It’s about time to write my Postmortem. Some users prefer to write only a list of what went right and what went wrong, I also do that but I like to add a reflection about the experience and what it means to me (the kind of thing you had to do for papers in school).

My game is called “The hero’s Journey (or get the treasure and run!)”. It was made to introduce Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth to some people. It’s a rotary platformer where you must repeat the “cycle of the Hero” a few times. It’s a metaphor of how you go through a challenge, come back from it and you keep repeating the process again and again, because that’s what we do everyday.

Let’s start with the traditional right/wrong list.

What went right:

• I had less than 8 hours and managed to finish, I could have used a few more hours to fix the issues but that’s ok.
• Some of the mechanics I used were completely new to me and I was able to implement them easily.
• Added detailed instructions
• 3 game modes

What went wrong:

• Collision system, the thing everyone complains about. It’s easy to die not because it’s hard but because there are many unfair deaths due to crappy collisions, my bad.
• Music and sounds. I really need to improve this field for the next edition. Music is almost random and there are no sounds, I made the assets but in the last moment decided not to include them because I found them too annoying (don’t ask me why). It was a mistake, they gave feedback to the player when performing actions and that’s necessary.

How I felt during Ludum Dare #27

First of all I spent more time on twitter than the first time (always keeping in mind that I couldn’t waste time).  I sent a couple of tweets to the developers I kept in touch with last time; it felt like revisiting some old friends. I also got to know more developers ,and even when everyone is in a different part of the world, and working on a different project, you feel like you’re working together, showing the others what you are doing and giving feedback.

Another good thing of being more social is that you get inspired by other’s people work.  It’s not like going to devianART and searching for random stuff, you are also creating something, being part of the process at your own level and the experience is more valuable.

And finally there’s panic time, it usually comes during the last hours, you feel your work is pointless and think about quitting. You must work really hard and  give the best of you to succeed, once it’s over it feels great; it’s a huge moral/confidence booster.

This has been my second Ludum Dare, I’ve been in some other jams but this is the one that I like the most. I always learn a lot in just 48 hours and it helps me maturing as a game developer. Ludum Dare makes me love game designing and being part of this community of developers.

So that’s all I had to say, I can’t wait to check the entries, there’s too much I want to play. Thanks to the jam creators and to everyone who participated.

click here to check my entry

P.D.: I’m seriously considering organizing a real world gathering in Madrid for the next edition, all I need is a group of interested local developers.

Hello!

It’s finally complete! My first Ludum Dare has gone quite well, but my spritework isn’t nice to look at. Hope someone will be awesome enough to play my game, and give me feedback, however insulting! Look forwards to playing other games and participating in other LD’s!

Here is my post.

Many thanks,

Taha

all the art is done for now, it just being put together by my awsome programmer jellycakes,

he is also streaming the development: www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1

Longtime lurker, first time poster presents a game of match-y matching. With photos.

A twitch match game, written in HTML/CSS/JS, with small screens in mind.

Check it out: Furious Focus.

Hey folks! We are finally made our game and 72 hours competition is over. During this time we get a lot of fun and experience. Check out some screens from our game, and be sure to play this burger madness ! =)

10sec. FastBeef Play

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-ZZh2zznpw&feature=youtu.be

Here’s the YouTube link.

Tags: timelapse

This weekend was not good for me, I had about 8 hours of total working time, for this game, and well that wasn’t quite enough, I’ll keep going though, and posting updates on gamejolt!

Goodluck to everyone!

Finally I’m done with Comet Run! I didn’t implement some things though, because of time lack, but I’m very happy with the result and I’ll implement the things I wanted after the jam. Play Comet Run here!

My hi-score

What went right?

• Idea: The idea I eventually had worked out very good.
• Graphics: Only with the use of built- in shapes of TCanvas the graphics look amazing! I’m not a great artist, so I hadn’t to do any drawing.
• Sound: With the use of FL studio I created awesome techno music and celestial sound effects.

What went wrong?

• Inspiration: It took a half day to come up with an idea, but eventually the idea was great!
• Levels, Hi-scores, Menu: because time lack, I couldn’t implement more levels and hi-scores for each. Also a menu is omitted, but isn’t really needed with one level.

It was very fun to do this first Ludum Dare jam and I’m very happy with the game I made. I’m for 99% sure I’ll join next time!

