For LD27 I had a few ideas, the first I had was that of an FPS where you have 10 seconds to escape an exploding building. I decided against this as I generally make physics-based games.

The idea I decided to go with was ChronoCards, a 10 second card game. I originally planned to have a CCG kinda meta-game, but didn’t really implement it.

Anyway, let’s have a look at how it went:

The Good

Component-based data-driven gameplay: All the cards were implemented through .card files that are loaded at runtime, which specify the text and pictures on the card, as well as which “attributes” a card has, which is basically an effect, trigger and an argument. Although this means I still have to code each attribute, it makes it much easier to modify without recompiling.

Robust, flexible codebase: No time was spent on the underlying framework. Graphics components worked flawlessly and adding audio was as easy as:

ASID Intro = Audio.LoadSound(“Intro.ogg”);
Audio.Play(Intro);

The Bad

Indecision: I was still deciding ideas 6 hours into the competition and was frequently second-guessing my decisions when it would have been twice as quick to do it the wrong way and recode it.

Time management / procrastination: I felt myself being easily distracted and putting things off. Overall I estimate I probably did less than 10 hours of actual coding, spread over the 48 hour period. I left a lot of it to the last hour or so (I submitted less than a minute before the compo ended) and as such had a lot of stuff unimplemented (a deck building system, with a card shop using money gained from winning).

Game idea: I think 10 seconds is just too short for there to be any appreciable strategy. It may work with 30 seconds or a minute though, and at some point I may revisit the idea.

The Ugly

Unresizable GUI: Even though my GUI system allows for it (see the buttons on the menu), the battle scene has entirely static GUI element positioning. The hand does not move down to the bottom of the screen, meaning if you have a larger screen it looks really silly.

No animations: Though maybe justified by the time-based mechanics of the game, I feel even a 1 or 2 frame animation would have improved the look of the card drawing and placing.

That’s all I think is really noteworthy at the moment.

Another gif for ya.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4243608/wip02.gif

I’m seeing progress

5 Hours and a half left! Just finished up all the enemy variations!

At this point, pretty much all the stuff that needed to be modeled and textured, is modeled and textured. And as Chevy rushes to add everything to the game, me and BambooBear aren’t quite sure what else to create anymore… xD

I guess now we’re going to polish/add more detail to some of the stuff we made, maybe make 1 or 2 panels with those render images explaining the game. Can’t wait to see the final build with everything in place :3  This is the first time me and BambooBear join a Game Jam and it’s all been so exciting ^^ It’s awesome to see how much we can accomplish when we have a tight deadline and plan things accordingly

Also has been an awesome experience working with Chavy, he not only codes super fast, but also does things thinking of how to make things easier to do art-wise, like the choice of the type of enemies that don’t really require a complex rig/animation.

I’m very happy to be a part of this ^^ and hopefully I’ll be here again next time \o

Peace

This entry was posted on Monday, August 26th, 2013 at 12:42 pm and is filed under LD #27. 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.

We’re frantically working away. >_< Horrible horrible time management skills this time, but at the least we’ll have a minimum viable game product We’re so excited to play everyone’s games though! I’ve been keeping tabs on the front page and previews and they’re all looking spectacular! You all should be proud!

In the mean time, while we’re slaving away, here are some screenshots! (That leaderboard is totally a MAYBE until we figure out the rest of our junk out :P) Also ignore that filler text. We haven’t written copy yet. XD *facepalms*

This entry was posted on Monday, August 26th, 2013 at 12:46 pm and is filed under LD #27. 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.

Another proverbial notch in my Ludum Dare belt.  I love this event.  I look forward to it for months.  I love playing all the games that are created.  The only time I despise Ludum Dare is the 48 hours between the theme announcement, and the compo ending.  Well… I don’t really hate Ludum Dare, I more so hate myself.  During that time, I often think:

• What was I thinking
• Why did I think I could do this
• This is the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever created

In the end, after I submit my entry, and the site is running like molasses, all the negative thoughts go away.  From that point, I’m eager to try everyone’s game, and start counting the days until the next compo begins.  Anyway, that’s enough blathering on.  If I want to post my thoughts on this event, I’ll make a port-mortem. This is what I really wanted to show you:

The Ones You Love is about reliving 10 second moments throughout the course of a day, and how your actions in the past can affect the future. Controls are simple. “M” toggles music on and off. The mouse does the rest. Click to interact with people and objects.

Please Note: The game requires a WebGL enabled browser (e.g. Firefox or Safari) to render correctly.  If you can’t swing that, the game page has downloads for Windows and OSX.

Play It

Rate It

If you have any feedback or thoughts on the game, I’d love to hear it.

Click to play

This one wounding up being a little weird. Here’s how my thought process went.

What if you had 10 seconds to save the world? Well there’s not much room for gameplay, better make it repeat like Groundhog Day so you have to do it over and over again to get it perfect. Wait, wasn’t there an obscure Zelda game along those lines? Yeah, why don’t I just rip that off.

