Now that I have a moment to step back I figured, like other people, I do a little post-mortem of how things went with Viral Attack.

Design/Theme:

I figured based on the past voting that “10 seconds” was going to win as a theme. I’d been cooking up a Dig Dug meets bomb disposal game set in post WWI France, s I figured “10 seconds, that’s a timer… bombs have timers DONE and DONE”. However once the theme was decided it felt a bit kludgy to stick a defusal or other strict 10 second rule onto that game so I bailed. This left me to come up with a new idea ASAP. The core idea that surrounded Viral Attack was holding a point for [x] non-consecutive seconds (In this case 10.) I like games that force you to play a mix of offense and defense. The rest became a wrapper around that idea.

Controls:

I’d planned on it controlling a bit like asteroids, but Osmos is a game I really enjoy so I decided to emulate part of their movement mechanic. This turned out to be good AND bad. It’s a really un-intuitive way to move by adding force to an object on the opposite side from where you intend to go, and Osmos does an incredibly good job of introducing that by giving you a little risk-free tutorial, Viral Attack needed this. This control method also ended up giving me a rude awakening to two other things that I stupidly looked over.

1.) Mouse games aren’t that fun in windowed mode.

Especially when you’re only concerned with relative movement of the mouse NOT the actual pointer. I should have forced the game full screen but that would have screwed up the web game and I wanted that to reach the more people…  (Seque!)

2.) RMB doesn’t work on web games.

The whole weekend I’d been testing on Windows without a thought to web. When I finally loaded up the web player I was confronted by this horrible truth and had to go back and add LCTRL support for use on the web. This control doesn’t feel quite the same to me, but was a necessary evil. What I should have done at this point though is generate two versions of the game with/without RMB turned on as required. I didn’t and the web game suffered.

Originally the repel wasn’t limited by stamina but instead you had to hold to charge it and the repel was proportional to length of time held. I liked this as it required a certain about of preparation for defense. I ended up adding the stamina meter to give the virus a reason to move away from the host cell from time to time. This naturally worked well with the repel ability and because a little risk-reward decision “Keep my little bit of meter to push away the white blood cells and escape, or take down the host cell by a bit more…” etc. However I didn’t revisit the control input for the repel button now you were burning two resources (time and stamina) to repel enemies and you couldn’t do it as an “oh shit” maneuver. This became obvious when I watched my wife play the game and saw her furiously mashing on the space and getting little tiny repels or none at all. She asked “Why do I need to hold it?”, and I realized by answer didn’t work any more so I changed it. I think it feels much better now.

I hope you enjoyed this, and the game. Please feel free to jump over and rate it.

Cheers and thanks for a fun Ludum Dare.

– mikegbrown

For this Ludum Dare I was so hoping for another theme than 10 seconds. The reason: for the last LD I made a game called 20 seconds and I didn’t want to create the same kind of game again. I was pretty disappointed when it became the theme with such a huge lead. Even though I was hoping for some other theme I also thought about what to do for 10 seconds. And this is my game:

Alien Attack

About the game:
Because I already did it, I did not want to create a game that was made of many games that last 10 seconds. I decided to create a game, that would get more features over time. So every 10 seconds, this game gets a new feature. In this LD version these features include graphical updates, sounds, enemy types and a simple message system/achievements. There is a lot more I would have liked to add.

What I liked:

• For the first time I made several status updates and regularly deployed the current version. This allowed me to get a little bit of feedback and see whether the idea itself was good or not
• I really liked the way the pencil drawn and scanned graphics worked out. Wouldn’t have expected explosions to look so cool when drawn with a pencil.
• The way I do the loading of required resources. Only 10 seconds before a feature becomes active, I start to fetch the required resources. So at the start of the game neither sound nor other graphics are loaded. This keeps initial loading times low

Things I learned:

• I did not do any collision detection for polygons before. Read about it on Saturday and started to implement the algorithm while reading about it.
• How to do (single frame) explosion graphics. They were the last thing I added on Sunday before I submitted my game. I just was too tired to make them right, so they are kind of cut off.

