Hello and welcome to the postmortem for my second LD entry, Worm War.

I live where LD starts at very early morning, and as many others have pointed out, that’s not a fortunate time to begin. I was quite satisfied when I saw what the theme was, and I started thinking about the concept of my game. I thought about existing games which can be definitely called minimal. Then I came up with snake, which was the main inspiration for Worm War.

I thought that addition of guns would spice up the gameplay and make the game a bit more original. Allowing the player to customize their snake with different guns and armor was the idea that almost immediately came to my mind.

At first, I wanted my game to mimic classic snake as closely as possible – it would essentially be snake with guns. Shortly after I realized that it could be too slow-paced to be fun to play. I recalled a snake spin-off I played on my phone, where player wasn’t restricted to making 90º turns and thought that it would make a better base for a shooter.

What went right:

• Concept. Some people have praised it in comments, and I’m satisfied with it as well.
• Tools. I picked tools I’m familiar with, though I really need to learn how to make better music.
• Following a plan. I aimed low, and I managed to include everything I planned at the beginning.
• Programming. At this point, I can easily expand the list of equipment available or change properties of spawned enemies.

What went wrong:

• Programming. The method I use to spawn enemies could be improved, as could be the AI (all or nearly all enemies seem to follow the same movement pattern now).
• Graphics. That’s the thing which didn’t improve from my last LD.
• Polish. In particular, the lack of background. People really complained about it.

Thanks for reading!

TLDR: Links to my LD 26 stuff. It went well! Honestly.

LD Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=1913

Soundtrack Page: http://curoi.bandcamp.com/album/plex-soundtrack

Phew! It’s been one hell of a ride this LD and for the most part it’s been a really beneficial and enjoyable experience! Plex has been recieving some very nice reviews and despite a few bumps in the road everything turned out pretty decently.

If you’re interested in checking it out, you can find the game here- http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=1913

Now onto the GBU!

Good

• The music went really well, especially considering the nature of it. In contrast to my previous entries, the music in this is of a way more natural, instrumental nature, based on real strings and what not. I’ve also released the OST onto Bandcamp, so if ye feel like supporting a lil’ indie dev along the way be sure to check it out here 😀 http://curoi.bandcamp.com/album/plex-soundtrack
• Graphically, the presentation of the game was another pretty smooth ride. Minimalism led to more focus on a cohesive art style, and although it did come out sliiightly pixelated versus its original vectors, the entire game seems to hold well :).
• Gameplay wise, aside from some conveyance issues and bugs with the HTML5 version (I’ll get to them shortly), the simple mechanics seemed to be a big hit for most folks.It’s humbling and awesome to see folks enjoy the game, its that kind of thing that really motivates me more to make and create content, games, etc :D.

Bad

• Conveyance issues. The code in the game is supposed to draw an axis to show you the orientations of your flipping, but it doesn’t seem to work in levels. As a result people have had issues regarding this mechanic and not quite understand it. It’s built around the principles of teslation, but I will certainly implement this in a future version.
• Level selection. I admit I was a little lazy regarding this so the game boots you back to the title each time you complete a level, which breaks some flow of the gameplay. Lesson learned D:
• Music was originally a serious issue, as only one of the tracks would play. This has been fixed for the download version, but for HTML5? Well…

Ugly

• Holy smokes the HTML5 export feature of Game Maker :Studio needs some serious work. Issues with randomize() functions plain not working and characters getting hooked up on walls for no reason caused me no amount of frustration. As a result the “Full” experience is really the downloadable version.
• The video for the Compilation footage is barely audible in the youtube video. The audio, whilst a little low by nature and made a little more quiet in the video itself was basically blasted away by the volume of the other videos submitted, meaning the music and sound assets aren’t really showcased in that compilation sadly. I guess for future reference I should crank the volume up to 11 next time. It’s a real shame though
• Some people can go diagonal in the game. Most can’t. I can only assume they’re Techno-Wizards, but for the next rendition I may just ensure that I keep movement bound to else checks as well.

Conclusion

This is what I love about LD. It encourages coming out of our little comfort circles to do something more than just retro inspired art platformers or the same kinds of games we usually fall into the cycle of making. It encourages open minds and the desire to better ourselves and others. It encourages motivation, and determination despite extreme crunch-time conditions. It encourages, at it’s core, creativity.

So, I’m going to sign off saying that LD26 has been a blast for me, I’ve loved most all of its moments. It’s certainly inspiring me to further the concept of Plex, building up on it giving it a good polish and education before sending it off to fend for itself in the world. For now though, I’ll spend my time getting ready for the next LD.

Cheers!

LD Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=1913

Soundtrack Page: http://curoi.bandcamp.com/album/plex-soundtrack

LONG overdue. Second game jam, first one as a team. The experience was even better the second time around, but that’s probably due to the multiplayer aspect.

Ai’n Av Diortem is a Run-and-Gun platformer. The idea was a combination of two of our other Minimalism ideas: One was a game where you “level backwards”, ie you lose your equipment/abilities as you progress. Think Super Metroid, but in reverse. The other was a straight-up Super Mario Bros. style platformer without any background textures: you use light sources (initially: the sun) to cast shadows, and those shadows tell you where physical objects are (since you wouldn’t be able to see them). We ended up reversing the latter, so light was cast on a black background rather than shadows being cast on a white background. By combining the two ideas (a SMB platformer with weapons) we were also able to integrate things like gib physics and blood streaks/splatters to the visual aid mechanic, so that you weren’t just relying on casting sources of light.

We were thrilled with the idea and excited to execute on it…

…but we ran out of time.

What went right?

Theme: Speaking over dinner on the eve of the jam’s start, we were talking about what themes we’d like to play with. Minimalism was on the bottom of that list. As you might have guessed, we were somewhat crestfallen when the theme was announced. But we were here and we were ready to go, so after a minute of sighs, we headed to the whiteboard to drum up some ideas.

It went very well. We had a few ideas relatively quickly. We scrapped some, combined others, and made compromises as necessary. Within 15-30 minutes we were set on not just a game, but the title of it, as well.

Team: Our setup was good and we worked well together. I’m not a particularly skilled pixel artist and spent a significant chunk of my time last LD getting the graphics to look presentable (it ended up paying off; I nearly made it into the top 100 for Graphics last time). In addition to lacking the skill, I easily get frustrated by it and burn out very quickly. Having a dedicated graphic artist offloaded not just the artwork, but a lot of the character and environmental design from me, allowing me to focus almost exclusively on coding/gameplay design. And that, I can do for hours on end without budging an inch (except to go to the whiteboard). Partway through the second day, we also recruited an audio guy to handle sound and music, so now we had all of our bases covered. A trinity of game jamming.

Workflow: Since we were all working in the same physical location, we were able to add assets into the game with almost no process cost. Assets were just dropped into the network folder that the compiler pulled from, so once something was done it was dropped in the right location and automatically included. Nobody was waiting on anyone else, and the “process”, as it were, didn’t eat up time.

Scope: We had an initial scope that sounded achievable – it wasn’t – but as time went on we were able to easily identify what was core to the experience and what we could cut for time, developing a bucket list of features and things to add into the game post-jam.

Fun: If there was a limit to how much fun we could have, then it would have been a problem. But there wasn’t, so we had an awesome time.

What went wrong?

Scope/Ambition: Even cutting back a lot of the features and levels we wanted to include but couldn’t, we weren’t able to deliver on a lot of the core concepts. We scratched the surface of what we were aiming for in the last room, but took shortcuts to get there and it inevitably felt like an elaborate tease.

Polish, Lighting: The lighting seen in the game was a compromise. It was implemented initially as a quick trial-run to see how it felt in game and once it was in, I tried doing a pseudo-raycasting lighting engine where light would bend around corners, not pass through walls etc. I think some of the code is still in the LD26 source, but suffice to say it A – did not work quite as well as I wanted it to, and B – actually looked worse than the blocky lighting we ended up reverting to.

Polish, Physics: Another thing that received too much attention was the physics engine. It’s still not “correct” in that it doesn’t follow proper laws of physics, but we had something simple and fun earlier, but I kept tweaking it, rather than spending more time on the enemy programming and level development. It wasn’t a huge waste, but the additional hour or two spent on it could have been better used elsewhere.

Polish, Decals: “Decals” refers to the burn marks and blood stains that appear on the environment. As necessary as it will be in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t entirely necessary to code for the jam. That is to say, it wasn’t prioritized correctly. We needed it, but we didn’t need it yet.

Controls: Bugs aside, the control/character physics were initially tested in a few debug rooms, but we didn’t have enough time to playtest it in the actual game, and it didn’t work well with the level designs we ended up going with.

tl;dr: Time Management. All of the things that went wrong with our LD26 experience can be boiled down to poor time management. We dreamed big, we thought big, and we attempted to deliver big – far bigger than we were capable of in 72 hours. I’m still quite proud of the end result, which still resulted in something very playable, but we got so caught up in our ambition that we ultimately failed to deliver on the theme, reducing it to a little room at the end that screams, “Hey, look at what we were going for! Neat, huh? Bet you wish we finished it!”

Not to be discouraged – we’re actually doing another game jam this weekend, to finish what we started. Or at the least, get much farther along with what we started. There are a lot of ideas we want to explore with the game engine and design philosophy our LD26 jam has left us with, and we’re going to cover as many of those ideas as we can. Look forward to it!

I have played a lot of LD26 games, and voted for many of them, here are some of my favorites so far (not in any particular order).

Enjoy !

minobi – Pixelboy_85 – Jam Entry

Mad World – patrikspengler – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Tulip – ianmaclarty – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Sine – f7f5 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

imy – Ditto – 48 Hour Compo Entry

… – Dir3kt – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Labyrinthine Tower of Misery and Flashing Colors – BipoleMoment – 48 Hour Compo Entry

(the game is better muted)

Less is More? – atraxgames – 48 Hour Compo Entry

You can also check out my game :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21541

Tags: favorite games, favorites, recommendations

These are my 5 favourite games so far (out of 150).

Budget Squad – deepnight (48h)

This game blew my mind. You switch between two submarines, one that is invincible and holds a light source, and another which has a gun, but is very weak. The art in this game is stunning and the unique gameplay very engaging.

Snake in a Cube – OU GDA (jam)

Snake, but more confusing! A cool and well polished twist on the classic game (with great music).

CLRS – acatcalledfrank (48h)

Mix colours and defend the blob! Crazy and addictive.

Cubique Noire – Detocroix (48h)

A very stylish minimalist crime thriller. Featuring cubes.

CHAMELEON RUN – Split82 (48h)

I must admit I’m a sucker for these kinds of games. Very simple, but fast paced, slick and so very addictive.

Hope you enjoyed these games as much as I did.

Cheers – Seb (my game)

Tags: favourites

What can I say… sometimes you just have to try even harder!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 15th, 2013 at 5:51 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.

RockLeeSmile over at Indie Impressions made a video of our Ludum Dare jam entry, Title: Subtitle, and agreed to let me post it. So those of you without Windows (or who, like me, watch youtube at work (or school)), can enjoy the following:

As a bonus, here’s one of our tilesets:

Now, in the spirit of “almost over”, I’d like to highlight some games that I really enjoyed but may have been overlooked by others.

Dragon Drop

Breaking the fourth wall is, hands down, one of my favorite tropes. This game delivers.

Life!

A rhythm game about juggling your responsibilities in life. One of the better adaptations of the Guitar Hero mechanics in a different setting.

Golden Age

There’s lots of games that peddle nostalgia. This one is totally unashamed of it.

Schroedinger

A twitch-based… runner? puzzle?… themed as a mathematical equation. This is a really great example about how aesthetics of a game can change the experience of playing it.

I’ve finally compiled together a post-compo, 1.1 version of my space simulator Screaming Cubes (incidentally just in time to maybe get some rates for the original version too).

Version 1.1 is vastly improved (after all, it’s several more days worth of work, not just two days), while still (of course) buggy, bit unbalanced and rather bare-bones prototype of a much bigger game then small tidy polished proper LD entry, but I prefer it that way anyway… I’ve decided to take SC as my official hobby project (I needed one anyway after all those years) and I have a lot of plans what to do with it… but right now I need to know – are there other possible players? I like my game a lot, but you could say it’s a custom made for a guy who spent hours and hours flying x-wing and Tie-fighter and elite and privateer and X Beyond and others and who always wanted a game like this but made in his own way, with a lot more freedom…

So calling for all space pilots! Let your voices be heard and force me to do another update!

