, Skill, “Magic”
Hearts / Cups : Happiness, Bounty, Emotional contentment
Spades / Swords : Insight, Conflict, Tumult

States

I considered how states use these things to gain advantage over others, and how without one of the four states historically have trouble with continued existence. So the idea then is to get a lot of each of these and to steal them from your opponents. But how? There’s got to be some method to this or else you’d just aim for the one place your opponent has the least of at any given time.

Advisors

So if the idea is that a state falls if it has no resources left in one of the four categories, perhaps there’s a way to make sure the category is well defended? That’s where the idea behind the advisors came in. The royal cards, rather than ruling the city directly, ensure that no matter what happens a city won’t be defeated by running out of their given resource. So a famous, skilled general (King of Spades) will ensure that no matter how battered your City-State’s military, it will never be an avenue by which the state will fall. In mechanical terms, this means the Advisor offers a +1 bonus, permanently, to their suit.

Actions

I wanted the actions to be highly constrained because of the “Minimalism” theme.

• You must attack some other player
• You must choose a means of attack
• You must choose a resource to plunder

I wanted attacking to be completely unrelated to plundering, and to make sure that attacking and plundering both are related only to one suit at a time. Therefore, if you use swords to attack, the defender must use swords to defend. Likewise, if your goal in victory is to gain Treasures/Diamonds, then you can’t just steal Guilds/Clubs and put them in your treasure column. If you want Treasures you have to take Treasures.

Base Game Complete : 3 hours in

Ummm… huh. Wow, it’s only 3 hours in and I’ve finished the game rules. Well, I guess I could submit it now!

But is that really why we’re here at Ludum Dare?

No, I don’t think so.

So in 3 hours I had the card game…

In 3 days I had the video game.

The Good

For a strategy game conceived in 3 hours, this actually is not that bad. I’ve played a few rounds with other people and while there are some balance issues with the rules as written there’s a really solid core idea. I think that had I spent more time on the initial card game rules and less on the video game, it would be a stronger concept… but then the video game wouldn’t have been completed. But again, maybe that would have been for the best?

It’s really interesting to build narratives out of the actions people take in this game. How do states use Guilds to steal Farmland? I can think of a few ways, and it’s fun to leave it to the imagination.

As far as the video game goes, my use of finite state machines made coding the game flow a total breeze. There’s a lot of content and a lot of states, but they are pretty well arranged such that it’s easy to keep track of the flow, or insert new states into the flow.

The Bad

Balance. The 2 player version really isn’t well balanced at all. Would more rules help? I don’t know… more rules would surely break the “Minimalism” requirement…

Explanation. The rules are *really easy* to demonstrate because there are so few things you can actually do. On the other hand they’re *really hard* to explain with words alone. When I show people how to play the game face-to-face I can do it easily. With the video game though, I struggled hard to come up with a good way to explain the actions to someone not already familiar with the game.

Unity was kind of crashy and unstable. I don’t know if it was my project structure or if it was some combination of plugins, but when I tried to export for Android my Unity editor would crash and burn in a firey mess. I sent a bug report to Unity, and they actually wrote back with a workaround and also a note that the bug would be fixed in the next release. On the other hand, once Android did finally publish I found a rendering bug. Ultimately this meant that the Android release was not ready in time to submit… just the web player version. I have since solved the issue, however.

The Interesting

So, I’ve never invented a card game before. You can probably tell! This was a very different experience from my “typical” (as much as you can call them that) video game development. It surely did lead down a totally different path of ideation and implementation. I think overall it was good.

Also, I notice that when the rules of a video game are awful, people just complain about it. When the rules of a card game are broken, people don’t have to hack your source code to fix it… they just house-rule and experiment themselves and tell you what worked for them. That was the really interesting takeaway for me.

So, in between working on a post-jam version of Double Hydra and writing up a post-mortem, we thought you guys would enjoy a little media pack we put together!

Here’s a free OTF font we built using the handmade letters Strega created during the jam. Every letter and number strictly adheres to the constraints of the art style of the game (Please credit us if you use it!):

| Download Font |

And here are four resolutions of wallpaper versions of the title page of the game:

800×600 | 1024×768 | 1280×1024 |  1600×1200

And finally, play the game here!