Things that went wrong:

• The name. I forgot a name for the game. Didn’t want to call it some variation of ten seconds. Came up with Alien Attack when I filled out the submit-form, because the player ship looks kind of alien. By now, I’ve come up with a name I like much more: Featurama. If I am going to add more features to the game I’ll definitely rename it.
• Implementing collision detection for polygons in the evening is kinda bad. I added some bugs and never got it running in the evening. Only in the next morning I was able to see the bugs and fix them. Should have gone to bed earlier.
• Graphics. I don’t like creating graphics and I don’t like the graphics I create. But as with the explosions, at least I still seem to be able to learn a few things. So maybe I’ll get better. Hopefully.
• My submitted game contained a bug that made the game freeze up. It didn’t do so in my development environment but if I had tested with another browser I would have realized. So, another thing I learned: Test your game one last time, even if you are too tired to go on.

With that, another link to my game and I’m off to play and rate a few more games of you.

5 LD27 games:

Kannas: 10 Seconds
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18332

Infernet89: The Value of Time
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14271

teamenschede: Placeholder
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27808

myachin: Descent Alpha
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=10579

Tange: Exocolony
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=1012

I feel like I’m re-iterating myself, but I’m a bit surprised for someone having a hard time ever finishing any programming task, that this adventure actually progressed in a very timely manner.

What felt right

• The quite simple idea of a FPS with a revolving world made for quite easy game development when the revolution was finally working. Not having to deal with a character sure saved me some hours.
• Using Unity + Blender definately helped in focusing on the game proper and not writing code in i Phython from almost scratch as I’m used to. In fact there was never anything truely stressful about the whole thing, I had something I could have submitted early Saturday afternoon.

What didn’t feel so good.

• I should have taken the time to learn the built in character controller module importable in Unity, the controls are definitely lacking some.
• It was a bit of a learning curve in Blender, and it would have made for a more enjoyable game if there had been a more deliberate world with levels that were not only built from static right angled blocks.
• My initial idea was that the power ups would have side effects such as vertigo and a pack of dolphins obscuring the visual field. That would have made the game about 112% more cool, but I opted for having a menu system and high score board instead. Next time I’ll go for the dolphins, I promise.

In all it was an extremely rewarding experience, and many lessons learned. Can’t wait until next dare. I’m going to be so much prepared, I’m going to be familiar with the tools, and it is going to be so much fun!

Give it a try, my game,

So this was our first LD, and I must say, it was an awesome experience!

On day 1, after declaration of the theme, the first problem was, of course, coming up with a game idea that could stand out. Add to that 6 people from 6 different parts of the country, without Skype (’cause of slow net), this took a pretty good part of day 1. 10 second levels, shooter with stuff changing after 10 secs (everyone loves shooters!), 10 second powerups – a lot of stuff popped up, but we finally decided on controlling different characters for 10 seconds to coordinate a prison break idea.  Granted, this was way too ambitious, but it seemed like a good idea, even if we managed a small prototype. Most of the day was spent on coding the basic engine, and coming up with level designs, and then discarding them due to complexity.

Day 2 and day 3 were huge! Specially day 3, with all of us having college and all. Stuff didn’t go according to plan, cut off many of the ideas, decided on 5 short levels, showing the core mechanic pretty well nevertheless. We wanted it to be real time at first, but later decided against that. So the game as it is now, is more like setting up the pieces before letting it all play out.
Our artists did an excellent job with the art, even if I say so myself. We got a friend to do the soundtrack on late notice, which he surprisingly produced really fast.
We didn’t get enough time to do proper cutscenes or tutorials in the end, and pretty much everyone else was against having a serious story to this, so we skipped that.
Finally, with 2 hours to spare (that’s 4.30 am here), I barely managed to complete it. Didn’t have much time to playtest for all the scenarios that may pop up however. (Updated the game with crash fixes later.)

The final result is pretty much a prototype rather than a full game, but I think we pulled it off quite well. And of course, it’d be awesome if you guys check it out. We may develop this further based on the feedback we get: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25325

And now, time to start rating all these awesome games I see up here!

This was my first Ludum Dare aswell as my first game jam I made a game where you have to destroy as much as you can in a city in 10 seconds by clicking

everywhere.It was so much fun and I made a great game. Coming back for the next Ludum Dare.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25019 I hope you enjoy my game if you can play it.

So this weekend I made a game.

THAT IS AWESOME

So this weekend I made a game that I am actually proud of.

