There’s a lot of entries, and quite a lot of them that I can’t see how it only took 48 hours (straight real time) to make (solo) graphics , code , sound etc… . the level of quality is really up there. Good luck all

Oh and my entry has only had 1 d/load so far

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=23091

So, LD#27 is finally over. There is something peculiar about it this time: Spark is  in the compo! My first completed LD48!

After my insuccess in April, getting this achievement really made me happy, despite the game itself being only a pale shade of what I wanted it to be. Still, no matter the things gone wrong, it was a great learning experience and I learned a lot, which is probably the greatest achievement. But let’s see what were the ups and downs of these two days.

The Good

1. LOVE2D
   I’ve been in love with love2d since the first time I discovered it. Because of it, I learned Lua and how amazing of a language it is. Still, I always used it in non time constrained environements: doing a Ludum Dare with it was a breeze, mainly because I got used to the environement, but also because of the amazing semplicity of the modules. I have this idea that a framework should be as transparent as possible so that it doesn’t get in the way of the developer: Love2d achieves that. I never had to stop more than five minutes in the excellent wiki to find out what I needed to do. This to me is like a liberation of a curse: passing hours on poorly documented and overly complicated APIs really kill the creative ideas one may have in a moment. My wet dream would be a love2dJIT, that would be the shit. But only time can tell.
2. Picking an idea I liked
   I wasted somewhere around 12 hours with brainstorming and another aborted game idea before starting working on Spark. This is a huge down, meaning a quarter of the limited time I had was spent on basically nothing that would be in the final game. This is a wrong thing to do (and will never do it again for the future compos), but it helped me find an idea I really enjoyed. While Spark didn’t come out as I wanted, I really enjoyed working on it and implementing it (The Call, my LD26 jam entry, in comparison, felt more like a chore). I knew from the start it was an overambitious idea and I would never be able to complete it all, but my motivation was so strong I got a lot more done in two days than I would have in a project I didn’t like. So those 12 hours didn’t really feel like a waste but more like an investment: they saved me from working a day and an half on a project I would have hated working on.
3. Submitting the game
   I was ashamed with how little I was able to put into Spark in the time given. I implemented stuff I never used, I created graphics I didn’t have the time to put in, the final product misses a lot of stuff and doesn’t even remotely resemble how I wanted it to be. But still, the game is in the compo! Great fucking feeling. I was in for a quarter of an hair, but was still able to put something up and online. The last three hours were the worst: I still had to create the levels and implement a lot of stuff and started to think it wasn’t worth all the sleep loss and the hard work since it hardly was the game I wanted after all. I stopped for a few minutes to think, then I realized that I was in the compo to make an amazing game but to finish a game. So I pushed through it. It was hard, but Spark finally got “done” (with quotes so big you could sleep in them). Now that I have something playable, I have even more motivation to complete the game because I see so much stuff I was unable to implement that would make the game so much better. I’ll start working on a post compo version soon.
4. Theme
   This time around, the theme was actually a theme. LD26’s Minimalism was hardly a theme (more of a style), which frustrated me to no end. I could hardly put something together because of that. This time around, I really liked the theme. I loved it so much I had a lot of ideas that I could be working on in the future, which I had to discard for the compo because they are way too big to fit in 48 hours. It was quite prolific. Even too much, which brings us to the negatives of these two days.
5. Moonscript
   Moonscript is a language created by leafo that compiles to Lua. It basically gives Lua a python-like style. While I know of a lot of programmers who hate forced indents with a passion, I personally feel they make the code immensely easier to read and write. No more ugly, verbose do..end cycles, just press enter+tab and you are good to go. It also forces your code to look good which is hardly a bad thing. Putting the simplicity and speed of coding of Moonscript on top of the beautiful simplicity of Love2d is like supercharging your game making potential. It literally flows under your fingers. My only pet peeve with it is that the debugging errors given but love2d refer to the .lua files because.moon files are compiled to lua. This means that I have to refer from time to time to the compiled .lua file for debugging instead of the .moon file I’m working on, which kinda breaks the flow for me. But still, Moonscript+love2d is a bomb of a combination.

The Bad

1.  Overambitious idea
   In the beginning, Spark was a huge idea. I had in mind to put forking paths, complex level design, and a story. None of these got into the final game, by far. Mainly it was because of me being stupid and wasting time, but even for the best programmer it would have been a challenge to put together what I wanted in 48 hours. I remember clearly thinking “I’ll never do this” when I started working on Spark. Buy, was I right. Still, I really liked the idea (see point 2 above) so it wasn’t a complete idiotic choice: it’s not like the idea will self desctruct when I submit the entry. But still, I should have probably toned it down quite a bit.
2. Tiles
   Oh boy. Tiles. Never really used them. And it shows. I wasted around 4 hours making a tiling system that creates levels from images and carefully drawing the tileset, only to discover that I would have to hand draw every level, every angle, every border. I would never be able to do that. It took me around 20 minutes to make one room! I was so heartbroken when I had to draw blocky levels that hurt my eyes only to watch. Also, since the pitfall and the wall tiles were too similar and difficult to determinate which was which, I had to basically throw in a barf-looking pitfall tile in the last half hour to make the game playable. It hurts to watch what it could have been and how it is instead.

