Think its about time to post this graph for #LD27

It shows the distributions of the coolness and votes for all entries, value being the number of votes and frequency is the number of entries with that number of votes …

Add your user name to the image url to show where your game is on the graph.
The graph updates itself so is always current.

Tags: graph

Not for fame, not for glory, I’m here for the fun! I love LDs, because almost every time after the submission I can say to myself: I still got it ^^

So this is my entry: Mr. Sushi! (Order Please!). I was stuck on the first day, because I haven’t really been programming for weeks, and as I wanted to move forward as a Flash Developer, I decided that this LD would not be about pixels, blitting and copypixels, but about Stage3D! A step that I didn’t take for way too long

What went well:

1) hahaha, I didn’t have the time to create music :D. On a whim I decided to do some voice acting with broken japanese-english like Matt Stone or Trey Parker always do on South Park :D. Broken and so bad, that you should know that no japanese actually talks like that ^^. And tell you what: It’s really fun to talk like that :D. That’s why the south park guys always do it^^!

2) Starling with Starling! I’m still not 100% convinced if it really runs faster, because on startup I get framerates of 30 or less. maybe I would have to build preloaders again 😛 But! I managed to create something that actually works

3) I created a new game! The game idea derived from dots (iOS), but I don’t like how the items fall down like in Bejuweluizzoausoi*censored*ioasd ^^. But there’s still room for improvements 😉

What didn’t went that well:

MY ASSHOLE BUDDY SET UP LIKE 10 ALARMS AT RANDOM TIMES AND HID THEM AT RANDOM PLACES IN MY WORKPLACE 😀 + I couldn’t really concentrate. what means it calls for revenge

I hope you play my game! And have fun doing so! 😀 Shameless adding of a link 😉 :

Play it here

So, this is my game.

Anyways, for my second Ludum Dare,  I decided to do something most peculiar.

This was actually the first thing that popped in my head when I was at my Optometrist when my eyes were dilated early Saturday morning.

So, what was my game?

When I heard the theme, I had two ideas. One of them was a horror game where you blink every ten seconds and stuff happens but I meant it as something I wouldn’t like making.

So, what ideas popped in my head, based on the theme, when I was coming up with “In Just a Moment”? Well, contrary to the comments, I thought of “YOLO”. Like, I think of a lot of things before I make any decision. A lot of those thoughts being negative.

If  I were to talk to someone, I’m always self-conscious about how I present myself as I assume these bad things. But seriously, what can go wrong?  That was the question I wanted to present when I was making this game. “What can go wrong with a choice?”

Granted, the way I did it needs loads of improvements but did it I tried to do.

What went good:

• I finished a game despite having my hands full with moving into college and what not.
• I made the game to the exact idea that was in my head.
• I didn’t have any headaches at any point in making the game.
• The music in the game fit what I was going for perfectly

What went bad:

• My message wasn’t presented clearly.
• The music loop thing.
• I relied a bit too much on “Show, don’t Tell”
• How the game ended. It seems that just ending the game without the player deciding to stop playing affected the idea I had for what I wanted to do.

I liked working on “In Just a Moment” and am still working to make it better than what I already made. Just, I need to learn how to present my idea.

I love the comments I’m getting, how people think of the game as an examination on relationships and life but that idea’s way more advanced than how I originally imagined the game.

Let’s compare it to my first Ludum Dare game, Princess Sheltering.

This was definitely a better organized game than my LD 25 and was a lot easier to make in terms of the idea that I came up with. To be honest, compared to Princess Sheltering, this is something I’d still play, even though “In Just a Moment” is so short. It was also awesome that I had someone come by and make music for my game! So this Ludum Dare was just so much easier than my last Ludum Dare.

This was my first Ludum Dare competition entry.  It was an exhausting weekend, but overall it was a great experience and I am enjoying playing and rating games and receiving feedback.  I am content with what I was able to put together in 48 hours.  Some things went well, and as always there is a lot of room for improvement.  I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the development process of Candelabra.

Each level of Candelabra begins with the lighting of a match, and ends with the lighting of a candle.  Matches burn out in 10 seconds. Matches also go out if you drag them too quickly.   Keep the flame alive by lighting other matches and flammables.

