We took our time, but we finally made it! So here it is:

What went right?

– The creative process

We did some brainstorming friday night on “minimalism”, called it a day and returned to discuss some of our ideas early on Saturday morning. As we stated before, we love alliteration (“the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words”) so we decided to take a shot at minigolf (some minimalistic minigolf). We thought about the constituent elements of minigolf (a ball, a hole, some obstacles and a swing) and wonder: how can we make this even “simpler”?

– Control mechanic
Control mechanic is a core part of lots of games. Some time ago, we interviewed Simon from Simogo (a great game studio!) and he told us: “We usually start out with some control mechanic, and then build a game around that.” Well, we did that and started our “minigolf simplification process” by thinking about a “minimalistic swing” that includes only a radius as a golf club. With this mechanic, we achieved to reduce two inputs (power and direction) into only one action: drawing a radius. Player would draw a radius holding the mouse click (or the swipe, as we intend to port it to iOs & Android!) and when released it would rotate anticlockwise in order to hit the ball. The more it rotates, the harder the hit! So power and direction all-in-one control scheme!

A nice video we watched:

– Some early marketing ideas
Happy with this control mechanic, we started thinking about marketing (it’s never too early for some crazy marketing ideas!). We chose a name: “Radius minigolf”. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It had certain je ne sais quoi and it would be easy to remember. So we bought the .com and made some banners.

– Framework
We love Unity!

– Betatesting
We made some awesome shots testing the game. Thanks to Vine you can watch them!

Nice shots! #radiusminigolf #ludumdare vine.co/v/bQrLKuPP25Y

— Nico Saraintaris (@NicoSaraintaris) May 7, 2013

What went wrong?

– Game mode
Due to the timeframe, we decided to go for just one mode: a time mode. We know it was not the best for our game, but it surely was the fastest to develop.

– Level Design
Time again. We did not have enough of it to design each level, so we generated them randomly using the same set of numbers.

What’s next?

– Mobile versions (iOs & Android)
– Different game modes (18 holes, 9 holes, free mode, time mode, etc.)
– It would be nice to have an integrated level editor, and some kind of community driven system to share levels.
– Experiment with some changes in the pov and camera movements. Actually we have a fixed camera, and giving a little movement would make the game much more attractive!

And last but not least: PLAY AND RATE THE GAME!

Cheers, people!

Tags: jam, Ludum Dare 26, post-mortem, radius minigolf

Making a plan take shape

Introductions!

Let us start with an introduction. My name is Tino, and my role in the team was to provide art assets for whatever we would build in this jam. What you are reading is my personal perspective and experience from start to finish of the LD26. Before you read on; I urge you to play the game first as the explanation below will spoil the experience. Turn up the volume, (preferably put on some headphones), take your time, and open yourself up to what you can find in this link:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=15100

Testing the waters (for ducks of course! :D)

When going into the LD26 we already had the team together where the designer expressed he would like to make a game heavy on the narrative side of game development. Personally, I like a challenge and looked forward to working on a type of game that I have not made before. When the designer carefully shared his preliminary thoughts I thought his scope was pretty insane. On the first day of the jam I secretly hoped he changed his mind and I think he actually did although as a result the scope seemed to have gotten even more daunting.

The Plan

The plan was as follows. The designer had thought of a touching story that is told through exploring and interacting with the environment. This required four environments and characters in different poses. The environments are (in order) a park, an apartment, city streets, and an office. Each environment features a single character model twice; each a different pose. The apartment is repeated and thus required additional poses as does the park. The amount of poses resulted in eleven.

Leaps and bounds

When absorbing the task ahead I thought to myself that the scope was way too large although I was curious to see how far we could get. If you have seen the game that Aceria and I made for LD24 you can see that it is a huge leap from boxes to a full on world like experience. On top of that, characters are my biggest nemesis. My experiences with modelling and rigging a character are rushed, crude, and done in different software.

We are in this together

How on earth did we manage then? What, I think, allowed us to pull this off was a combination of great team work and long hours. For example; What made making the environments really easy was the excellent assistance from the designer in providing me with reference material. The characters probably wouldn’t have looked half as presentable without the intervention of my anatomy loving girlfriend. Additionally, she also assisted in the apartment scene and whipped up some furniture out of one of the objects I had initially placed. In terms of hours I have counted about 47,5 hours of work with roughly 10 hours of sleep.

Long hours are nothing without a goal and focus

Because the scope was daunting I figured it was smartest, and safest, to model the scenes in passes starting with the scene the player would start in and provide the programmer/designer with a space to be explored as quickly as possible. With the environments blocked out faster than I can remember; it was time to go for the second pass. This pass included all the key items in the environments that has story attached to them. The programmer had to wait for this pass for such a long time that he started working on easter eggs (perhaps you may find them eventually). Once the key items were placed in the environment it was time to get the character modelled. As mentioned before I had some awesome assistance on this hurdle. Next up was rigging which resulted in the crudest rig imaginable. With the character modelled and rigged, and the key narrative items in place in the blocked out environments I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Prettiness and performance

The characters were rather simple to place although getting the poses right took quite a bit of fiddling. With everything in place to provide for a minimum viable product it was up to the programmer to get it all to work from A to Z. In the mean time I got to focus on prop modelling to dress up the environments and give it more character. Initially we had also the idea to use Unity’s option to automatically generate UV’s on import, and bake shadows and ambient occlusion (fancy shadows) into the environments. A light bake during breakfast taught us that just the park required 40MB of light map textures. This was not an option and so we shifted from strain on the memory to strain on the processor. As if that wasn’t enough for the processor; I also really wanted to emphasise the mood and experience by using chromatic aberration (Google it) and a vignette. Without ambient occlusion and shadows the environment looks really flat. Luckily the deferred rendering method and SSAO (screen space ambient occlusion) in Unity provided solutions to these problems. With a considerable amount of tweaking in Unity’s settings we feel that we have come close to the sweet spot in terms of performance and strain.

We have seen the light

Because we are now using deferred rendering and SSAO, instead of baking shadows and AO, we could use many lights in the scene as the cherry on top. With the environments fully decked out in models and all the character poses in place all that was left was to do was to place these lights. Keen eyes may have also noticed the blinking light on the messaging machines and flickering candle lights.

Closing words on environments.

Environments have a history and can also tell stories. For example, in the office you may have noticed a picture frame in the bin next to the door; or the books beside the filing cabinet. How this happened is speculation and whatever your imagination may come up with for a reason, it adds to the experience of the world before you. Thank you for taking the time to play our game and listening to my words. If you had additional questions I would love to answer them.

Cordially,
Tino

Post Mortem time…

ENTRY LINKY

I’ve gathered from some of the playtesting and some of the comments that the difficulty for my game was too high.

I wanted to highlight some design things that went right/wrong with the levels and what I think might have contributed to the difficulty.

Level 2

This was the second level. I have the player spawning over on the left and then has to jump down and over 3 spine kill thingies to the exit.

At this point I’ve shown the player that they need to get to the green glowy platform to continue. Logically the player should figure out that they need to jump over the spiney things to the exit as if they touch them they die and quickly respawn at the right.

The issue with this is that I hadn’t taught the player yet that holding down the left/right buttons before hitting the ground will increase the momentum of that jump and allow them to jump over the spine creatures.

I think that the concept of the spiney and the momentum should have been separated into two different levels, with the introduction of the spine creatures coming after the momentum lesson. The levels should probably also not included a decenty/stair thing before the jump as I think this tripped up the momentum of players that weren’t as skilled at placing their first jump to have good momentum for the second jump.

Level 3

At this point I’ve taught the player that getting to the green launchpad is how to exit the level. But this level starts and the launchpad is red, with a mysterious object above the player. The object of this level is to teach the main mechanic of the game; collecting the idol/button thing and escaping to the green launchpad.

What went wrong was 1.) this is the first time a player encounters a vertical jump that requires finesse to get up. I found that in play testing some people would accidentally continue to far left and get caught under the lip which prevented them from jumping up to the top ledge. I think that making that left wall flush with the whole thing might have made the level more linear and more apparent as to where the player needed to go.

2.) In the non post compo version  the ceiling falls a tad too fast. If a player misses jumping down through the 1.) part then they can be easily killed. Actually as I type this I think maybe this might not have been such a bad thing as it introduced the fact that the ceiling will kill you. Although players might gather that from the shaking camera so I guess I’m a bit conflicted. Maybe having a scripted sequence where the player sees something else killed by the falling ceiling? I dunno.

I also wanted to mention that #3.) I think that having the teleport pad and the button right above each other and both in camera focus when you grab the idol and the teleport pad gets activated was (I think) a good design choice. I think that it communicated that you needed to get back to the teleport because it was now active and the shaking was probably a bad thing.

Level 4

This was the one… the one that everyone got stuck on.

I think that this level was a huge fail. I wish I’d cut it actually, the more I delve into the design post compo the more I think that this level did so many things wrong. Lets start with #1

#1 the exit is not obvious. The player starts in the bottom left, they might go right towards the gap, but unless they went very near to the edge the way the camera worked meant that they probably wouldn’t see the exit.

So most likely they just went up as that was the best looking choice. So the path that they were supposed to take was up to 3. and then a long jump (I hadn’t introduced the concept of long jumping over gaps sort of over the spiney guys but not over gaps) over to the platform above 4. and up. This tripped up a ton of people. Aside from not having introduced the long jump concept I think the confusion of where to go to 3 or 4 frustrated players, and may have led to people quitting.

If they did manage to get past that they got to 5. Now I had timed the level ceiling fall to be very close, but I think I should have timed it with a missed or extra hop in there because I think this ceiling fell far to fast and frustratingly killed a lot of people. Enough that most people gave up on this level.

Level 4 Post Compo

Here’s the post compo version of this level with a few things I fixed.

1. You clearly start and can see where you need to go; but the wall there prevents you from getting over.

2. I made the button closer so that the jumps aren’t as difficult to get over but still tense such that the ceiling is threatening.

3. I made this jump much shorter so you don’t have to have learned momentum jumping to accomplish it.

I think the post compo version works a bit better and hopefully less players get stuck and frustrated with it.

Anyways this post is getting long so … some take aways from this compo

1.) Make sure to edit your level such that they introduce at most one concept at a time. Make sure that when you flesh out the concept after teaching it, that you don’t accidentally introduce another concept when you’re trying to make a more difficult version of the mechanic your previous lesson introduced.

2. ) Playtest! Playtest! Playtest! This is hard when you’re rushed for time but the more people that play your game the more chances you’ll have to catch these sorts of things. Also take a backseat and just watch the people playing, don’t give them any clues, otherwise you might taint the results of the play-testing.

3.) Diffculty can be fun!  

Hi everybody,

To talk a little about my first LD compo experience, I will say it was hard but fun ^^

Hard because hours passed so quickly and if you don’t make the right choices, it’s bad. In my case, perhaps my first mistake was to work with Haxe I didn’t know very well. I am used to flash but Haxe has little differences I discovered during development. Secondly, before entering the LD, I was thinking of bitmap graphics and my tools were ready… and when I saw the theme I think vector graphics should be more appropriate so I changed to inkscape, discovering the software, swfmill and some problems when trying to import svg… if somebody knows about strange behaviors of bounding box when using swfmill converted svg, I am interested !

What I have learned here is choose and master your tools before entering LD !

Another hard point was trying to do something between 2D and 3D in flash from scratch. It was a little headache but I don’t know if it was a bad idea. To bring something innovative, you have to take some risk, that was mine.

Final point, it was very hard for me to find a great game design for the theme. I was not really inspired, I tried some freewriting and I’ve got some ideas but I’ve never had a great game design. I lost so much time on this, that was bad… I finally give up and finish a kind of game but as I already say, I am not satisfied of the result, it’s not really fun.

So, it was hard… but it was fun because you have to go to the essential and at the end of the week end you have something to show ! And even if it’s not finished, I think I found an interesting potential and I will try to develop a post ld game.