THAT IS FUCKING AWESOME.

So this weekend I made a game that I am actually proud of AND people in the comments seem to like it*, especially the story which is what I am the most proud of as well.

The feeling I get from that is indescribable.

If people keep posting comments like that, I think my head might get so light with happiness that I float all the way to the moon. This might have been my first Ludum Dare, but it sure as heck won’t be the last.

But anyway, since I really like all the post-mortem lists of rights/wrongs, I am going to copy that very idea. Here goes:

Where I rocked

• Good idea choices. Got an idea that I liked very quickly. I scrapped that after a few minutes of thoughts. Then I had breakfast and showered and got a much, much better idea, which is pretty much unaltered in the final game.
• Awesome work ethic. I looked at the theme, went to eat, shower, stuff like that, had the idea and then worked pretty much uninterrupted until night, where I actually went to bed at the responsible time of 11 pm (which seems to be an extreme exception to 5 am in this jam). I was then well rested for the next day, and worked till 12:30 pm the next night (2½ hours before time limit). Never lost motivation, probably due to how much I liked the idea.
• Story. Wrote a, in my humble opinion, touching little story, and put it nicely into the game. And the thing that I am much more proud of is that the gameplay actually supported the emotions of the story, especially towards the end. I’m very very happy about having achieved that.
• Gameplay. Although not as flavored or challenging as I would have liked, I am rather content with the gameplay. The main mechanic, spinning, feels very good.
• Game feedback. Something that I once had a lot of problems with, now came pretty easily. It is quite clear to see/feel when you get hit, when you hit enemies and so on. <3 particles <3
• Finishing. Yay! I could have added a lot more, and there are some small tweaks that I could have made, which would have improved the quality of the challenge a bunch, but which I only thought of later, but I had to sleep, and so I just told myself that it was finished and submitted. Feels good.

Where I sucked

• The tools. I had not prepared them, so lost at least an hour downloading and setting up Flash Develop and Flixel. And I wasn’t really comfortable using them, since I haven’t made a game with them for a while, so had to spend a lot of time refreshing as well. Rookie mistakes, I know, but it is my first time.
• Sound. Never made/got it. A nice quiet soundtrack could have improved this game by miles.
• Art. Just look at it. I am not good at art, and I never had time to even try.
• Testing. The only ones who I had time to test with were my parents, and neither of them know how to play video games. Part of the reason why the game is too easy, probably.
• Challenge. As stated before. The initial idea involved more types of enemies. Another way to make it more challenging in a good way that is glaring me in the eyes, would be to require the player to kill a set number of enemies before being able to grab the night stash. Boom.

All in all, I am so happy about participating and about my game, that something VERY important will have to be scheduled in the next LD weekend for me to not participate again.
Thank you for reading this
-ZC

*Of course, on all the games people are very polite and mostly say the good things, so I can’t really be sure if it’s actually any good, before I see the ratings. I am aiming for a relatively good mood score most of all.

Tags: Half the Time, post-mortem

UPDATE 27.08.2013:
Added additional Keybindings for Arrow Keys + CTRL for shooting + Movement
Limited Rate of Fire + adjusted enemy health scaling to that new RoF.
Enabled Lazymode (keep Space pressed to shoot – no more RSI)

Apart from that, everything stayed the same.

Feel free to decrease your rating if adding this things upset you.

This is Bit, he is happy the jam is complete!

So we finished our Second Ludum Dare! It feels great

Boy was this one FRUSTRATING

But we learned SO much……

——————————————————————————————————————————–

-POST – MORTEM-

First the things that went WRONG

-1. LIMIT THE AMOUNT OF BETA SOFTWARE USED-

Heres the first thing I did wrong. I am running on a OS 10.9 beta. I am writing my code in Xcode 5 beta

Besides all of the crashing, one night I hit a total dead end bug in Xcode where I could not distribute my app. I almost QUIT the dare.

-2. MAKE SURE IF YOUR STREAMING/TIME LAPSING THAT ITS SET UP AND WORKING BEFORE THE JAM-

I spent too long trying to make sure my stream was exactly the right way, plus because of rule 1, it kept crashing, total productivity bust

-3. PREPARE YOUR TOOLS/CODE BASE/LIBRARIES BEFORE THE JAM-

This jam I switched over to SDL for the first time. I hit so many little snags that were simply because SDL works different, a number of times my productivity stopped was because SDL would be handling Floats as Integers, and leaking memory when it renders text, or flat out dropping sound because of an extra curly bracket.