Nobody has tested it yet, so if you have any trouble playing it, please let me know!

Hi everyone, we are PinoklGames, and that’s our first jam here at ludum =) Things are going pretty well (o rly?), so we’ve got time for this short post) 

Game title – “10sec. Fast Beef”, and  you can guess what this game is all about (or not)…but we are making some really crazy things out there and truly hope you will enjoy this madness.

What is done by now:

* Title Menu – done, yippee !
* Game mechanics – 85%
* Graphics – 99,99999%
* Animations – 100%
* Levels – 55% ( 5 / 9)
* Sounds – need some work but they are almost done
* Win screeen – done!
* GameOver screen – done!
* Music – music is ready (Yay! Link to listen – below )

More updates are coming soon, stay tuned!  \m/

So just finished my proper player sprite ( ’cause i made a player sprite, but it was a robot that i made ’cause i didnt know what my concept was and why the hell not and i thoght it would of been really random and out of context, also started making a ninja one too) and it’s staring to look good all i need to do now is finish my level designs, add a bit of context, add some sound(I’ll do this last if I have time), and maybe touch up that room a little.

This is also my first post, and first ludum dare too, I’m excited and I hope I’ll be able to finish in time, maybe not, maybe it’ll not have sounds or music !

We’ll see, I’ve got 9h47m left after all !

http://www.twitch.tv/jordo76

Decided to go for the Jam, went to sleep at 6AM and woke up now… zzzzzzz, gonna try make the deadline!

http://www.twitch.tv/gigaabyss

Check it outttttt

LD #27 is over, time for postmortem!

First, heres my entry: Seamless Check it out!

The good
It was my first LD, and it was great. 48 hours is really short amount of time to make decent game.
Tools that Ive used are great!
LibGDX as general framework and
Spine for animation. Its fantastic, check it out.
And lastly Tiled for building the map

The bad
Im very tired.
I didnt plan far enough, and the code is truly awful.
Wasted plenty of time figuring out box2d, no time for any sounds or music.
And no time to tweak controls and the level. Map was supposed to be huge, but it ended up super tiny.
Also missed the mark on integrating Universal Tween Engine and box2dlights.

The ugly
Turns out box2d is pretty bad choice for platforms, who would have thought?
Controls in Seamless are pretty floaty and unprecise.
Camera is zoomed to far, you cant see enough far ahead.
There are no sounds or music.

Overall,
LD was a great experience. Ive finally made a game that someone else but myself saw. I look forward to next edition!

 For my first participation to Ludum Dare, I wanted to make a quick analysis for this WE.

The facts :

I have worked 2*12h on the project. I had the idea in mind since the last round of theme voting.
Everything is from scratch, no framework used.

The goods : 

– The game is short, but complete.
– I have implemented the A* algorithm for the minions.
– I have tried Javascript (“HTML5”) for this kind of developpement, and it is quite powerful.
– The game may be fun, with more levels.
– In general, the code is clean. Some shortcuts here and here, but the code is ready to handle evolutions and changes.
– Work on many browsers, including the iPad.

The bads :

– Graphics : I wanted to make a logo, and better sprites, but I only spent 1 hour to make them. However, the characters are ok, for this time budget.
– No animations.
– Sound : I have made a music and basic sound effect but no time to include it !
– The sprites are loaded one by one, helped by the HTML <img>. I definitly need to develop a media manager.
– I wanted to make more minions types and put actors : explosives, teleporters, fighters, traps… But I choose to finish cleanly and completely with only blockers. The good news is that the game engine is good enough to add them quickly.

The ugly :

– Nothing but now I know I am officialy a NERD when I say to my friends what I do on my WE

Thanks for voting and commenting my entry : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14085

Here is my game: Mission Mars.

I had so much fun making it and I was happy to finish it in time!

That weekend was crazy, that “sleep – code – eat – sleep – code – eat” kind of moment.

This is my first HTML5 platform game I ever made. Technically, I used Pixi.js for the rendering, Backbone.js for the models & events and Q for Promises.

My goal was to make something done and polished – graphics may have been a bit better but I think it was so far the most finished game I ever made! (At least I have an intro, some dialogs and a story, not just a demo as I used to do.)

> Day 1

I started the day by brainstorming some ideas in the train in my way to Paris.

Then I joined @mrspeaker to some coding session all day long at Paris’ Starbucks, that was fun, may not be the most productive idea though!

Back to my game, It turns out that I wasn’t fully prepared: I’ve implemented all the game core logic from scratch: implementing my own collision detection (+ re-writing it twice!), implementing some classic platform game mecanisms like gravity/walk/wall/platform/jump/climb-on-ladder features… so I lost my first day having a prototype working! At least, I finish up the level design the first day.

> Day 2

Second day was more productive back home! I plan to only do graphics/audios/dialogs/polishes that day. However I still found some time (up to 2 AM!) to add the boss level, I won’t spoil it but I didn’t have so much idea for it so I end up with mixing a classic video game with my platform controls!