   Spark’s original tileset

   

   The original pitfalls

   

   Instead you got THAT

   

   The hell is this?

   

   MY EYES! IT BURNS!

   So… Yeah. I’m not proud of how it looks. But hey, that’s a mistake I’ve learned from.

3. Horrible code structure
   In my last few projects I got used to an entity component system I’m developing for Lua. While at first it is pretty weird to work with, once you get the hang of it it flows easily and is very clean to mantain and use (even though there are some weird bugs that pop out once in a while). I could have used it for the game but for this ludum dare I wanted to try something from “inspiration”. The result is a mess of a code. I already have problems changing it because of how horrible it is. It is my fault for being lazy and breaking encapsulation too much, which in the end makes mantaining code an abomination. I should be more careful next time around. I’m already thinking about rewriting the engine to make it more human (right now it looks like a deformed monster struggling to breathe).
   The way I implemented stuff was also weird. I had a lot of problems creating a switch that would change the level, which was quite embarassing thinking of it (but still, I have the excuse of sleep deprivation, so shut up>:( ), so I created this weird solution where there is a switch that changes level from one to another, which greatly limits future implementations since it is limited to one switch per room and can only change THAT room. This really hurt level design since there was hardly anything I could do with it, and the time to implement new mechanics simply wasn’t there. I want revenge and I’ll probably reimplement the mechanic in the post compo version.

So, this looks like that’s it. It was a pretty stressful weekend, but Ludum dare is about that. It makes you understand how difficult actually finishing a game is, it takes away your sleep and it makes you ashamed of what you make, but it is still an amazing experience.

Now, for the best part: actually playing the games! I’m so excited. Happy voting!

Blog Entry ->

Tags: love2d, lua, moonscript, postmortem, spark

Who you are, where you are, or how you got here is irrelevant.
You have 10 seconds to do whatever you can to find the lost Shield of Awesomeness.

Then you start again.

But…

As you pull levers and collect powerups, they carry over after you’ve died.
The goal is to advance more and more until you can finally reach the goal.

I (unoriginally) called my game TenSeconds.

You should play it for yourself. Here is the link.

I’ll do a proper post-mortem later.

It’s a puzzle-action hybrid, so is challenging in two aspects.

I admit some parts are hard to get right, but that’s the idea.
But just in case it was ruined for someone, I included a walkthrough.

Good luck, rate it fairly, and leave a comment if you want.

HeroesGrave

Lets face it, my game sucked, it was glitchy and unpredictable , and now that I look through my code I see why, I have no consistency with coding, I did some things this way here and other ways there, its a mess in that code, mabey is even a symbolization of how my brain works… any way If any good java programmer wants to give me some tips on good organization, that would be lovely

Link

I spent the last hour writing two of the songs for my game. I’ve uploaded them onto a Bandcamp album, so feel free to check ’em out if you want:

CLICK

If it seems like they cut off abruptly, that’s because they’re supposed to loop.

I am also debuting the title of the game: Trouble in Platformville or How I Accidentally Caused The World To Nearly Explode In Ten Seconds And Subsequently Reverted The Damage Thanks To Technology I Don’t Understand

YUP.

I have a headache and I’m tired. Off to bed!

Welp, here it goes. Crunch time, gut check time, time to shine. A smidge over 18 hours to finish the game. Still not much to show, but here’s something at least:

Doesn’t look like much, does it? I’m still confident we’ll finish on time, though <3 We thrive under preassure.

Stream limping along as ever. Todays music is from our very first game, ahhh.. I love that astral jazz.

Good luck everyone, if we can do it, so can you!

I finished my first Ludum Dare game. I am so happy.

Yeah, it could be more original or of better quality. But there it is. Playable, with a few levels and does even have sound.

I learned a lot on this weekend. Here are some random thoughts:

– tackling all the side stuff (menus, level structure, narrator, music and sounds) on the first day really helped finishing the game, because it nearly was a complete game on the end of the first day, it just lacked content

– should have planned longer, maybe there would have been a better idea for a game which was more original and also doable in the given time

– should have prepared a “core library” with useful and necessary stuff, would leave more time for content creation and planning

– but Unity was already a great help regarding so many things

What I have seen so far of the other games looks really top notch. Unbelievable what people can do in 48 hours.

With more than 1500 games + work, I have given up the idea of playing even a significant part of these games. So, if we can’t go for quantity, we go for quality, right?