During the compo, I ran into a bug that made two pushable box (which should collide and stop) run over each other.  I’ve been trying to fix that, but now nothing makes sense anymore… The gif bellow can better show it (and also show a new stage! :)).

As you can see, the first time it collides perfectly… but the second time (which should be the exact same situation), they overlap each other… One thing that I was able to notice (after dumping some frame-by-frame information to a .txt file… >_<)  is that there may be a relation with their order in the object list (FlxGroup, if you’ve ever used Flixel).

Ok, this gave me a (stupid) idea. I’ll check which is the left most one and pass that as the second object to the collision method (FlxObject.separate). I’ll post soon with results. Obviously, it didn’t work. ¬¬

Tags: as3, bug, Flixel, postcompo

Why do people release post-compo versions right now?!? Doesn’t this really take apart the idea of the compo?

So I put on this post-compo stuff I worked on for just a little longer because the compo version was, like , rushed and incomplete, and stuff like that, and then

BAM !!! Post-compo it’s soooooooo much better and stuff…

It’s okay because if you rate, you only rate the compo version, ooooooooooooooooooooooooof course, like yeah, suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure……!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just a thought, and I’m not making a F****KING POST-COMPO (which means AFTER THE COMPO like in WHEN IT’S OVER !!!!!) right now!

Thanks for not listening….

This entry was posted on Friday, May 3rd, 2013 at 3:12 pm and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve made post-compo version of my entry “Coder”.

In this game you are a programmer, who need to refactor projects to implement new features, while your boss is waiting you to give him a reason to fire you.

Complete story mode (11 levels) and get “Hardcore coder” badge for your Ludum Dare profile!

Try and rate here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20479

This is our third time entering Ludum Dare!  Our previous games were Macro Marines in LD23 and Mighty-chondria in LD24.  We didn’t manage to enter LD25, but for LD26 we’ve made another great game!

You may remember us from previous games such as…

A post-mortem of ❏♥❀ (Square Heart Flower)

Please do play our game and give it a rating!

Here’s a timelapse of us making it:

Good

Unity is brilliant, and easy to use!  We’ve used it for a couple of games, and although we could still improve the way we organise our code/prefabs/scenes, it lets us put a game together very quickly!  It’s also robust enough that we don’t have to worry about crashes or rendering problems.

Minimalism made the art easier to create!  It would be easy to think that a minimalistic theme would allow us to create bad art and pass it off as minimalist.  However, we spent some time thinking about minimalism, and came up with an art style that looks great without requiring detailed texture work!  Using Blender’s Inset Faces tool with a group of faces selected, an outline could be created in the geometry of the model itself, and then a black material applied to the “outline” polygons to suggest the edges of the object in the white game environment.

Objects are reduced to the minimal graphics needed to represent them, but you can still tell what they are.

Can you tell what it is?

Minimalism made the dialogue easier to write!  There is no text in the game – we explored the concept of reducing language down to symbols.  It’s part of the puzzle, but we find it interesting that players can figure out what’s going on even though the characters they meet and the dialogue interface only convey a minimal amount of information.

What’s up, brown cube? You heart flower?

We pushed ourselves to make something new!  We are all programmers by profession, so it is unusual for us to have a go at making an artistic game.  Violence provides a variety of game mechanics that are easy to build a game around, so it was a challenge to create a non-violent game for a change!

Bad

Having only one Unity scene meant we couldn’t all work in parallel.  Unity scene files are binary, which means they won’t merge properly if there are conflicts in the source control.  At the beginning of the weekend we were working on separate scenes to test individual systems, but at the end there was a lot of work to pull everything together, and it could only be done by one person.

We didn’t get the story working completely until the end of the third day.  It took us a long time to create all the content, including the AI behaviour.  This meant that the story we implemented, although a complete story, wasn’t as elaborate and non-linear as we were hoping.

What’s wrong?

We didn’t make use of all the features we’d programmed into the dialogue system.  By having a minimalist dialogue system, we envisioned that the player would be able to say anything they wanted by constructing the sentences from symbols.  That is present in the game, but because of limitations in the graphical dialogue interface, we removed the ability for characters to respond to every piece of information you give them.  Also the code allows for much more complicated logical rules – to change what the characters think and do – than are present in the final story, but again the GUI is limited in what can be reasonably displayed.

