Hey Everyone,

Gonna make this post quick… Here: twitch.tv/0creds

Thanks,

– 0Creds

Finally I’m done with the game and I can go to sleep.

After I get some rest I’ll write a proper post mortem.

Meanwhile, you can play the game here: Mirror’s Face for LD#27

Had a blast with a great group of people, and I’d say we made a pretty decent looking product!

It basically turned into a space trader game; we didn’t get solidly into the real theme tie-in, but we did get in a lot of the ideas we were looking at. We’ll probably add more of that in over the next few days though!

Enjoy =D

Unity3D Web Player

If you’re feeling adventurous, we even built an Android version!

We’ve submitted our game, which we’ve called Cosmos Commander, because alliteration.

The idea of the game is you give your ships commands before the conflict and then watch 10 seconds play out. Then you give them new commands for the next 10 seconds and repeat until you’re victorious. Or defeated. Preferably victorious, though.

The orders you give your ships are where they move, where they fire, and whether or not you’d like to prioritise shields or firing-rate with a slider bar. You give these commands to your ships one by one, sequentially.

Here’s a gif:

We like gifs

The pre-combat phase is not as intuitive as it ought to be, but I’m really happy with the way the game has turned out. Ludum Dare has been such a great experience, but mostly so for us as a team. We’ve learned a lot about working together and it’s been so much fun, and we’re really eager to work on more projects together.

That said, I really can’t wait for sleep… and then to play so many games. I’m really looking forward to the feedback!

Just submitted my game and here’show to play:

You must reach the teleporter to the next level, sounds simple.  But something random happens every ten seconds that will make the game easier or harder (mainly harder).

Featuring  10 levels

I am Pretty happy with the end result. It was quite the experience.

Build is uploading, will update when it’s done.

Tags: #27, jam, udk

Well, this was my first experience ever creating a game from start to finish and releasing it to the public, and I have to say i LOVE the feeling! The sense of accomplishment when you release a game can’t be beat. At this point, knowing people are going to be downloading and playing our game is a great feeling, and it convinced me that working through the slumps and ending projects is always worth it in the end. At this point though, I’m on hour 72 of game-making, so I need to take a quick breather before I start thinking about it again, but I promise to add a post-mortem with some lessons I learned from the whole thing in the future.

After a long Monday of expecting to be done but always finding something new to fix, we wrapped up Kickbox and are ready to release it! Try to imagine QWOP + Slime Volleyball, all packed into an exciting game of “soccer”. Every 10 seconds, something exciting jumps in to change the game. So grab a friend and play Kickbox to your heart’s content!

Link: http://thomassteinke.net/kickbox/

We already wrote a finished post for Switch!, but I just made a bunch of small changes. In particular, we:

Added boxes around the timer, keys, and hp text (for visibility)

Added Level 7

Changed Title Text to Switch! (I can’t believe we left it as “SFML Works”. That just goes to show how little sleep we got)

Added a loading screen so it doesn’t look like the game has crashed while it is loading textures

Added sounds for gate opening, level completion, and switching

If you haven’t played Switch! yet, you can play it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=22112

We created a hybrid puzzle/fighting game for the theme.  The concept is that you play as a samurai from feudal japan.  You are notoriously powerful because you can predict enemy actions 10 seconds in advance, and react to them very easily.

http://madleedesign.com/projects/tensecondsamurai/

To create this game, we used only raw javascript, no frameworks of any sort (out of some sense of samurai-like honor/nobility.)

There were also many sprites created on sunday, but we couldn’t get them integrated/registered in time and we sadly had to scrap them:

http://madleedesign.com/misc/tenseconds/samurai2.html

General gameplay:

Almost every key on the keyboard is a control.  Each of the four rows of keys (1-0, q-p, a-;, z-/) is a type of move: High Attack, High Block, Low Attack, Low Block respectively.  The further right on the keyboard you press the key, the cheaper the move is to queue, and it goes to a corresponding part of the move queue.  The further left the key you press is, the more expensive it is, but the less time the enemy has to react to it (and the more time you had to react to the enemy).

There are a few other nice little features:  Blocking stance stays so long as you don’t take damage.  To break someone’s block, you can stack multiple attacks into one big power attack.  This also staggers them, reducing their damage somewhat for a few seconds.  Another way to stagger the enemy is to start a new block (not the same stance you are already in) exactly when that type of attack arrives.  It takes some skill, but has tremendous strategic benefits.