Thanks to all comments, I had some ideas to make a real game. Here they are and every comments are welcome:

• first separate perception and concentration into two antagonist mecanics and try to maximise both to be able to find your keys. Concentration go down when there are pigeons and go up by clicking on pigeons. But pigeons are vicious, they appear in your back ! so you have to look around to find them. And the more you turn, the more you got the sick effect and the more your perception go down. When your perception go down, your vision is altered until you reach the abstract view where you can’t see pigeons anymore ! you have to rest and move slowly to recover perception…
• when perception and concentration are high, you have a chance to find your keys in the grass by clicking on it. As soon as you looked into the chosen grass element, if you didn’t find them, pigeons are back and perception is altered, you will have to maximise gauge again to have another chance to find them. You have to remember where you look at before too.
• more graphics and variations, a better screen ending with your keys as a reward !
• music evolving with perception level: sinusoid waveform based music  for max perception, square waveform for abstract view for example.

It was really fun to participate to this event and to play with all the game you made. There are great entries, congratulations all !

Last point, I was thinking of publishing my timelapse, but I can’t see where I can do this on my entry page. Can somebody tell me how to do this ?
And  another question, where can you set your profile image ?

Sorry for my english level, hope you understand what I was saying here 😉
Have a nice day !

Some news for my entry ^2.

I have reworked the collisions and they are now much less buggy (or at least you shouldn’t be misplaced in the level due to collisions anymore). I have removed the first sneaky circle and I have added a reset shortcut (R key) which brings ² to its starting position.

More to come in the next days.

Post compo : http://maxgun.fr/games/square/

Entry page : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21322

Compo : http://maxgun.fr/ld26/

This week has been hands off tragic for me with multiple parents having cancer, and an old friend dying… life is rough… Broken 1 has morphed into this project: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-tale-of-persephone-and-hades/x/2513003#share

And combines with this adult artbook: http://goingclassical.deviantart.com/

And more I cannot bear to write up. Stay tuned…

Tags: blog, broken one, confusion, hades, indiegogo, ld48, loss, Ludum Dare, persephone, postmortem, solo, tragedy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 at 7:44 am and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

So I received lots of great feedback for my entry into this Ludum Dare #26 which inspired me to keep a blog documenting the continuing development of Ninja Flare. Builds of the game, and source will all be available from there, as well as some of my other projects. Hopefully it may be of interest to some of you, and it would be nice to keep receiving feedback as development proceeds. the blog can be found here:

http://the8bitpimp.wordpress.com/

Here is a little spam of the new sloped tile animations.

Hello everyone! I want to apologize for not rating more games. I’ll get on that shortly, but in the meantime I made something really cool to browse all the games from the last Ludum Dare, it’s (very descriptively) called the Ludum Dare 26 Games Browser. Check it out!

If you hover over the game you can get access to the game page, the author, how many votes they have and their coolness. Also you can click the download icon on the top left to get a list of all the game’s downloads. If you have any feature ideas tell me.

Click to view it

Tags: moonscript

Hi all!

just a short post to annouce that, as promised, i’ve done a Post Jam version of my game(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20741) which fixes many bugs and no-time-left feature of the LD version. Now grass slows you, hitbox fixed, obstacles work in a more realistic way, obstacles sounds redone and other fixes. There are some bugs left, but now the game is much better and I don’t want to spend too much time polishing this game, since this is my first LD and i have already learnt a lot, but the game itself is not enough good to deserve more time.

But enough with the talkings! Here is the game!

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?iwm1j3nlmohjzc8 (Java)

Thanks all for playing and commenting my game! This was a fantastic Jam and i’ll be here on the next one!

I’ve finally compiled a Linux (Ubuntu 13.04 64bit) and OSX (10.7.5) version of my game.

This is my first LD entry and I’ll definitely be in for more in the future.
However, next time I’ll try to come up with something more advanced and probably make it in flash, unity or html5.

LD entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=17770

A bit late, but here’s the postmortem of our 3rd jam game together: Erase

Play and rate It here !

Foreword:

Sorry for the bad English, we are French.

Design vs Code :

The major problem with our team is that nobody has high knowledge in coding, the game designer has had to take on the programming task. In addition to making something in accordance with the subject, we had two limiting objectives.

The first one was to do something you can do. Obviously, the topic was an open door to an abstract gameplay. The problem is that even though we have the ability to imagine it, it was impossible to code it. We have chosen a simple base (a platform game) as the foundation of our game / topic interpretation. The platform game advantage is also that it’s known by all of us, and allows a rapid progression in the subject.

The second challenge was to make a game really Gamee. We don’t like things auto-claimed Indie in which players are completely inactive. We love indie games, but we love the game over all, and it’s important for us to produce something with a challenge to both brain and skill.

If the game is only a reflexive object, we don’t need to do it in video game (a card or board game is the same) which is why the address aspect is important for us, it’s a unique component of digital game. Conversely, if the game is just a skills game, it no longer carries the whole topic.

Theme :

Among the list of potential topics, Minimalist was the one we liked the least (more relevant to the compo than for the jam we think). A priori, minimalism is a trend to remove all of the work that isn’t necessary to the core idea in avoiding unnecessary emotional or sensitive element.

Quickly, we’re start on the idea of staging the iterative removal of unnecessary elements of the game. The idea was to realize a platform game composed of a series of little level /puzzle with several features and decorative elements that the players have to destroy in order to solve the riddle. However, it was easier to find the idea than to done it, and the concept of clean-up the asset at maximum curlicue was actually very difficult to achieve.

In addition, the theme interpretation makes sense when the game is done as a whole and when you arrive to the final level without assets, with few sounds and a character without features.

Realization:

The first night served to the basis codec implementation (the character and features, feature deletion, camera, collisions etc.). As we used Construct 2, this implementation was pretty fast. Meanwhile Mathilde and Alexandre were able to reflect the visual and audio aspect of the game.

Unfortunately, the game design work couldn’t be done quickly (efforts was concentrated on the code) and thus clear explanation of the game principle documents was missing, and therefore until the second day, the creation been difficult. Therefore the following days were more devoted to the creation of assets, levels and integration.

From a graphic design point of view, for a long time the results weren’t enough satisfactory and concepts were thrown away or converted without success. It was difficult to find a graphic charter in agreement with the theme, graphic and minimalist, which has evolved through the levels to represent the character life cycle and depending on the level design. For reasons of time constraint we had to start to make assets without being satisfied with the result and the guideline was found while the levels integration had already begun.

In the initial audio concept, was to form melodies which are decomposed over the levels outcome; however it was rather difficult to achieve an atmosphere both pleasant and minimalist. Communication between the sound aspect and the rest of the game for more than half the Ludum dare was almost nonexistent, which gave us a too late visibility of the total project, due to poor organization. Thus, inspired by Steve Reich on “Music for 18 musicians”, the audio is a music track that mix evolves through the levels. The sound integration hasty made at the Ludum Dare end, which didn’t allow us to do something up to our ambitions (a number of songs weren’t included).

From the game design point of view, there were a lot of things to balance without having the time to do it (notably find a compelling collision box for the triangle character). It was paramount for us that Character is pleasant to manipulate (as Easy-fun sense). It was important to gain momentum (especially the jump), and Dash feature inspired by Rockman X or Sonic in which the feature isn’t fundamental for finish the level but brings dynamism in control, the goal is to push the player to use the exhilarating but dangerous non-core features (the dash is required just in Level 4). But the fundamental interests of the number of features comes with the Erasing and self-Erasing feature. As a first step the player clears level elements to solve the riddle, but from level 5, player has to self-destruct its own features (Jump, Dash or Shoot) to finish the level which requiring a strategic choice in the level course.

Where we failed to use the self-destruct feature is because we don’t have enough levels to a slow difficulty progression and establish levels in which the destruction choice is a real dilemma. In other words the time devoted to the level design was too short and therefore the level is far below the potential that allows the erasing and self-erasing features combined with the three features.

Conclusion:

This is the 3rd jam that we did with the same team and we met some difficulties we had never encountered before such strangely more stress and lack of sleep than in GGJ for example. Nevertheless we are happy to have finished on time a version of our game, a game that far from being perfect, who despite the lack of polish, shows anyway few good ideas and quality realization.

What went right?

1. Mechanics coding: construct is a powerful tool for jam.
2. Graphics: Because lot of people congratulated Mathilde’s graphic design.
3. Game is realized in time (but with few bugs), and it looks nice.
4. The erasing and self-erasing mechanics could be used through lot of level, the idea could be developed with better (and harder) level design.

What went wrong ?

1. The theme was pretty hard for a team with a graphic designer and without a real coder.
2. Coordination on the theme interpretation
3. Resource integration time.
4. Graphic research, it was difficult to realize different assets for the different levels, keep a graphic style and represent the life evolution of the character with abstract shape.
5. Time devolved to Level design.
6. Not enough time to test.

Tags: Ludum Dare, Plateformer, post-mortem, postmortem, puzzle game

My game does an HTTP-POST every time someone finishes a level, so I can analyze how people behave. It’s quite useful, as I can have live statistics of which level people quit on – I also gather some information about how many times people die on that level.

About half an hour ago, someone finished the game after having it open in their browser for more than two days. I have no idea who this person is, but that kind of behavior warms my heart. <3

So, I've decided that I will create a full-fledged game out of this entry; I've started a rewrite in C++. I'm going to give it all the polish and wrapping that you associate with "proper" games. And I'm going to sell it to everyone who wants to buy it.

Small post mortem:

What went right; Almost everything. Things just ‘clicked’ for me this time. ImpactJS is really easy to work with, HTML5 is nice – and I’ve been working a lot with javascript over the past year, so I’ve grown fond of the language. I’m not a wizard in the art department, but this is acceptable.

What went wrong; There are a few things I don’t like about my game. Those are:

* I should pause the game for 0.5 seconds when the player pushes the button – so the player is able to orient him/herself after rotation.

* I should introduce players to the gun more properly – several players miss the fact that you can shoot in this game.

* I should have made more levels – even though 15 levels is a quite proper amount for Ludum Dare, I feel I should have a few medium difficulty levels before the final few. I should also rearrange some of them. I’m afraid that the difficulty may cost me some points in the end, but that’s OK – I think there should be more challenging (but reasonable challenging) games out there; and that’s what I want to make.

* I should have juiced the game more. I’m happy with the particles, though!

Other than that, I’m pleased.

I made a time-lapse:

Oh, and if you wanna play it, you can do so at http://ld26.trygvevea.com. It’s a bit rage-inducing, but it’s def. possible to finish the game

Min

Min was a collaboration between me and Keo. We’ve collaborated on several Ludum Dares together now, so we have a pretty good working relationship. I’m especially proud of how our latest jam game turned out.

Design

As usual, we started off by brainstorming ideas in a google-doc. We had all kinds of ideas, from a turn-based puzzle game to a procedurally generated roguelike. In the end though, our thoughts came back to our first Ludum Dare game together, The Two Of Us

Our first game together

Despite making several games after The Two of Us, we both felt like we never made a game as fun as our first. After realizing this, it was easy to decide to make a successor to our first game, a boss-fight-centric platformer.

There were several aspects with The Two of Us that we wanted to improve on in our new game. First and foremost, the difficulty ramped up too quickly. In TToU, the entire game was boss fight after boss fight. There was no time to breath or learn how to play. We tried to fix this in Min by having non-boss levels in between each fight. The idea was that these levels would introduce new mechanics before the boss fight, as well as allow the player to prepare and take a break before each battle.

Another issue with the TToU was that the player wasn’t very mobile. This was all right in TToU because the hero had a sword for a weapon, and the small rooms he fought in aided his ability to hit the enemy with a melee attack. But personally, I really like playing platformers where you’re mobile and your positioning varies a lot. So, we made a game where the hero is small, agile, and very very mobile. The mechanics were inspired greatly by Megaman, Kirby, and Cave Story.

