Woohoo! Got in and (just about) finished a dinky little tower defense game.

I love doing Ludum Dare, and each time I get better and better. Intro, tutorial, game, ending: this time I got a lot done, and I feel really proud of that.
However the downside is that the core mechanics are “loose” and I don’t quite achieve what I set out to do.

My thinking was that tower defense games are essentially boring. I wanted to do 2 things.

– Create a meaningful time constrained period what your choices matter (10 seconds)
– Create a spectacle that you watch and enjoy as your actions are played out

The bones of both are there, but not quite developed to the extent that I envisaged.
Please play my little slice of Ludum Dare and give me your honest feedback!

You can find it:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=17889

Here’s my first Ludum Dare compo entry, Time Loopy:

It’s a game about being stuck in a ten second time loop and using your past selves to overcome challenges, written in ImpactJS (HTML5). Some thoughts:

• I’m happy with how the character design and animation turned out, and the time travel mechanic works surprisingly well. However…
• The game isn’t really polished at all. It’s too easy to miss the dialogue, you end up having way too many versions of yourself which get in the way if you’re not fast enough to complete the level (with no way to reset them except reloading the game), and there are no menus to speak of.
• I didn’t have time to get enough people to playtest the tutorial portion, so I have no idea if it makes sense to anyone other than me. The overall level design could have been better if I hadn’t been rushed during that part.
• I only got to make one level. I spent too much time getting the time travel mechanic to work well (and getting ImpactJS to be deterministic at a mostly reliable framerate so the playback of past selves would work), and it also doesn’t make for easy level design when the player gets put back at the beginning every ten seconds and has to deal with multiple versions of theirself from the past. I may explore the concept more when I have time to make better and more varied levels (perhaps the player could be required to use the past selves to distract enemies? maybe he/she has to make sure the past self doesn’t die or get injured?)

Good luck to everyone in the jam as you’re finishing up, and thanks to the LD staff for making this a fun event.

 

 

wine here, hi everyone!

And a little announcement of my LD27 project “When He Left”

*

It’s a simplestestest god simulation. Why he can’t make all people happy?

And what will happen if he will leave – at least for ten seconds.

So… there is still a lot of work )

*

And good luck to all!

Submitted earlier, though I should post a link

 

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=1900

Finally I recovered after two very difficult days. The game is ready and I just wanted to say that you can open 3 different endings. Enjoy the game.

Free fall

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

GET HYPE!

(It is actually a legitimate game of mid-range complexity with a lot of polish and detail in strategic spots. But it’s also a game about James May stealing parts from cars for Vin Diesel.)

Almost all of the game logic is in place, except for the more complex rules of chess like en passant captures, castling, and pawn promotion. Those probably aren’t going to be implemented.

I’m not sure 20 hours is long enough to implement an AI either. Progress is being made, at least, and I should have something playable by the end of the jam.

So this is the first time I managed to finish a Ludum Dare!  Yay!  Please play it and let me know what you think, espeially if you finish all 64 levels.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21737

All going well so far! check out the title art  and first level. Good ‘ole 16bit puzzler ahoy! 

Not quite the level of a lot of the people here but with the help of a tutorial i am almost finished, i mean it could use sound.. that’d be good too and i’ll have to export it, but my main concern right now is creating AI for the enemy that spawns at 10 seconds. I think i have an idea of how i’ll do it, it’ll just run in a random direction.

So far people are liking my game, quite surprised seeing as how its simple af but you know.

if you want to check it out entry link here.

I’ve been fiddling around with HTML5 and JavaScript with enchant.js as a way of making games since LD26. I have two other HTML5/JS projects in the works, one of which was created purely for learning what I am doing and the other of which I intend to be a free-to-play educational game for learners of English as a second language. I spent most of last week reading into the gritty inner details of JavaScript and learning about design patterns in preparation for this week, and in some ways I leaned pretty heavily on those other two projects to figure out what I was doing, at least to get things started.

In spite of looking at my previous code to remember how the library worked, I feel like I started from a more knowledgable standpoint this time than I did either of the other two times I participated. The first time, I couldn’t do graphics and had to make my simulation game using nothing but text; the second time, I was using the pyglet library for the first time and then had trouble compiling with it.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the game turned out, even though I didn’t get to implement everything I wanted. And it’s got a bit of a bug. I feel like I hit on a good game idea, like I did during LD25, but had decent graphics and entertaining sound, like I did for LD26. ^_^

What Went Right

My only screenshot from when my game was going to be something very different.