We have 10 unique opponents, each with their own AI/fighting style, so hopefully you enjoy our little game

Instead of an in-game picture, I put here the end screen. If you haven’t played my game yet and wish to see how it looks, have a peek  here.

When coming to write this Post-Mortem I looked in my previous posts from LD26 to see if I have learned anything at all and also compared this jam’s goals to what actually happened.

I think the main idea for this game came to me the day before the the jam started.
I don’t really remember if I thought about the specifics, but it surely helped after I verified the theme is indeed 10 seconds.

The Good:

1. C – I think it was a good choice as I’m quite comfortable with this language and I felt I was coding swiftly. I encountered only a single mind boggling hair pulling memory bug, and one or two annoying “Who wrote this” bugs. Another important part was my framework. The fact I don’t mention SDL2 here, is because I hid it entirely, probably saving a lot of time.
2. Time planning – Yes, I’ve finished the end screen and achievements system (pictured above) 4 minutes before submitting time, but  I had time for these and the intro screen because I’ve finished the core game 3-4 hours before. In my timezone, LD started in 4am. Unlike the previous LD, I slept until 8, had a look at the theme and went straight to eat breakfast, during which my ideas and plans took shape.
3. Fun – The main goal I had was to make a game that is fun. In the previous jam that was low priority, and it showed. I think my entry improved exponentially over its predecessor. There’s still a lot to be desired, but the gameplay seems to work!
4. Audio – I’ve never imagined I could do such things using my laptop’s built-in microphone and audacity. I even had to hit myself a few time until I was satisfied with the recording that was eventually transformed into the effect that plays when people bump into each other. An anecdote: Before coming up with the idea for this game, I planned to record myself playing live music during the jam.
5. Funny – I laughed out loud so much while making this game. I tested the game very often, with every feature I have added (which is a good advice, by the way!), and it still made me laugh every time, even near then end when I was coding like mad.

The Bad:

1. Funny – Back to the statistics, humour has absolutely no correlation with the overall ratings, and even though I wished to focus more on the gameplay and less on the lulz, it didn’t happen that much. As stated in The Good, it’s an improvement from last time, but there’s still more way ahead.
2. Graphics – I had all the tools I needed, Gimp is wonderful, and my framework supported loading spritesheets. I didn’t use them. Right in the beginning I created the first 5 or 6 sprites as separate files, and didn’t migrate to sheets later. With every type of person I have added, I had to do way too much redrawing, exporting and coding. Even if it didn’t waste that much time, the repetitive work was extremely annoying.
3. C – Well, using C with a simple game means you don’t have to waste your time on optimizations. That means you can recursively merge sort this list. Heck, you can even bubble sort it! However, I have done neither of those. I looked in the internets for a merge sort algorithm with loops, found one, implemented it adapted to my intrusive lists, and all hell broke loose. Memory pointers went flying, and I was relentlessly debugging. After two hours or so (maybe even more) of searching, I’ve found the bug in an unrelated place! Another fail that relates to the previous point about graphics is all the ugly asset loading code. It should probably be implemented in lua or something, but even if not, some functions could really simplify this horror.

The Ugly:

1. Graphics –  😀
2. After the first day I understood my game has no end or goals. That’s why I came up with this headlines/achievements system, because the thing I enjoyed most during testing was to cause amusing things to happen (such as a police officer tasing their colleague) .
3. If you haven’t noticed, the field floats in space. I wanted to have an audience. I even wanted them to be throwing bottles and stuff at you. Unfortunately, Other things had higher priority. There are no goals either (football goals), the goalkeepers have the same uniform as their team. Did I mention there’s no referee?

All in all I’m satisfied with the result, and I hope you like it as well!

So that is it after two days of working on the game as well as real life stuff taking up time it is finally done, it is such a great feeling and looking forward to next time to make something even better 😀

You can find our game here: Anonymous Anomaly

Hi everybody !

Finally, 10 minutes from the deadline, our game is done! Marie, Maxime and I are so happy to achieve our first game and first game jam! Hope you’ll like the result!

A postmortem will be coming in the following days, but now: let’s sleep! Big thanks for Peter and Joseph in the last hours to help us with the sounds!