The Good

• Limited Scope – I aimed for the game to have 10 levels and I was able to accomplish that.  There are a few core game mechanics – clicking and dragging matches to light other matches, dodging water, dodging blocks, and lighting fireballs which travel along a set path.  Much more than that I think would be too complicated.  Any less would be too boring.
• Simple Controls – One thing I’ve noticed is that after playing 40 or so games from this competition is that it’s not easy for me to adapt to the multitude of control schemes I’ve encountered.  I haven’t come across many that are too hard to learn, but when you’re playing lots of games in a short period of time, it’s a lot easier when controls are introduced as you play the game.  Having to read a paragraph of instructions can kill it for me.  I wanted people to be able to play my game without doing any reading, and for the most part I think that is the case.  If you haven’t figured out what to do in 10 seconds, the word SPACE appears, which is all the instruction needed to get going (hopefully the player realizes quickly you need to click and drag the match).
• Unity – It’s a great engine and I have a lot of experience with it, so there weren’t any technical hurdles.  I’m no artist, so I used Unity’s lighting and particle system to improve the aesthetics.  All the text in the game was made with a Unity plugin called Polygon Tool, which lets you create polygons by adding and modifying points in the editor.  This was the first time I used it in-depth, and it was perfect for what I needed.  For the few textures I used, I made some quick random images in Paint.NET and took one picture of some rocks near my house.

The Bad

• Audio – It’s not that I thought the audio itself was bad, but it does not sound the same across different speakers.  I made the music with Linux Multimedia Studio.  I was wearing headphones.  The background music consists of three oscillating waves which shift subtly every 4 measures or so.  The effect is noticeable and helps set a weird, eerie mood IF you have headphones on.  If not, your speakers may not pick up the subtle changes in the waves and it just sounds like an annoying buzzing noise.  I wish I could have caught this problem because it would have been easy to avoid.  If you do play with headphones, I think the audio is ok.  Definitely could be better, though.  Also, I would have really liked to record the sound of an actual match lighting, but I could not capture a quality recording.
• Frustration – The main game mechanic can be incredibly frustrating.  Moving the mouse the slightest bit too fast will put out the flame.  You can do this 5, 6… 10 times in a row even when you SWEAR you won’t do it another time.  But you will… oh you will.  I did not have time to have other people test this mechanic or I would have a better idea of how sensitive to make it.  I adjusted the sensitivity a few times, settled on what felt right to me, and hoped that it wouldn’t be too hard or too easy for the average person.  I’m not sure if the satisfaction of beating the game outweighs the pain endured while playing, and for that, I apologize, but will not be held responsible for any broken computer peripherals.

Thank you for playing Candelabra.  I really enjoyed making it and would love to hear your feedback, good or bad.

14 matches were harmed during the making of this game.

Tags: postmortem

So, I used GameMaker 8.1 to make my game (I know, I know, kill me now), and my main complaint about my game is the file size – its about 107 mb! There really is no reason for it to be that big too. In a little while I will release the source code, and then if people could let me know how to optimise it I would be EXCRUCIATINGLY  appreciative!
Here is my entry.

Many thanks,

Taha

Check the let’s play of our LD48 entry on youtube made by a fan !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2dnB42mZBA

And make sure to try and vote for it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=19103

Tags: LD27, Let's Play

I’ve already written a post-mortem about what I personally learned from LD#27 and creating my first entry, Food court hell. However, I haven’t gone over what I’ve learned that will affect the future of my engine, LynxJS. After much thought and consideration here’s what I’ve decided is important to LynxJS development.

LynxJS is ready to make games

Originally I advised people against trying LynxJS as I thought it was extremely buggy, and basically useless. However, I would not have been able to complete the dare had I not used this library. I saved quite a bit of time compared to if I had simply prototyped a game with pure javascript, and much of my work was already done for me in terms of collisions, object handling and asset management. LynxJS, though a small library of only 1500 lines of code, is capable of game creation. That being said…

LynxJS is not ready to make games

A little contradictory, but it’s the truth. Though Lynx is capable of making the prototyping process easier and faster, it still isn’t ready to go beyond just that. I found that with my library it was still missing some basic features that I’ve overlooked, including collision settings, a better collision detection algorithm, and no ability whatsoever to go beyond the prototype phase. It may have simplified my development, but there were too many instances where the library had hindered me more than helped me. Lynx was originally designed with no specific targets defined. My goal was to create an engine that worked, not worked well.

In all fairness, Lynx has a long way on a short road to go before it could be considered a true game engine, which is something I will be working on over the next few weeks.