Web version, Kongregate hosted
Web + Windows version on dropbox

Rate page

The technology behind

This Ludum Dare I only could spend one day for making a game and I wanted to try out a new technology (HaxePunk). Usually that’s not a good idea for a time restricted jam, especially with restricting oneself even further.

Working with a new language and library worked surprisingly well. Tuning down the scope of my game probably helped, but Haxe seems to be quite a convenient language to work with. The HaxePunk library was a great addition to have quick results, as most of the basic engine stuff necessary for my game was already in there.

For creating some ambient background sound for my game I had a nice idea: As it is finally spring now in Germany, I wanted to record some spring sounds, like birds. I did this with my phone, which worked pretty well. Unfortunately transferring the file into Audacity did something very strange to the sound and it was too late to figure out how to solve it. That is the reasons the bird sounds seem more like from a jungle than a mid-European garden.

What’s that game about

As mentioned, I didn’t have the full 48 hours, so I had to come up with something really simple. The basic idea has some resemblance to my LD23 game Bottlecolonies, but this time with free placement and only two different colors. This makes the gameplay probably a little boring quite soon.

Can you spot the similar concept?

The idea is, that with each new planted flower, the existing ones will grow through different stages. If there are negative influences around (potatoes, mushrooms, different kind of plant) and surpass the positive ones (same kind of plants) the plant will decay. Additionally, a feature implemented quite late, the mushrooms will spread for a while. So goal and strategy of the game is to place the same kind of plants close to each other, block spreading of mushrooms and avoid the negative stuff around your seedlings. The rhythm as how the two different plants are seeded is quite simple. Each three plants it will change. You will win the game if there are enough grown plants and will lose if there are too many decayed ones.

What went right

• Getting the idea (I already had this idea in my mind for OneGameAMonth for the theme “spring” and it also fits the LD theme)
• Fast progress with a new tech (I’m surprised by myself how well I got into HaxePunk)
• Making a Flash game (a lot more plays than usually with a Windows standalone)
• Finish in time (was a long evening, but I did cut the features early enough)

What went wrong

• Making the background sounds (as mentioned above, and took me some time to mix the few recorded sounds to not be to repetitive)
• Player feedback in the game (A lot of people mentioned it: an indicator for the placing position and some feedback what will seed next would be great; I agree)

So all in all I’m quite happy with my entry.

Tags: ambient background creepy sounds aren't either, flash, haxepunk, post-mortem

There’s no sound, but I’ve at least put some annotations to explain what’s going on.

Gameplay video

As promised, a timelapse and graphical analysis of my LD48 project, minigames octacade. Let me first explain something about the workflow used here.  I batched several activities in order to save time.  Before even knowing what games I was going to develop, I created 70 random sprites, and 15 tiles and backgrounds.  After that I developed the games one by one.  For each game I selected graphics using a “graphical selector” that shows different combinations of sprites, tiles, and backgrounds.  After the games were finished, I created all sounds for all games, as well as explosions and particle effects, in a single session.

The batch activities are called “general activities” in the graphs below.  Other general activities are programming that is not related to a specific game, deployment (uploading, creating LD entry, creating screenshots), and “other” (not classified).

Some graphics were created during game development as needed, these are classified under the particular game that the graphics were created for.  This accounts for about 1-2 hours of development total.

Some conclusions:  I created too few tiles at the start, given how little time it takes to do it batch-wise.  More colour schemes to choose from would have been useful.  The backgrounds are the most time-consuming, not shown under “backgrounds” are about 30 minutes of creating backgrounds during game-specific development.  A more automated process for making them tileable etc. would have been useful.  Sound also took more time than I expected. I spent a lot of time unsuccessfully mutating sounds in sfxr.  Actually adding the sounds in the code took hardly more than 2 minutes per game. Surprising is that deployment actually took significant time, so this could be further optimised too.

About equal amounts of time were spent on each specific game.  An interesting fact is that the game I spent the least time on (Axis Invaders) was actually the most popular with the reviewers, and the game I spent the most time on (Digger) is my own least favorite. Story of my life… this is what inspired me to do this project in the first place.  In the wild, some of my simplest and even roughest games seem to be appreciated the most.  Once I find out which games people like most, I can concentrate on further polishing these games.

And here is the timelapse which the analysis was performed on:

And, before I forget, you can play the games here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=14520

Tags: infographic, timelapse

And finally, Erase walkthrough : the second part.

Good game !

Tags: html5, platformer, walkthrough

She complained about the lack of music and I know she likes games for their story, not the gameplay

She also said it’s too hard (no pun intended), but she beated it!

It really is hard and it’s meant to be that way for now. I’m planning to add newbie mode with arrows on the platforms and checkpoints or shorter levels.

You can try it: here

Let me know if you beat it

Natural. Gameplay screenshot

Mobius Post Mortem

    From the perspective of 3beard’s C.J. Kimberlin

What went right?

Complete Game – Unlike our previous Ludumdare game, Plane of Misery, Mobius felt like a complete game. Sure it is pretty short (can be beaten by someone who knows how to beat all the levels within 10 minutes) and there would be some features that would have been awesome to have if we had the time (level indicator and possibly scoring of some kind) but the game was complete for the competition. The mechanic seemed solid and we created 21 levels that leveraged all the level mechanics of the game. We had sound (for those who played Plane of Misery this was a step up) and I was pretty pleased with the art style we went with (simple yes but we’re three programmers and not artists). We scoped appropriately and managed to produce a product that felt great for the time we had to work on it.

Mechanics – I’m certainly biased as it was primarily my job to create the mechanics for Mobius (physics, collision, ect…) but I felt that the end result ended up being quite smooth. It isn’t perfect, there’s a very obscure collision bug where the runner will flip out and skyrocket across the screen. One of my partners encountered it but we were unable to reproduce it to try to figure it out. Also I saw an odd collision behavior when a friend of mine try to jump at just the right moment at a bottom left corner and sent the runner in the opposite direction. Overall though the mechanic bugs seemed few and unlikely to encounter, which I find acceptable for a 72 hour competition.

Library Extension – Starting about a month before the competition, we spent time expanding the available functionality of the game library that we planned to leverage. This including creating runtime editing of objects, data reporting, UI functionality, parsing the output of a tiled level editor (cha-ching for Mobius), and much more. This was helpful, not only for the added functionality, but because in order to do some of these tasks, we had to dive deep into the library we were using which meant we were learning more about the environment we were working in. Information is usually good and it paid off for Mobius.

Warm Up – The week or two before the competition, I spent time creating a platform game with a single level using the library extensions we created. This ended up being very useful for multiple reasons. It had helped me figure out the gaping holes in the extensions we created, the same extensions that were using to create Mobius, it helped me further learn more about the game library we were using, and it help me learn about some collision quirks and issues that I would have otherwise spent time figuring out during Mobius. This may have been the most important benefit as some of these issues took me quite awhile to resolve and if I had try to figure it out during Mobius, it is possible the mechanics would not have been done in time.

Play Testing – +1 +1 +1 +1 +1!!! This helped out so much! We were lucky to have a few friends come over and try out our game in the various stages while we were working on it. I’m sure most fellow Ludumdarers would agree that it is incredibly difficult to judge aspects of your own game. Is the game fun? Was it easy to learn? Was this level as tricky as and fun as it is thought to be? These are hard questions to answer when you know the complete ins and outs of the game. So we had our friends play our game and they would tell us when they felt a specific gameplay mechanic felt odd or how easy/hard they felt a level was. This may have been the most valuable thing we did during this Ludumdare and I could not recommend enough that others do the same.

Dedicated Time for Level Design – For this Ludumdare, we allotted a set amount of time to be dedicated to level design. This was quite a bit different than our previous Ludumdare game where we were desperately still coding on Monday and spent the hour or two before the deadline creating levels. It turns out that level design is just as important as the game itself. In my opinion it is better to have less features and better levels then have a ton of features but the levels are terrible and not fun. We put aside time on Sunday to create levels for Mobius that friends were able to play and we dedicated most of Monday to creating and ordering the levels that we have created.

Managing Features – Managing what would be in the game ended up being an incredibly valuable tool while actually creating the game. We came up with a ton of ideas for Mobius during the competition and we would have loved to be able to incorporate all of the ideas, but there simply isn’t the time. Prioritizing what should be in the game versus what we would like to be in the game helped us push out a better product. We have a whiteboard where we worked and on that board was two lists. One list was all of the ideas that would be totally awesome to be in the game, and the other list was the items that had to be in the game in order for it to be ‘complete’. This helped keep things in perspective as we were dealing out tasks to be completed. Not every, or even most, of the items in the ‘nice to have’ list made it into the game, but some did and absolutely every item in the ‘must have’ list made it and it shows.

What went wrong?

Ordering of Levels – It’s interesting that I place play testing in the ‘What Went Right?’ category when I feel like we didn’t have our levels is an appropriate order by the end of the Ludumdare event and this is certainly an issue more play testing would have helped solved. The play testing we did do certainly did help us order our initial levels however there weren’t any friends available to help us out for the levels created on Monday (stupid jobs!).

Communication – There were certainly some communication issues with how each of us envisioned the game or at least how I envision the game differed from how my two partners did. It’s probably my fault, I’m sure I misunderstood them but regardless the original mechanic created Friday night for the game ended up being very different than how my partners envisioned it. This cost us some time as I had to change the mechanic on Saturday to match how the game was envisioned to be played.

Conclusion

Overall Mobius was an incredibly positive experience. Not only was the game much more complete than our previous Ludumdate event, I feel that it is genuinely a solid concept and a great game for a 72 hour competition. It’s my personal goal that Mobius should beat our previous Ludumdare game in the overall category and I think we will succeed. I learned a lot from creating this game and look forward to the next Ludumdare where I hope we will do even better.

I finally had time to fix the game and removed the delay between button presses:

I have uploaded a postcompo version:

Dieter Rams Memory entry

¡Thanks to the 87 people who have rated the game!

I finished playing through through 100 games, some were pretty good. I think this theme sparked a lot of creativity because I saw so many interesting ideas it would be hard to go over them all. Here are my top 5 in no particular order..

Reach the Moon – Nanolotl

XYZ – ataxkt

Minimalismism – tayl1r

Dehumanizer – UltimateWalrus

(Follow the) Line – Chman

The youtube celebrity Maxwell Damages reviews Steve Can’t Zen and other LD26 games.

Ok, maybe not a celebrity /yet/, but he is really funny! (Steve even got a harmonica tribute, can’t leave that unrewarded!)

This is a postmortem about my lövely game, JOHN, which you can play right here. If you haven’t played the game yet, this contains spoilers and the game takes around 2 minutes to complete, so go play it.

I’m rather happy with my game overall my third time around, though it is by no means a happy game.

JOHN is a game about being in a perpetual nightmare, and for being a game about eternity, it is exceptionally short. I was in a very similar mood as I was when I made my Ludum Dare #24 game, UNBOUND. The mechanics are very similar, the tile loading scheme is nearly the same, and the aesthetic is obviously from the same mind.

I began Ludum Dare on a stream on TwitchTV for the first while with my friend Brandon, known by lots of different aliases in lots of different places. It was fun, but I eventually turned off the stream on the second day because I wasn’t feeling great. That’s when I got most of my progress done.

Walkthrough of Authoring

Day 1/3 — A Plan? No.

On my first day, I got nothing done. I was still on stream throwing ideas out with Brandon, but none of them felt like they were any good. With the theme of minimalism, you could make anything, but I didn’t want to make anything, I wanted to make something special. I patched up a couple pieces of my game engine and went to bed early with nothing in mind to make.

It was then that I had a lovely nightmare-type dream that gave me the idea for the basis of the game. You would play as a character named John, and you would be trapped in a world that was inherently hostile, yet resembled something you once knew. I was excited to get working on it when I woke up really early, but I needed more sleep, so I went back to bed and woke up a little while later.

Day 2/3 — It begins.

This was the day where everything began to click. I developed a character with rather bright colors who resembled very heavily first version of the character from UNBOUND — you were top-down and were wearing a hat. I dropped the hat in UNBOUND, but kept it for some amount of depth in the character for JOHN. I made a couple animation frames and rigged together an animation system with some amount of character movement. This time around, I’d be rooting the sound engine within each of my game components so that I didn’t have to make too much artificial ambiance.

The character ended up something like this:

Character Progress (video)

By this time, I had figured out that I wanted the world to be a dream. You would then wake up into foreign world that would be revealed to be a dream. I implemented collision, a finalized map format, and a couple triggers in a special system. I drafted out the early version of the early “prologue” level which would span around 15 seconds on a standard playthrough, made another video, and published it.