———————————————————————————————————————

Things that went RIGHT!

-1. Work with friends-

Luckily I had the support from two close friends of mine. Both of which worked with me in the previous jam, but had dedicated time this jam to help. Having three people working on the game felt nearly perfect. The conversations were always motivating and productive. Also having two other people critique your code/sound/music/art is always great. A number of times Id find myself implementing something , and because of lack of sleep/reality/food one of my friends would remind me that what I did looks or sounds RIDICULOUS

-2.Have a Plan-

My friends and I prepared better for this jam. Last jam we did not realize the theme was announced so soon, so we scrambled after work to get together. Not this time, we were together as soon as the theme was announced and spent a good 3 hours whipping up ideas. I have a HUMONGOUS white board that worked so well in capturing and reducing our ideas to the very best ones. We could then get down to work, and glance at the checklist of things we needed to do on the whiteboard.

-3. Share often –

Try to have people test your game as soon as you can, some of the weird little things you know about the games rules or how it plays may not be apparent to others. You have to develop a sense of “communication” to your player , and there is no better way than to see how another player plays your game.

Overall, I feel extremely accomplished having finished a second dare. This time the pieces fell together much better than before. We had the idea down the first night, then got cranking the next two days. My friends and I discovered new talents and developed some since the previous jam. We look forward to finding out when the next jam is, and now I can’t wait to try some of your games!

—Don’t forget to try our game FSCK! Bit needs your help!—-

Download Here!

Tags: 10 seconds, 2D, C++, game, post-mortem, postmortem, progress, SDL

Pushed an update to Duel today(only the kongregate link, the dropbox link will remain the original version).

Duel on Kongregate

Duel LudumDare Page

Fixes:

-Added “Allow Bots” button so players could choose to play against bots or wait for a real person to join. If you choose to disallow bots please be patient as there is very low player traffic at the moment.

-Improved matchmaking. Matchmaking should be much faster than before and has a much higher chance of actually getting you a game(allowing, of course, that there are other players in the network)

Go defend your honor!

This was my entry for Ludum Dare 27. It was made in around 15 hours with most of the work done on Saturday. It is a simple arcade style game inspired by Pac-Man, but it automatically moves onto the next random “maze” every 10 seconds with more enemies added in over time.

My primary goal was to simply finish something, even if it’s not too original or amazing of a game. I’ve been participating with Ludum Dares off and on for five years, but I kept biting off more than I could chew and running out of time before nearing a completion. This time I tried to keep everything as simple as possible — a character that lacks complex geometry, has only two bones, simple animation, and minimal texture mapping. Even though I did not have the full 48 hours available to work on it, I succeeded in creating something and I consider that is a pretty big accomplishment considering how little time there was.

What Went Wrong

Because most of Saturday was spent with family before I head off to college, I was pretty much short a day.  This extra time certainly could have been used to add more to the game and polish things up a bit.

I Jumped straight into development without spending much time brainstorming game ideas.  Halfway through making this I came up with a few game concepts that I think could have been more fun, unique, and funny, but I didn’t have the time to scrap what I had and start over.

I kept having a weird problem on Kongregate where my game gets moved down a little and cuts off the bottom of it.  No matter how I tried to change the size settings nothing seemed to fix it completely, so I just tried to have it cut off as little as I could.

Near the end, the project started to get a little hacky and messy.  I was experimenting with using a heavily component based style of game design, but I wasn’t entirely certain how to handle some special case problems, since I was trying to keep everything generic with pretty much no specialized gameobject code.  I think I now have an idea of how to better handle entity state switching.

What Went Right

I with into it with the plan to keep things as simple as possible.  There were very few assets and what it had were extremely simple.  Probably the number one reason I failed to complete any of my previous Ludum Dare projects had been because of spending too much time making too detailed of graphics, so I managed to avoid making this mistake again.

Although though there were times when I had to really push myself to keep going, development went pretty smoothly without any major problems.