Our external source control system was slow.  The Mercurial repository was hosted on bitbucket.org.  I had hoped that this would be a good way of enabling us to continue working on the game together after we had all gone home, but it meant that pushing to the repository took up to several minutes.  “We’ve wasted, like, hours of the competition, pushing to this repository” said Dunk, who has no concept of the passage of time, and who liked to commit huge MP3 and WAV files.

In the UK, the competition started and finished at 3:00 AM.  Technically that would give us more time, because we usually sleep through the theme announcement and start when we wake up on Saturday morning, then stay awake on Monday to work through to the competition deadline – an extra hour this time compared to the usual finish of 2:00 AM.  However working that late is a recipe for introducing bugs into the game at the last minute, so we decided to create a stable build, submit it and go to bed even though we could have stayed up longer to add more features.

Conclusion

We’re very pleased with the game we’ve made in Unity!  It fits the minimalism theme well, and is playable and fun.  We can always think of more that could be included, but it’s a time-constrained competition.  Please play and rate our game!

Whew!! After playing and rating 101 games (for those playing at home, that’s 4,3% of Ludum Dare #26!) I finally feel comfortable enough to list some of my favourites so far. After this post I’m taking a weekend break from this whole Ludum Dare thing and return to rating business with fresh eyes and mind in Monday.

Without further ado, the recipients:

[stextbox id=”info” caption=”You Actually Finished It?? award for the most together act”]

…to the game that, against all odds, managed to be a complete experience with nothing to add or take away:

Fragments of Him

I don’t know if you already know this, but drama is hard. I’d argue it’s even harder than comedy to get right because the tiniest things can break the mood completely, but maybe it’s just me and my high standards for storytelling in visual media.

That being said, Fragments of Him nails the tone perfectly. It’s a tragedy that made me feel things! Think stuff that made me sad! Getting the plot to advance sometimes can be a bit of a pain but that’s honestly the only complaint I have about this entry.

You should play it. Everyone should play it!

[/stextbox]

[stextbox id=”download” caption=”Brain Reconfiguration award for the most clicking game mechanic”]

…to the game I’ll be playing in my dreams for weeks to come:

Metahotel

Everyone has had a case of tetrishead. Play a game where actions are simple and repetitive, yet you have to be aware of the whole picture all the time and plan ahead and anticipate coming actions and you will keep playing the game in your head long after you have quit the physical action itself.

I’m playing Metahotel when writing this and I’ll be playing it after I close this computer and lay down to sleep. See if it clicks similarly for you.

[/stextbox]

[stextbox id=”info” caption=”The Next Portal award for the most promising first person puzzle game”]

…to the game I wouldn’t mind buying from Steam sale for a couple of bucks:

Cimi Mal

Combination of exploring weird landscapes and a mechanic to alter them is what makes these types of games enjoyable. Cimi Mal does this perfectly, and I truly wish there would be a lot more of it.

There are certain unpolished aspects to it (falling damage will kill you, despite never being mentioned anywhere), but the sheer excitement of seeing blocky environment transforming around you overrides everything else. Go take a look.

[/stextbox]

[stextbox id=”download” caption=”Didn’t See That Coming award for the most interesting mode of transportation”]

…to the game that took blocks and remade them:

Deja vu

As in previous entry, this game features weird landscapes. But instead of restructuring them to progress, you restructure yourself. I don’t want to spoil too much about Deja vu, but I will say that it features the best use of verticality in level design since Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight.

It’s helluva pretty too.

[/stextbox]

[stextbox id=”info” caption=”The Plucky Plumber award for platforming excellency”]

dot dot dot redundant additional description colon

Title: Subtitle

This title has a lot going for it, least of it being the visual motif of using words describing things rather than the thing themselves (culminating in ending that is meta as this simile), but it also was one of the few entries I came across that got platforming just right. You can even stomp the enemies!

Also features perfect controller support.

[/stextbox]

[stextbox id=”download” caption=”I LOL’d award for making me actually LOL”]

…to the game where humor came from mechanics, rather than only writing:

Random Legend Adventure

Fight alien ships with pointy stick! Use your goldfish to find secret treasures from mysterious forest! Random Legend Adventure is exactly what it says on the tin, and delivers it’s promises. Check it out!