Super Early Gameplay Video (video)

After the first level, I took a little bit more time and put together a bunch of tiles and sounds. I made title music, experimented with directional sound a bit, and finished a fader queue system that never did work right, which got some complaints in the reviews. I drew some sort of title screen too!

I made something hostile in this game, which was something many people were complaining about in UNBOUND — there was tension, but nothing actually out to get you. I ended up with my lovely shadow demon:

Shadow Demon (Rough) (video)

After making that good gameplay element (which would only appear twice in the whole game) I decided to hit the hay for the second time.

Day 3/3 — Finish! Polish! Publish!

The third day consisted of finishing up the game, adding an ending, and fixing a couple sounds. My TODO list from the day reads the following:

• Make Shadow Demon pretty
• shadow_scream.ogg
• Third Level
• Fourth Level
• tunnel_ambient.ogg
• tunnel_cue.ogg
• Atmospheric glow
• Make wall scratching scary
• VICTORY

And so I did everything on that list (though I changed the shadow scream to more of a non-human screech thing) and made existing assets a little bit prettier, about as well as I could given my lack of art skills.

I uploaded a video of my third level before moving onto the fourth and final level to demonstrate to some friends what sort of progress I had made with everything.

JOHN – Progress! (video)

I sent the game to a few good friends for a little bit of testing. The feedback was mostly positive, except that the game was really short. It was really short. I fixed a couple game-breaking bugs, and uploaded my entry with a couple hours to spare.

I went to bed some hours later after playing a few games and promoting my game on a couple of those streams.

General reflection

Unlike Ludum Dare #25, I’m not sure I had what I’d call “fun” with Ludum Dare 26. I’m happy with what I produced, certainly, and it was a great relief to pour my emotions into a game like this. Going into the competition, I felt depressed and terrible, but coming out of it, I felt quite a bit better. It didn’t last, but it was still a great break from the bleakness I had been living in.

My biggest issue in the ratings is going to be the length of the game. I personally feel like it is a “Ludum Dare size” game, as people must remember that there are over a thousand other games left to rate after my game, and I’d rather not take up all that time with a long story of pure anguish.

I’d love to do a write-up of the level format I wrote specifically for JOHN, so keep a lookout for that, as it’s a rather efficient format overall with relatively good results.

Thanks for your time.

Minimalism is not easy, with just 48h feels like anything you could do should be minimalistic by nature. I usually waste half a day at least to get a good idea but this time the idea come up quite early, a simplified strategy game. It is one of my favourite genres and I thought it would be funny to do. And it was very fun indeed

Link to Minimal Annihilation

The concept

The inspiration came from many places, a quick list:

• Shadez: A game I played long time ago that consisted in building units using a cooldown system to the enemy. It had no building and the view was a lateral scroll.
• Starcraft and Dune 2: I wanted the player to feel like in Starcraft, and many elements of the game are borrowed from the Blizzard game. Resource gathering, building, unit training.
• 8-bit Starcraft video: A fake video that appeared some time ago in youtube, I really loved it. A pity we never had this one 30 years ago.
• And even more inspiration from my childhood, like the Dr Who droids for the drones, the Turrican armor for the soldiers and the Starcom set of toys for the rest on units.

What went right

The idea

I have never played an strategy game with these game mechanics, and there was the risk that the game wasn’t funny after all or that the game mechanics didn’t work when put together. The task of setting up unit behaviour, movement, etc for this game take a long time, almost a day and a half without knowing if the idea would work, but at the end the feeling was what I expected

The graphic style

I’m not a graphician and I feel I’m not good at it. In my last Ludum Dare I spent many time doing graphics, and for this game I needed all the time to program a proper RTS. Thanks to the theme I could go for black & white graphics, they ended looking very “Apple like”. Another good decision was to scale them by 3X, allowing me to draw all the graphics using pixel art style. I’m not so bad at pixel art because I spent many hours as a kid playing with Deluxe Paint on Amiga, for fun and for some freeware games. The UI ended being quite good and big at the end, and the minimap works, although nobody has noticed it I think.

Technology

For the scope of the game I needed a language I am comfortable with, and again I decided Flash/AS3 would be the best to code the game fast. I still want to try to use Unity3D for Ludum Dare, but it will be in another occasion. And I wanted to use Flash to publish the game in a web browser.

Particles

Very little time left to submit the entry, I’m very tired. I take a look at my todo list and I read “particles”. I thought “Yeah, they would be cool when a unit dies, but I have no time for almost anything”. And then I coded the most minimalistic particle loop I could imagine, I just needed the particles to move, to detect the ground and to die.

And they were done using just five lines of code, these ones:

x += dx;
y += dy;

dy += 0.015;

if (y >= Game.GROUND_Y) dy = -dy*0.7;

ttl–;

Fool of me, I only used them when a unit dies. I could have used them to indicate that the droids are mining or when a unit is firing, but my mind was running out of fuel as I said.

It has sound!

Yes, it is my first entry with sound. I lack any musician abilities, but I have seen other people using tools like Autotracker to generate the sound and I decided to try to include some sound in the game this time. I had also downloaded a synthesizer tool to add some sound effects but at the end I only used one sfx for the clicking.

What went wrong

No right click

I was very happy on day one, the controls could be like in Starcraft: left click for select, right click for action, excellent. But then I remembered I wanted to distribute it via web, and Flash only allows the right click on AIR applications, (facepalm). I had to spent time patching all the code to make the left click behave in a different way depending on the different situations and it turned out to be quite difficult. The result, sometimes after you have done something with a drone and click on another unit, the drones move to that unit, losing the last action, usually mining minerals.

Nasty animation engine

At some point I had to deal with the unit animations, and the solution I implemented was quite basic, there was not much time to do a proper animation system from scratch. The result is that any new unit required to copy&paste several lines to load the graphics and create the images for both factions. The most tedious and boring task to do while developing the game is this one for sure.

AI

One of the trickiest parts to implement. The AI is not very clever, at least knows how to get resources and to build everything. It can be a challenge to the player, but when the player knows how to win I think it is easy to win. Basically how it works is calculating its status and the oponent status and then acting based on its needs. Pretty basic but it does the work.

Lack of time

This is quite normal after all, milestones suck. I had a lot of things I wanted to add, like a proper tutorial, more sound effects, more builds, more types of units, add a repair option. The unit balancing is was iterated many times but still need a lot of tuning, I am glad (and surprised) that several people has asked for a final version of the game. I can do that, should be easier with plenty of time available

Conclusions

My scope for the game was too big, event a minimalistic scale and I had a hard time trying to implement everything I had in mind. But at the end I managed to get a full mini game, and I think that most RTS fan will find it very enjoyable. For next Ludum I hope to do something simpler, this way I will have time to focus in the sound or in doing something with Unity. But anyway I am very happy for having implemented a mini-Starcraft in 48h!

7 guys walk in. 7 games walk out.

We at Blue Brick invited some friends and made quite an event! For your entertainment we’ve set up some cameras, started some screencasts and put together this video. Enjoy!

Don’t forget to enjoy our games as well!
The Room by dragonee
Be The Wind by dstozek
Greyspace by Spierek
100% Safe Download by 3.14
Rex Galaxy and the SpaceSkull by ret44
8 jumps and a fat man by exclamationMark
raveGRID by sick

Thanks everyone for watching, kudos to all of you Ludum Darees. We are sooo doing it again for LD27!

Play and rate

I didn’t do the latest Dare, I had exams. But still, I have a few things to say.

First of all, for y’all doing HTML5 games, Clay.io is awesome! Not only do they host your game, but also give you an API for adding Advertisements, Leaderboards, in-game purchase and whatnot!

Second of all, I reworked a bit SpinTurret, a game that I made for a Mini-Ludum dare, that weirdly resembles the current theme! It is a simple 2key game, the first of mine that I could call finished. I have also adjusted it to work on mobile. I didn’t finish polishing it yet, but here it is: spinturret.clay.io .

Uh oh! Almost a month after the Ludum Dare #26 I’m here to write the postmortem of my “game”. It’s name is “Title”.

Why Title? Well, the time was over and I couldn’t find a proper name for it, so “Title” was the way to go. That was the name I put when testing the game screens.

The theme? Minimalism. Somewhat broad. Anyway, I had a couple ideas in my head: make a pacman-like or a tetris-like game with just two colors.

But a few minutes after the idea of making something with a dark maze and a lonely player trying to get out came to my mind. The player could pick up some lights from the floor to lit it’s way out but the duration of each light would be limited. That idea was finally the winner.

What went well?

I felt much more comfortable when doing the sprites. I like a lot the retro-8-bit-pixelated style so I tried to reproduce that style as well as I could in all the game sprites.

The sound effects were a little bit difficult for me. I had never done that before. However, I think the result was acceptable. It was difficult, especially when finding the proper sound for hitting the wall and picking up the lights.

What went wrong?

The coding process was somewhat messy. I waste a lot of time fixing exceptions and errors. I also waste a lot of time changing parts that were working for something fancier.

So, at T-3 hours to finish the Jam, I had no sprites, no start screen and just one game level. At the end, I couldn’t finish it completely. If you play it, you’ll notice some green boxes. Those boxes are suposed to be the lights you pick up when walking the maze. I couldn’t give them a proper texture.

Lesson?

I truly believe you need to have a clear and simple idea from the beginning to finish this competition successfully. Period.

A good advise would be to not improve your idea until it is completely implemented. Simplicity is better, even more if you want to create a game in a weekend!

That’s it. You can play it here.

Finally, the traditional behind the scenes timelapse. Enjoy!

This post was originally published on Rukbottoland Games website.

Thanks to everyone who has been playing our game, Square Heart Flower!  We appreciate the comments, and we look forward to finding out how it’s been rated!

Have you worked out how to enter the castle?

Here’s a timelapse of us making it.  There were three in our team (Jonathan, Dunk and Ricky), and Jonathan used two monitors.  You can see our different attempts at trying to achieve the distinctive minimalist graphics, and some clips of gameplay at different stages throughout the development!

I’m not sure what it is about LD, but after the event and doing a bunch of game ratings I always seem to forget about doing an actual postmortem. As such, this is our little team’s fourth LD and our first postmortem (although we do have four timelapses)! Hopefully this is the start of a good trend.

So the theme was minimalism. Unlike past LD’s, we didn’t brainstorm too long. All I really knew was that I didn’t want to do a game with colors and squares and things of that nature. Eventually one of our dev’s said “What if you were a toaster?” Our new artist chimed in and said she liked the idea of animating a toaster, and thus our game was born. We were making a game about launching toast. Toasters are pretty minimalist machines, right?

The Good

This was probably our easiest LD yet. For LD25 we used Tiled and had to write a level loader, had fire mechanics, and all manner of crazy things we had never done before. In this game we just, well, launched toast. With such a basic concept we were able to make progress very quickly. We tasked the artist with making some toast and toasters, and we wrote some code for menus, throwing condiments, launching toast, and things like that. Soon enough we had a toast launching program that we called the ‘toast fountain’ which we were all fairly amused by.

Another of our artist friends came in on Sunday and a bit on Monday to help throw together some menu graphics and make some additional toasty products, so that added some additional polish to the game.

The Bad

Our main artist had never done anything with games before, and at times it was clear we didn’t communicate what exactly we needed. We ended up spending some time retroactively fixing some of the images.

Our sound person showed interested but was ultimately unavailable. This left us without the great music we had last time. I wasted a lot of time looking for a free song that I thought went with the game, but I didn’t find anything. Eventually one of the other dev’s grabbed Autotracker-C and tweaked the output until we had something we considered decent.

On the programming side, we had some growing pains. I made a small engine on top of Pygame to avoid the hassle of rewriting the same code again and again as we had been doing for the other LDs. This used bits of previous LD code and some other abstractions. It was incredibly untested, so we’d sometimes hit errors (mainly with drawing). However, once we got things ironed out we finally entered the modern era where we had dirty sprites that didn’t require us to redraw the entire screen.

Something else I’ll be fairly critical of was the lack of an actual goal in the game. None of us really like high score games, but despite having several ideas on how the game could operate we never bothered implementing anything better. In fact, until the minutes before release, it didn’t even have a time constraint! It was just infinite score attack, and that is pretty lazy.