I finally completed something!  I first discovered Ludum Dare five years ago, and this is the first official competition game I actually finished!  I also finally have something put up onto a web game site, which is kind of neat even though I don’t expect too much from it.

Conclusions

All-in-all it went pretty well and has left me wanting to make more games!

The Ludum Dare entry page can be found here:
10 Second Mazes Entry Page

The game is available through Kongregate:
Play 10 Second Mazes On Kongregate

Tags: LD27, postmortem, success, timelapse, video, youtube

Hello boys & girls,

as many before me I decided to throw in my two cents about the compo.  A small spoiler before I start – this was fucking awesome!

So, this was the first time I took part in a Ludum Dare and I must say I’m really disappointed that I’m gonna have to wait another 3 months to do this again 😉

The entire experience was epic – from the hectic schedule, to sleep-deprived coding and the last minute heart attacks induced by game-breaking bugs you found but can’t wrap your tired brain around. I think I lived off of bananas & energy bars on Saturday and forgot to eat on Sunday >_<

The first “Thumbs Up” comments I got made it all worthwhile though 😀

Without further adue, here’s how it went for me:

• The Ups:

Well first of all, the process of making a game, from start to fin.. *cough* a working demo, as you all know, is very rewarding in itself

Also, as with any Game Jam, it put pressure on me as a whole – from my skills, to my ideas, to planning, performing under stress and even taking some very hard decisions what to let go and what to work on till the very end so I can say I pushed my limits which is always accompanied by the liberating feeling of “Hell yeah, you’re the man!” (I’m sure you ladies out there can relate :P)

• The Downs:

Uhm, nope no downs, everything went according to plan and the game is already making millions..

.

.

ok ok, maybe that’s not entirely true Planning was ok overall, but I underestimated the time it would take to animate the entire storyline – the game is like a pre-recorded movie that you control yourself, and so I was left without time for proper fine tuning which led to a few mental breakdowns from “Fuck, I’m so not gonna make this…” and “Come on code, you’re a good fella, you can debug yourself.. pretty please?” to begging, threatening and physically abusing the computer until it finally worked.

• Thoughts:

To all of you that made it: Kudos, you guys are awesome and I can’t wait to try as many of your games as possible! And to those of you who didn’t, well, I know the feeling but don’t let it eat you up – it was more likely than not a great experience and I’m sure you can make something of it

• Wrapping it up..

I leave you with a short timelapse in pictures :

– Model creation .gif – and yeah, I use the term Model quite loosely 😉

– Proof of concept – Check 😉

– Versions 0.1 and 0.2

– And the final export

If you wanna try the game, here it goes:

Click to play!    (Opens in a new tab)

Hope you all had as much fun as I did and I’ll see you guys & girls in 3 months 😉

Ciao,

~Konstantinos

Well, that didn’t go according to plan. In a Somme like way it was two days of carefully preparing my troops, bombardment of pixels followed by one day of complete slaughter with only a few gains here and there.

Captain, your report :

What went right: 

 Initial Set-up – Got my DropBox set-up in advance with a template folder structure. Everything nice,  neat and clearly laid out.

Base Code Set-up – As part of my Unity template I’ve got some character movement scripts based on a Rocket 5 tutorial from yesteryear.  These can quickly and easily be adapted. Drop in a character sprite, drop in the scripts, tweak and you’re done.. Although saying that, they do need a lot of fine tuning.

Reference Code – From the last LudumDare and from everything I’ve been playing around with since I’ve managed to keep all the code in a reference folder. This is a great help even if nothing applies to the current project.

Initial Idea – Got a pretty sound idea in my head straight away. It didn’t actually pan out the way I wanted but the ground work was there and was easily adaptable.

Graphics –  I’m more comfortable with graphics and character design than anything else. Photoshop and I get on pretty well and it didn’t crash once!

Unity and Orthello Pro – It’s a breeze to use and wonderfully quick to get some ideas up and running very quickly.

Unity Support – If there is a stupid, newb code question that I’m asking, someone, somewhere has the answer.

Planning in the initial stages – I had one core idea but also had some fall-backs if that wasn’t achievable.

What went wrong: 

First off the silly mistakes.

Texture Packer – If I save out as .plist one more sodding time!! So yeah, Saving out as .plist and not .xml proved to be an easy miss. Why has nothing updated? Best check that first rather than cycle through C# files trying to find out what you did wrong.