Art

Before solidifying the art style, Keo came up with several mockups to determine not only the stylistic direction, but also the scale in which the game took place. We settled on a small, one screen game, with no fancy scrolling or camera panning to complicate the view of the game. Having the entire game take place on one screen was a fun restriction to work around, and it was also in the spirit of minimalism.

the hero

Keo ended up with a very minimalistic art style for the game, using a restricted palette (Keo must have used less than 10 colors, easily). Keo focused on outlines of the characters, rather than their textures. The end result was a style that, despite being minimalistic, was gorgeous.

an initial mockup

 we decided to scale up the graphics 2x, to enable the player to see the game more easily

Technical Development

Because I’d written several games in HTML5 now, I didn’t run into many technical issues this game jam. I was basing the engine on a pre-existing engine that I had written for a previous gamejam, and as such, I was able to quickly begin programming specific content for Min. What worked really well for Keo and I was the workflow we established. Keo would drop his latest sprites into a folder on dropbox, and I would copy them over to my development folder. I would then integrate his newest sprites into the game, and commit/push using git to my personal server. My server had a post-receive git hook set up that would automatically minify the javascript and deploy the game to a staging site. Because of this, Keo and I were both able to test the game consistently and iterate on the gfx/code together, despite being in different physical locations. Git is awesome.

git+vim is all you need!

Closing thoughts

Overall, I gotta say I’m happy with the game we ended up with. Sure, there are areas we could improve our game (there’s always room for improvement!). But given the 72 hours we were given, I think we did as well as we could’ve done. I even had time to create some BGM tunes.

If you’ve got a moment, try out our game! We read all of our feedback, and really appreciate any comments you have.

So I always conceived Hero as a touch device game. Took a few hours to get Android SDK playing nice on Windows 8 but I built an APK and tested it on my nexus device.

If you want to give it a go download and sideload it.
Disclaimer: Untested on other phones, Unity so should be dandy but not tested

Let me know what you think. I was playing around with the idea of expanding it to a more full mobile title but instead I think I will leave it there and move onto other projects I have on the backburner.

Tags: android, post comp

I usually don’t know how to write these kind of things but I figure I try and write as much as I can about how my game turned out and what it was like taking part in and actually completing my first Ludum Dare.

Long story short, Only One Shot is a game where you must shoot all the enemy squares to complete the level. However, the game adds a twist where you must do this with one bullet otherwise you fail the level (Hence the game title). But how do you kill more than one enemy with just one bullet (especially when the enemies are spread quite far apart)? This is where the reflector blocks that are placed around each level come in. When a bullet hits a reflector, the reflector will spawn a bullet from each side apart from the side that it was hit on. In levels containing more than one reflector, the game almost feels like a Rube Goldberg machine where one bullet starts up a long chain reaction just to kill some enemies in one go.

What went right:

• The Graphics: Having minimalism as a theme meant that I didn’t have to worry about the art (since I can’t draw to save my life XD) and sort of essentially get away with simple (if somewhat crude) shapes.
• The Gameplay: Trying to interpret minimalism in terms of gameplay mechanics was a bit difficult. Whilst I could have made a simple one button game, I wanted to convey minimalism in the sense that the simplest of things (either one or nothing) are only needed to start a huge reaction hence the one bullet rule of my game. From this core concept, I managed to create a game with simple, yet deep mechanics.
• Having a Plan (and mostly sticking to it): Once I had decided on the core idea of my game as well as figured out the type of game I wanted to make, I decided to flesh my idea out a bit further by brainstorming and jotting down notes on a pad before I get started on doing some actual coding. Although some features I had planned in my notes did not make it into the final version of the game that was submitted, doing this really helped in two ways: Firstly, having a plan to stick to meant that I was able to get most of the essential concepts of my game done in time without the distraction of bloating up my game with unnecessary features and secondly, having a plan meant that I would have a concrete idea of what to code without the risk of suffering mental blocks (if I had decided to just jump in and start coding without one).

What went wrong:

• Time Management: This was probably by far the biggest fault I had with the game. Originally, I had planned to get the game completed and submitted in time for the compo but overall, I wasn’t really making full use of my time as I was either too distracted to work or taking too long on one task (The collision code for my game between the player/enemy and the walls took one long tedious Sunday afternoon to do and most of it was wasted on trying to work out which parts of the collision boxes have overlapped before I eventually realised that I could just use the direction vector of the player/enemy and use that instead whenever the two collision boxes interect and reposition accordingly). Having to work on a Monday didn’t exactly help either which meant that I was only able to work on the game during the evening but fortunately, my game was nearly done and luckily I managed to submit it in time for the game instead (despite the fact
• The reflectors: Although the basic function of the reflectors worked out pretty well (spawn additional bullets when hit), there were a few glaring bugs in the overall functionality which meant that they didn’t work out exactly as I had envisioned. The most obvious bug was when a reflector would spawn bullets when it wasn’t recently hit. During early playtesting, an endless stream of bullets would sometimes spawn from a reflector for no reason causing the game to unfortunately slow down and crash. Although the bug still persists, I managed to work my way around it by adding an extra flag in the logic that checks for a game over condition.

Initial Feedback:

To my own actual surprise, the initial feedback for my game so far was really nice with most saying that they loved the overall concept of the game (with some saying that they would love to play more levels) whilst criticising the fact that the player moved too slow and that there was no way to tell which way the player was facing (a fault of my own in trying to keep the art as simple as possible).

Post-Compo Version? :

Due to the positive feedback that I have received, I am considering making a post-compo(post-jam?) version of my game (depending if I have time) fixing all the bugs I wasn’t able to fix during the 2/3 days of development as well as tweak the game based on feedback (i.e. a faster player and a way to work out where it’s facing) plus add some extra functionality whilst keeping the core mechanics and art the same (although I may consider adding some extra polish to the art as well). To keep things fair however, I would only consider starting work on this version once the judging period so that way I can take all the feedback and work out what needs to be changed.

Overall Experience and What I’ll Do in the Future:

For me, taking part in my first Ludum Dare and actually completing it was a rather scary yet fun experience and despite the fact that some things didn’t go exactly as planned, I feel that my gamedev skills have improved (a bit I think) further. For the next Dare however, I will be working much harder to ensure that I am able to submit something for the compo rather than the jam by working hard to improve on my graphics skills (which I find terribly lacking) so that I don’t have to make something rather crude and simple (unless it’s actually better to go that way). I might use another engine for the next Dare (I’ve used Unity before) or perhaps learn a new one (I’m looking at you LOVE). After all, there’s only roughly 3 more months I have left to start improving my skills until August 😉

And now for a selection of some of the nice comments that I have received for my game…

“Really cool concept. Would have loved to play more levels :D”

“Cool bullet splitting mechanic! Work on this, you have a neat puzzle game idea on your hands :)”

“Great game, I loved the concept.”

“Simple, challenging, awesome. Simple, yet smart design.”

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, xna

Thank you everyone who rated my game. Just surpassed 100 today! Yay!

And if you haven’t yet, now’s a good time to try this awesome-hard rhythm game I made. =)

This Ludum Dare was my second time and my entry My Mini Castle has gained more than a 100 ratings!

On top of that it was one of SonnyBone‘s picks for his Rad Game Roundup!

Now I was already really thrilled by all this, but today I found out that my game was reviewed at www.IndieGameMag.com!

You can read it here!

I can’t express well enough how excited I am!

At the very least I wan’t to thank everyone for playing, rating and commenting!

And (hopefully), see you next Ludum Dare

- Tijmen Tio

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 8th, 2013 at 6:41 am and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

After reading the comments from my entry, -End-, here is a few things I’ll consider adding in next updates.

• Firstly, I fixed hitboxes a bit and a few bugs
• I shall nerf the first levels a bit… or maybe add difficulty options which may not be possible for me at this time, but I’ll do something.
• Now about music, I tried to fix that, but it loops only one song for a reason, so I tought about something else. If you noticed, only when you die in first, third or fifth level you die, that’s because these levels contain the music playing object. The solution? Intros! (before every 5 levels (yes I’ll add more levels)).

This thing stays on the screen for 3 or 5 seconds, starts the music and after that the actual level begings with the music already playing. With the m.p. object in another room, when you die the music won’t restart on reloading scene. Because the m.p. was already crated somewhere and because it’s looping and not just playing the music, you’ll here the same song until a new intro appers.

• More enemies! because only zombies would be boring. In an actual apocalipse what is the first thing you meet (except a few people if you are lucky)? That’s right, the army. That’ll be recolour of the player with a “cap” and a sort of gun (a few gray pixels). You may want to say “hey, but that’ll make the game even harder”, well nope because they will be avaible only in a few levels.

That’s what I planned for now, of course many ideas are floating in my head but after reading the comments I know I should really work on bugs and difficulty.

(And I would like to thank the people who gave me feedback! You rock people) <3

[Cross-posted from my blog over here]

This is a 30 minute post on the technical side of things from my recent (and first) Ludum Dare 48-hour gamemaking competition entry. Maybe these notes will help me in the future. Maybe they’ll help you in the future? Maybe not. Either way, head over here right quick to play the game and get a sense of what I’ll be talking about for the rest of the post

To start off with, I made the game in GameMaker: Studio. I really like GameMaker because that’s really all it is- software that helps you make games. What’s really nice about it for me is how quickly you can get things to show up on the screen and lots of common game interactions are built right into it. With only 48 hours, speed is crucial, and since I knew I wasn’t going to do anything too fancy, there was really no reason why not to use GameMaker for me.

“Click, Release” is a pretty simple game, and there’s not too much magic going on behind the scenes. One slightly tricky thing though was creating the “squares” (or regions of blocks) properly and in the right place. Each region is actually comprised of many smaller squares, and the squares are what individually appear or disappear when you hit them. To accomplish this effect, I used what’s commonly referred to in programming as “the Factory pattern.”

A factory is something which makes other things. A car factory makes cars, a balloon factory makes balloons, yadda yadda yadda. For “Click, Release,” I made a Square Factory. The square factory knows how to make the little colored squares which interact with the ball. Once I have this factory, I can tell it where to start making squares, how many rows to make squares for, and how many columns to make squares for, and then voila- my square factory makes nice little regions of squares! If I move the factory around the screen, it’ll produce a new region whenever I move it and say “GO!”

You can think of how the balls are created the same way. With a Ball Factory. Whenever the game registers a “Left Mouse Pushed Down” the ball factory fires up. Until the mouse is released, the factory keeps increasing the angle of its ramp – or the angle at which it will send the ball into the world. To let the user know this is happening, I draw a little black dot outside the ball’s edge at the current angle. When the mouse is finally released, the factory says, “Ball, go out into the world at this direction! Godspeed.”

The squares and the balls are the main visual components of “Click, Release,” but there’s a whole other channel of sensory information that makes the game work. For me, getting the sound right was the biggest pain while making this game. Ideally, I wanted the game to create your own personal “Gong bath” – to cover you in long full tones as the ball bounced around the screen.

However, two things stopped this dream from becoming a reality. 1) I couldn’t find many good gong sounds online and 2) I learned that making your own sounds was highly preferred for competition entries over using somebody else’s sounds. So naturally I started downloading free synthesizers as fast as I could.

I downloaded A LOT of free synthesizer programs. How hard could it be to find one which had an interface easy enough for a complete novice and also could simulate a chime? Apparently, very hard. After tons of trial and error, I went back to that good old indie sound effect staple http://bfxr.net.

After generating random sound after random sound, I stumbled upon one that had a decently clean enough tone and was free of bips and boops. From there, I modulated the tone’s frequency to produce and download different notes in the same key. I settled on a pentatonic major scale so that each note fit together with all the other notes. This allowed me to simply play random notes from the scale to create a “bath” of sounds.

Yes, the sound is a little cheap, and if I could do it again, I’d be smart enough to say, “Why don’t I just go outside and record the real wind chimes hanging in the backyard?” But I wasn’t that smart, and I made do with what I had.