The future of LynxJS

Right now, the biggest problem I’ve found is that I haven’t completed the classes I’ve already created. Collision detection is buggy and overpowered, IO is not nearly finished and requires more precise events, and mouse support isn’t even added. At the moment, my plans are to touch up IO and Time classes, and I’m going to add components before changing collision from a built in class to a supported component. What that means is that this presents the opportunity for either myself or other developers to create collision components to help cut down collision checks and better algorithms to perform said checks, while still allowing the core to handle the onCollide event subscriptions.

While collision is being pushed to a supported component, it isn’t the only class that will be making that transition. Both the developer tools and Map classes will be converted to components. This is in an effort to reduce bandwidth and load times to be minimal, and both tools have instances where the classes would not be used.

With these changes in place, Lynx will become a more dynamic library, loading only what it needs to while remaining powerful and efficient. Lynx-CORE will be the only file you need to directly include in your applications, and a simple import command will handle anything else you need. I’m still looking into ways to make this even simpler so these plans are subject to change, but overall the goal is to keep Lynx simple and to make Lynx as powerful as possible.

After the above changes have been completed, Lynx will be at an alpha milestone and I will open the community, where hopefully developers will come together to help with library changes, creating components, and showcase their creations. I’ll also begin working on a visual editor for Lynx games to help simplify the process.

What to expect:

Honestly you shouldn’t expect much from Lynx in the near future. As a (somewhat starving) full time server, I don’t get too much time to work on my favorite projects. Another problem is since I’m working on this mostly by myself, I don’t have many people I can run ideas by/decide how things should work with. I’m looking for more people to join the LynxJS team, but I’m not expecting much considering it’s much harder to find a team for something that isn’t well established. LynxJS probably won’t become viable until at least early 2014.

If you are interested in contributing to the development, you’re welcome to send me a short message on twitter and I’ll get back with ways you can help. I’ll also be revamping my personal website as well as pushing these changes to the LynxJS website within the next week.

Thanks for reading, and best of luck in your future game creation endeavors!

-Cosrnos

This was my first Ludum Dare adventure and also my first game jam. I usually avoided game jams because I was under the impression that you must suffer sleep loss. Funny, I found a lot of Ludum Dare advice saying to get a good night’s rest, but that’s besides the point.

My best impression with Ludum Dare was the wonderful community here. There was a lot of positive energy, which I don’t usually see on the interwebs. I would like to thank everyone for making such a wonderful community of game developers and for making this game jam. And thanks to everyone who played my game. I was surprised by the amount of people who liked my game!

The game can be played here. Video here.

Design

Even though I’m not a game designer, the design stage of this project was probably the fastest. When I saw the theme 10 seconds, I was more than happy to work with it, but I wanted to make something a little unique. Then someone mentioned finding other definitions of the word “second”. This intrigued me to look up the word in a dictionary.

Seconds most likely refers to a unit of time, but there is also that verb that’s similar to “agreeing”. In that context, it would be like saying “I second you!” That’s where I got the idea of the ten diamond-shaped spirits revolving around you. If you do what they like (risking your health for a special relic) they will “second” you, as in support you in your fight against the opponent.

I’m not sure if that makes much sense, but that’s what I came up with. That’s also where the name “10 Seconds In 10 Seconds” derives. Not the most unique name on earth, but I figured it would be good enough. I surprisingly finished designing the first night (Friday).

Programming

Programming was where I spent the most time for this project. Probably the case with a lot of people. I would have to say that it was better than I thought. Of course, I studied programming in college and I already had experience with Unity, but I think all programmers know that you get this great feeling when you program something and it mostly works and you know what you’re doing. I certainly felt that way, even in AI, which I struggled with.

One of the hardest things I struggled with programming was the HUD, especially the healthbar. I haven’t done too much HUD programming in Unity, and even if I did, I don’t remember much. The biggest problem with the healthbar was to get the width to dynamically change. I was using a GUITexture in Unity to do healthbars, and GUITexture has a property called pixelInset, which is a rectangle. It took me a good night’s sleep to figure out that rectangles don’t like to be edited directly (such as pixelInset.width = 80), but the whole rectangle has to be replaced (pixelInset = newRect). That one dumb problem probably wasted a nice 3-5 hours, hours I could have spent on AI.