I found the usage of Promises to organise code and pipe the scenes flow quite powerful…

Final words

I hope my game is not too hard to finish. If you have any questions and suggestions feel free to comment. Congrats if you reach the end

Thanks!

Streaming our final push! http://hitchh1k3rsguide.com/projects/livestream/

Scrambling to implement as many of the puzzles we planned out. Hoping to get at least 8/10.

Last night I submitted my compo entry The Village of Lost Time!

You control villagers, 10 seconds prior your daughter’s demise. The villager movement and actions are recorded and repeated. Create gatherers, javelineers, mages, progress through the mini story!

Technical ramblings!!…

Unfortunately, numerical errors crop up in the recorded movement so villagers end up running all over the place. I knew this bug existed, but under the pressure couldn’t think of a fix. This morning I facepalmed and immediately knew just to calculate velocity and position for the current villager, and only store the final position for that frame for the future recorded movement.

Instead I was storing the controls and recalculating velocity and position with the same function for the current and recorded villagers.  Still, the method of storing the controls should still work, because time steps are fixed so any numerical errors would just be repeated again and again for the recordings..? Actual frame rate does not matter because the time delta is fixed. This is going to bug me.

I added a link to the fixed version, but I left the buggy 48 hour version as the default.

Tags: compo, post-mortem, postmortem

WAAAAAAAAA!!!

Yesterday was a horrible day. A lots of bugs, a lot of drawings, a lot of work… But now the gameplay is finished and we are polishing the Menu, the mansion and the end game screen. I hope we could have time to do a good work with the audio.

I’m very proud of the results.

Some people complaint that the game was hard to understand, to solve that I have added a small tutorial info at the beginning of the match.

I also added a key to remove the Postprocessing effects, it improves the framerate a lot in old computers.

Remember to try the game clicking here and to rate it!

Gameplay

I’m nearly done with the main game, as you can see.
There’s multiplayer support, not shown in the video. You just need a second device, be it Android, Windows, Mac or Linux.
I’d make an iOS version too, but there’s no way of getting it on the store in time.

There’s going to be a second “game” if you will. With the same mechanics. I’ll only do that if I get the time.

Despite having no artist for most of the first day, I think the result is looking pretty awesome!

This weekend was pretty fun. It was my first time doing something like this. I had a lot of crazy ideas at the start, but I knew I had to play it a bit safe if I wanted to get it finished. So while, innovation was important, it took a bit of a back seat to the rest of my goals.

In the end, besides the primary goal of completing the game, I also wanted to make it fun, challenging, and rewarding – hopefully most of that shines through this relatively unpolished piece. The main personal goal for entering this competition was to force myself to learn some new things and try out some techniques to add to my arsenal of game development. I capitalized on that aspect as well. I am happy with the result for these reasons.

HTML5 is great for these kind of competitions because I had people playing and testing while I was developing all simultaneously. I think that sped up my development process a lot. I was originally going to try out Phaser, a recent HTML5 game engine, but was having a lot of issues with physics and collision. In the end, I decided to do it from scratch and the result was a lot smoother, but I definitely wasted a bit of time testing Phaser and then coding my own systems. Time which could have been spent doing some of the stuff below.

If I had more time, I would of fixed up some of these things:

Better Internet Explorer 9 & 10 Support

Foolishly, I assumed IE9/10 had nearest neighbor scaling for canvas. I was wrong!

More Mario!

I know I wanted to use some pretty advanced jumping physics. I got most of it in, like arcing, imprecise corner jumping, corner boosting, friction, dynamic jump heights (based on input); however, on smaller jumps the arcing isn’t noticeable or effective. I would also perhaps like to implement jumping momentum like in Super Mario Bros 1/2/3 where your jump forces you into a direction a bit more so you can’t just stop dead in air.

Music

So quiet… we need some trashy chiptune stuff going on! Sadly, my skills are quite lacking in this department.

Content

While there is a decent amount of content for a 48 hour game, I would maybe like to push that more. More power-ups, more block types and mechanics, better randomization/templating. Who knows, maybe even some real enemies?

Mobile/Touch Support

It’s an HTML5 game, right?! So, ideally, with some more time I could of added some touch controls for this to work on mobile and touch devices.

All in all though, I’m very pleased and look forward to the next Ludum Dare! Who knows, maybe I will expand on this one after all.

View Game Entry

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Although I posted my game 10 minutes before  the deadline (in fact, 10 minutes before the submission hour which I had no idea that it existed), I found juste 17 hours later the energy and the motivation to write a post to “announce” and present my game.

In Bombed Life, you’re a baseball fan who wanted to pee and when you enter in the toilet, you found a bomb with 10 seconds remaining. A lot of choice appears to you. Try to survive to this nightmare, and preferably, save thousand of supporters in the same time.

Here is my entry, have fun and say me what you thought of my game please !