Lastly, the name was kind of a cop out. No one had any good ideas on Sunday, so we just kind of left it. When I was wrapping up the submission and needed a name one of our artists pointed out that the kitchen was obviously full of ghosts. Who else would be launching toast and throwing condiments everywhere? That’s good enough logic to title an LD game Toastergeist I guess!

The Nyan

One of our artists pointed out that we had rainbow condiments, and nyan cat is a poptart with rainbows. Obviously the only logical conclusion is to implement a nyan cat mode that is activated when a poptart hits a rainbow condiment.

Okay, so this is one of those ideas that might actually be better in theory. It was and amusing to implement, so I guess that is worth something. However, that dev time could have been spent making the toast appear on the plate (probably our biggest complaint) or implementing an actual game mode.

That said, our artist made all of the frames, so nyan cat is actually toasted at whatever level of toastedness the poptart was when you fired it

Final Thoughts

The game is pretty fun to play. If we had put a little more into it we could have added a lot more polish, but as it stands it is probably our best looking LD game. Having artists around is pretty nice. It also has music and sound effects, which, as we all know, are missing from a great many LD titles. Including the credits and pause features is always nice, so I felt like despite the simple nature of it we still had a pretty good end product.

If we can put in a little more effort next time, keep the artists, and get another sound person or two on board, I think LD27 could be a smashing success as well.

If you’d like to play and rate, you can find Toastergeist here.

Finally, this timelapse, like all of our timelapses, is solely from my perspective. I’ve tried to get some of the other members to timelapse their contributions, but I have yet to convince them to actually do so!

Finally, I get to write a Post-Mortem about my Game “Escape the Minimalism” that I made during LD26, my first LD. Here is my first short summary of my LD.

I’m not totally happy with how it turned out, but it still turned out better than I thought it would.

A screenshot of the “finished” game

So I think I will give this whole Post-Mortem thing a twist and do it a little bit different:

What went worse than expected:

• The THEME: From all the possibilities, why would it have to be Minimalism, and it struck me extra hard, because I think I’m not totally irresponsible for this. Well, at least we can all learn from our mistakes.
• The Motivation has been quite low at some times, partly because of the theme, partly because I got up at 4:00 AM to start working and kept working for a whole of 22 hours. Taking breaks and drinking a lot is essential to keep healthy, stay motivated and avoid dehydration.
• Being sick for one day is not awfully productive. I had food poisoning and spent the second day in bed and on the toilet. So be careful and watch what you eat, but eat something, because you need the nutrients for your brain.
• I didn’t even got the core mechanics ready after the first day, and I only started making levels after the second half of the last day, so I didn’t have enough time for smart level design. But I shouldn’t have skipped on letting others playtest it, because this really helps finding the balance in level difficulties and to get valuable feedback.
• Working in a team was not working out as I wanted, because of the theme I didn’t have a plan for a long time and still didn’t have a concrete one when I started working. Some of my friends didn’t have much time, and I was ill the second day. The last day I was already giving up on making a polished game, and just decided to push it through and get at least something playable out of this.

What went better than expected:

• The Feedback for my game has been surprisingly positive, I personally didn’t think at first, that people other than myself could actually enjoy it.
• The weather was perfect, it was cold and it has been raining a lot, so I didn’t have to come up with excuses why I wouldn’t leave my room.
• I was able to create my first game with Slick2D and I learned Tiled also along the way. This weekend had been more of an extensive learning session than a game jam, because I didn’t really know my tools beforehand.

What went like expected:

• As hoped I didn’t die from this extreme challenge or dehydration, but I nearly thought I would at some point over the weekend.
• I wasn’t able to create a complete polished game within 72 hours, but at least I made something playable and finish-able. But that’s okay, maybe next time I’ll use tools I’m already familiar with.

So my first LD made a lot of fun, and it motivated me to get at least something done. I will for sure create a more “finished” verison, fixing all the bugs and creating some better levels. And I think I will participate in the next one for sure.

Now when you go play my game, I would be happy if you left some constructive criticism, because I can’t believe that my game got so much positive feedback. 😀

Tags: postmortem

The folks behind IndieCade got in touch with me to tell me they love what we’re doing here at Ludum Dare. So much, that they want to offer you a discount off the usual submission fee. To take advantage of the deal, do the following:

1. Visit indiecade.com/submissions/ and fill out the entry form.
2. Mention Ludum Dare in your description.
3. Use coupon code “dare13” in the payment section to receive 40% off.

Early submission deadline ends May 31st ($80), and the late deadline is June 30th ($110).

I’ve posted a video compilation of the 7 of us woking on our games, but some said the clip did not work for them. Now that’s fixed Check it out here.

I was not satisfied of my original LD entry and recently spent some time to make a more polished version of my game here. Comments are welcome.

To quickly present the new gameplay, concentration and perception bars are now uncorrelated and must be maximized to find your keys in the grass. Naughty pigeons will perturbate your concentration, click on them and they will fly away. Look around to find them but be careful, don’t turn too much or your perception will be altered and you won’t see birds anymore !

How fast will you be to find your keys ? My highscore is 1 minute and 2 seconds !

Basing a game on Jam code can be tricky.

The idea of the game I’m very much fond of, but to improve on it I’d have to write quite a few additional systems while rewriting bits and pieces here and there. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to do so recently as I’ll have to work on other projects at the moment.

This project was a learning experience when it comes to building abstract and passive simulation structure and returning to it is a high priority for me as there are much more important ideas and concepts to (un)cover.

The post jam version eradicates a heap of bugs (hopefully not introducing many more in the process) and implements a few additional and missing mechanics.

There is also a quicksave/load feature now.

Hey there!
I’ve made a little trailer for our game. Sound is made by LeoL.
Please have a look and enjoy!
Don’t forget to rate!

DRUG HUNT

Several posts mentioned people looking for free songs they could use in their Jam entries. All the songs that I have created and posted to SoundCloud are free to use with attribution. This is a sample of some of the music.

Monsters 101

Do Hairballs Dream of Dryer Sheets

Patient Zero

Just got up the main site for my game,

Check it out at  http://vindince.com

This has the link to my game , and will be updated with links to the post-mortem and links to my friends music who did the music for our game!

Hi all , i just updated my game with some improvements from the comments. Another nights worth of work.

heres the link to new game: http://lowtek.co.uk/unity_games/Pencil/Pencil2/WebPlayer.html

Now has a radar.
Enemies randomly spawn
Fixed the way the line is drawn
Made the controls easyer

Hope you all Enjoy 😀

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18865

more updates on the way ,

Hard mode,
and increasing difficulty

DOWNLOAD AND PLAY AT THE GAME HERE  (English and/or Frenche versions ) : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22158 or http://www.adipson.fr

Ok… the final stretch towards the end of the rating period.  Still many games I’d like to see but didn’t get round to.  And time for a last announcement for my own project.  I do hope to get one or two more comments.  Yesterday I uploaded the latest postcompo version, which fixes a number of flaws.  The idea of this postcompo is not to seriously change the games, but only to quickfix the problems that emerged as the most important.  I spent maybe 3 hours on it, staying in the spirit of spending minimum time with maximum yield.  I think Leaping Larry plays really well now, and Digger has also become more fun to play. You can find the link on the LD page. It includes a list of changes.

Minigames Octacade LD entry

I made a gameplay video for the video compilation project, but that amounts to only 1 second of gameplay per game! So I also made a  longer video with 10 seconds per game.

Tags: gameplay video, postcompo

As the competition nears end, I figured I’d put out a video playthrough of my game for anyone who either couldn’t play it or wasn’t able to complete it (I never made it round to adding saves/checkpoints so you had to play it all in one sitting to see the ending).

If you want to play Proxy, Click Here

Always appreciate more feedback and ratings. Hopefully I’ll get to do something with this project in the future, fix any bugs and expand it into the game I originally envisioned.

Cheers,

Dan

Click here to play and rate!

Click here to check out my website

My first Ludum Dare entry, and the second game I’ve ever made! I’ve decided to go for a game with very simple mechanics, but is difficult as hell to win. While most people chose to go for a minimalistic art style, I’ve decided to keep the controls (only up/w and down/s) and actual gameplay minimalistic instead. It seems extremely impossible initially, but after awhile you get the hang of it.

Gameplay:
You control a spaceship that you move up and down to avoid getting hit by asteroids. Minimalistic yes? You have 5 seconds of small numbers of asteroids, then 60 seconds of full on walls of asteroids before another 5 seconds of calm if you make it that far. If you make it through all that, you can beat the game in a mere 70 seconds. Trust me, it isn’t easy. I swore profusely while testing the game.

Story:
You are the first test rocket to escape earth’s gravitational field! Unfortunately, the snarky people who made the rocket never made any way for you to turn the thrusters off, forcing you to have to dodge your way through an asteroid field.

Code:
I wrote the game from scratch in Java, using knowledge from my previous game to help me. I followed similar code for things like the game loop, the sound loading and playing, and the resource management. Coding was done quite fast as I already knew how I should structure the engine, and I hard coded a lot of things to make the progress faster. I though this was a great decision in the end to avoid over optimisation as it really helped me pump out the code quicker and leave me more time for the other things.

Difficulties:
The most trouble I had in this project was deciding what game to make, then actually starting it. Once I actually made some progress and knew where I was going with it, I flew through it quickly. I am really proud that I managed to make it in the designated 48 hours.

Click here to play and rate!

Click here to check out my website

Tags: asteroids, asteroids (the side-scroller), dominic, first ld, mortl8324, mortlock

+++ Scope: One button switches lanes.
++ Share: Windows, git, FlashDevelop, Flixel, and PhotoShop.
+ Agree: We discarded ambiguous warnings, words, and refueling.

— Decide: Saturday we could structure the 4-column sprite sheet.
— Play: Early on Saturday, we could playtest timing.
– Edit: Saturday we could quiz American/British like “restroom/toilet”.

Play now!

By Duncan Robson and Ethan Kennerly

I released a new version of my post compo! Here is a list of what has changed since release:
+ Added Music and Sound
* Changed player image
+ Added Easy, Medium, and INSANE difficulty (hard is what it was during the compo)

Click here for the entry page.

I also posted a video featuring the changes (note that the actual game looks much better) below. Oh and don’t forget to watch my timelapse.

And here is a GIF preview:

Tags: post-compo, speedrun, video

Well, this LD was definitely a learning experience for me. I learned a lot about thinking realistically about the scope of your project. Originally, I wanted my game to have a cool dynamic lighting engine, but I spent so much time trying to figure that out (and failing) that I had to rush just to finish a simple shooter.

Next LD I’ll use JavaScript instead of Processing, and vote for a weekend that works for me. This time it wasn’t a great weekend to do it

I won’t win anything, as I’ve gotten a lot of negative feedback about the way the game feels and it’s a pretty simple game anyways, but it was fun.

Looking forward to see what everyone won, and see you all next Ludum Dare 😀

-Cheezey

Hey everyone, I decided to take my Ludum Dare entry, make it much better, and release it on every platform I can! (PC, Android, Ouya, and maybe iOS!)

Here’s a video my progress so far:

And here’s the original Ludum Dare entry (I promise to play and rate everyone’s games who comments on Space Jellyfish!):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13748

Woo games!!

I don’t know why, but I really happy to know that my game got 100 ratings! It means that result will be pretty much objective! I want to thank those who spent their time to play and rate my game! :-*

I need to rate 78 more games to reach my goal of 10% of all games on LD #26.. Well. I have more then 48h to do it

I can’t get tired of being glad to see so much amazing games here!

This postmortem is a little late because I’ve had company over, but I’d like to take a look back on my entry, Priorities.

Priorities turned out a lot more thoughtful and meaningful than what I usually make. One player described it as “exceedingly artsy,” which I though you had to be deliberately trying to do to achieve, but here we are. Let’s see what went right and wrong:

The Good:
-The metaphor seems to resonate with people. When the theme was announced, I didn’t want to make something that just looked simple. Minimalism is a movement for communicating ideas, so I wanted to make a game that communicated SOMETHING. I’ve done a lot of reading about stress, success and perseverance lately, so after about two hours of thought, I decided to try to combine minimalism in the artistic sense (simplistic elements) with minimalism in more of a zen-living sense. I know I’m not the only person out there who would love to cut a whole bunch of crap out of their life!

-Discovering while developing. I learned some new things, but I was especially pleased with some of the deductions I was able to make while prototyping and playtesting. Originally, the squares would have been five different colours, and looking at the labels would tell you which things you want to get rid of. After a run at this, I found that the action ground to a halt. The reading sucked the energy out of the game, so I replaced some of the colors with black squares that were obviously time-sucking stuff like Farmville and Internet trolls, so players could tell at a glance what absolutely HAD to go, and then could examine the other things more closely later. Bigger squares originally also took more clicks to destroy, but I scrapped that to speed up the gameplay and give players fingers a break.