And that’s the main problem for me concerning AI. I started it late (about 3 hours before the deadline) and I could actually make it decent if I had more time to think over how the behaviors would work. Debugging AI is a very time consuming activity, so that doesn’t help much. I realized a lot of things in the AI I could have improved after playing the game post-release.

Art

I’m not much of an artist. Knowing that, I knew I couldn’t waste too much time on art. At the same time, I didn’t want my game to look bad. Early on, I actually wanted to use simple textures, but as I became more aware of the time limit, I stopped thinking about textures.

I decided on an art-style that mostly relied off differences in color and an appeal to simple polyhedrons (I suppose like old 3D games). There should be a sense that you are in an abstract 3D virtual world, not a realistic place you can compare to in real life.

The many cubes in the background, I feel, add to this art-style. They represent depth and location in the playing space, since you see all of them at slightly different angles. I also figured that I wanted a visual background of some sort. It kind of reminds me of the games made by Kenta Cho, so in a way this art-style is a tribute to his inspirational works.

I modeled everything in Maya except the pentahedron (the players) and all standard Unity primitives (capsules, spheres, and blocks). The pentahedron was borrowed from a game I worked on with a student team. I was surprised I still had the Maya license granted for being a student, but I want to learn Blender someday so that I don’t have to rely on very expensive software.

Conclusion

In the end, I actually had a really great time (I was uncertain of the outlook) with this game jam. The time constraint was actually a nice driving force to make me deliver something, even if it’s not the best thing on earth. You really do learn a lot from this, people are serious when they say that.

As for my game, I will make a post-compo version that addresses the problems mentioned in people’s feedback. I’ll tweak controls, but who knows how long that will take. I definitely will have a local two-player setup. The two-player mode will most likely use Xbox 360 controllers. I will make the tutorial much better because I know it does not explain the controls and that would annoy players. I’ll try to refine the game design so it’s easier to get ammo and get seconded by spirits. And of course, I will fix the AI. I will take my time for the post-compo version, so I can’t promise that it will come soon.

Anyhow, thanks to everyone who played my game and gave feedback. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can check it out here. Gameplay video can be seen here.

Tags: 10 seconds, First entry, First Time, first-timer, postmortem

I think I shall go with the time honored separation of Good Stuff and Bad Stuff.

Good Stuff:

• Choosing to do the Jam (solo): I wasn’t feeling particularly well this weekend, and doing the Dare, with its ridiculous and demanding pace, probably would have killed me. Doing the Jam was great because it allowed me to slow down a bit, meaning I could put a little more effort into my art and music.
• The Tiled map editor: Tiled is incredible – it works so well that it seems like it can read my mind at times. If you’re still editing maps with MS Paint, or God forbid using a home brewed map editor (like I was at one point), please do yourself a favor and check out tiled. It will save you so much time.
• Writing music: I’ve really honed my ability to write music quickly – I busted out the main theme in 2.5 hours and I think it rocks, and I even had time to write two other themes too! This is all thanks to One Hour Compos, which, over the last year, helped me get better at writing music faster than anything else I can possibly think of.
• HaxeFlixel: It gets the job done and it gets out of the way. Back in the day I used to have a lot of people complaining about clumsy controls and awkward interactions – all that’s gone now. This is wonderful because it means I can focus on the important stuff
• Clever concept: I loved the theme, and came up with 2 brilliant ideas almost instantly. I really loved the idea I eventually stuck with, though I felt like it had a LOT more potential than what I managed to get in-game.
• Art: I think this is certainly a step up from LD26.

Bad Stuff:

• I failed to get a beta tester… again: Actually not 100% true – my beta tester just happened to live in Sweden (I’m on the west coast of the USA), so our interactions were unfortunately super brief. Near the end of the jam he shot a ton of brilliant ideas at me, and I wish I had more time to implement them. But then again, isn’t that how all Ludum Dare game work?
• Forces outside of my control: I was feeling less than spectacular pretty much the entire Ludum Dare, and I had a lot of other crap happening during the first day (I had to move from 1 apartment to another). Can’t do anything about stuff like this, of course, but I’ll always wonder how much better the game could have been if this wasn’t the case.
• I didn’t really know HaxeFlixel: Know your libraries. Know your libraries. Know your libraries. I had used HaxeFlixel for maybe 5 total hours before LD27, and it definitely showed. Especially at the beginning, I was running into dumb bugs that were taking MUCH longer to resolve than they should have been. By the end I was starting to gain more proficiency, but with more expertise with my library I could have done a LOT more.
• No polish: I had a lot of great ideas for polish that failed to make it into the game – particle effects, gradual darkening of the background as the world was coming to an end, etc. I pretty much failed to get any of them in game. This is because…
• Poor planning: The first two days I spent programming a lot of features. Then when I finally designed some levels, I didn’t use them. Like, I had this whole complicated setup of lasers that required some raycasting and stuff, but I never ended up using them. So dumb! So I’ve learned a valuable lesson to apply next time: Build levels as you build features. Whenever I do this, I have a nice and playable game by the end (LD24 and LD19 come to mind). Whenever I don’t, either my game is too short (like this one) or too buggy and hard (like LD26 and LD23).
• Humor: I feel like my game had 2 or 3 genuinely funny bits, but honestly my LD24 entry was much funnier. Seems like the funniest bits came when two (or more) characters were talking with each other, so I’ll have to remember to make excuses to do that in the future. I came up with most of the funny stuff when I was taking a break from the code, so I should remember to do that more often, too.
• Art: I’ve practiced doing background tiles a fair bit since the last Dare, but I’ve never really practiced doing 1) sprite animations, 2) animations of any kind, 3) dialog pictures, or 4) detailed backgrounds of any sort. So when I had to do any of those during the Jam, I procrastinated, or took forever, and so some of my art looks great, and some of it doesn’t look good at all. This should teach me to practice ALL things equally, not just one thing!

Things I’ve learned:

• Build levels throughout Ludum Dare, not just on the last day. This is seriously the most important thing. It’s important so that I can…
• Stop being such a misanthropist and ask people to test my game! I’m positive that this would have helped more than anything else. I need to idle on the Ludum Dare IRC more And of course, I need to also…
• Know my libraries.

If you read through that, I’m massively impressed! If you just read the bold stuff, well, that’s pretty good too. Play my game and let me know if there was anything I missed, and I’ll hit you back with a review.

Original LD release: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=17178

V 0.2 alpha

Windows: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-H5lq1kSggrQTd1eDBUN1pDTmc/edit?usp=sharing

Linux: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-H5lq1kSggrLWhuMTUxN3RjdEk/edit?usp=sharing

WebPlayer: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9938325/PostWebPlayer/PostWebPlayer.html

fixlog:
– shooting works, altho it awaits animations and a true projectile. ( DEATH TO THE GOBLINS!)
– goblins have sound and animation again
– added fall dmg settings and execution
– moved death control to a designated class that holds HP
– added swing and shoot sounds
– added walking sounds
– added running sound
– added jump sounds
– added jumpdmg sounds
– added pickups sounds
– randomized death sounds
– enabled the running mechanic
– improved jumping mechanic further.
– audio randomizer and manager still needs further testing, it loads audio, gets the messages, but the playback does not occur.
– audio configuration is fully text based. Gives us alot of flexibility.
– audio randomizer follow the children audio chain if child owns an audio randomizer.
– if you kill goblins in the wrong direction it crashes the game.
– we have a beta map editor from Skalniak
– we’ve found a fix for the web player, soon we’ll roll out the fix. MAC users unite!

Known Issues:
– Movement still feels weird
– No controller support
– No controls mappings
– Credits button does not work
– You cannot swing sword

v 0.1 alpha

Windows: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9938325/PostLD.zip

Linux: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9938325/PostLDLinux.zip

Fixed:

• Jumping
• annoyance with the any key presses on win/loose
• display timer with time left
• kill sound for main character
• added crosshair
• death sounds and looks cooler + blocking controls and timer hud.

Known issues:

• Unity web player does not work with keyboard input, does not play scripted sounds. Any help here will be great.
• You cannot shoot
• You cannot swing sword
• Movement feels weird
• No controller support
• menu sliders do not work
• credits button does not work

I guess it’s a good time as ever to reflect on things from the competition. If you haven’t seen my entry, Timeline, you can view it here or access the web version on my site here. I had a lot of fun, even if I didn’t work as hard as I should have. Participating definitely gave me something to do and I managed to learn a lot about how flexible I am in terms of design decisions. Lots of lessons learned, some more experience gained. All in all I’m glad to have finished in 48 hours.