This LD, my plan is to do a Mini-LP of every game I rate! These videos will be recorded as I play each game the very first time, so all the bugs, surprises, emotions and annoyances will be there :-).

If you want to see my video reviews, just go to this Youtube playlist.

IF you want me to review your game, just leave a comment! I will do what I can (time restrictions pending).

Tags: review, reviews, video review

I didnt have much time this weekend, had a party and some other stuff. Thanks to that party I also was a bit tiered Saturday so most of my work i’ve done Sunday evening. around 23:30 I finished the biggest part of the game. Except the bullet detection and the countdown, reset and sounds. The bullets where quite hard for me. Normally i would check if the bullet was within the x of the enemy + the width. But that wasn’t possible because of the rotated planes. Since i’ve had never done that before it was quite the challenge. Luckily I finished that around 1:00 and was i also able to add a few sounds and the timer/rest.

At the end i think the game is quite nice. The AI isn’t too easy and the controls are usable. I don’t think its will still be fun after a few plays but that said, I also haven’t played it for so long because I had to get up early again.

I’ve used Inkscape for the graphics, as3sfxr for the sounds and Brackets for the JS programming. I have not used any library’s.

Play/vote: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=4506

Today is mostly about polish, and we’ve gotten off to a great start.

We’ve added stars with a parallax scrolling effect which has given the game a nice sense of depth. Then we’ve added arrows to help the players locate enemy ships and their movement off screen, as well as lowering the glow of non-active phases on the Phase Bar.

You can see this stuff in action bellow:

Aren’t gifs fun.

We’re currently working to implement one more priority feature – the ability to to adjust a ships use of shielding vs attack power. At default they’d sit at 50% power each, though if you desire you could ramp one up at the cost of the other.

We’ll have a small toggle bar located in the lower left corner. It looks like this:

Then after that it really will be full time polishing and tweaking. A lot of that will be in order to make the ships feel more unique.

Best of luck to all those still going! I’ve been seeing some really rad games floating about, they’re quite the distraction!

Wow, what a Ludum Dare. I ended up working 36 hours on my entry, entitled Triad. It’s a blend of top-down shooting, puzzle, and strategy. I’ll the game’s page say more.

Hello,

I’m Jeff, and here is the game I worked with a co-worker called Stealth Man: And the Magical Stopwatch. It’s a stealth heist game, were you have a stopwatch that can pause time.

Credits:

Code / Art / Level Design – Jeff Eastman

Get the game here!

Post Mortem:

Pros:

– Learned a few new tricks in optimizing Game Maker.

– First Ludum Dare!

Cons:

– First Ludum Dare…

– Too much time on creating AI, that wasn’t needed for simple game.

– Creating traps required a lot of trial and error in testing.

– Cameras were a pain to change.

-Didn’t have enough to implement Richard’s work.

If you have any questions, feedback, blackmail, be sure to send a tweet to me @Jeff_Eastman!

Tags: man, prototype, stealth, time

For my LD27 entry, I wanted to pick up Twine and see how fast it would be to put a small text adventure to work.

There’s not nearly enough stories about early French Canadian settlers, so I chose a setting of a small group of abandoned cabins from a scouting party sent by Jacques Cartier just before he (wisely) declared Canadian winter sucks ass and headed back to the land that invented French Kissing.

So far Twine has been a pleasurable experience and it’ll be my “goto” package when text adventures is what I want to write.

Tags: Twine, web game

Wrote up my Post Mortem on my website’s blog.  Had a blast! Now…to play a lot of games!

http://www.otherworldgame.com/1/post/2013/08/ludum-post-mortem-report.html

Hi there

Just wanted to share with You – few hours ago I have submitted my first LD48 Compo Game. I am not 100% satisfied with it, but yeah, time limit is time limit. You can read all about the game on its page: Ab Solanum

Thank you Windows 8 for having FreshPaint. Makes really cool graphics imo.
For everything else, Windows 8 is horrible.

Now that things have settled in a bit and I’ve gotten some feedback from some people playing 10.00s…10.00s…10.00s…, I suppose I can do a brief post-mortem of some kind:

Good stuff:

• Learned how to use custom fonts in Javascript
• Decent music
• Usable level editor -> A goodly amount of content
• I enjoy playing it!

Bad stuff:

• It’s really hard…I suppose that since some things are still tricky for me, it’s probably just too much for anyone unfamiliar with the game.
• Library code is a mess and needs reworking (especially collisions)
• Built-in shapes still used in final version, although partially for stylistic reasons

I hope you’ll give it a try and let me know what you think! I’d be happy to back a post-compo version that’s not as difficult if that’d be helpful. I probably will do it regardless.

Good luck in judging! I’ll try to get in as much playtime on LD games as I can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QI5dg8SO7w&feature=youtu.be

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25511

Post your game in the comments and I will play your game(Rate and comment) if you have both rated and comment on my game!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21017