My fourth, and possibly most polished LD entry so far is complete!

After spending most of Saturday at work, and also working Sunday, I’m quite surprised about the outcome of this game.

Play Sausage Gobbler HERE

A bunch of hours ago we finally implemented the ability for the player to divert power between Shields and Attack-power (or rather, the firing frequency!) Increasing the one lowers the other, though you can never be fully shielded/damage immune.

In addition to that, when the shields power is boosted a subtle blue glow surrounds the associated ship.

You can see this in action in this here gif:

We also have menus now!

As you can see, you can click anywhere on the slider bar, or drag the slider itself to achieve the desired results.

Other additions that really make quite the difference include spinning  asteroids, as well pixel perfect collision, though you can’t really see that here. The asteroids are lurking. Waiting.

Hmm, well, I’d better shoot off and get some polish in before we submit! Craig is currently fleshing out the AI a little more, and there’s a wee more balancing to be done, time permitting.

Best of luck on the final run folks, don’t leave things too late! Just 3 hours to gooo!

This is my post-mortem for my ludum dare entry 10 Seconds Before You DIE!  The entry is here.  The game is a simple rogue-like-like where the objective is to keep moving through the dungeon and killing all the monsters you encounter.  Your ‘health’ is the clock which is maxed at 10 seconds and counts down.  If a monster attacks you, it takes away even more time.  You can gain time by killing monsters.  As a programming challenge I wrote this all in plain C, no C++.  I started with nothing, I did not reuse any code from any other projects.  The only libraries I used were SDL2 and SDL image.  I also did not use an IDE, just Sublime Text 2.  I used gcc to compile the code and a simple make file to build it.

No joke.

What Went Right:

I was able to get into a pretty good flow in terms of programmer productivity.  Most features did not take too long to get working.  The one feature that did give me some trouble was the random map generation, which is still pretty simple.  To save time, I used the famous Oryx tileset since I really wanted to concentrate on programming and game design.  I thought I would throw bad pointers a lot since I had not programmed in C in awhile but this only happened a few times and I was usually able to debug the problem relatively quickly.  A few times I had to debug by throwing in some printf()’s to output some variables to the console.  I was happy working with SDL2 as well.  The setup is pretty easy and the performance is great now that it uses hardware acceleration for sprites (compared to SDL 1.2 which used software to blit sprites to the screen).  I would have loved to have more time to polish the game as there are many flaws.  Which leads me to…

What Went Wrong:

I spent a few hours Friday trying to get SDL2 setup in Visual Studio Express 2010 as I figured most people have Windows machines so a Windows build was a priority.  This turned out to be more difficult than expected.  A Windows build is still forthcoming.  I ran out of time to implement collision so you and the monsters can walk through walls.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

Also, I only created one monster initially so I could go work on other things but ran out of time.  It would be easy to add more monsters by setting up another sprite definition that is just the x ,y, width,and height of the cell in the sprite sheet.  I also wanted to randomize the floors and walls a little so it did not look so bland.  I would have liked to have added the following: sound,music,title screen, and a restart button.  I guess I need to code a little faster.

I only finished text rendering for the numbers, not characters so with 10 minutes left I implemented the worst kill screen in the history of video games.

As you can see it is not centered and way too small.

All in all I consider this a success as it was a major coding challenge for me starting from scratch and using plan old C code.  It pushed my coding skills to the limit and I was able to implement a game design pretty quickly.  I am sure there are many other games that blow mine out of the water but I had a blast making this and learned a lot along the way.

Go defend your honor, and hopefully not end up like this guy!

Play Duel now : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93839109/WesternDuel/DUEL.html

LD Page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21441

Hello again,

Seeing as everyone else is doing this, I thought I would to 😀

Also, Here is my post.

What went right:

• The idea, eventually turned out pretty cool
• The game is kind of fun

What went horribly wrong

• My sprite artist didn’t show up, so I was working solo, and now the game looks ugly. With time I’ll get him to update it with sprites.
• The theme was too restrictive IMO.

But, I learnt loads, like never to be constantly coding for six hours straight 😀 (though I probably will next year too)

If some people could play my game and give feedback, however insulting, but letting me know they played it, I’d be very appreciative.