Additionally, post-competition it’s easy to think how nice it would be if I had made the game in Flash. It would be great to be able to play the game online. And exporting a Mac build from GameMaker turned out to be a serious half-a-day waste of time. But for those 48 hours, I was happy to have GameMaker’s help, and I’m happy with the result.

Thanks for reading! Now go play the game and see this wizardry in action!

It’s been more than a week since Ludum Dare ended (at least the “making a game” part) and though I made a postmortem I’ve decided to do it again. Quick reminder, English is not my native language and I’m translating and adapting a text I previously wrote in Spanish for my personal blog.

This is an auto-review, I tried to be fair and honest.

First of all, I must say I’m not happy at all with my game, in fact I haven’t opened it since I finished. This is the kind of things you shouldn’t say about your project, you should be encouraging people to play it and give it a high rating instead of saying that you don’t really believe in your own game; the thing is that I care more about having fun and learning that I do about obtaining a better rating.
I’m very proud of participating on my first Ludum Dare and finishing in time, it was quite hard, but I feel like I didn’t accomplish my basic objectives.

I really like to ponder about game designing theory, I keep track of every speech Jonathan Blow and other people like him post on Youtube, I find them very inspiring and interesting, I also think they are a must-watch for developers because they try to make you think out of the box and create things that matter. I wanted to achieve something with my entry and I ended up with a couple of half-baked ideas glued together; I don’t know if I wasn’t ready, it was the pressure or what, it doesn’t really matter, but my idea and planning had many mistakes from the beginning.

When I try to analyze my own game what I do is breaking it into parts. The graphics are just acceptable (taking into account that the theme was minimalism), the music is unexisting and the only sound you hear is when you jump and when you discover a new block (which is kind of irritating after a while). So, what we have left are the gameplay/core mechanics and how you affect the player.

• The core mechanic is pretty simple. The stage is invisible and you have to discover it walking from one corner to the other. Ok, it’s a bit original, but nothing great. It’s a totally unfair system without any type of challenge. You are given two paths, you don’t know which is the right one, the one that looks shorter is probably going to be blocked, sometimes the developer will block the long path so you don’t always skip the short one; but that’s all, choose one randomly and if it doesn’t work go back and choose the other. That mechanic is OK for one level, it gets boring with many levels and it makes no sense to use it on a full game. This is the kind of things I wish I had realized before.
• In the game there is also a “being” who writes messages, in the beginning it was gonna be something that gave the player inspiring messages about life and tried to encourage the player, it turned itself into a jerk who messes with the player, I think that was a good decision. It’s kind of funny, makes a few jokes and hopefully made someone smile while playing the game. But then again it’s a half-baked idea of unclear purpose and glued to the rest of the game.

I’ve failed to communicate with the player and make the experience worthy, maybe because I wasn’t sure about what I wanted to express. My entry is kind of soulless and distanced from the original theme. I spent a lot of time trying to design new levels thinking that it was gonna fix it without realizing that it wasn’t the solution. Some friends told me that they wanted me to keep on developing the game and making new levels because they enjoyed the current version, but I don’t think I could, maybe I’m being a bit tough but I really think I’m just being realistic and honest.

The fact that I kind of hate my entry doesn’t mean I’m giving up, probably it’s the opposite, I’m more motivated to keep making games. I already started a new project, nothing big right now, I just have some basic graphics (I’m keeping the guy I designed for the compo) and some pages full of ideas, I’ll see where it takes me.

This is what I’m working on right now

My friends liked my entry, I’m really glad they had a good time with it because I worked hard but I want to make something I can be proud of. I won’t be participating on the next Ludum Dare ( exams ) but I won’t miss the one after that. I had a lot of fun participating and I think I learnt a few things. Thank everyone for this!

Personal Blog (Spanish)

Twitter

Entry

Tags: postmortem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More
A (very) short video extract:

Cylinder 10s extract

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

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

What went wrong?

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

What went right?

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

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, SuccessStory

5 Weird and Wonderful games.

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

Minimum Reason Game: Hail To The Potato King

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

I feel that the instructions are clear.

Perfect Crime

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

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

Special client

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

I would like more games that feel like Oatmeal comics.

Mr Potato assembly-line

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

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

Get The Potato

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

YOU HAD ONE JOB

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

5 other great games

Leaf Me Alone

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

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

Line Knight

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

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

This is not a minimalist game

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

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

Flight Time

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

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

Nega-girl

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

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

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

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

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

The Good

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

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

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

The Bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play the game!

Tags: post-mortem

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

Compo entries:

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

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

3.  ::.::::::. by rwos. Sort of FPS.

Jam entries

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

2. Aranami by Frozen Fractal

3. Enlightment by  xploitgames.

The most crazy entries

1. Please Ignore The Dancing Llama by Zed

2.  Staring Contest by timtimtimtim

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

Advirtisment

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

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

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

People Who Mark Territory

hey look in the next room!! 😀

IGNORE THIS PATH, MISCREANT.

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

this Is my humble abode welcome

don’t go into the next room

PLEASE ENTER MAZE FROM OTHER END

~ Society for Protection of Mazes and Puzzles

People Who Think Deep Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

People Who Tell Stories

HEED YOU NOT OUR WARNINGS?

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

Once Upon a time, there was a foolish man.

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

People With Different Ideas Altogether

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

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

—,===,”<   crocodile

Never go full Zen.

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

To everyone who’s left an interesting note,

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

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

About the theme

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

So I should do something different.

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

What wrong ?

about game:

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

misc :

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

What Right ?

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

Next time

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

AbbrevsMaster

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

Tags: Google Dart, post-mortem, postmortem

Mondritron: 2026 Post-Mortem

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

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

Anyways, about my game…

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

Here’s all the notes I wrote:

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

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

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

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

Hey!

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

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

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

Favorite Compo games

Budget Squad by deepnight

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

Weapons of Minimal Destruction by bluescrn

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

You Must Escape by GertJohnny

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

Favorite Jam games

Mustache Armies by TurboDindon

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

Swimming Fool by blackmagic

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

Potato Dungeon by _Rilem

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

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

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

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

[Cross posted from Omiya Games]

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

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

Pen & Paper

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

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

Wacom Tablet

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

No love for the poor guy.

Fossil Wiki

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

And coming up with the game’s title

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

Unity’s Pre-installed Scripts

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

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

Introduction

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

Timeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What went right

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

What went wrong

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

Conclusion

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

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

Escaped with all alive

Hi there, just a noobie question…

On the compo site it says :

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

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

So just for my curiosity, does anybody know this ?

Sorry to bother you again …

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

Hipster Pad is my third Ludum Dare submission.

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

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

What went right:

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

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

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

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

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

What went wrong:

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

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

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

Summary:

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

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

Here are the first 6 from my list:

1. essentia


 

2. Minimalist RTS


 

3. Battery


 

4. Join


 

5. end


 

6. XYZ

Check out all 48 Awesome Games Here

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

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

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

Link: Android

(playing on a tablet)

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

Tags: android, LD #26

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

What happened

Conception

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

Programming some squares

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drawing some stuff

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

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

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

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

Sound

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

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

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

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

Finally

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

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

So, to sum it up:

The final game!

What went right

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

What was wrong

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

PS.: Yeah, sorry for any engrish.

On a projector!

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

http://www.twitch.tv/superdisk_

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

Fuck yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good

– Theme

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

– Brainstorming

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

– Scale

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

– Camera

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

– Audio

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

The Bad

– School

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

– Audio Processing

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

– Difficulty

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

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

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

Tags: playthrough, video

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

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

Tags: MiniLD, post-compo, release, SuccessStory

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

1)  A thing about nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Meh

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

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

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

The Future

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

Anyway, here’s the related links. Enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-CrazyCage

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

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

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

What’s changed:

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

my entry for this LD

click this to view my entry

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

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

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

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

sorry for my english XD

Tags: post-mortem

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

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

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

Tags: Let's Play, Twitch.tv

It’s okay.

Dont worry.

Challenge is dangerous for you.

We play so you dont have to….

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

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

Less is More by atraxgames

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

Revolvengarde by Andrio

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

F*** this job by Casino Jack

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

Budget Squad by deepnight

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

Fractured by dalbinblue

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

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

Play ‘Super 1-Bit Space Arena’

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

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

What went right!

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

What didn’t!

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

So – what now?

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

Post Mortem

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

Gaem 1:

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

Gaem 2:

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

Gaem 3:

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

Gaem 4:

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

Then, this mockup was drawn:

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

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

The good

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

The bad

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

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

Rate it here

Well, better late than never, huh ?

So here’s my game, The Minimalism Quest.

What went right :

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

What went wrong :

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

What to do next :

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

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

Hey there!

I made this

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

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

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

I am

and I’m one of the founders of

and we organised this

with help from the awesome people at

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The editor interface was mostly mouse-driven:

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

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

The Gathering

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

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

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

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

Here they are:

PHILIP KLAS — neight

SDFJKL — Dining Philosopher (50) *

XYZ — ataxkt

Be Still — metadept

Art Critic — sanojian (38)

Title: Subtitle — LizEngland

Hito — lucas_gaspar

Union — theplotlessplot

Minimalism Tower Defence — Dew

Join — Perry

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

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

Thanks to some really appreciated feedback and also some unfinished business of my own, here’s the postcompo version of squarespace!

• the game content is pretty much the same as original compo version. 
• major performance improvement 
• major collision detection improvement (it’s harder as a result!) 
• in-game help system improved 
• can now pause the game  
• various other bits of tweak and polish 

Please submit your ratings based on the original compo version.

Web! | Standalone! (Java – Platform Independent) and a slightly updated Play Guide (PDF)

Skware was my first game written for Ludum Dare. In fact, it was my first game ever!

I enjoyed building it so much that I’ve decided to continue working on it in my spare time (nights/weekends). Getting feedback has been great (though I’d love more) and so I’ve begun to organize my next steps. I’m using Trello to list the remaining work. Here’s a picture of where I think I’m headed

Thanks to all who’ve played and rated my first game. It’s been a great experience!

Tags: LD#26

Released a post compo version of my game Kriok
It is also my attempt to finally complete the october challenge.

It has some minor changes and a few more levels than the compo version.

Tags: android

I survived another Ludum Dare.  Me and about 10 other programmers went to a museum, ate pizza, drank soda, engaged in other unhealthy activities (actually I did mostly DDR:Max2 until we found DDR:SuperNova, but those were the healthy options, other popular options were playing Battletoads), and after 48 hours, showed off our results to each other, the founder of the museum, and a couple of other interested onlookers.

I was highly disappointed I didn’t finish.  But I scrambled to get it done, and I submitted it in its unfinished state.  As many people commented, I could have easily finished it up on Monday in the Jam time frame, but really I’ve got stuff to do Monday and after marathoning all weekend the last thing I want to do is keep working on it.

I submitted it, and I also wanted to take another look at its state.  My first commentary on this game is that I had no idea the direction it was going, from start to finish.  Well, at some point, I had the idea it would just be a collection of simple puzzles, something people would likely go through once to say “oh hey that’s cool enough” but highly unlikely play ever again (unless except they got bonked off of level two and wanted to retry to see the rest of the game).

What went right:

• People seemed to like it.  This surprised me, as it seemed to me that there was no game at all in this.  No really, you like this?
• For having no plans, just laying stuff out, for just experimenting, everything went better than expected.  I started thinking minimal: “what could be more minimal than a cube on a plane?” But then I thought “well there has to be something this cube wants, why not a sphere?”  After the sphere puts up the sign, well, there should be a castle that the princess is in, right?  And it just flowed from there.
• 3D models.  I don’t know if my skill in using Blender just went up three levels since the last time I used it, but I had no problem making assets in Blender and with “all those cubes” in Unity.  I mean, I don’t think I’ll be winning prizes on polycount.com any time soon, but considering that my usual experience with Blender starts with “how do I use this thing again” and ends with “well I guess that will do if people squint…”, I was quite impressed with myself.  Of course, last time I was quite impressed with myself on graphics, the commentary was that the graphics were horrible.  I guess that is more a commentary on how confident I am in my graphical ability than how good they really are.