Tiled – Alright it’s super easy to use and super fun as well. However I’ve never used it for a project before. I didn’t have the auto-update for TileSheets turned on and couldn’t work out why my tiles were not updating (cmd+T).

I also found out that updating my tile sheet would result in the entire level design becoming totally fecked!

Tiled + Collision + Unity = ARGGGGHHHH!!! – Every time I updated my tile sheet it would reset all of the collision detection meaning a manual update. This may have something to do with my collision detection being set to a layer but it also reset all the tags for Triggers. This was a bit of a mare.

The BIGGER issues:

 Screen Resolution – Ok there is something I obviously don’t get here. I need to do a lot of reading on this cause my brain obviously can’t compute how to get anything looking decent on different resolutions. Full-screen = funking stretched mess.

GRAPHICS – GRAPHICS – GRAPHICS – I spent soooo long pouring over pixels – most of which you can’t even see in the bloody level!

Environment – Not being at home with a heaving 27″ beast of an iMac. I’ve never missed that screen so much in my life!

Programming – It’s weird cause I can visually see what I’m trying to achieve but my knowledge isn’t there yet. I spent longer trying to get one thing to work that would have taken a semi-decent programmer seconds to implement. I think it’s best summed up by, “I’m playing all the right notes but not in the right order”.

The language isn’t hard, C#, and I know this is just down to experience but it’s incredibly frustrating. There are so many things I don’t know and so many things I’m sure I’m doing poorly.

Play Testing – There was none. I’d literally finished a bug fix with 10 seconds till submit – leaving the other 20billion bugs to roam free.

Over Ambition – Oh boy did I get carried away with the idea and added more things to it than I could ever hope to achieve.

First it was going to be the  wonderful dialogue scenes to introduce the player to the trenches.

I had a cast of characters laid out each with their own dialogue and quirks. Each to bark out orders, make requests etc..

Each Order had a level of importance based on who was making the request. High command , regardless of the order, took priority. The Captain at the front was second making desperate pleas for Ammo and supplies.

The actual battle that rages in the background would be affected by how well you carried out commands. Ammo doesn’t get delivered then the chance of a counter attack is raised a notch. High Command doesn’t have a clue what is going on at the front, they might refuse reinforcements. All of this was to have a hand in how the game played out.

The dugouts were supposed to have a really claustrophobic look and feel to them, dust filtering through the air from blast aftershock. Purely aesthetic addition.

Artillery was supposed to crash out of the sky at set-intevals making the rush over No Mans Land a real life or death situation. Wounded soldiers stuck in the mud would pop-up in dialogue boxes pleading for aid. The graphics of the explosions would light up the background and the surrounding area, mud, debris + body parts would blast out from every hit, there would be a nightmare of obstacles.

Achievements – The Battles would only rage for so long for each level. Depending on how may wounded saved || supplies delivered || messaged delivered checked against bombardment level would result in medals being awarded.

If the front was lost or you were KIA  then Game over.

So that was in my head and on paper. That is not what is on screen.

Unity Build – I wanted to build this for web but for some reason it doesn’t like the tile map and I have no idea why!

Notes to self –  I don’t think timing was a major issue on this. I think I could have achieved most of what I wanted if I’d done the following:

Graphics – kept things simple to being with. I spent too long pushing pixels.

Sound Files – grabbed / created these early.

Built basic intro, Won, Lost and Pause screens as a first measure. These would have been incredibly easy to do and would have bookended an actual game – it’s not a game unless you win or lose something!

Code, Code, Code till it works.

PlayTesting and more play testing.

Refine graphics – they’re in a sprite sheet so one update and you’re done… DOH!

Summery :

I really wanted to push myself on this one and get out something that looked good and played well. However, poor planning on my part let me down and I ended up having less time on my weakest link – programming. A reversal of that might have produced something different.

So, this was almost not submitted because it’s not ready for submission by a long shot. However, after all that time spent crouched over a screen is it better to show what you achieved in that time and the general thinking / execution behind it  or keep it hidden in the trash?