• Not streaming while coming up with ideas. The pressure to share my random game-planning thoughts made LD26 harder, and I’m glad I axed it this time.
• My first idea was going to be a boring game, so I canned it and started over a few hours in.
• Studying JavaScript’s innermost workings and design patterns last week paid off, though I still managed to make messy code.
• I planned my time well enough that I had my game in a good-enough state before bed on Sunday night — living in UTC +9 and working on Monday made that pretty important. I only had enough time this morning to throw in a couple of things that I didn’t get around to before because I knew I could implement them quickly. Namely, a way to restart the game from the game over screen and an on-screen display of how long the player had survived.
• Placeholder graphics FTW! For a long time, the gauges were ugly fuschia boxes that just had number values in them and the warning triangles with exclamation points were just plain triangles. At that point, it was hard to tell what was going on if you weren’t me (and most of my playtesters were not). When I got the real graphics into place the game instantly became easier to understand and the players instantly started having more fun.
• On a related note: I’m rather happy with my user interface. I feel like all the important details are pretty well conveyed, though if I’d had more time I would have added a flashing red background to the warning triangles. My few playtesters who played both early and late versions really appreciated the changes from placeholder to actual graphics.

What Went Wrong

Placeholder graphics! It’s so much prettier now. ^_^

• Messy, messy code. I used the design patterns that I knew, but I wasn’t careful enough about encapsulation and by the end all the little things I’d been lazy with were coming back to bite me in the backside.
• I have a game which is a survive-as-long-as-you-can game, but which has a bug such that if you survive long enough, you can’t lose. I know what’s happening to cause it, but since I only learned that the methods I’m using to pull it off exist just yesterday, I don’t know how to fix the problem.
• Browser compatibility issues. Even with them, I think I am still reaching more people than with my Mac OSX Python games, but… still. I’m working on ironing out bugs relating to playing in different browsers.

Conclusion

Not bad. Not bad at all.

I’m going to make my next LD game in HTML5 as well, I think, so learning more about enchant.js is to be my goal. It’s an open source project, so I’m planning to contribute — the team creating it is Japanese, and so all the documentation is in Japanese and only half of that has been translated. It’s good that I can read Japanese, but if I help them translate the documentation then I will learn more about the library and it won’t take me as long to look things up next time. 😀 Laziness FTW.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Hi

This is all i can do ))

10 Seconds Of Life

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=11201

 

 

Made a new hud and overlays,. Also i made this Midground image in blender , hopefully i will get time tomorrow im implement it. now time to sleep.

This Ludum dare, I created a 2D platform side-scrolling puzzle game. It has a simple graphic with a player as a cube trying to escape each room within 10 seconds. There are 12 levels in total, so it will not take you much time to finish this game. In fact, it might takes around 3 minutes for this 2D game. So, give it a try and see for yourself, and I hope you enjoy it.

Link to Cube Escape

Tags: timelapse

It’s done!

Well, not quite…
but still!

Our jam game has shaped up quite nicely; 10 seconds to insanity, despite some gameplay issues (well, I mean, the mood is the main gameplay element…), the game’s really spooky, and it should be somewhat spookier tomorrow! (I mean, we’ve got some neat ideas coming up)

without further ado, please play it (you will get all the cookies. ALL OF THEM) here

it was only slightly painful to code…

All right. I finished my game last night and submitted it, but I had time on the bus and no wifi today, so I fixed some major bugs I found. I didn’t have a chance to get everything updated until now though. Aiyee! Hope it’s not a big deal. I would have submitted but I was without an Internet connection.

So what were these bugs?

1. The game loop didn’t reset properly. When you selected “Retry?” and said yes, the game state didn’t reset. So you kept on dying over and over again. Oops. Similarly, when you said “no”, the game thought you won. Whoops.

2. Enemy spawning, caused by innocent, but silly swapping of > and < symbols as well as missing parentheses. That's one of the things that I noticed last night and said, "Hmm something's wrong… but I guess it's still playable" but decided that it really needed to be repaired.

3. Okay, I added a secret, undocumented weapon. Press "3". (Yes, it has a ten second cooldown.) Unfortunately, it's not that useful. Oops.

Anyway – here it is! I hope you enjoy it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=22457

Okay, what’s the “bad” about partial Ludum Dare that isn’t a last-minute, finger? Well, besides the fact that I didn’t have the time to really get as much as I wanted done, I think the biggest thing I miss about not taking the entire time in a last-minute rush to hit the deadline for Ludum Dare is that adrenaline rush to see how much I can complete and crossing your fingers for that last compile and then getting the submission in 5 minutes before the deadline, and then sitting back and taking a deep breath about it all. The adrenaline rush was GREAT and I didn’t really get it as much this time, since I was able to submit and then think about it, and then work on it, and then submit some improvements rather than that feeling of “finality” where you submit and then you have to live with all of your mistakes!

Yeah I do kind of miss that feeling. Maybe next time. I’ll have to learn that real-time sound engine in Python next time!

Lost a day worth of Programmer Time yesterday, so we had to hit this project with the Simplification Stick a few times. Moving into the last day, we anticipate getting done with about 6 of 10 planned Puzzle Rooms, but we’re still working hard to implement as many as possible. Things are shaping up, though; the gameplay is turning out to be a little bit Pipe Dream, and a little bit Ghost Trick.

Yes, his arms still need to be animated. I’m considering that a stretch goal at this point, though. :3