What went wrong:

• I didn’t finish it.  This fact bothers me a lot more than it should, but I guess that’s personal.
• Camera.  I kind of liked the Grim Fandango-esque of camera movement, but it really didn’t behave, in almost all situations.  I spent more time on it than I should and still got frustrated.  If anyone has hints on how to deal with the camera in Unity I’d appreciate it.  I was trying to use the default third person cameras controllers in Unity (Assets->Import Package->Character Controller, then delete everything but the Camera scripts) which I thought would be better than rolling my own.
• More bugs.  Most of the bugs I noticed but kept adding more stuff with the idea of “well if I take time to fix bugs, I won’t finish”, and I probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did if I didn’t just give up on camera, inventory, upside down signs, and other issues.
• Difficulty.  I had intended to make the key a little harder to find, or just harder to find than the door (the idea is that you find the door and castle first).
• Blue on black text.  This looks good in a web page, but a few people who didn’t get the game from Ludum Dare and thus didn’t read the commentary that you could play the text adventure without the rest of the game literally didn’t see that there was a text adventure on the wall.
• Sound.  What sound?  I had great plans to add sounds all over the places, at least feedback sounds for when you pick up/drop/bonk in to things/etc.

Random commentary:

• I’m glad that everyone has enjoyed it, and this makes me want to rate everyone’s games so I can get a rating too.  When I was being mopey and just thinking that I should just push this off a cliff, I thought “well good, I don’t have to be playing all your games and coming up with ratings”.  But now I kinda want to be rated, because others have indicated appreciation, and I wonder if I pull off enough ratings, even if I don’t get top marks, maybe it would it be worth it.
• On that note, LD #26 has produced some awesome games!  Normally it’s a chore to rate games, but I’ve played several games that were quite fun and I didn’t just play them to rate them!  (Despite this I think I have only played and rated about five games.  I promise, I’ll rate a few more!)
• Popular culture references:  There was a post on here on ludumdare.com ranting about games using popular culture references.  In this game, I blatantly steal ideas from the Atari game Adventure (including the title!) as well as referencing Super Mario Brothers “I’m sorry, but the princess is in another castle!”  I think this, plus text adventures, pushed “happy memory” buttons in some gamers.  One person told me that if I had just made a 3D implementation of Atari Adventure he would have given it top marks.  I don’t know how much bump this gave my game, but I suspect some.  To be honest, the whole Adventure theme came when I made that castle and I thought “hey, that castle looks quite a lot like the one from that old Atari game”, and I replayed it to remind myself what it was like.
• Finishing post compo:  I think the only reason I would do this is to feed it to my onegameamonth account, which is looking pretty dismal with only a game finished in January (but, eh, three unfinished games since then?  I was doing better than this last year, without any 1GAM toys).  It’s probably true that it will take another day to finish to what I had in mind for LudumDare, but I really don’t think that I will take the time to finish this.  If I do, I will likely spend a little more time on it and add more Adventure-ish things, such as larger wrap-around mazes, additional castles, and a carryable bridge.  Some of which might be very hard in Unity.

Once I get past the initial disappointment of not finishing, this was an awesome Ludum Dare!  Thank you to everyone who came down to the MADE and worked on their adventures with me!  (Hey I should rate those, since I’ve played them all, that would give me an additional six games I can say I have rated.)  Thank you to the MADE for pizza and soda!

Also, since everyone else is posting their favorite games, I might as well too.

Looking for love – by Filth And Money – made with me at the MADE!

Gods Will Be Watching – by GreyShock – I can’t believe this was made in a weekend.

Ah, the satisfaction of doing something that actually makes you proud. I learned this the hard way, when I attempted a more complex game with Ludum Dare 25. I was not in a mood for it and already after day one, I was considering tossing the towel into the ring. But I carried on and delivered a broken prototype, that left a nasty feeling in my gut that I just wasted a weekend for nothing.

However, lessons were learned from that, and thus this time I made sure I would only make things I truly enjoy and that are focused on my strongest sets of skills. I wanted to aim for something rich in mood and story, that had a cinematic feeling to it, or as it turned out in this case, a sense of theater play. So a quick rundown of how the weekend went about.

Day 1:
Got up to read the  theme. Thought about it for a while, and the remembered an old idea that I have had before. Started setting up a base template to work upon for an hour. Then I went out into the nice sun and weather, since we were having a spring cleaning that weekend. Then in the afternoon, I started working on the game. My main goal was to set up all the game mechanics within the first day, so that the second day would be focused entirely on content, which really payed off.

Day 2:
By somewhere around afternoon I guess, all mechanics, graphics and music had been wired up. For the music, I know from previously Ludum Dare that it is not my cup of tea, so I put something together with www.jamwithchrome.com and left it at that in order to save time for creating content.So now it was time to create the actual game and storyline. It hit me as brickwall and I didn’t know where to start. Luckily I did what would turn out to be the best choice I could have made. I sat down and wrote a walkthrough.

Yes, that is correct, before the game was even made, there was a walkthrough for it. But this was going to serve as great reference when I started coding the logic for the game and knowing what would happen at every sequence. So I made a silent placeholder dialog consisting of “…” that could be invoked of every character. And I then  began to code all the logic with the goal of matching it completely with the walkthrough and all the scenes that was supposed to happen.

Having it then done, a writing marathon began, as I wrote lines of dialog for 4-6 hours straight. The code structure made it really simple to add in dialog and replace the placeholder. So it was quite a magic moment when I first played through the game, now that all the dialog had been added. It took me 20 minutes just to get through and proofread everything. So the game was more or less complete with 3 hours to go. I used another half hour or so for some final tweaking and then it was finally done and ready for the compo!

———————–

So that is how the weekend went about. Now, before I do a quick summary of what went good and what went bad, I would like to talk about a few things.

One thing that I put great emphasis on, was to make the game and story completely free of any gender and racial bias. That is, you can not tell anything about the characters besides their manners and personality. This made some of the sentences tricky, but nothing that couldn’t be worked around. Why I did this, was that I felt it was necessary in order to prevent any form of stereotypes and prejudices. Otherwise, there would be a high chance that it would have turned out a white male (as I am) or perhaps a white female. By conceling the characters, they would be guarded from any type of preconception from my side.

I also made sure to heigthen the words that was important to the game world as a way to enforce them and give them a more heavy weight to the player. By repeating them over and over in a sort of honory manner, they will eventually start to live as a higher concept. This also came about, as all the actors and probs had a static place and associated Hymn, further rooting the very nature of the game for the player.

Lastly, everything was intentionaly but in a high abstract form. My idea was that this game should be able to translate completely into a real life theater play. And thus, for example the name of the characters sounds something you would read of a theater program where they list the cast. It also gives more power to the player, as they will have to use their own imagination of what the different concepts mean and what is going on.

So to round off this postmortem, let’s do the traditional list of good and bad.

What went good:

• Making something that were in my right domain, focusing on my strongest skills
• Complete game mechanics day 1, only make content and minor logic day 2
• Having a complete design document, in my case a walkthrough. This made it possible to write all the logic without worrying how it all would fit together. Also it made me focus better, since it made me ignore any branching paths and other things that I was planning for at first.
• Working with Html and Js, as I could find bugs and both fix them in the code and at runtime. Otherwise I would have to start all over with the playthrough every time a blocking bug showed up. Now I could just hotfix it in the DOM and Js and just carry on.
• Using bitly to get nice statistics of how many have clicked the link to my game =)

What went bad:

• Since I was using css3 for animations, there was some trouble timing it with the javascript. Which in turn made the pacing for the game a lot slower than it should have been. Since it was such a long game, it was hard to get the flow and pacing right, as I was mostly busy patting myself on the back for a good job this time =P
• Did not use the remaining time to polish the game more. This includes the timing as I mentioned, but also to add some sound effects and animated movement that could have helped set the mood even more.
• Missed putting the toggle button for the music at first, which I knew from the beginning that I should have done.

All in all, I am extremely happy with this entry. It makes me look forward to how much I can improve next time =)

Check out the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13137

Tags: postmortem

A reminder that I’m live-streaming at on 11:00 pm, Eastern Time!

Edit: Aaaaaaaaand we’re live!

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

Tags: Let's Play, livestream

At long last I have a web version of I Know Nothing up and running for anyone that wants to check it out! Definitely use Chrome as your browser.

This is my first game and HTML5 has been somewhat of a pain to deal with but a great learning experience. Alas, WebGL saved the day in the end for the primary issue at hand, namely performance.

Next up: a trailer. Stay tuned.

Out of 100, here’s my favorite web games (and their task):

Orbicular (Aim and dodge)
Aranami (Rotate)
Root Route! (Navigate)
Less is More (Simulate)
Mind the Gap (Optimize)
You Must Escape (Memorize the maze)
Potato Dungeon (Swipe)
Join (Navigate)
Leaf Me Alone (Explore)
Gods Will Be Watching (Manage)
Flight Time (Orbit)
.MONDR (Dodge)
The Lamp (Seek and avoid)
XYZ (Rotate)

And here is Duncan and my entry:

Right Side of the Road (English)

So I’m well on my way to getting sick of playing games… at least for a while. Here are eleven good games I’ve played, in randomized order, out of just over 150.

A – infernet89

A game with no instructions that does not need any. You get the simple joy of figuring the game out as you go along.

Placeholder – mtrc

That bug that you can’t quite catch… just make a comment in the source code and move on. It’s the experience of game development.

My Peculiar Car – brantkings

Wacky and simple gameplay, with a fusion of sax hits and comedic automobile design that just works.

I Know Nothing – MathiO

Simple gameplay focused on exploration and obstacles that are organic parts of the terrain.

Hexzilla – Bernhard

Strategy game that’s very addictive. My high score is 4537 credits, on wave 404. It’s all about building redundant shield generators behind a double layer of turrets.

This Is Not A Minimalist Game – Volute

A polished puzzle platformer with a great twist at the very end, and some sharp dialogue in the middle.

# – Kitch (not pictured)

A minimal arcade game that gets a lot of mileage out of some great sound effects.

T.O.M.B. – Knighty

Wicked puzzle platformer with an array of tricky but well-designed levels. I can’t beat it, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

Prototype (Jam) – OnlySlightly

Another game that evolves as you play.

The Epicly Short Adventure – JaJ

A platformer with no repeating tiles: each area has its own complete set of artwork. The final boss is a real treat, and it even has multiple endings.

X PRESS (Jam) – Pitoum

I’ve never had a game give me instructions so many times. Guess which button you have to press in this game…

Bonus challenge: find the artwork…

How many games can you find that feature artwork in Piet Mondrian’s style?

How many games in LD26 feature Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”?

I know, a lot of people propose to start with a playable prototype and set up proper gameplay as fast as possible, but I noticed something during the last jams…

…the longer the time advances, the more tired I am, lacking in concentration (obviously). Additional, starting with gameplay always led to overestimate myself and therefore coding and bugfixing until the end, rushing some graphics here and there. So as the timer expired, I always had a game which was, respective gameplay, not finished, and had not that art I wanted to make.

So this time I made it the other way around – and (I think) it worked in terms of “I am satisfied what I made”. If it plays or looks good, is truly a different kettle of fish (wow, the dictionary spits some funny things out… “this is a different kettle of fish” is in german something like “this is written on another paper”  : D).

At first, I made the background and the different areas where the player can walk on and implemented the generation of the map, the highlighting of areas where the cursor is on as well as other (graphical/interface) stuff, but no resource management or the player’s movement.

Grasslands, forests, mountains, lakes and snowy landscapes.

Afterwards, icons and tooltips were made and implemented, showing some dummy values in the game. The graphics and interface as well as some very basic programming stuff took the first day.

Hunt for food, draw water, chop wood, stay warm and find the resources (fishing grounds, herbage and ores).