What Went Wrong

• I promised myself I’d make something with really neat source materials, and then sort of threw that out the window. I ended up with this cluster of events by the end of it with no real discerning marks between them. If it wasn’t for last minute changes, all the objects would be using the default names as well. So, in the future, stick to a more strict system to get everything named and organized.
• Like everything, Construct decided to crash after having been running for 12 hours or so, and unfortunately I hadn’t saved for a while. I had lost all my work from the reverse gravity power-up to the first secret level (so the game was complete). Fortunately I managed to redo the power-ups and also get some of the levels back (good thing I posted them on Twitter), so it wasn’t all bad. I learned my lesson and saved more option (it would crash 2 more times before the end of the competition).
• Lack of sleep made me make a grave error in judgement and I accidentally erased all my animations and had to redo them from scratch. I never did redo the idle animation however, but I think the game looks better without it.
• I approached this like creating a small game without realizing that I’d be judged for it, so I might have made the game wildly too difficult and added too much content that was hard to reach. How many people found out that there’s a secret exit over the moon in the first level?
• If I did this game again, the timeline would be static and activities could not be moved. It would have allowed me to automatically put down actions in the right order (like parachute jump for clearing long gaps).
• I also made it so the timeline doesn’t reset between deaths. That was a stupid idea because it will mess with player rhythm in certain levels. Definitely a bad decision on my part.
• Of the 10 items ideas I had, I only managed to add 5. I also wanted to do more with the items I’d added, especially the really cool ones like reverse gravity and hi-jump.

What Went Right

• The timeline worked a lot better than I expected. Jumping was awkward as hell but the other abilities worked perfectly with it.
• I tweeted a picture of one of the levels I had lost and managed to redo it from the image. I really liked that level, so I was glad that I managed to add it back in!
• Because I went with Construct, it was really easy to port to every system possible. Not only does it have some of the best web support, but the ability to export to NodeJS made it a one-click process to port it to Windows, OSX, and Linux. Plus, the ease of use meant that I could get a lot of work done that would have consumed a ton of time in Unity.
• A lot of design flexibility meant I could change and balance a lot of mechanics in the game, as well as quickly come up with new levels, and I’m sure there’s a lot of brilliant combinations of the items in game that I hadn’t considered. Additionally, if I wanted something very specific to happen, I could give the player a new item that would do exactly that. Having an extremely vague design with a highly modular mechanic let me get away with a lot of things.
• Originally I was worried because I was supposed to be busy on Sunday, which would mean dedicating less time to the competition. Fortunately (or unfortunately from some perspectives) my plans were delayed and I managed to finish earlier than I expected.

What I’d Change

• Like I said before, make a static timeline instead of the dynamic, player-controlled one I have now. Giving the player control over every item collected meant that they could get stuck or not understand what combination to use to get through a level or over an obstacle.
• More states instead of actions like jump or attack. Reverse gravity is my favorite item in the game because it’s easy to understand, lasts for exactly one second, and lets you do some neat stuff with it. Things like jump don’t always last for a second, so even though I had combinations like parachute into jump, jump into parachute didn’t go as well.
• Probably a shorter timeline. The theme made me use 10 seconds somewhere, but when you’re controlling input it would take way too long to come around again if you mistimed a jump.
• An easier game with more content instead of secrets and tricks. Nobody is going to find the secrets during the judging period anyway, so it would have been better to introduce players to more interesting ideas rather than frustrate or confuse them.
• Make the item system a lot more family based. That would have allowed me to add new items a lot faster, though as it is, adding them was pretty quick.

Overall, it was a great experience! I’m proud of how the game turned out and I’ll definitely be participating in the next Ludum Dare. Now there’s nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs and wait!

It is a few days after the competition now, so I’ve had some time to rest and reflect about my performance over the weekend. Although I am not entirely happy with the outcome of my game, I am very proud that I managed to string together a functioning game with an actual goal. I would have loved to have more time to implement all the features I wanted, but I guess every LDer runs into that issue.

Play the game | Ludum Dare

I managed to render my ridiculous timelapse video after having a lot of trouble. The biggest lesson I have learnt this weekend is not to record a time-lapse in fraps because 10 hours of footage is about 500 GB of data. Sadly, this meant I only managed to record about half of my work over the weekend, but it is symbolic enough none the less. I’ve compressed about 12 hours of footage into a few minutes, but I had to render multiple times so it really screwed up the video quality. Oh well, I have learnt from my mistake. In the future, I will use fraps to automatically take a screenshot every 10 seconds or so, and instead use the image files to compile the time-lapse.