Ho-hum till the next one…

Cpt Nick Claypole – 1/5 Essex

A lot of the entries for Ludum Dare #27 have been created using Unity (including my entry), and I wanted to pass along some information that might be helpful for Unity developers to make their games as accessible as possible for all players.  Users on Windows and Mac don’t need dedicated builds as frequently, given that the Unity webplayer is readily available to them.  For people using Linux systems, however, they must download and play the game directly on their system.  Here’s a few steps to improve the experience for Linux users.  The instructions that follow are for Windows, but I’m sure there will be similar solutions for Mac

1: Download 7-zip.  This will allow you to create archives in Linux-supported formats (.tar and .gz).

2: Export for Linux in Unity:
I’m not going to post a tutorial for doing this, as Unity’s interface is fairly self-explanatory.  But you should end up with a folder that looks like this.

3: Put both files together in one folder and name it something that makes it easily identifiable.  LD27-YourTitleHere should be adequate

4: Right-click on this folder, select 7-Zip>Add to archive…

5: This will bring up a prompt that allows you to package the directory in a variety of ways.  For archive format, select “tar”.  Leave everything else with the default settings and click OK.  This should give you a new file called LD27-YourTitleHere.tar

6: Repeat step 4 on this new file (Add to archive), but in the prompt, select the Archive format of “gzip”.  Leave everything else default and click OK.  You should now have a file called LD27-YourTitleHere.tar.gz

7: Upload your new Linux-friendly game to your hosting site and link it on your page.

This may look like a bit of work, but keep in mind that the few extra minutes this takes can really improve people’s impression of your game and open the door to a broader audience.

Hi !

I just played my game and I found a lot of mistakes. Am I allow to make a V.1.1 without mistakes and adding change some little details of the game and post it in order to replace the first version ? I ask because it would be considered as cheat, I thought.

Thanks !

Day 1

This was my first time creating a game in javascript so I kept the game design simple.
On the first day of LD27 I made notes on what the game will be like and drew a simple view of the playing area.

Day 2
I did not work too much on the game during day 2. Most of the time was spent working on the game design and learning javascript. I added some basic javascript and HTML/CSS for the layout and very little game logic.

Changed Mechanics
Some of the mechanics were changed or dropped as the game was being made.
Some notable differences are the store, running away action, disappearing skills, stalling, and popularity.

The store was changed to allow healing and refilling all skills.
Healing gives the player another decision on what to spend money on. With how random the final game is, buying healing felt too punishing. A full heal after each round may be able to stabilize the randomness more.
Disappearing skills was removed in favor of skill refills. Refills allow the player to decide if they wanted to reroll or keep their skills.

Stalling changed from adding turns to being a stun. Adding turns went against the theme and it would have made the player’s skill usage choice in combat trivial. A stun allows players to heal up or ignore healing skills so that turns are not used by them whereas adding turns would allow the player do everything unless the client damage was very high.

Popularity was originally going to be used as another way to lose the game and get stronger clients. Different levels of clients would show up based on the popularity which would allow the player to choose which client to work for. Popularity would be decaying after each client and more after each failure. I could not think of a way to balance this in time so I went with a simpler route and had the game be level based. Popularity is now just a way for the player to level up their maximum random skill limit for rerolls.

Day 3
Day 3 was when I added in most of the game logic. When implementing game logic I also refined the design a bit more.
Some attempt at balance was done with client stats and costs. Due to the randomness of the game and how little skills were involved in playing, balancing with just those parameters was difficult. A more fair rerolling method would probably have had a greater effect on game balance.
Polish was added to the game such as attack messages and descriptions for each client. Colors were added during the last two hours of LD27.

Closing Thoughts
Javascript/HTML/CSS turned out to be a good fit for a game that’s text and buttons. Changing states in the game was as simple as setting the display to none and resetting displays when changing back. All the core objects in the game were global and public which is good for prototyping but does become harder to maintain. Having everything public caused some problems during the end. I sometimes set variables directly instead of through a method that updates the variable and the display at the same time.

I did not like how reliant the player was on getting good rolls. Money is too limited to allow players who got bad rolls to reroll again due to the costs of healing and popularity increasing. Having a longer game would have allowed the player to build up skills. A longer game would prevent a single strong roll from winning the game because the player would still have to level up to get even stronger skills.