The fear of not finishing the game and the case, that I have actually only one day to make the programming of the gameplay, forced me to decrease the graphical amount which therefore limited the complexity and amount of the gameplay. I did not changed graphics or added some during the second day, so I totally could focus on making a game based on the graphics. The result was a lot of time for bugfixing, playtesting, balancing and such stuff.

On the other hand, there are some things in my framework (on top of XNA) which need too much time to program (implementing the interface, the areas for click and hover events etc.). Additional, I really need a particle library…

Okay, this post mortem was somehow short, as I focused only on one aspect. Did you have a jam where you started with the graphics at first? Worked it or was it a fail? Let me know!

You can play my game right here!

Tags: post-mortem

This entry was posted on Monday, May 13th, 2013 at 3:57 am and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I just wanted to let people know about the enhanced version of my game I just uploaded. It’s an abstract game where you use shadows to orient yourself and go through walls to escape enemies.

You can play Shape of shades here : [PLAY]

Tags: enhanced, flashpunk, haXe, haxepunk, screenshot

Hey guys.

I could compile a “compo” version for windows. Also added post compo updated versions for mac and windows, and a video with both versions in action. Everything here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22219

Things I plan to do before writing a post mortem:

– Add lifes and perhaps continue

– Add a scoring system

– Some enemies won’t kill pato loco – he’ll just get damage (use the energy bar)

– Add a new enemy (I made a dog sprite – I want him in the game). Maybe I’ll make a hunter sprite if I have time (pato loco is a duck… a dog and a hunter seems to me his natural foes).

– Ice stage.

– More stages.

Things I won’t do anymore:

– A water stage (did the sprites, but I won’t be add anyways).

– Keys opening doors.

I wonder if my game is the best looking one of this contest ^^ In fact I have good-looking water, nice ice, moving clouds and more 😀 For it’s graphics the game is pretty small, too – the Windows&Linux version together is 16,6 megs big! And the derivate of  Sauerbraten I use grants relatively good performance.

Shifting away from the technically aspect.. Gameplay-wise, it focuses on exploration. You’re an explorer on an iceberg, who wants to get famous by discovering things. Theoretically, the chances to find something on a small iceberg are minimal, but practically.. who knows..?

Jump in your boat and move to the isle.

Don’t forget to vote after your journey has ended.

Hi there!

I’m glad to announce that, after lot of work, a post compo version of … is now available! It has more levels, more awesomeness and completely new graphics, look!

It will be released on Kongregate and Newgrounds in a few days. But before play the beta here while it’s still hot! Any feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome. Do not hesitate to drop me a tweety-tweet!

Of course my original entry can still be played here (100% shameless). By the way reading the comments I do believe that there are not a lot of folks that found the super secret level available only in the compo version. As a motivator, here is a sneak peak at it:

Mr Potatowesome FTW!!

The first one was so fun, I’m live-streaming again! this time, it’s on 10:00 pm, Eastern Time!

Like last time, I’ve setup a public Google Docs spreadsheet to list the games I’ll be playing. Feel free to post a comment with your game’s URL on this post, or directly in the spreadsheet!

Tags: Let's Play, livestream

I forgot to make an announcement but I add a post compo version, the game is the same, it’s just more pleasant to play!
(And by the way I now rated more than 20 games ^^)

(a beautifull gif with an awesome quality ^^’)
——————————————————-
Update:
-more user-friendly controls
-faster (the 48h version is a bit slow)
-improve a little bit arms modelisation & animation
-add a few sounds
-add an end scene
——————————————————–
Hope you’ll have fun!

Jacques le lezard
@jacqueslelezard

Theme:

I liked the theme, I felt this was the perfect theme for my first ludum dare compo, once I finally understood it. I am sure everyone had a glance at Piet Mondrian’s Compositions, I know I did. At first when I hear the word minimalism, I think of either Bomberman or Mario shrinking down to size or as I used to call the “teeny- weeny disease.” So I felt I should research the term a little more deeply. The words that really hit home when I read it on Wikipedia was, ” simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect.” so I felt my game should live on that statement.

The idea:

I was mostly inspired by Piet Mondrian’s Art. You start in pure blackness as a black box and you strive to come out of the dark and “make something of yourself.” So you then navigate through the darkness somehow then come to some simple obstacles or compositions that are preventing you from escaping.

Design/Mechanics:

The first level/area is based on the composition by Piet Modrian’s Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red. The mechanics would work like so: Blue colors would transfer you from white area to white area, Red areas would be elevators lifting you up from floor to floor and Yellow/Green would transfer you to a different area. I wanted to have top down camera at first centralizing the black square/player, but midway through I changed to a third person camera. I designed my levels based on those mechanics. I wanted to start in darkness so I needed a way to be guided through, so I then found my answer for Audio. I used as few sounds as possible making only four files that would be the only sound in the game and I wanted to make the most out of the sounds as I could. I needed to plannout my repeating level assets better.

Programming

I have been working the model-view-controller shown to me through Unity3D by mbakr . I think it has been working quite well usually I think I run into trouble figuring out my static variables, but with this method it helps me keep my static items organized with the get and set methods.Towards the end of the compo, I think I got a little sloppy just throwing scripts on objects that may have been better set on the player/controller or thought the model itself.

Audio

I enjoyed doing the audio. Being a bass player in the past, had me really enjoy making the music. I think for next time I might even try recording my bass amp through some audio recording device. It was my first time bring sound and programing it in Unity3D as well which was awesome and easy. Audio sets a mood for sure.

What when wrong?

Guiding the player or Instructions/ Tutorials, helping guide in the darkness. Spending to much checking ludum dare site and twitch.tv which could have been used on more designing/brainstorming time . I think interpreted the theme minimalism to an extreme, by adding to much minimalism to everything, including the instructions which really threw some players off (see images above for something I should have done). I did not want to change it during the compo because I felt it was probably going to take adding a tutotrial/learning section. I think I may have spent a little too much time in Unity3D with level design. Better planning of levels with repeated assets can go a long way.

What went right?

I feel I definitely got the theme right . Finishing the game went right. Whenever I hit any “road blocks” I went back to my sketchbook replanned any problems that I had and at the same time came up with more ideas. Using the sketchbook was nice and I plan to do it more often instead of sitting there thinking in my computer chair.

Conclusion

I felt I got a real crash course on getting a game out before a deadline which I have not really done before. With this theme I think I got “off the hook” designing some assets which usually takes up most of my time. I feel as though this was my warm-up to ludum dare, because when I look at some of the other entries, they don’t need to be so theme concentrated. I received great value in my feedback for navigating the player and feel the next experience won’t leave any aspects open for interpretation.

Play it here:

Box’s World

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20551

I have corrected two bugs in my game.

I will to do a post compo soon.

The new version!

With less than 7 days to go until judging ends and well, because pretty much everyone else is doing it, here’s my top 5 out of over 100 games rated so far:

F*** this job

(Follow the) Line

You must Escape

Super 1 bit Space Arena

The Sentient Cube (Game has unfortunately been taken down as of 14/05/13 but it’s still in my Top 5)

The Special Hidden Gem Award (Courtesy of the Rating Rescue Rangers): A Trigger Darkly

And finally, insert shameless plug of my game here.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 13th, 2013 at 5:22 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.

So I finally did my post compo. The only thing left is to add the music that I made. But I’m lazy, so I think I’ll leave it.

What has been changed:
Added sounds (which mostly were created during the compo)
Added difficulty
Changed version in about menu XD

Well that’s pretty much it. You can find the entry here.

You can also see a speedrun (of the original) here:

Or you can see the timelapse:

Tags: post-compo

It’s awesome seeing user creating clever level for your game. After I loaded the post-compo version of my game on Newgrounds with the level editor included, some people created very cool levels, examples here:
Less is More? – LD26 page

Tags: LD #26

After rating 100 games, I decided to share 10 best ones / most noticeable with you (order is not important):

1. Tower of Pixel by AlanZucconi – super addictive!

2. The epicly short adventure by JaJ – beautiful graphics and great mood

3. Minimalist Horror Story by MinionStudios – truly scary horror game

4.  Requiem by Nik Sudan – amazing mood and story

5. Cottonhead by  Patacorow – simple, cute and extremely polished platformer

6. Mustache Armies by TurboDindon – my favorite in terms of gameplay

7. Barren Universe by TomboFry – my favorite interpretation of theme

8. Mind the Gap by shiprib – simplified public transport simulator, addictive like hell!

9. Hunter hungry by Jonathan Whiting – excellent atmosphere and mechanics

and the last one is…

10. Potato Lotion Dilemma! by shotiris – probably the creepiest game I’ve ever played, not sure what I can say about it… you should check it yourself.

So, minimalism turned out to be a great theme for me. I’d already been thinking about the idea of just doing a simple, fun game to relax after all of the hard work I’d been doing on my other game, so everything worked out. But not before a sidetrip through the insanity of development that was just a little bit more insane than usual.

I decided to take a well-known genre and pare it down to the core experience. Hence, a bullet-hell shooter with no shooting. The player doesn’t even have to click on anything–the click at the start is just to make sure your web browser is focused. While the art style references De Stijl, I felt that for a game the essence was in the mechanics, not the visuals, so I avoided the visual minimalism of horizontal and vertical lines in favor of an interactive minimalism of a handful of actors and the tightly defined but emergent relationship between them.

Despite everything in the game being a square, you can pretty much instantly tell how they relate to each other just but how they move and interact. I like how that turned out.

You can play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12047

What Went Wrong

Time

Technically this didn’t go wrong so much as I knew going in that this was going to be an issue. I had a major paper due the week of Ludum Dare, so there was no way I would be able to devote the full time to the game, or even very much of it. I actually wasn’t sure if I was going to participate at all until a late evening conversation on Saturday made me realize that I had to get this idea out of my head. I always make a point of sleeping properly and not disrupting my usual routines, so even though I had deadlines about to steamroll me I ended up putting in about three hours on the game Saturday night and picking development back up at about ten or so on Sunday. In total, I probably spent about twelve to fifteen hours on the game.

Audio

I knew I wanted to get audio into the game, but a bug earlier in the day had put me behind, so I ended up with three hours to go, no audio–and no idea how to add it, because Processing.js doesn’t natively do audio. I had to learn HTML5 audio and make the sounds in three hours or less. Preferably less, because I like to leave some extra time at the end of Ludum Dare for breathing room. It worked in the end, but I’d have liked to have a bit more attention to the audio–but not to add much, because the minimalistic effects that are currently a part of the game do fit the theme. Just be glad my screeching temp sounds got replaced.

Testing

The procedural generator I wrote is fairly clever, given the time constraints. It divides the different possible features a wave can have into buckets and then uses Perlin noise to select a subset of those features to use. But it needs a bit more tuning than it has. I was the only one testing it, so I knew the ins and outs of the generator, but other people take a bit of time to figure it out and mostly die when the difficulty curve ramps up really sharply at the fifth level.

If I had been able to watch other people play the game I probably would have been able to avoid the other big problem, which is that there’s no “Game Over” screen. I didn’t need it while I was testing, and I didn’t care what my score was, so I didn’t notice that it was missing. But having one turns out to be really important for the game. Adding it in was a simple 26-line change, and the post-comp version has it, but I feel that if I had other people test it during primary development the game would have ended up even better than it is now.

What Went Right

Processing

Processing was a great platform to work with. I had to implement my own collisions, but that wasn’t a problem since I already knew how. I was able to use a lot of programming tricks that are technically feasible anywhere, like adding easing to most of the movement, but Processing’s immediate feedback let me fine-tune to get the exact feel that I wanted. And feel is a huge part of a game like this. Processing.js was easy to get working once I figured out which PVector functions weren’t implemented yet–in fact, it was so easy that I switched to make the web version of the game the primary one for the competition release.