[/stextbox]

[stextbox id=”info” caption=”Lasting Appeal award for the intriguingest game”]

…to the game I’ll actually be playing after this month:

Seed

If you ask me, best games feature an element of mysticality. Seed has you in charge of creating life for the plantkind, and it’s mesmerizing to watch! There seems to be endless opportunities to grow your field…

Try it yourself.

[/stextbox]

If you liked this post, you can also try out my game and drop a comment!

Tags: compilation, recommendation, reviews

Managed to get my time-lapse uploaded. I think I might have cranked up the speed a bit too much haha. May cause eye strain.. Also cheesy funk music 😀

Game Page:

www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=rate&uid=22035

Tags: LD#26, timelapse, unity, unity3d

I been trying my best to play and rate as many games as I can, but these are some of the ones that stood out to me

• Circles
• Feint signal
• Chronodrax
• Minobi
• Solix
• Pixl
• Synesthsis
• Eraserland
• Core 9000

I’d recommend all of these games, Good bye!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 3rd, 2013 at 5:09 pm and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve uploaded a post-compo tweaked version of Invertigo!, taking in to account some of the feedback left by you, the commenting public. Hopefully this makes the game less angry-challenging, and more hooray-challenging!

I wasn’t going to do a post-compo version until the judging period was over, but the feedback is overwhelming and I want people to enjoy playing what the game could’ve been (playtesting y’all, 48 hour time limit is no excuse for skimping on it), so I whipped up a lil’ edited version that addresses the biggest flaw of the game, which is being able to stand in the middle forever and just shoot at the doors.

Huoheian Post-Compfaux edition

(it’s probably too hard now but challenging gameplay beats the pants off of boring gameplay. A real post-compo version will come later)

Enjoy!

 The Summary

I totally had fun this LD! Even the painful aftermath helped a lot with figuring stuff out. I was at long last able to upgrade to glsl 1.5, fix my shader setup, get more familiar with matrices again (even if i’ll forget it all by next week) and was able to deliver a solid entry, that’s actually gamy, unless most of my previous entries.

The Theme

Like every other LD i need a good half day to get over the theme. I keep complaining on IRC, to my housemates, to basically everyone that dares trying to talk to me within the first couple hours of saturday. I don’t try to intenionally violate it, but i usually end up doing something that only remotely could be considered themed. This time around it was technically quite challenging to set up, but the gameplay atleast mechanics are simple:

Get Gems, don’t run into things, get to goal.

Day 1: The Work

After a bunch of coffee and ranting i fired up the IDE and started working on TunnelVision, not actually being determined on pulling it through. I made the ring model, imported it and have it arranged along a spline. I realized that this solution is not at all sufficient because rotating the rings along the spline direction is a task i didn’t want to bother with. I remembered that you can construct a rotation matrix out of forward, right and up vectors, so i use an array of those to make up a track, where each node has a definite position and orientation i can further work with.

Applying a constant rotation along the forward axis, and a translation along its up and right vectors allowed for some interesting level design components to create segments that don’t look dynamic and not too uniform, like a rotation of 12 degrees every ring in distance 2; although it is nice to have that kind of control.  Basic ship and camera mechanics were added aswell, but in even cruder forms than it is in the entry. Also i started implementing phong shading only realizing later that there will a be whole lot more problems arising.

Day 2: The Joy

After implementing most of the basic mechanics in day 1 i could focus on building actual tracks and a add little more variety to them, get some polish done and get a smooth release. Glad that i decided as i did because i was just on time, so i thought. I realized a bug in the intersection code just after the submission hour started, i tried my best to get rid of it, but i wasn’t able to figure out exactly what the problem was and i wanted to wrap it up, so i left it in.

Another thing that is still bugging me are the ship controls and camera logic. I wasn’t able to get the physics done in a way they behave like i intended them to, so i didn’t bother with it for the time being. The camera logic is another beast. Just attaching the camera do the back of the ship looks very boring and undynamic, i wanted to have it follow the ship with a slight delay but that turned out more diffucult than i imaged. So for now it keeps following the path left behind by the ship in a certain distance. The result is not quite like what i had in mind, but it’s close.