Here’s a link to the game – LD27 – Sleep Consultant
The LD27 page – LD27 Submission

Tags: postmortem

I’m developing my LD27 post mortem about Spacetime Adventure, my physics-based time-travelling game, on my website. You might be some of the few people in the world who actually think it’s interesting. Please check it out.

Dear Ludum boys and girls,

The directors of Bird TV are still looking for a ambitious cameraman.

Do you think you have it in you to show the world what they want, then prove it!

What do I need to do to become a Bird TV cameraman?

1) Click here

2) Download it

3) Play it

4) Enjoy it and let me know if you’re the right (wo)man

Sincerely,

Eddy93

This is a post mortem of my LD27 entry Lost in the Dark”, a maze-horror game.

Day 1 (Friday night):
I sat in front of my computer at one o’clock (I live in Iceland) at night when the theme was announced. “10 Seconds” it said. I thought “Oh fudge, this will be hard!” and went into brainstorming mode. I ended up thinking about various concepts revolving around a maze and ten seconds. Since I expected many of the entries to have some maze elements and maybe a “get from here to there in ten seconds!” thing going on I wanted to do something a bit different. I decided on a mechanic where you are walking around a maze but time is an added pressure. maybe the maze will lock up as soon as the time runs out, but I thought ten seconds to complete mazes was too short. The maze would have to be tiny or the controls super fast. I eventually hatched the whole “Repeating darkness for ten seconds and then ever shortening periods of light” which gave the player lots of time to escape the maze. To make things interesting I added a bit of a survival element in it where the player would not be alone in the maze.

I fired up unity, created an empty object and started work on the most important aspect of the game, the maze! I implemented a variation of the sidewinder maze algorithm which resulted in nice tree-like mazes so the path would be pretty clear while the player could easily choose the wrong “branch” of the maze and end up lost.

This would take up the friday night and the first few hours of saturday to complete. But I was satisfied with the result:

Lost in the Dark maze gen

day 2 (Saturday):
I fired up Blender and quickly mocked up a character model (which ended up staying in the game as seen in the “victory” screenshot:

After the player model was modeled, rigged, textured and a couple of animations hastily thrown in I created a second texture for the zombies which inhabit the maze (green and purple screams “zombie!” right? 😉 ):

After adding a couple of block types (walls, floors) as well I had all my major building blocks set up, now all I needed was the gameplay.

I had rarely used unity3d before this so I had very little idea on how to make the characters actually move. This took a couple of hours to implement.

I added a timer class which would keep track of what should happen when and control the camera angles as well as light intensity levels. When the player enters the game the view is like this:

But every ten seconds he gets a few seconds of “light” which changed the camera angle and illuminated the maze:

This felt right to me. After adding a victory condition “Yay, you got out! Have another level!” and a losing condition “Yay, you lost! Have a death scene!” I had my gameplay set up.

day 3 (Sunday):

With my game almost complete I went ahead and added some atmospheric and smoothing elements (Lerping is easy in unity as I found out that day. It made my “snapping” angle camera transition to the illumination view much smoother) such as zombie speak (Credit for that idea goes to my girlfriend) and tweaking the lighting all I had left was sound, gameplay testing and bug-fixing.

I “bugged” a few of my friends and my girlfriend into playing the game and hunt for bugs. None of them found much  so I chalked that part “done”.

Sounds gave me trouble. I wanted to keep within the spirit of the competition and make everything myself. But everything I attempted to make was crap. In the end I decided against having sounds since no sound does less harm than crap sounds in my opinion. (Many have said in the comments they miss the sound, so I kinda shot myself in the foot there I think 😛 )

The good:
I learned heaps about Unity3D, it is a nifty little toolkit which I see myself using again in the near future. I am also pleased with myself for releasing a “completed” game for once. I usually end up tinkering with the mechanics until my enthusiasm for whatever I am working on is gone.

The bad:
Not many things to be said that went wrong. I almost wish I had changed my entry to be an “jam” entry instead of the 48 hour challenge so I could have added sounds. But hey, I decided to to 48 hours and gosh darnit 48 hours it would be!

Summary:
All in all this was a good experience. I created a game, learned about unity and had fun

My entry page is here (I urge you to try it out and give me a rating/comment).
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25925

See you all next time

A Screenshot of our game that made us laugh, thx @ Termite