Scope

I gave myself permission to not do everything. That is, the game wasn’t going to be the best graphics, the best sound, the most innovative concept–I was going to focus on making a game, not starting a revolution. Minimalism turned out to help with that, since it let me make a game that is deliberately about the most basic expression of a core idea.

No Feature Creep

Speaking of which, minimalism gave me an excuse for avoiding feature creep. Every time I had an awesome idea for something that would be an awesome addition to the game, I could just say, “Nope. Minimalism,” and go on my way.

Source Code Control

I took a few minutes on Sunday to set up a git repository for the game. I never ended up needing it, but it let me experiment, knowing that there was always going to be a mostly-working version of the game that I could go back to. I can, right now, jump back to the compo-version or forward to the post-comp changes with no trouble at all. If you aren’t using source code control, take a few minutes to learn how. You won’t regret it.

Conclusions

Keeping yourself healthy is important, even during a crazy crunch situation like this. I made a point to sleep and eat–and that really helped when I needed the energy and concentration to learn a completely new thing three hours before the deadline.

Finally, the community is a big part of why I participate. I make a point of rating a bunch of games–nowhere near all of them, but as many as I can find the time to do. I’ve already incorporated some of the suggestions I’ve received into the post-comp version I’m working on. I try to leave feedback that will help make the games better and I encourage you to do the same.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12047

Tags: 2D, minimalism, nothing left, post-mortem, postmortem, processing, processing.js

It is time to help the less reckless players. Here is the first part of the Erase walkthrough, with the solution of the famous Level 4 which stop a large number of players.

Good game !

Tags: Plateformer, walkthrough

I’ve finally rated 100 of the entries, so I wanted to take a moment to highlight a few of the games I feel are underplayed (have under 50 ratings). Here they are, in no particular order (click the titles or images to go to the entry page) …

Slime Factory – Evil Cult – Jam Entry

Guide the slimes past turrets, spike traps, and lasers with a limited array of tools.

Unfurl – TeamEagle – Jam Entry

A brilliant concept for a puzzle game with a complete and awe-inspiring aesthetic.

Hubu Handler – derdragon – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Take care of an adorable critter with a mind of its own.

Line Quest – RandomSpark – Jam Entry

Confounding at first, but after just a short while, you’ll start to see the world that exists behind the characters.

Reach the Moon – Nanolotl – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Starting with just a few plants, find your way eventually to your destination … the moon.

Street of Rave – TinyDrakkarStudio – Jam Entry

Run around like the crazy, dancing fool you are, avoiding cops and infecting others with your groove.

MinZ – unpronounceable – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A deceptively challenging game centered around a very clever and simple puzzle mechanic.

RUNNERIST – BumbleBirds – Jam Entry

Simple take on the endless runner genre with great polish and its own twist.

That’s all for now; I hope you enjoy playing these games as much as I did, and if you’re feeling generous, you can always give my entry, HELPME_, a try.

Reminder I’m live-streaming on 10:00 pm, Eastern Time!

Edit: Aaaaaaaaand we’re live!

Like last time, I’ve setup a public Google Docs spreadsheet to list the games I’ll be playing. Feel free to post your game’s URL in the spreadsheet!

Tags: livestream, Twitch.tv

Down The Line is my game developed for the 26th Ludum Dare on minimalism. It was my second entry in the competition.I took advantage of my own JavaScript engine, {FM.js(engine);}. It proved very useful and trustworthy, I did have to make a few tweaks on the pathfinding component but overall it worked pretty well out of the box. I also used Netbeans, Tiled Map Editor, Inkscape, Audacity, bfxr and Circuli.

Last time I participated I was alone, this time I decided to enter the Ludum Dare with other friends such that we could spend the week end together, help each other out, playtest the game of one another, etc. It was extremely motivating, we were in an infinite motivational loop. If anyone of us was tired just the fact of seeing the others making progress was enough to keep working.

We live in France and the theme was then announced at 4 am, In my opinion it’s the worst time to get started, do we stay up until the theme is announced ? Do we wake up at 4 am ? Or even 6 am ? There’s no perfect solution so we went with the last one, we woke up at 6 am after a good night sleep, ready to get started… but 6 am is still not the best time of the day, especially if you count on working ’till 2 am.

The theme did not really appeal to me since I consider minimalist game design as good game design. I just felt like the theme was not a theme but rather a constraint that I already try to apply to my games. So it took me roughly 4 hours of eating, sleeping, thinking to get started but I finally got excited with my newborn concept. I wanted to let the player experience minimalism by letting her carefully creates paths with few waypoints but maximum efficiency. During judging I saw a few games with a similar approach so I guess it’s not completely irrelevant. It could have been brought further though, especially in terms of level design and scoring by allowing the player to find better paths for a same level.

Anyway, even though it was very fuzzy at the beginning I sensed that there was something that could be done. During development the game kind of evolved on its own and became its own thing. It was a bit as if I had no plans but I knew what kind of feeling and level design I wanted. The gameplay had to fit that.

In the end several iterations altered the way the player handled the entities, that’s how were created the blue and red entities, depending on the directions they took when hit by a waypoint. I could not decide whether they should follow the path forward or backward so I created two types of entities.

Overall it went pretty smoothly and after my last Ludum Dare one year ago I could not have dreamed of a better second time. Now that I’m done with my whining and ranting let’s talk about the development itself. What did I do wrong ? What went right ?

What went right

Early prototype: I was able to get a minimal working prototype very early, this helped me a lot and made me confident that I would be able to deliver. In 48 hours of hard work confidence is key, you sleep better, you work better and it helps you stay motivated.

Concept: the early playable prototype proved me that my concept was leading somewhere interesting, somewhere with potential. I still had some doubts of course but manageable ones

Design: one of my main tools was Tiled Map Editor. Even when you’re not building a tiled game it is still relevant to place your objects, giving properties to them and to the levels themselves. Building levels could not have been easier.

What went wrong

Programming: the system I built at first worked perfectly, each entity was assigned a path as soon as they touched a waypoint. But when I added a new entity (the blue one) I discovered that my system did not handle AT ALL the reversed behaviour. It can seem pretty basic, and it is, but the system I built did not consider all waypoints in the path, only the following ones. At the end it was a mess and I discovered a bug that prevented me from adding more levels. This is the main regret I have for this Ludum Dare, I should have thought of that or designed the last level first such that I would have discovered the bug earlier and have time to fix it.

Design: although I had built a prototype early I didn’t use it to quickly create my levels. I kind of waited for the game to build itself and let it inspire me. While it might be cool to work like this it can also lead to undesired situations, like the one described above.

Sounds: I think that my lack of knowledge in sound design has prevented me to make a perfectly consistent game. Specifically, the sound effects appear less clean and clear than the music since I used bfxr to generate sounds and Circuli to make music. The former is made for 8 bits style game and it does not mix perfectly with the crystalline music produced by Circuli.

Conclusion

Time to wrap it up. As I said above I could hardly hope for a best second Ludum Dare. Of course I could have made a better game, the theme could have been better suited for my taste, I could have been more cautious to avoid major bugs, etc. But it was the best 48 hours I had spent in a long time, my tools are working great, the game seems to be well appreciated and I think we (my friends and I) are considering participating in every Ludum Dare ’till we’re bored… or dead.

Thanks for reading! And don’t forget to play my game and rate it!

Simon

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 14th, 2013 at 2:58 am and is filed under LD #26. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Hi! Welcome to the post-mortem for Cottonhead.

Here’s the trailer.

Day 0

Remember Bottled Worlds? Once again, I came over to Itamar and Mati’s house with a laptop. We spent the night playing Rhythm Heaven and watching some weird and loud videos.

Day 1

We woke up early, saw the theme, and instead of breaking our heads over it like in all previous Ludum Dares, we went out and got ourselves some… Burekas!

We sat down in some nearby garden and started coming up with ideas. We had plenty of ideas, one including a story where the world is being kept minimal by an evil machine. Another idea is that you’re something who wants to fly. How is that minimal? That’s it. That’s the story. You’re something that wants to fly. We weren’t sure where to take it from here but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

We sat there with a pile of papers and Burekas and began drawing some ideas.

Unfortunately, our brain storming session was interrupted by a birthday party, but we still had plenty of ideas we wanted to put to test.

We already had the basic concept art for the main character finished. We wanted a blob with a big nose.

We headed back home and started working! After a short dilemma, we decided that, yet again, we’re making a platformer, woo! (we love platformers)

We decided to not think about the gameplay and keep that for the end, so we polish the game properly and make it pretty. This is the first time we were doing this ‘experiment’ and I think we’re very pleased with how it came out, I’ll touch on that later in the pros-cons.

So after a few hours we created a basic engine with concept art for the main character.

We also had a basic idea of how we wanted NPCs to work in the game; we didn’t want anything violent or action-oriented, we wanted some minimal banter between them and the player that will only add to the mood of the game.

Mati started working on the tileset: 

Itamar drew some NPCs:

And after many hours of work we had a basic level created!

(also notice the feathers on the bottom left!)

I went home, but we weren’t finished yet! I put up a post on lonebot.net for a recap of our first day, then headed to bed.

Day 2

OH MY GOD, I came to their house again (with a laptop).

We dedicated the second day to completely finishing everything except for the level design. We decided to leave that for the final day. The reason we did this is because we wanted the map to be balanced in terms of content – to have everything ready to be placed within the final map while making it, without having to change things around.

So first of all we finished the NPCs! Here’s a collection of all of some them for reference:

We started adding the main quest: collecting feathers. We didn’t hide feathers around the world yet (we were saving that for tomorrow).

We also added some pretty eye candy such as birds, and leaves falling from trees! 

Also dancing flower   

This day was tons of fun because it mainly consisted of making pretty particles, finding music and adding awesome effects.

We also made Magina the Wizard!

Itamar drew a new tileset:

And they both drew some houses:

We added more sounds and an ending, and that was the end of day 2!

Sadly, for some reason, lonebot.net  got hacked!!!!!! So we couldn’t post a day 2 recap!!!

Day 3

Final day! I came over to Mati and Itamar’s house…. again!! Without a laptop this time. This day was pretty short-lived because all we did was build a level and playtest our game.

Making the level was extremely fun! Unfortunately, I don’t have much to write about this day because it mainly revolved around the map and fixing small bugs, here’s this picture instead 😀

also an intro:

And thus, Cottonhead was finished.

And unlike any other Ludum Dare, we finished it BEFORE the deadline without any stress!!!

And now:

What went right?

• Extremely polished. We decided we want this game to serve more as ‘eye candy’ and we think it worked out well!
• Workplace. Unlike any Ludum Dare before, we all worked in the same physical workspace which made things MUCH more interesting and easier for us. It made the workflow much easier and smoother and everything was fun.
• Nice world. I think the world map in this game came out very nicely. We gave it a lush colorful feeling which helped us shape up the world.
• Minimal story. There is barely any story behind the game, we let the player shape it in their head to what they think makes sense!
• Awesome music. Thanks to Suezo from Newgrounds.
• Almost no bugs!! Woo

What went wrong?

• Too hard. Some feathers (2) were a little too hard for our playtesters, and we should’ve fixed that when we could. One feather requires an extremely accurate jump and the other is just barely visible. In one of the playthroughs we saw for our game a player thought that he had to something before getting the accurate-jump feather.
  
• Too short. This is criticism we got plenty of times… We’re not sure if it’s also a compliment but we’ll work on it next time 😀
• Lonebot hacked. 
• No mac/linux client. 

All in all, making this game was very, very fun for all of us. This was probably our best Ludum Dare, because everything just went in our way so easily. 😀

Also, our biggest achievement: this is the first game we’re releasing under the name ‘Lonebot’!!!! Please check out our new website at lonebot.net 😀

We are hoping to make a really big game soon, and this is all thanks to Ludum Dare! <3

So, that’s it. That’s how Cottonhead was made. Now go play Dota or Rhythm Heaven.

Thanks for the read <3

Hello. I just made a Java applet version for my game Mono. Check it out here.

I still haven’t fixed the collision bug though. My apologies for that.