-The music. This was my first time composing music, and I’m pleased with the results. I used Milkytracker and some free piano samples, and tried to mimic Philip Glass, a minimalist composer. To the person in the IRC channel who encouraged me to keep going when I was discouraged: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

-Low-stress development. Last time, when I made Build-a-Bandit for LD25, it was my first original game ever. I was up until wee hours in the morning trying to cram in interface bits, figure out the intricacies of my spriting program, and wrestling with packaging the whole thing up in an exe file. This time, with about ten other small projects under my belt, (including my warm-up game, Gotta Groove!), I was able to get things up and running much more quickly.

The Bad:

-The scoring system. With so many players getting negative scores (often six or seven digits!), I wish I had changed the scoring system to something like a stress percentage. Then the goal would be to reduce your stress to 10% or less, instead of playing for three minutes only to discover you have negative 800000 points.

-Fun. I swore that this time, if nothing else, I would try to make something fun, after a somewhat dismal Fun ranking for Build-a-Bandit. At least it has some other redeeming qualities, but I don’t think Priorities is very fun, when everything is said and done. I definitely made it more fun throughout the course of development, but ultimately, I don’t expect people to have a blast playing it. Maybe that’s OK?

-The balance. I spent the last six hours of my development time begging for playtesters on IRC and didn’t really get the sample size that I wanted. I was acing the game every time, but a lot of testers first said they wound up with solid walls of black, and then found it easier on subsequent tries. Come deadline time, I cut all the spawn rates by about 10% and prayed it would work out.

Priorities is set up in such a way that it is either laughably easy, or hopelessly difficult. The way that the total number of squares influences how fast squares grow and spawn made it possible to completely screw yourself by taking care of too many big things while neglecting small things, or by taking lots of time deciding what to get rid of instead of ruthlessly triaging. Since it is all metaphorical for the stress we cart around via our to-do-lists and bad habits, and succeeding depends on doing something true to real life, I don’t know if I would change the mechanics given the chance, but I do wish that the balance wouldn’t tip so extremely to either side.

There are a few other changes I would make. I want to put a border around the squares so they don’t all fuse into a big blob as they get larger, and though you could argue that this too is metaphorical, it would be nice if squares didn’t spawn under other squares.

Overall, I’m happy with how Priorities turned out, and I hope you give it a try!
I’m also very proud of my warmup entry, Gotta Groove!, so if you want to smash your keyboard a bit, check that out too.

Well, this has been a great ride.  Pixel Dust was a great first (complete-able) LD and the following are some notes, especially to myself, for the next round:

• Do not bother with an editor (yes, there is one, but it’s obfuscated).  Use static, static, static files or better yet internal data structures instead.  PD started with internal data only but ended up wasting time with an editor half-way through — though it reused a lot of the code from the player.
  
  
• Focus on instructions and user hand-holding more.  PD has them, but they could have used a lot more attention.  In fact, in future make sure to write them as early on as possible (after getting some prototype working) as a test of the game design.
• Don’t add scoring/win condition stuff too close to the end of the project.  One reason PD is so unbeatable on some screens is partially due to a bug whose fix I’m holding until after the LD compo.  That bug stems from trying to add a scoring mechanic right at the end of development.  Try to get all game-mechanic related stuff done by the mid-way checkpoint.
• More UI drawings should be made immediately following basic analysis.
• Save more time for “flair”.  A simple score update animation would have made a world of difference — we’ll see after the post-compo update.  also animations relating to the “dust” in Pixel Dust might have been good.
• Spend more time on the release message.  Just copying the journal doesn’t cut it.
• Possibly be more willing to adjust issues after the compo.  The rules for this are a bit hazy, but I’m thinking I could have fixed my scoring bug following submission.
• Get all hosting/repo stuff out of the way ahead of time.
• Need to add a place to gather issues right on the web interface (even if a link back to github).
• GAE was a mixed bag.  Got things going quickly, but did have to spend a little time working through GAE issues/idiosyncrasies as well (especially in the process of storing/retrieving boards from the DB — see point 1 though).

Some things that worked well:

• Brainstorming/analysis phase — that first 1-2 hours of analyzing the options was a clear help.
• HTML — worked fine for this type of project and make most of it cross-compatible.  I suspect that faster games might require too much tuning though to keep fast.
• Web server from the start — if using HTML, why not?
• Use of TODO file instead of standard bug/issue tracker to develop initial features.  This ties the results nicely with the version control and is very quick to manage.  Consider adding a trigger to make sure the file changes on every merge, especially to master.
• Avoiding graphics saved a lot of time, but that was partially because of the theme.  May not be so lucky next time, but definitely avoiding making pictures is a time saver.
• Making the site look and feel flow reasonably well with the game.

And most importantly — make sure to have fun; if you don’t, likely no one else will either!

And I did with Pixel Dust.  Hopefully others will too as the post-compo updates are deployed.

Hi All 😉

The Simply Clicker Game have 50 clicks on vote, and 25 comments so… Thank You All! 😉

<I already made a little roundup before>

Here are some other great little games I’ve stumbled upon.
The Ludum Dare Voting ends soon! Make sure to check these games out!

Random Legend Adventure by Captain_Genial

100% Safe Download by 3.14

Four Scepters by Benjamin

F*** This Job by Casino Jack

Life! by cwilloughby

and again, make sure to check out my game as well 😀

Super 1-Bit Space Arena by Orni

Hey! I just finished playing and rate 50 JAM games and this is my TOP 5:

#1. Potato dungeon.

Combat system of this game is unusual but very cool (control sword’s direction by mouse).
This feature was enough to get good rating but beyond that the gameplay is constantly changing and does not get bored. There are a lot new abilities during game (unexpected but awesome).
And stylish graphic. And logic puzzle. And bosses. And humour. The best one.

Not very clear keyboard control, but it is not critical. I willing to buy full version

# 2. Leaf Me Alone

Not very attractive screenshot? Play it! In fact, the game is much prettier in dynamics.  It is charming story where you will not have to kill anyone. Just find the objects and learn to use them. Best level design, that I seen on competition and organic tips about control. So beautiful, so cute, so indie way. Must play.

# 3. Mustache Armies

Actually, I did not complete this one. It crashes on my computer at the end of game
But anyway it is very exciting gameplay. Each of your killed soldiers is transferred to the next round and repeat all the movement. Until the screen is flooded by mustache army! Epic and fun!

# 4. Moonshine

Very simple gameplay:  just go to the finish and do not fall into the trap. But atmosphere is great. Darkly. Lonely. Beautiful.

# 5. Cpt. Sqrjaw

Enemies fly into pieces according to the laws of physics! And sometimes you need create a mountain of corpses to climb up and complete a game. Is not that cool?

Hi everyone! Just a quick message to say could you come and have a look at my game!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13844

Thanks! 😀

Only 1 day left to rate games ! I’ve rated about 160 games. I didn’t really like “Minimalism” at first, but seeing how many great concepts people came up with, I guess it was a good theme after all

Here are some highlights, in no particular order.

[placeholder] – mtrc – 48 Hour Compo Entry

It’s a puzzle game for programmers, which is a great idea, as the audience here (us, participants) mostly is. Lines of commented code help you figure out what to do, and you have to deal with nasty bugs. Very cool !

Unst – Milo – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A very challenging puzzle game with a concept I’ve never seen before.

Floating Point – 7Soul – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A very uncommon entry. You have to have two browser windows opened side by side to play. On one side, there’s the detailed world, on the other, there’s the abstract world. It’s a point and click game, and your actions on one world have an effect on the other. The graphics and mood are excellent.

The Road – GeorgeBroussard – 48 Hour Compo Entry

This one nailed the theme in my opinion. The graphics are very minimal. You play a red square, you have to go forward and avoid stuff. The whole thing represents real life. When you die by hitting a black triangle for instance, the game tells what it represents, how you died in real life. Some deaths are very funny.

Street of Rave – TinyDrakkarStudio – Jam Entry

So much fun in this game ! You dance, and you have to run around people in the street to make them dance too. You have to avoid the walls and the cops that will chase you will make your life harder.

Minimal Annihilation – Zener – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A Starcraft in 2D with minimal graphics. I think it’s perfectly done, and the UI is very intuitive.

MONO – timtipgames – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A highly polished and professional looking entry. An amazing work in 48 hours.

CLRS – acatcalledfrank – 48 Hour Compo Entry

Another great looking entry with a very cool concept. Evil color circles are attacking you and you have to defend yourself by drawing lines of the right colors around you. It’s a “draw-em-up”, as the author says

Zip – Chronodrax – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A fun puzzle game with cool graphics and a very nice concept. The little character can absorb the color of the platform he’s on, and then he’ll be able to pass through any block of that color. You have to do things in the right order, or you’ll fall !

Schrodinger – myachin – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A very interesting experience where you play a wave function. You have to change state to go through obstacles, gain speed, and avoid the black hole that chases you. I really like how the graphics twist when you start to lose.

nadir – Zillix – 48 Hour Compo Entry

This game tells a story in such an interesting way. Your character (a pink square) is falling and she’s trying to remember what happened to her by reliving her dialogs with her fellow adventurers. While progressing through the memories, you have to avoid the dark walls around you, and it really adds something to the immersion.

Lunar Rain – LeafThief – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A point and click with fantastic graphics and mood.

L’Hypnose – Wan & Almudys – Jam Entry

A very artsy, oniric experience.

Reich 18 – jerombd – Jam Entry

A Game & Watch like looking game with awesome visuals. Really worth a look !

Dragon Drop – Tom 7 – 48 Hour Compo Entry

A game with a great twist that made me smile

LOOP – vandriver – 48 Hour Compo Entry

You play as a crow in this entry with a fantastic mood and very cool graphics.

Escape Shaft – Zathalos – 48 Hour Compo Entry

So I had a great showing for my game, a lot of plays, and a lot of helpful comments, which I am very thankful for them all. My friends and others have pushed me to create a mobile game out of my entry, and so the past week I have gotten to learn a language, and make a native application for Android. Here is the link for the google play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.perry.join . I have had a few plays so far from friends who have given me a __lot__ of constructive criticism. This is my first time working with Android and it’s a completely different experience to working with web, with so many different devices and screens, it was very overwhelming.

I again thank Luddum Dare for their competition, inspiring me to create games, and all of you for your support and kind wishes.

Hi everyone,
The Bear is back to write his postmortem.

It all started by a feast.
Then the dance floor had vibrated under my feet,
And the bear drink beer,
And moles danced,
And the bear is bare,
And…
There were only three hours to make a minimalist game, crap !

It was time to a micro-minimalist-LD.
The only way,
Was a fight against the letters of MINIMALIST,
And the bear’s beard has grown.

You can try this fight here !

During the course of the Ludum Dare 26, did you find yourself working on a game only to realize that it was too huge of a task to take on? Did inspiration strike you just a day late, losing yourself 24 precious hours? Did a new, more interesting idea pop into your head during the voting stage of the competition? Did you simply wish you had more time to continue development of your game into the beauty it could become?

I know that one of these (or all of them) could have happened to you, and that is why I created Ludum Daradise. Ludum Daradise is a laid back “competition” that takes place over the course of four weeks from May 20 to June 17. The goal of Daradise is to give you ample time to polish your game to perfection, or to create an entirely new one under the same theme.

I found that my entry didn’t convey the minimalistic theme as much as I would have liked. So, over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a game on and off that I believe would fit the game better. The graphics are simple and clean, the gameplay is a mix of Asteroids and Lunar Lander, and the music is actually implemented this time around and is created randomly by the gameplay itself.

If you already have an updated version of your game, or a completely new one, you can send it in to ludumdaradise(at)gmail(dot)com. I’ll post it HERE whenever I am able. Make sure you include at least one screenshot, a brief description, and a download link so others can play!

What Went Well

Overall, this game was much, much better than any of my previous endeavors.  People complimented my previous games (either sincerely or at least politely), but this time there have been people asking me to continue on with this game and make it a proper release.

Theme – I really liked this theme.  When I saw it during initial theme voting it was the one I had hoped would win the vote and had some good ideas and the vague idea for a game stewing in my head a few days before hand.