The game is here

PS : If someone can give feedbacks about the linux and windows versions, it would be very helpfull. I also experienced some sound issues with the web version. Any feedback/bug report welcomed!

I have completed my game, “Hot Dawg Dash”! For my first Ludum Dare Jam, I know that I definitely learned a lot about creating a game in this amount of time. Also, I think that people will enjoy the basic premise and gameplay that this game can bring. I do hope to update it later for the sake of improving the game logic and smoothness of the controls.

I would also like to issue a challenge. My best score on the game so far is 15 hot dogs in 10 seconds. Can you best that? If so, tell me your score!

Regardless, congrats to all of the participants that made it to the end, and I hope you enjoy my game.

At the last minute Fat-Guy-In-Batman-Costume-Man saves the con!

Can you do the same? Find out by following a link.

So, my LD26 game Tiny Runner got dinged a bit in the reviews/ratings because I didn’t get around to adding any sound to the game at all. I wasn’t going to let that happen this time around.

So, what did I do this time for LD27? I made a music game of course!

The Vengeful Baby-Men is an audio-based puzzle game where the goal is to take 10-seconds songs that have been sliced up and put them back together.

It’s kind of an oddball idea, but it was an interesting and fun project regardless. Plus, I got to spend a little bit of time composing/recording a few very short and simple songs.

I made the game basically under compo rules, but was unable to get anything in by the Sunday deadline so I’ve submitted it as a Jam entry.

Screenshots won’t do a music game justice, of course, but here you go anyway… Hope you all enjoy!

PFIEW
So I just submitted the thing. It’s playable online (flash).

So about the theme : each sequence of the game lasts 10 seconds (or asks you to be quicker). That’s all.

About the game itself : it tells the story of Mrs. Sheriff that runs after a train and then everything goes KBOOM.

Say that I thought I’d be able to make it in just two days. Silly me.

It looked real bad for a moment, we didn’t implement all the features we wanted, but we made a game! A game that’s actually kinda fun to play, and at least made us laugh (YMMV, we have a terrible sense of humor).

Great jam, congrats to everyone who managed to make it in time, stiff upper lip to those who didn’t; don’t give up, there’s always next time!

Yay for game development <3

Tags: motivation, progress

My game is done and submitted!

Here’s a quick post-mortem/summary on how things went. I’ll probably post some more detailed thoughts about how things went and what I learned later on my blog, but I’m posting here first to sign off on my submission and wrap things up.

The good:

• Feel – I’m really happy with how the visuals and the feel of moving the ship around and shooting turned out.
• Pacing – On Friday when the theme was announced, I spent 3-4 hours roughing out a concept. I slept on it, and then hammered away at it for about 10 hours on Saturday. A few more hours on Sunday (mostly audio work), and an hour’s worth of bug-fixing and polish today. This spread of hours across the weekend felt the most successful of any jam I’ve done before. I was never too tired/unfocused to work on the game, but I never felt overwhelmed with tasks. I guess I’m getting better at this part!
• Playtesting – This was the first time I posted WIP builds online during a jam, and the feedback I got from doing so really took the game to a higher level and kept me motivated. I did in-person playtesting as well, but getting feedback from different sources really helped keep things feeling fresh.

The bad:

• Difficulty Curve – Since all the weapons/enemies are random, difficulty doesn’t ramp up the longer you play. The result of this is new players sometimes feel overwhelmed, and experienced players get bored. This problem comes up in a lot of games I make, I’ll have to practice dealing with this specifically.
• Sound Effects – I fell back on using SFXR for the sounds, which is fine, but I’m going to make it a goal to get a bit more creative with audio than just bleeps and bloops next time.
• Unoriginality – At a glance, the game bears a lot of similarity to games like Geometry Wars, and the aesthetic is even pretty similar to a game I made previously called Return. I think I put enough unique elements into this game to make it worthwhile, but I still felt like I was using existing games as a crutch to prevent myself from having to make too many tough design choices. Next time I’ll challenge myself to deviate more freely from existing gameplay tropes/visual styles.

Now to give it a bit of time and think about what I’ve learned from doing this jam. Overall it was a very positive experience! Time to go rate some games

just about to excute after setting up final bits of splash menu screen, and plugin decides to fail! breaking my entire project, will try and fix this beofre the hours up!

6 guys, 14 hours, 1 game! Our second Ludum jam entry.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26312

Video