Also, here’s a GIF of a zombie chasing Mr. Mime. 😀

Rate my game here if you liked it. Thanks!

10 days ago, I posted a little highlight of my favourites entries to celebrate my 50 first games played – you can find it HERE.

Now, I reached 100 games, which means it’s time for another highlight for the 50 latest ones. Once again, this is based on my own jugement, and doesn’t mean the games I’m not mentioning “suck” : they just didn’t hook me up as much as those ones. Also, no particular order. Let’s do this !

Aduno – Jam

Minimalize junk forever ! Aduno is a clever puzzle game reminding me some childhood educational games about logic, except more challenging and fun, like some sort of “extra light Space chem”. What struck me is the very polished animations, looking IMO sort of “professionnal” without ruining the game nice style.

Unfurl – Jam

Zen atmosphere, scroll theme, simple rules yet great complexity : Unfurl faced the theme “full power” without betting on minimal graphism. Unfurl scrolls to create lines of shapes, but do it right, as unfurled scrolls will hide bottom ones. This underrated game twisted my mind quite hard despite apparent simplicity – the zen atmosphere almost mocked me !

The team even created a fake traditional game to give presence to the tutoria, which was fun and unexpected.

Drug hunt – Jam

I’m usually not fond of “wtf-game throwing random images and you and call it a day” as it’s often a lack of actual effort to come up with something well thought. One could argue about my point of view and go one step further on the meaning of art, but for now I’ll just praise Drug Hunt’s successful blend of “what the hell ?” factor and actual, well thought features.

This game is basically a suit of thematic mini-games depending on which drug you take. It’s very fast paced yet clear enough for most of games (not EVERY game tho) to bring an actual perceptive challenge. And of course, the atmosphere is nuts, yet “well thought nuts”, rendering the experience IMO even more enjoyable.

Tessitron – Jam

Which seemed to be your average rythm game turned into a creative blend of Guitar hero (well, Frets on fire here) and a rail shooter. I almost felt like playing Rez in some parts. The whold experience, mix of an electro trip and a frantic rail shooting quest for the Evil Boss, is remarkably well put together, despite the somewhat awkward connection between letters, colors and enemies. Minimal 3D trip at its finest, but including satisfying pacing and challenge : deal !

Root Route ! – Jam

This may be my favourite entry of 100. Everything in this game feels “right. The gameplay is simple, effective, includes ressource management, yet it’s a NON-RUNNER-one-button-game (okey, well, it’s some sort of vertical, super twisted runner-like). This kind of minimalism allows some liberty on graphic design, which happens to be very well crafted, feeling both nostalgic and polished, yet very coherent with the music & sfx, which happen to be very enjoyable and setting a soothing mood.

But the most impressive feature, which perfectly makes up for the few imperfections (high difficulty curve, no previous zoom which would be handy to plan the level ahead, hitbox somewhat difficult to guess), is the amount of appealing details : clear interface, the flower blooming more or less depending of the scoring, the zoom back on top when the level is finished and the general feeling of constructing something different each time.

Some extra games I liked very much as well (-> look at them, really, they are great) :

Street of rave – It’s not only the name : this game is great fun, to play, to watch and to complete ! Make people dance, avoid angry cops : what’s not to like ?

Mind the gap – Minimal, symbolic subway simulation. Downright excellent, great atmosphere (very soothing), playable for hours : totally worth playing !

Escape the minimalism – May seem like a basic platformer, but really has an interesting mood with variating epileptic rainbows, very powerful.

Metahotel – An interesting puzzle game blending AI management, logic and reflexes with elegant graphism.

Less is more? – Everybody is talking about that one and I can see why. Mesmerizing puzzle game twisting Mondrian with style.

QbQbQb – “Orbital match 3”, great in every field with very impressive polish and mood.

Rainbow rocket – The most interesting way to pilot a rocket ! So very hard to handle but great potential and excellent experience.

Bezier challenge – Will ring a bell to every “maths nerd” for a reason : very peculiar concept and design, which makes the game fun to play.

Aranmi – The sole idea of making a game based on a rake and sand is amazing enough, but succeding it is even better. Relaxing yet challenging RAKE game !

A simple circle – Smart puzzle game with smart scoring system : this game proves that simple doesn’t mean stupid or meaningless.

That’s it. Also, feel to take a look at my own entry (which includes a cute circle and a creepy voice) : YAHG.

Tags: compilation, review, roundup

I wonder if my game is the best looking one of this contest ^^ In fact I have good-looking water, nice ice, moving clouds and more 😀 For it’s graphics the game is pretty small, too – the Windows&Linux version together is 16,6 megs big! And the derivate of Sauerbraten I use grants relatively good performance.

Shifting away from the technically aspect.. Gameplay-wise, it focuses on exploration. You’re an explorer on an iceberg, who wants to get famous by discovering things. Theoretically, the chances to find something on a small iceberg are minimal, but practically.. who knows..?

Jump in your boat and move to the iceberg.

Don’t forget to vote after your journey has ended.

I reposted this, since the link to the game was previously wrong.

It is sad to inform all of you this late in the contest that I have removed all the links to The Sentient Cube for legal reasons. I was recently informed that the main mechanics of Katamari Damacy are patented (edit: and also, it seems, Crazy Taxi). To stay on the safe side, I’ve deleted the source, webplayers, and executeables from my servers.

I want to be clear that I did not know about this prior to this contest. I fully support the beloved game series, and wish for its continued success.

I want to thank all of you who supported and rated my game, and I truly apologize for the inconveniences.

Edit: Now that the dust have settled a bit, let me address a few things.

• I did not receive a Cease & Desist order from Namco Bandai or Sega.
• The take-down was entirely my decision, originally for legal safety.
• Upon researching into multiple patents, the take-down will be permanent.
• As mentioned above, every binaries and source codes were taken down. All links to them will simply 404.

I’ve had a few people suggest that my little 20 pixel wide LD26 entry, Tiny Runner, could fit on a watch. Whether this was meant in jest or not, it got me thinking about what kind of tiny target platforms are out there.

One of my original reviews actually suggested that I port this game to the Pebble wristwatch… though I think that’s not realistic since Pebble is an e-ink based display and won’t have the refresh rate needed for Tiny Runner to be playable. It would be cool to get this game on some kind of tiny display though. Anyone know of any other devices with a tiny display that might be well-suited for a game like this?

Tags: lo-res, platforms, tiny, watch

I’m currently creating a new game, JavaScript and HTML5.

Theme: Raid

http://www.twitch.tv/ashmorefur

Inspired by the 10 second clips from Codexus‘ awesome compilation videos, I created a sort of teaser trailer for my entry. It’s short, one might say… minimalist, perhaps?

I enjoyed this process actually. In keeping with the theme, why not create a short trailer for your entry with the bare essentials without giving too much away? If you haven’t already and are on the fence about it I encourage you to do so!

(At this point I’m just procrastinating the postmortem and event review…)

So far, I’ve played 50 games. On my first Ludum Dare, I only played about 15. So I’ve improved. Anyways, I’ve decided to give some of favorite games (in no particular order) to help you find some cool games to try out before judging ends.

Bipolar

A really cool puzzle game where you use magnets to solve puzzles.

I really enjoyed the gameplay of this game. It was very unique, and I think it is full-game material. I think this may be my favorite game.

Merkaba

A game where you have to find enough crystals to power your spaceship. But you can only turn left!

This was a simple but fun game. There were not really any enemies, but it was still challenging. I think NostraDamon could take this somewhere.

Cylinder

A game where you must get to the end of a cylinder/tunnel, and you get to turn the entire cylinder.

This one had unique gameplay. I would also like to see a full game from this one.

Mustache Armies

The game’s creators explain it best: “Each unit of your previous rounds adds up, replicating all the movements you made when you controlled it. Thusly, a massive army”.

I loved the graphics of this one as well as the unique, innovative gameplay. The sounds were also hilarious. Definitely worth making into a full game.

Of Guards And Thieves

A multiplayer shooter/stealth game.

Unfortunately there were not many servers or players, but it sounds like it is still being worked on, which makes me happy.

ProductionVille

A city builder.

Has room for expansion…

SDFJKL

Words can’t describe this one.

Too innovative to skip.

Potato Dungeon

A fighting game?

I don’t know what to say. I guess you will have to see for yourself

Well I’m too lazy to add anymore images, but some games you should definitely check out are:
Bridge Crosser
Screaming Cubes
TOOM
My Mini Castle
S.A.M
Tessitron
BASHLAND
Reversnake
And not to mention, my game 😀 XD.

Please join today on my stream now.

LD games…I have to lot of random ones to play. I can do request.

Hey y’all!

There’s been a lot of hate going on in the game making community for some reason against somebody. And honestly I think a lot of that energy is misdirected and should be focused on making games instead. So! Without furthur ado, let me introduce the Whine Jam:

Get Twine From Here: http://www.auntiepixelante.com/twine/

Rules: Twine ONLY.

Due NEXT MONDAY.

Test player’s honesty.

No use of Special Commands to check if a player has something or not.

Example: Click here if you have a candle. Click here if you do not.

Theme: None.

Other then that, have fun and make a game! I’ve chosen twine because it’s super easy to make a game in there. You can work on it whenever, don’t have to worry about sound or grahics, and worry only about making a good story. Hopefully this’ll take care of some of that pent up energy and hate and we’ll have a little fun in the mean time. Good luck!

Howdy, I just thought I’d share the Android version of the game that I just finished.

“The World is in your hand”:
 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20841

Note that the Android version is post-compo, and included physics improvement. So to be fair, you might want to rate the 48h Web version. Also, the Android version has something extra:

• So I was able to port the game to Android and iPhone using Adobe AIR (iPhone version still pending app store review), but I actually had to go through performance and physics improvement. Before that, the game was slow, and bumping into walls was getting annoying so I had to reduce its effect.
• Basically, the game is about a paralyzed man who can only move his right hand, that’s why the game is played only by pressing one button. Along the development, I remember imagining, although unlikely to happen, that perhaps a paralyzed person in real life would play the game (basically, by having to constantly press space on the keyboard… not really user friendly).  I thought it could be inspiring for that person. As I finished porting the game, I suddenly had a thought. If that case ever happened, it would be much friendlier for the paralyzed person to play the game by pressing on a small device, rather than using a keyboard.
• With that in mind, I decided to implement the whole system that lets you play the Flash game using the phone as a remote control. (You can still play the game on the phone by itself, but if you link it to the Web version, your phone turns into a remote for the browser game ;-P). It’s kinda far fetched, but somehow I felt like it had to be done.

• The link between the phone and the browser is done by peer-to-peer. To test that, view a post-compo version of the game @ http://www.dobuki.com/the-world-is-in-your-hand.html  (Note that the Web link in the entry is the 48h version). Scan the QR Code, which will prompt you to install the app. After installation, scan the QR code again, and you now control the game with your phone, which brings you closer to the experience of the paralyzed man inside the game.
• Since this is using P2P, it works better if your phone is on the same wi-fi network as your computer. Also, the p2p technology I’m using doesn’t bypass firewall unfortunately.
• There’s also an iPhone version of the game, but the app is still in review. When it comes out it’ll have the same concept.
• My thoughts on LD: Definitely a nice experience and one I will repeat. Although, I worked really hard in the first 6 hours so I ended up being too tired and sleeping most of the time afterwards. For me, the project really got interesting when I added the intro. At that point, I started viewing my game more like an artwork than a game for fun. I went to the minimalistic process of removing all text from the gameplay, and developing the intro with just enough to tell the story, and express why it’s important that you can only use one button. Anyway, for the next LD, I’ll probably do a jam instead, and I’ll try to prepare an open-source library for controlling the game with the phone, so others can try that too.
• Last but not least, my favorite game: Four Scepters by Benjamin

It seems Twitch.tv can export to Youtube, so I’ve been cutting out parts where I play the game into separate videos, and aggregating them into a playlist. Check it out!