Controls – This is where I failed the most in my last two games.  I made games with too many things the player could do and I used awkward buttons for these controls that just frustrated people.  It also made my games way too difficult.  With minimalism as the theme it made sense to me to make the controls minimalistic and eliminate my weak point.  While the game has three buttons for controls, you only actually need left and right to complete the game.  Not once did anyone complain or get confused dby these controls, so I would consider that a definite win for me.  Going forward I’m going to have to keep myself on a tight leash to make sure I keep my controls simple in future games.

Scope – As stated with controls, I tended to let players do too much in previous games.  This was another problem that I have in putting too many different things in a game, especially one so short; as a result many things were half baked, and while worked, could be done much better.  This time I decided that I needed to reign myself back in and do something simple but polished.  As a result, I had a very small list of features I wanted to implement the game, and had a completely working engine and initial levels within 8 hours of development time.  Thus by Saturday morning, my entire time was spent making the look, sound, or play better and could stop at nearly any time with a playable game.  This let me get far deeper in story and subtle little things in the game that really caught people’s attention, and on building a complete game with a proper ending.

Graphics – This was probably where I made the best decision on.  Initial the game was not supposed to look the way it does.  It was supposed to look a lot different, and if I pursued that route, the game probably would not have been as good as it came out.  My initial intention was to rotoscope the player, drawing over video recordings of myself performing all the actions in the game and having the game play done as a silhouette, it would have worked, but it would have had no charm.

After four hours struggling with the rotoscoped animations, I decided to scrap the whole thing and just try drawing something.  After a very quick doodle, I had a cute little character to work with; he was boxy, simple, but charming.  I quickly put together a few animations of walking, sitting down, falling, crying, until I had a character that with no facial expressions could actually show show emotion.  From those few frames, I put together the entire plot of the game and graphic style.  All in all the main character and his color shifted friend have 68 frames of animation which is a lot more than the 15 and 40 frames of the main characters of the previous games I worked on, and those characters had a lot more actions.  The result was a character that was much more endearing to the player.

The lesson learned here is to not be afraid to throw out something and start over if you you know it’s not going to work.  Let it go and concentrate on what will work.

Music – Music is another area that I am typically bad at.  The music in my previous game was terrible, absolutely terrible.  It was a 12 second loop that probably drove a few people batty.  In retrospect I should have just left it out.  This time I devoted more time to the music.  I knew I needed a longer music piece, and decided to spend all my allotted time on one good song.

To be honest, I’m not sure how the music got to a point where it actually sounded good.  I sat at a piano and banged at the keys until something sounded right.  Got a chord progression then started to fill in a melody, by what I can only describe as a breadth first search of notes.  In the end though, the music matched the game really well and people liked it enough that one of the other competitors, SonnyBone, went so far as to remix the music, which you can hear here.

Tutorials – The first six levels of the game teach all the mechanics of the game using only one word (“Space”) to tell the user how to reset a level.  I used simple levels, visual clues, and even other character’s actions to lead the player into learning how everything works in the game without having to tell them.  I learned a lot from Egoraptor’s breakdown of Megaman which I highly suggest you watch, though I will note he is a bit vulgar. My first game had a “here’s how to play” screen at the beginning; my second had tutorial text in game. This game did it much better, though I did mess up in one small way. One of the tutorial stages teaches how to reset a level by having a button that if pressed makes the level impossible to solve without a reset. I assumed players would walk to the wall that closed up, and had logic that would show instructions when you reached it; however, what I found is that as soon as the player hit the button, they would try to reopen the door by pressing the button again rather than walk forward. They would eventually get it, but it disrupted the flow of the game until they started just walking around the level looking for a solution.

Playtesting – If nothing else, I suggest you do this while developing your game, and if you want to continue working on the game get people to play the game afterwards and watch them play. During the 48 hours, my brother volunteered to test the game. I sent him several in progress releases often and early in the contest so that I could get feedback on what worked, and what didn’t. Afterwards, I signed up with nearly every person who was streaming their reviews so that I could see how people played the game. Actually watching people play, get frustrated, and have the aha moments taught me so much about game and level design and really helped my overall growth. I hope next competition to be in a position to do the same service to other developers but I was getting ready to move as part of a new job and didn’t have a consistent time to sit down and set up streaming and settle down for long play sessions.

What Went Bad

Before I get into the bad list, I want to note that the items that are bad in this game are far more specific and less significant than my previous games.  My last LD game wasn’t bad, but had some significant issues, so much so that my previous game’s post mortem was actually a comic making fun of the game.  While people did note issues in this competition’s game, they also noted that they played the game to the end, which is a fantastic thing to here.

Level visibility – One complaint is that the player could not see the entire level in one shot which caused them to miss things and have difficulty determining what was going on when hitting certain buttons.  In a puzzle game, the player really needs to see the whole puzzle at one time to make it possible to solve the puzzle without just guessing.  While I don’t think that being able to see the whole level at once is always necessary, the ability to scroll around or zoom out would have helped players quite a bit.

Even the in game character had to squint to see some of the buttons.

Difficult to See Buttons – Compared to other issues this was minor, or at least fewer people complained bout this issue; however while watching people play the game I did notice that people got hung up in one or two places where a button was in shadow and players skipped over it and get frustrated.  The lesson learned here is that I need to make sure the environment does not obscure the actual gameplay elements of a level.

Difficulty Curve – The game starts off with a few simple levels to demonstrate the game’s mechanics, then throws the player into some rather difficult levels.  Two days is a very short amount of time determine a good difficulty curve, but it would have helped to create a few simpler levels that showed a simple puzzle with fewer pieces then build up the harder levels as a composite of these simpler puzzles.

Feedback – This is by far the biggest issue.  I alluded to the issue above with the visibility issue, but the real issue here is that in far too many places the player did not get immediate feedback to let them know the consequences of their actions.  The player would press a button and nothing visible on the screen would change.  The player was then forced to look around the level and find out the one thing that was different that they could interact with.  I think the best way to address this is that when the affected element of an action is off screen, the camera would pan or zoom to it to let the player know what is going on.  That simple of a change probably would have removed most of the frustration of the game do to the game engine (but left the good frustration you have in a devious puzzle).

Conclusion

I am extremely happy with the final results of this game.  There are definitely some rough edges and places to improve upon, and I fully intend on continuing the the development of this game right now (I’m debating platforms right now, so if you have any preferences, I’d like to know).  If you haven’t had a chance to play my game, I ask you to take a look, even after the competition is done and leave a comment with constructive criticism so that I can learn even more.

Play fractured here.

Something I have noticed in the comments to my game, was that half the people felt it didn’t fit the theme, will the other half thought it was a good match. So why is that. My main theory is because the presentation is quite elaborate. If you take a look at the full cast, there is a lack of cubes and triangles that seem to be what most of the entries consist of. Also there is a rather heavy and lengthy story involved, so everything seems to be anything BUT minimalistic.

So why should this fit the theme? It is because the minimalism lies within the actual story and elements. Everyone of them, whether it is an character or a prop, they are referred in platonic and abstract manner. Also the entire stage is more or less a a blank slate, leaving the imagination to fill in what the place actually is like.

Check it out and say what you think about it, would love some input on what people think about my intepretation of the theme.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13137

Also, for the first time, I managed to keep track of the number of clicks that went through my entry link. As you can see, most of the traffic comes when the judging starts. But the second spike came from when I submitted my game to a stream. Which is why I regret not fixing a 10 second clip for the compilation videos. That would most like have a great increase in traffic. So if you want exposure, do it socially. Check the frontpage and submit your game when people ask for recommendations for what to play.

Hi everyone!

Right now I finished my Android port of my LD26 game COLORUS! This is amazing feel.

It has huge progress from original game. Now it have different game modes, better control. And at near future new updates will be added such leaderboards and new game modes.

If you will download my game I hope you like it. At the same time you can can play web version free. It some sort of demo or lite version 😀

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

And here the direct link to Google.Play:

And if you noticed some mistakes (I’m very bad in english) I’m will be glad to get PMs about it.

If miracle will come and game would have 5-10k downloads I necessarily make iOS port and make both version full free.

Thanks again!

I don’t want be poor hobo like now. Please buy my game : (

Out of the 70 games I managed to play so far the following 8 caught my attention based on the ratings categories:

Overall: Tendril

A deliberate pace sets the mood for this unique game with a one-button mechanic that rewards patience. The tension that is created as you try to weave through an opening and the relief once you’ve cleared it is extremely satisfying.

Innovation: SDFJKL

An original control scheme that makes for a very interesting Spider-Man-like experience weaved with a tale that puts the abstract graphics into context with every varied level.

Fun: Super 1-Bit Space Arena

Single player Smash Bros. with guns. In space. Enough said. Seriously though I kept coming back to this for more.

Theme: (Follow the) Line

Simple yet elegant graphics, one-button controls, and no audio. Minimalism to the core.

Graphics: Somsnosa

Outstanding artstyle with mind-bending abstract/surrealist environments and crazy creature designs give a fresh look to this entry that really sets it apart from the rest.

Audio: Wandering Darkness

This claustrophobic platformer has compelling level design and it keeps you company with a number of varied tunes that are not your typical fair.

Humour: Staring Contest

Minimalist comedy. Couldn’t help but laugh at the voiceovers and absurdity of it all.

Mood: GHOSTS

The tension is palpable in this game. Every element seems to reinforce that mood, the crescendoing music, the increasing light and thus greater threat level from the enemies as you try to find the exit.

PLOT TWIST: Worst Game (stealth shameless plug)

There is so much talent in this LD it’s not even funny, and it’s sad that I won’t be able to play even a fraction of the amazing-looking games out there. Here are my lesser-known favourites after rating 100 games:

The absolute unquestionable champion:

SPACE TEST 48 – lazybraingames

At present, only 14 people have rated this game, and that is a crime. This game is so jaw-droppingly good at everything, from the audio and the humor to the phenomenal gameplay. It’s looks like an alien shooter, but plays like something else altogether, an amazing blend of puzzles, dodging and multitasking. Play this game.
Seriously, play this game.
Did you hear me? Just stop right now and go play this one. You don’t even need to read the rest of the list. It’s amazing. I promise.

Runner up:

*Humorous Title!* – Graf_Grun

Pass through holes in the tunnel without hitting walls…and after you’re done, level different aspects of the game up or down to change the experience! Add colour! Make the geometry more difficult to perceive! Make the shapes simple or jack up the gameplay to make the corridor rotate!

Other awesome games:

SLEEP! we have a long way to go – NicoJaujou

This one actually made me sleepy. It has a wonderful atmosphere.

Add Removal – StuStutheBloo

This is a creative and tricky puzzle game, where you subtract colours from images to find secret codes.

Tokyo Minimaley Land – junt74

A minigame collection of games themed around different Disneyland attractions, with tiny sprites of famous characters to match. This one had really tight theming and creative games, including a breakout where you control the ball instead of paddle.

———————
I hope you give all of those a try. I haven’t seen them highlighted yet and I believe they deserve the attention.
If you’re interested, you can also check out my game, Priorities. De-clutter your life by clicking objects to free them from your mind! I wrote a postmortem here.

We set out to simply finish a small scope project within the time limit and ended up surpassing our own expectations. More than four hours was spent designing the concept and almost nothing went wrong during development. Our final product is remarkably similar to our initial ideas.

After we received emergency feedback from a number of friends, the game play was streamlined both by simplifying the mechanics and through tighter level design. In the final hours we rushed to add multiple levels and UI.

We took advantage of our team members strengths. Pupnik worked on the mechanical side of the game (scoring, tile interactions, backend), while Abregado worked on the graphical side (UI, tileset, sound).

The timelapse of the entire development can be found on our YouTube channel here:

http://youtu.be/AS3RPzdeTCA

Surprises

• The theme was generic
• only spent ~22 hours actually working on the project
• GOPRO batteries dont last long!

Hurdles

• bitbucket was broken
• more dramas with recording than with the actual project

Things we learnt

• proved to ourselves we can make something polished in a short time
• could have increased scope
• having emergency testers is awesome!
• cooking in advance or ordering food to save time
• more time spent on design initially saves more time later
• need better instructions, UI and tutorialization

Personal evaluation

• could have spent more time actually working
• didn’t do much for the theme
• fantastic teamwork
• team had a unified vision
• final product was as originally envisioned

Wow, my game Squares has 50 votes! Thank you to everybody who has played and rated my game. If you haven’t please click the link above an try it out. You won’t be sorry!