Otherwise it was a smooth process; I planned to have enough time for everything so i didn’t need to resolve to botching. Only thing i regret is that i weren’t able to squeez in a second tune.

Spiral Power! ORE WO DARE DA TO OMOTTEYAGARU

Day 3-6: The Pain

Only the day after submitting is when the actual work started. “Error”, “Not working” and “Crash on startup” are only a few of the messages you can read in my comment thread. Again. AGAIN. ATI oh why you just do not care when compiling shaders. At first shaders weren’t able to compile on nvidia systems at all because i called functions that aren’t available in the shader-version i specified (Thanks for realizing ATI). Then, after upgrading to #version 150 nvidia complained about attribute/varying keywords being obsolete (Thanks for mentioning ATI).

After fixing that the game started to run, but the normals were totally wrecked. At this point i already got a lot of help by you guys, providing me with info in your reports and helping me to fix this, so let me say thank you: THANKS YOU! A  remote debug session with NeiloGD in a Hangout enabled us to figure out the culprit. I am at fault myself for not realizing this one: I assigned the correct shader only after buffering the modeldata and assigning the attributes. Since the wrong shader was loaded at that point, the Normal-attribute was not active due to optimizations by the compiler. I can see how that is my fault, but damn, ATI, why you allow for such lax programming!

The Conclusion

All in all i’m very happy with TunnelVision. It turned out mostly like i planned, and you guys seem to like it too

But yeah, i’m sorry i forgot to add the option for inverting vertical controls. It will come soon =]

Speaking of which: A post compo version is planned, and partly in production. If you want to be kept up-to-date on that you can follow me or visit my burrow [RSS].

And if you haven’t played it yet DO SO NOW!

 [PLAY]

While Zeik is fiddling with his own timelapse for the code he made for our game “Stargazers”, I was able to throw together mine fairly quickly and have it ready to go! (He’s much more of a perfectionist when it comes to his video. )

Check out our game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=10976

“Stargazers” required a lot less intensive art than usual, I think. The constellations were pretty easy to throw together since there were only 10 of them in varying detail, plus even the most detailed ones were extremely geometric and just required small amounts of shape wrangling.

Shamefully, typography took a large chunk of this video. u.u Moreso than I’d like to honestly reveal, since I probably edited that down to a much more inaccurate representation of how much time I spent.

Maybe next time I’ll sacrifice overly customized typography for more detailed worlds. Hope you all enjoy my timelapse~ <3

Also, we apologize for being much slower at rating games than usual this time around! Cake and Zeik are drowning in a sea of school projects and end of semester/quarter assignments. We’re hoping to make a “Best Of” post after going on a rating spree though! (Which should hopefully be after this weekend!)

Tags: timelapse

Something about the theme of minimalism has really brought out the creativity in people. The quality this Ludum Dare is through the roof. Here’s a few of my favourites so far.

Persist by AdventureIslands

Persist

A very fun nes-style platform game where the main character loses abilities as the game progresses. Excellent use of the theme, a fantastic art style and wonderful music.  There was a bug in the original game but it’s since been fixed in the post-compo version.

… by Dir3kt

…

Very nicely polished game with lots of attention to detail. There are some great little nods later in the game to classic arcade games.

Join by Perry

Join

Join takes a very simple idea (snake) and builds nicely upon it to create a unique action-puzzle game. Quite difficult but still lots of fun.

# by Kitch

#

Another game with a very simple concept but really nice execution. Very pretty visuals and nice sound design.

Guru by BrothersT

Guru

I have no idea how such beautiful animations were created in such short time but somehow Joe and Rob did it. Well worth a look.

(Follow the) Line – Chman

Follow the Line

This ones been talked about a lot and for good reason. Very fun and very challenging.

Here it is, a mosaic of Ludum Dare 26 made using all the main screenshot of Ludum Dare’s 26 games. (click on the image for the high resolution)

You’re welcome

Tags: composition, mosaic, screenshots, wallpaper

Vote here

My game is a minimalistic puzzle game where we tell a history of a little boy called Ted, trying to make a better world around him with the imagination.