Many Thanks,

Taha

So, for this 27th LD compo, I made a game called X-TREEEME Pin the Tail on the Donkey. XPtTotD for short. And all in all, I think I–

For the first time in one of my LD entries, this game had *drumroll* good graphics! No, really!

My tileset, as proof.

So yeah, I’m pretty proud of that. Let’s go over how it all went down:

Friday night, I spent the hours trying to come up with an idea. I chatted for a long time with my friend, and we came up with this: a game where you have to go from checkpoint to checkpoint in 10 seconds. I went to bed satisfied with the concept, but I couldn’t fall asleep. While I’d love to play that game, I decided against being the one to make it when I came up with something much better on the brink of sleep. When the subconscious works best, as you know! It can be summed up below:

I have no memory of what thoughts led me to come up with that, but I really do love the idea.

Saturday, I woke up and got on the Team AllHailNoah IRC and started my livestream. The IRC was our private alternative to the overpopulous Ludum Dare IRC, and we had fun on it. My live stream was never visited by too many people at one time, but the people who watched were helpful (especially Aran Koning) and we listened to music from Spongebob. My standard (set by last time) is now three enemy/obstacles per game, and since these ones didn’t need any path finding, it was much faster than last time. I ended the day trying and failing to make tile graphics.

Sunday, I picked back up on the graphics and finished them all up. I then did the level design. I’m pretty bad at level design, so it took way longer than I wish it had, but it got done. I had to cut any pretense of story out of the game, but I had time to work in the instructions graphic you see above instead. I also got to work with a gui library this time, so adding buttons was a breeze! In the end, the biggest disaster was how little time I had for music at the end, compounded by a crash in Aria Maestosa the first time around. Luckily, no one has complained about it so far, so I guess somehow it’s not that annoying.

To be honest, I haven’t even beat all the levels in the game myself. But I know they CAN be beaten.

What Went Right:

• Graphics!
• Concept!
• GUI!

What Went Wrong:

• It’s a bit difficult.
• I didn’t get to put in any story.
• The music.

In the end, I’m sure this will get a higher score than all my other games in all categories (except maybe mood and audio). Once again, I had a great time. See you at LD28!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26280

Play and enjoy

Love feedback

Its finally done!!
Check out the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25856

Our game is done! check it:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25252

This weekend has been a nightmare. We had an amazing team together, but I, the coder, really screwed up. I was arrogant enough to believe that I could learn JavaScript, three.js, and cannon.js all while trying to compete in the LD. I ended up realizing there was just no way I was going to be able to finish the game in JavaScript because I kept on having to troubleshoot things and learn things I should already know how to do. So, I ended up having to switch to C++ Saturday night (less than 24 hours before the dare ended, but luckily we’re doing the jam). After switching to C++, I made a lot of progress very quickly, but there just wasn’t enough time left to finish the game. So, I’m going to jam out as many features as I can in the last 2.5 hours and post what I have. So, while you dare enterers are all relaxing, please keep us jam enterers who are still suffering in your thoughts. Here’s some art and screens:

Unfortunately, there’s no way I’ll be able to get the boss battle in, but we are definitely going to continue this week and finish the game, because it’ll be so epic when it’s finished.

Celebratory pizza anyone? I’m feeling oh, so, good having finished my first jam! The finished product isn’t the best by a long shot but, hey, I made it! You made it! Everyone who made it gets a slice ^^ Heck, even if you didn’t make it, here’s a slice for attempting this madness.

Sunshine or, in my case, freak storms in life and in nature, aside,… it was a wild and fun–fun–fun, ride!

Here’s the link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27229

Please do check it out if you can and see if it suddenly crashes or not so I can get on that! It’s my first VN project I’ve released into the web and I programmed it alone (Is a artist and sub-par-writer under pressure here usually) so, do excuse me if it’s just one, big, bug!

I dared and won! Now to sleep, eat and get back to my schooling. *stuffs face and hands y’all some*

Bun is out right before the count! Well, until the morning when she fixes all the mistakes.

Tags: 2013, complete, LD27, Ren'Py, THE WHiTE ROOM, Visual Novel, VN

As you’ll be able to see on the entry page (Lion Racing) it’s missing a lot of features but that doesn’t take away this awesome feeling of pride LD27 has been a great success for me! Once again thanks for all the great tools guys. I’m awfully tired right now and going to bed, tomorrow I’ll be rating your games!