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

Things that went right:

Theme:

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

Lots of programming/design time:

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

Quickly implementing key features:

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

Overlaps in gameplay/design:

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

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

Things that went wrong:

Physics bugs:

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

‘Wasted’ time:

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

Distribution:

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

Hardware issues:

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

Summary:

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

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

Super Clutter Blaster 2013 – Homletmoo

The Parasite – jahlgren

Tiny Runner – Jarcas Studios

Square Heart Flower – JonathonG

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

Terminally Ill

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

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

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

Hole in one!

Before the jam

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

The theme is revealed!

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

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

Day 1: Anti-minimalism 3rd person shooter

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

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

Day 2: New game idea

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

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

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

Day 3: Polish!

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

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

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

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

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

After the jam

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

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

For next time

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

PLAY MY GAME HERE

Tags: postmortem

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

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

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

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

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

Stackman

Stackman

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

A puzzling composition

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

Gist Structure

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

sn (yes the game is called ‘sn’) 

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

Color treason

Fun and original game with interesting graphics.

Tilegrid

Complex but promising puzzle game.

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

You can play it & rate it here!

Sorry for the minimalist post 😉

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

What went wrong:

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

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

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

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

What went right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

-Metal

My last minute picks!

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

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

Potato Station
 Pixel art, good music, and potato!

Voice of Fire
 Dreamy runner game
 
 

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

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

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

The first steps

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

the result

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

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

Hadron the Uniter

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

Results

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

What Went Right

1. Inspiration.

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

2. Concept.

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

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

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

3. Minimalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Not Stressing.

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

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

What Went Wrong

1. Not Stressing.

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

2. Doldrums.

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

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

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

3. Tuning, gameplay, lack of, total

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

4. Preloader

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

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

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

5. Website

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Other than that, see you all next LD48!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ludum dare experience:

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

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

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

What went wrong:

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

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

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

What went right:

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

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

Final words..

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

Thanks and see you later!

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

Play and Rate My Game!

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

What went right?

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

What went wrong?

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

Overall, pretty happy with this LD.

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

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

And up first we have tokken’s postmortem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now emarcotte’s:

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

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

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

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

Here’s brendo’s:

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

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

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

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

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

And of course we have the illustrious Spacemars:

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

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

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

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

And last but not least, mine:

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

The good:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ganking

Tags: Construct 2, html5, robotater, scirra

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

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

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

Roundup part 1

Roundup part 2

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

How did I do?

You can view your results here:

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

The individual category results are just above your comments.

Top 100 Games

Check out winning competition and jam games here:

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

Winners are decided by the Overall category.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Categorical Top 25s

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

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

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

Ludum Dare 27 – August 2013

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

Suggestions

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

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

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

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

PS. Sory for my English. I hope everyone understand what I want to tell you.

Hi everybody!

I wrote a short post-mortem of my game which I made on LD26, I hope that anyone read it and don’t die from boredom. On beginning I need do some explanation. The main purpose in my game is to reach yellow square to the green square. In reaching this purpose hinder us wall-squares. Red squares “kill us”, other color only block us. To increase difficult, in one moment we see squares in only one color, nonetheless there are STILL THERE. It also doing with them, one color on one moment – minimalism J I explain it, because some people wrote in coments that the game is buggy, I think it stemmed misunderstanding of the concept, and I very sorry for this L it’s only my fault. Let’s get start whit post-mortem:

GOOD THINGS:

1. Humor – some people wrote that the game is very funny, I’m veeeeeeery happy of this

2. Simply gameplay – I implement gameplay very quickly and I could engage in graphics, sounds, itp.

3. Unity – nonetheless game is in 2D I used unity 3D, this allowed me to do prototype very quickly, with unity we can export game to web whit one click, it’s very import, because in those days people don’t have time to download and unzip/install games, the sooner they can start playing our game the more people do it.

4. free sound site – I used sound and music from site whit free sound, I must spend time to search for right sounds, but I think it worth it, because I don’t have any skills with doing it by myself.

5. Have time for polish – because game is very simply, a have time for perfecting details, like “graphics”, sounds and balance. Balance is very imported thing, it depends on if people will play 30 s or 10 min

6. Sleep J – sleeping during game jam is very imported, it’s be my first LD, but earlier I participated at GGJ 2012 and 2013, in both editions I sleeping less then 4h during  weekend!!! On 4am your productive fall below zero,  It would not work, you need sleep!!!

BAD THINGS:

1. Paradoxically too simple gameplay – gameplay was so simple that I can invent more features to improved game fun.

2. Little original gameplay – nonetheless use technique that I read earlier, “when you hear theme, write five thing which first came to your mind, and toss then, probably the most people think about it too”, a large amount of games was based on the colors, I see also some “maze” games

3. Zero graphics skill – I have no artistic or aesthetic sense, I’m just a programmer J also I’m very beginner in graphics program I’m used (GIMP, Paint.NET), my game is ugly…

4. More time for LD – I have spent little time for this LD edition, gamplay a have finished on Saturday before noon, you can check it on TimeLapse J then I eat diner, get some sleep and go on party with my girlfriend (real life > LD, sorry :P), I think I spend less then 20h for LD

5. Don’t implement highscore table – I can’t explain why I had not thought about it that weekend…

PROVISIONS FOR NEXT LD:

1. Still put emphasis on humor

2. Make more original gameplay

3. Unity, still learnig this pawerfull engine

4. Improve graphic skills, or do some beautiful procedural graphics

5. Spend more time on LD – send girlfriend on weekend trip to Caribbean Islands either though to her mother

Thank you for reading, I hope someone has survived so far J

Please try my game and leave some comment. Any feedback is worth more than gold and diamonds

My Entry! Enjoy!

I made a cool graph thing showing how I did in all 7 LDs I participated:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ar-33qvLZBHXdHgtV3RmTUFtTGxPV3dQbXZfa0dXc0E&usp=sharing

And here’s a summary of them all. If you’re new to LD, I hope you can find some kind of wisdom somewhere in there.

My first LD, #19: Worked my ass off, and my game was really buggy and unbalanced. The graphics were very tiny pixel art, but I’m glad people liked it. Here I learned that having a clear goal is important, and that the main mechanics should be worked on first (as obvious as this might sound)

LD#20: Remembering how I got tired after LD#19, I said I wouldn’t work as much and do something simpler, so I made a puzzle. It holds most of my worse scores… That’s what going into LD with no enthusiasm looks like.

LD#22: Now trying to find a middle ground, I decided to take part in the Jam and just get my game polished and not buggy. I was really satisfied by the end product and the ratings. I don’t take pride on the audio score since I used free music for it (which is what I usually do)

LD#23: This time I worked in a group. It was as fun as it was stressful, me being the project coordinator and the programmer. We aimed a bit higher than we should, so the game lacked in the level design department, and there were a few glitches.

LD#24: Again with the same team, we decided to go with an idea that didn’t involve intricate puzzles or graphics. The game was simple enough to work on, and the team did a great job working on the assets. Only problem was a lack of decision-making, resulting in a lot of confusion and last minute rush.

LD#25: Working by myself again, I decided to try different ideas (no platformers or shooters).  I enjoyed making the game, and take pride in the end result. Problem is, there was a lack of good documentation making planning and debugging a mess in the long run, and resulting in the game being confusing, with unclear goals and feedback.

LD#26: Zero hour hit, and people were mad about the theme. I wasn’t. To me it was a great opportunity to try to think outside of the box. I remember explicitly saying “with this theme, few good ideas with shine” (and they did!). And some of the games were amazing.

So I had my idea of making an interactive adventure where you could switch between two worlds to solve puzzles. I quickly saw a need to simplify this idea, so I made it a point and click game, which would have simpler graphics and mechanics.
The idea of having two game windows that connected to each other came when I went to bed (like most ideas :P) but I was not sure it would be possible.

So I spent pretty much the whole first day making sure it worked, and the entire time praying it wouldn’t break the last minute >_<
I’m glad I could figure something out that was unique and fun to do, even if I didn’t work as much in it as I wanted (had to cut a good 1/3 of the game…)

Then results are out and I see a golden medal next to one of the scores. It took 7 LDs (and a couple MiniLDs) and I couldn’t be happier!

See you in august 😉

Tags: postmortem

I got in the top 100 for humor! I got #76. This is a lot better than my last LD. Below I have shown my rating improvements. However, there are things that made me mad about the ratings. Not so much my ratings but just ratings in general. So I have some tips for those who haven’t been here very long.

Use “n/a”. Very often people will rate as one star when they should really rate as “n/a”. For example, this text adventure. It got rated better in graphics than my game. It is a text adventure, graphics don’t matter in a text adventure. If it doesn’t have sound, rate it as “n/a”. Same goes for graphics.

Read the entire description. It seems as some people don’t read the entire description. There is sometimes some important info in there. For example, people didn’t seem to realize there were only two levels in my game. Or they said restarting was annoying even though I showed a way to restart faster. Please, JUST READ THE WHOLE THING.

Leave a comment. There is nothing more annoying than people who don’t leave comments. I like to hear what you think. How am I supposed to know how I’m doing if you don’t leave a comment. Please, LEAVE COMMENTS.

Also, here is a rating comparison:

LD26 ratings

LD24 Ratings

And here is a timelapse:

Just a couple of minutes to finish the voting period I wanted to post my favorite 4 games.

For all this time I didn’t know which to choose because I really loved many of the games on this ludum dare. Some just screamed GENIUS. Now I can choose because my mind is filled with beer and everything it’s more clear.

Anyway I’ll start the list with

Gods Will Be Watching

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=11045

I guess this is the favorite of many, but this one caught the eye of my girl friend. So I am putting this one for her. She really loved this game. She played about 20 times, only lost 2 the rest she just kept playing. She was amazed with it so great game!

The second game on my list is:

Fractured

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13960

This is a crazy and difficult game. The puzzle will probably destroy you brain, I don’t know if it’s because I am not smart enough for this or what, but I wasn’t able to finish it. Even though it was a very hard game it really kept me going.

Next on the list is:

(Follow the) Line

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=17883

Another popular game on LD26. I really loved how simple it is. It’s simple but not easy and doesn’t get boring after a while. This is a game I really want to keep playing. Please port this to phones and tablets. I read you made this with haxe, so you MUST!.

And last but not least:

Somsnosa

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18575

I really felt like I was on a surreal painting. The art  was just great! and I really loved the battles. Something about this game just makes me feel like I am on a dream.

If you have a minute left you could play & rate my game  “SHON” ( whoring  )

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=13148

Just updated my version with latest fixes and improvements.. Oh and an ice stage

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

If you’re bored, and waiting for the winners to be announced, heart this post and be entertained for 2 seconds

Alright, I think I’ll do my obligatory look back at the competition.

I’m going to look at it in percentiles because the numbers aren’t impressive.

Categories I care about:

Overall: 967, 41%

Fun: 864, 37%

Ok, not the best scores, but technically, above average! This was my first major game competition, and I’m proud I did it!

My game was Left vs. Right – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=16998

Ludum Dare results are in, even without any audio my game ranked #416 overall out of 2346 games 😀 Not bad at all. My highest category was #408 in graphics, also somehow I managed to get #1069 in audio, even though my game has none? lol. With #595 in fun I think I did pretty well, and it will only get better next LD!

Hey everyone,

Now that three weeks have passed and the judging is over, it’s probably time for me to get around to my post-mortem for LD26. Let me start off by saying that it was an absolute blast! I’ve been a teaching assistant in the Computer Graphics Technology at Purdue University for a year now, and during that time I have taught and been part of the development of two game design classes. Yet, I had not made a game to date despite guiding several student groups through the process. So I set off to challenge myself with ludum dare 26.

What went well

• I was fairly confident in my ability to have a functional game. I’m relatively familiar with C# scripting in Unity so that’s what I went with. Though there were a few bugs, and some HORRIBLY formatted code due to time constraints + feature creep, everything managed to function the way I intended it to.
• The art style was a success. I even managed to score #100 overall in the graphics division! I haven’t ever done pixel art before, so I was pleasantly surprised at the positive feedback I got from it. I spent probably 60%-70% of my time on the graphics since that was the part that intrigued me the most. I knew that pixel art alone wouldn’t stand out – the minimalism theme was going to make sure of that. I added shadowing to every sprite, which made the implementation take a little longer but Photoshop actions helped tremendously.
• 3 Character sprite sheets. About 3-4 hours before the competition ended (time lost all meaning somewhere around 8am that morning), I decided that I wanted the character to get his color sucked out – requiring a greyscale and full black/white sprite sheet to be made. Not terribly difficult but my sprite code wasn’t the greatest and it was quite a rush to get this finished. I’m also not the strongest animator so adding wings at the end really pushed me. Luckily I was able to pull through as that last burst of energy carried me across the finish line
• Skype! I know this is a bit odd, but I had the longest Skype conversation of my life with Sakuyan and jgnilka (look up their entries, they did a great job!) I think it ended up being 27 hours long at the end. Chatting with friends who were also working on their own Ludum Dare games really helped when we started getting tired or frustrated. I attribute the relative success of this project to them as much as myself for being supportive and keeping me (mostly) sane.