We receive in our page great reviews, and the most good thing is the surprise of the game be so polished. It’s because we fix in the idea that the game have to be something minimalistic at all, not only in the graphics, but also in the gameplay, and even in the story.

We discuss about the first version of the game and we decide to make a puzzle. Then we decide to make a storytelling game, and finally the mix it all.

We develop the game in pure as3, making the project as mobile in Flash Develop. Game graphics are totally made in code. The music has chosen by Sharbel (he plays piano) and the sounds are made from he in the piano as well. The sound is not very nice, but it’s better than the first try we did.

We’re thinking in put the game in iOS and Android. We have put the game in Kongregate as well.

The most difficult thing in the game to do is the level design. We design the levels, and the we realize the levels was hard as hell. So, we design again, wih the same base of the first, just to make the things easier to play. And put the hard levels in their appropriate place. When my girlfriend finish the game in normal mode, we notice: the game was finished.

As the final challenge, the people don’t get it what they’re doind in the game, so the Help button turns an guide for the first player. The first idea is only to show what the pieces do, but after a few plays, we put the answers in the help, and this make the game so much better.

For now we’re going to fix and adjust some details, fix the sound (maybe even change the music) and release it for web and mobile.

Thanks, and follows us:

@stigmawall
@sharbelfs
Fire Hurricane

Tags: as3, final, flash, game, LD#26, LD72, post-mortem, postmortem

I thought I’d have a go recording some of these.

Ludum dare 26

Apologies for the quiet voice. If you want your game done, tell me and it shall (maybe) be done.

I had originally planned on collaborating with a friend on the Ludum Dare 26 Jam, however, plans started to fall apart Friday morning when my sister went into labor. Long story short, the baby was born later that evening, and along with other family commitments, took up most of the weekend.

On Sunday I was finally able to sit down and start working on something. My mind kept going back to some sample code I had given a FlashPunk user in Afternet’s #flashpunkers earlier in the week. He was asking for pointers on a drag mechanic and I was able to offer a little help. This sample code was still sitting in my initial basecode project in FlashDevelop and I just started going with the seeds of a simple idea.

I wanted a game where the player had to think fast, but didn’t have multiple types of actions to perform. The Drag mechanic is simple, and everyone who uses computers should be familiar with it. I also didn’t want to have to explain the rules to the player. I wanted them to be able to discover the rules with visual and audible hints. I decided that simply moving objects into a target would be adequate to satisfy those two pieces.

So I worked on Sunday night and before long had the basic functionality down. There were some overlap issues that I had to figure out due to me forgetting that I was centering the origin, but that was probably the only thing that was a pain. After more work on Monday night, it was ready to turn in. I ended up with a progression of levels that started simple and ended up fairly frantic. I knew I was going to be dinged by some voters if I completely avoided instructions, so I put a little blurb on the webpage about discovering it as well as adding a hint to the end game screen if you didn’t make it past the first level or the first level with multiple colored targets. I hoped this would be enough to keep people from being frustrated or downvoting me because they couldn’t understand it.

(I have to say that with the Minimalism theme it is hard to balance the polish. I decided that not only is my gameplay going to stick with one basic action, but the graphics would be minimalism with simple shapes. However, I know someone is going to downgrade the graphics because there are so many more entries that are fantastic graphically. Should they be voted higher because it looks better? Or should the simple graphics games be voted higher because they are following the theme? I don’t know, there are many entries where I can’t for the life of me figure out what is being interpreted as minimal but will probably score high because they are good.)

Here is a video of myself playing the game. Reviewers have apparently done a good job scoring higher.

I think the fact I kept the gameplay simple but had something challenging and fun was great. I was focused on that without having to prepare and test other mechanics. The progression of difficulty was simple and changed things around while still keeping that simple dragging mechanic.

I would have liked a high-score option that reported to my webpage or Twitter, or at the very least kept your own personal high score offline. I didn’t get a chance to do that before the time limit. I also had to skip the sound/music toggle which would have been a nice polite addition.

I had the same thought that showed up in many LD comments: It would be fun on mobile. I would like to explore this. I think I’d have to change the underlying code for handling the dragging to support two at a time, because I know that would be intuitive on a device.

If you would like to give it a try, please go it’s LD page.

Tags: #1GAM, drag, ld48_26