What didn’t go so well

• Everyone complained about the theme enough, so I won’t go into that. Let’s just say that I found it hard to be inspired.
• I didn’t really focus on gameplay, sound, or story. Nearly all of my efforts went into having pixel art that actually looked decent. It was my first attempt so in the future I know that my art speed will improve – leaving me more time to make my game more of a game.
• About that story – I threw in incoherent thoughts in the background as text to give some semblance of a story/deeper meaning. I really wanted to try to come up with something good but I just kept drawing blanks.
• I would have loved to incorporate 3D graphics somehow, but there’s simply not enough time for me to to model/rig/animate a character. I’m a lighting/shading/rendering guy so anything that doesn’t come at the end of the pipeline goes pretty slow for me.
• Bugs. But hey, they weren’t too noticeable. Lots of people seemed to have lost the long elevator platform but I haven’t been able to reproduce it.
• The ending – or lack thereof. It left a lot of people wondering if the game had ended, which is a bit of a sour note to hit right before your audience is about to rate the game.

Things for the future

• I’ll definitely think about sound for the next competition. While I believe it should really be the last thing priority-wise, it can be the extra finishing touch that really makes a game stand out.
• No more Unity for 2D games. It’s doable, but the engine isn’t really made for it and it shows when you’re trying to work with it. The lack of a built-in 2D character controller seems really strange to me with all of the other wonderful features it has, and using 3D assets in a 2D environment lends itself to another host of problems. I’m working on a project in Construct2 now, so I intend to be fluent in that before the next competition starts.

Thanks everyone who played and rated my game, and thanks to everyone that keeps the competition running smoothly!

—

Andrew Kennedy

Almost in the top 100 for humor (#106), and in the top 500 for Audio. Seeing as this was my very first LD, I enjoyed it, and did better than I expected :D. Super fun, cannot wait for the next one.

For those who want to play my super awesome game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=20256

Because I like it. And I’m willing to make it.

Either that or it’s got something to do with the fact that I only rated about 7 games.

But lulzfish_4 rated many more games than I did yet performed bloody awfully. Maybe people are vicious when they see someone’s made a few mistakes. Or maybe they just can’t cope with 8 enemies firing targetted shots at them. I don’t know. (It’s pretty easy to dodge once you know your hit region.)

And he got 1.33 for audio? His game doesn’t even HAVE audio! DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO PRESS THE N/A BUTTON (obviously I had better people voting for mine because they knew how to press the N/A button for humour even though there was a bit in the game itself)

His game wasn’t even terrible. It was just a bit incomplete, and a bit rough around the edges. I’ve seen worse games that deserve worse scores, most notably a particular game which involved going around a huge-ass cavern picking up 50 identical things. It was not fun at all. I am neither naming this game nor this author, as everyone does duds every now and then and he doesn’t need to be remembered for such a dud.

Hell, his worst placing was in the theme department. I feel this is complete horseshit. If anything, this needed MORE things.

Come to think of it, if his game were some Unity hackjob, he’d get a much higher score because shitny*. I really don’t like that.

(* typo’d that, corrected that, decided to leave it in. It’s a new word, guys!)

If it’s any compensation, I at least did well in the audio department, and somehow did alright in the fun department.

MiniLD #42 is coming up. Provided my coursework doesn’t suddenly start kicking me in the crotch, I might take this time to learn how to use LÖVE, and then make a bullet hell shooter with it.

Alternatively, if emscripten decides to work, I might be able to make an asm.js port of my LD26 entry, and then I can gut the engine out and use that as base code. Hell, I might even stick in a few #define macros just to save my sanity (getting the texcoords right was somewhat tedious, lots of copy paste, thank you vim for being awesome).

And then I will make a bullet hell shooter.

Because I like bullet hell shooters.

And, to be quite honest, there are other people who do.—Maybe I’ll have enough time to stick in a few difficulty levels. I for one am not particularly good at my own game, but I can get a no-death run every now and then.At least I still find my game challenging.

Well, my first LD has come to an end, and it was a blast! Participated in the jam and quite happy with our results:

Super happy to break top 10 in a category!!

Would still love any feedback people have on our game as we plan to continue working on it, bringing it to both iPhone and Android soon! If you havent played it yet, give it a shot, and please leave comments!

Also, if you would like to be notified when the mobile version is ready, sign up here.

Cant wait until next LD!

The first thing I said to myself before the start of the Jam was this : “I will do my best to respect the theme in every aspect of interpretation or development.” Then the theme was announced : “Minimalism“. I was very frustrated because I knew that obeying THAT theme would kill almost every fragment of creativity I have could put into it my game. I wasn’t creating a personal game anymore, but a thing resulting of the maximum extrapolation of an invasive theme.

My thoughts are a battlefield with Conformism (C) against Anticonformism (A).
I do hate the C part, but it’s keeping me sane. This is how I proceed, talking to myself :

• A : What is the Minimal in a Game?
  C : Interactivity. Without interactivity, it’s just a show.
  A : But is a show a real game with unconscious inputs and inexplicit outputs?
  C : Don’t mix show and game or people won’t understand.
• A : What is the Minimal in Interactivity?
  C : An input, an output.
  A : It seems to be true with 2 people (considering Player and Game).
• A : What is the Minimal Input or Output?
  C : A click and displaying a pixel I think.
  A : Where are your arguments?
  C : In common games you just have to click and pixels are small and light.
  C : Remember, people need to understand.
  A : MAN, stop attacking your liberty of thinking by using understandability as a filter.
  C : Do a game for your yourself if you want BUT UNDERSTAND that shareability is primordial in LD.
  A : Go **** ******** C!

— Cerebral Meltdown —
I’m not going to show you everything, because it took hours.
And my head hurts.

• A : So… what’s the minimal game engine?
  C : Notepad.
  A : LOL, are you trying to mimic me? You’re bad at this, you know.C : It was a serious answer.
  A : It was unoriginal originality, around 10 people will have the same idea.
  C : So what’s your idea?
  A : No game engine.
  C : WHAT???!! We are NOT going to make a game??
  C : GOOD JOB, YOU’RE RIGHT : 0 octets, that’s Minimal!
  C : Who won? Everyone who did NOT submit a game.
  C : You’re going to be hated for that.

— Conformism ragequit — Long wait — Conformism comeback —

• A : Bro, try to understand me,
  A : I was saying : no “standard” game engine.
  A : Let’s use Ludum Dare website as a game engine.
  A : One possibility : Title = Question ; Download links = Answers.
  A : Let’s minimize everything
  C : Wow, you’re a genius, no kiddin, but can we?
  A : It’s not forbidden, I think. Let’s submit in “Jam”. In case of.

• C : So, what’s the minimal question for you?A : “How are you?”
  C : Answer links : “Fine, thank you” and “Not so well”?
  A : I don’t like this, the question must be more challenging.
  A : What about “X = 3 – 1“, btw : weird name, easy to see.
  C : That’s not challenging at all.
  A : Well, it looks challenging so people UNDERSTAND where the game is.
  A : Remember, there’s no downloadable game, no Flash, no HTML5!
  C : Why not “48÷2(9+3) = ?“, we will get more points in fun.
  A : Too hard, and minimalism has a difficulty interpretation.
  A : Note : We must do minimalism in the most diverse field of interpretations!
• C : Where the “download” links are going to redirect?
  A : Maybe to wikipedia, to the true or false page.
  C : I like the “true” or “false” idea, it’s very “game-like”.
  C : However, some people will not understand that wikipedia is a part of the game.
  C : They will say “the link is broken” or something else.
  C : I will write “you need a web browser” so people don’t search a “physical” game.
  C : And it’s funny at the same time.
• A : Good idea, hhmm, for the links I will write true or false in images.
  A : I will then upload the images and use their direct links.
  A : It’s important to lure people into thinking we spent minimal time and skill.
  C : I think you’re right.
  A : Haha.
  C : Be careful, some people will look at the URL, so upload the false image several times.

And that’s roughly how I got this :

Tags: bipolar, bronze, disorder, gold, humor, jam, ludum26, postmortem, theme, x=3-1

Our first Ludum Dare, and I think we did pretty well!

Go and give it a play!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18307

The reactions to the ratings are flowing in, and I noticed there are some misunderstandings on how to interpret the ratings, and how to calculate a percentile.  First of all, the ranking is based on the category.  That is, if your game is in “48h compo” it is ranked within a total of 1610 games, if it’s “jam”, within 736 entries.  But that is not the whole story.  A number of games have not been rated because the number of ratings fall below the threshold (which I believe is 12 or 14 ratings or some such).  Without knowing how many games were not rated, you can’t calculate your percentile.  As a first attempt to solve this problem, I took a random sample out of all games, and noted the percentages that were and weren’t rated. Figures calculated from all games would be nice to have, but these aren’t available afaik.

Percentage of 48h games rated: 88.9% (32 out of 36 in my sample)
Percentage of Jam games rated: 64.5% (20 out of 31 in my sample)

Note that the percentage for Jam games is much lower for some reason.  Anyway, this means the total number of rated games in each category is approximately:

48h: 1431 (1610*0.889)
Jam: 474 (736*0.645)

UPDATE: thanks to ashdnazg, we now have accurate numbers!

48h: 1357
Jam: 566

To get your percentile, divide your ranking by one of the numbers above and multiply by 100.

Also it makes sense to look at the absolute ratings (the number of stars) and to know something about the relationship between absolute and relative ratings.  In some cases, a 0.1 star change can drop or raise your ranking by 100 or so.  I’d also like to see a graph of this relationship.  Maybe I’ll make one myself.

Mighty pleased with the 9th placing in the jam humor ratings, the fact the game was made as a satire joke makes it feel like a big win for us. Thanks to everyone who played our game. Roll on the next jam!

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

 Scores

  PLAY GURU

We got our first medal – in ‘Graphics’!! And as the artist I know how competitive that category is so I’m extra amazed at the result! If you just look at the scores around ours, 0.01 of a star could have tipped us over the edge into silver territory or knocked us out of the running for the bronze. So tight!

Thanks to everyone who voted on our entry!

We also beat all of our previous records apart from in the fun category (understandable, it was a very hard/cryptic point and click puzzle game), and almost came in the top 50 for everything!

And we trashed our previous scores for Humor, Theme and Mood.

Spreadsheet of our past 4 Ludum Dares + Graphs

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgqMypAQnKEYdGhUcXZLWjZ4MEtTazZjdV9hdDhtbWc&usp=sharing

Linux

We’ve also got our game working on Linux! – Does anyone have any idea if it’s possible to update the entry page with a new download link now that the contest is over? If not we’ll just post it with the timelapse that’s coming soon!

Social Networking

Join us on Facebook and Twitter! (I just made the accounts the other day so they’re looking pretty lonely)

I love Ludum Dare.

Top 100 Finish?

#77 overall?

I couldn’t BE more astonished.  I’m so happy people enjoyed my game that much, and there’s nothing more encouraging than that.  I think I’ve got all the motivation I need to work on the post-compo version now.

Congratulations to all of the compo and jammers that finished their entries, and thank you to everyone who rated my game.

You’re all awesome.

My entry to LD #24 : Tiny World seems to be mostly better, except in terms of graphics..

As my first LD, I wasn’t expecting much, and with so so so many entries I’m glad to have finished at least in the top 10%.

Check out Proxy here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=22132

I must add that I am a bit disappointed to see the ratings look a bit wonky. As an example, I’ve seen some games that are little more than moving a square with the arrows keys in the top 100 of innovation. Don’t get me wrong, simplicity can be fun, such games can still look polished and make for an overall great game experience, but perhaps innovation should not be where they’re scoring highest.

I also saw a user share an anecdote about his game being bested on graphics by a text adventure.

Nevertheless, the overall top 100 certainly look like entries that deserved to be there. Congratulations to the winners, and all the best to all the game devs that took part, and good luck to anyone who will be continuing there game post compo!

Cheers,

Dan M.