Click here to watch the video

What went wrong:

I spent way too long fussing over how neat and reusable my code was, that in the end I was very short on time. I managed to program all these brilliant tools for making maps, characters, and weapons, but because of the lack in time, I couldn’t make the assets to actually use the tools. I ended up with only a few building variations, 3 characters, and 2 weapons. It really doesn’t take long to add variety to the game because of all the infrastructure I coded, but because I didn’t have time to make any art assets for them, the tools proved to be useless. I really should have just hard coded everything. That way I would have been able to focus more on the art, and actually make some sound effects and music. Next time, I will definitely try to manage my time better.

The theme was actually another reason I ran out of time. I decided to do a more ambitious project in hopes of using the theme in a more interesting and unique way. I originally planned for you to play as the good personality, trying to keep your other personality out of trouble by hiding weapons from him, or taking pills to try to suppress the amount of control he has over you. Unfortunately, I realised I was running short on time and had to change the rules so that you play the psychopathic personality that is obsessed with murder. In the end, the theme felt very tacked on, and not an essential part of the game even though the whole game was planned around it.

Because of the lack in time, I really skimped out on the art. I didn’t have time to texture the buildings, floor and doors. And I had to design the characters as just emoticons so that it would be faster to make. I really want to focus on this more next time.

As I said before,  I didn’t have any time to make the music or sound due to the lack in time. To be honest, even if I did have a few hours, I’m not entirely certain I would have been able to make any. I have absolutely no experience in any sound software, and was very unprepared.

On the first day, I should have gone to sleep much earlier. I spent a good amount of the day doing proper work, but I started to slow down near the end. I started day dreaming, getting distracted and making bad decisions due to being tired and having worked on the game for so long. I would have been much more productive if I went to bed a few hours earlier and woke a few hours earlier the next day.

What went right:

I personally felt that I had done some very solid coding. The game is relatively bug free, works as intended, and has some very reusable classes. I spent too much time on coding properly, but that did mean it came out quite nicely. I might pull out some of the stuff made in here to keep for later as some basecode.

I think constantly forcing myself to step away from the coding to write a development log about my progress really helped me. It gave me a good break, and allowed me to take a step back and evaluate the choices I was making. This helped me slow down, think more about what I was going to do without just rushing into a decision that would have turned out badly.

I managed to get a few people to play the game and give me feedback. This helped me find a game breaking bug that I could not replicate on my own computer, but I managed to fix that. I got a lot of great suggestions, and I wish I had time to actually use them, but I didn’t even have enough time to fill in my own stuff.

In general, I thought development went well. I spent a total of about 25 hours of pure development (taking out breaks, etc), which is quite a lot in 48 hours. I also felt quite productive in that time, even though I might not have been producing the right things.

Conclusion:

Overall, while I wish the game could have come out so much better with all the features that I planned, I am still very pleased that I managed to make a functioning game. I think it can actually be quite fun once you understand all the rules and controls. The competition has definitely given me a kick of inspiration to continue with game development once again, so I hope to use this to be a bit more productive. My next project will likely be the October challenge, where you have to try to make at least $1 by making a game. I think completing a challenge like that will be absolutely crucial to moving up a level in terms of game development.

Platformer with 20 levels about Schrodinger’s cat!). By pressing the Shift character is in a superposition and can pass through walls for a while) This game should you enjoy it because everybody loves cats!)))

These postmortem posts seem to be a thing, so let me recapitulate real quick.

This was my first Ludum Dare and a great excuse to jump into the development of a new game head over heels. I almost stayed away because the theme did bother me initially.

I went terribly unoriginal and decided to base my game around defusing bombs with 10 seconds left on the timer. That instantly reminded me of a scene from Lethal Weapon and so I had the main ingredients for Hair Cop already together.

Since I’m a sucker for platformers and 8bit style graphics it’s no surprise that my entry would become just that. Kicking down the doors to start a level and some pseudo-stealth-ish gameplay made it interesting enough for me to go through with development.

Most of the mechanics and assets were done on the first day. The second day was mostly tweaking, creating actual levels and adding a few more things. All of that interrupted by bodily needs, lazyness and Saints Row 4, I would roughly estimate the development time at 8 hours overall.

The whole process went surprisingly smooth for the most part, only in the last few hours I kind of dropped the ball and didn’t use the available time to include a few things that should have been in the game. There was suddenly time-pressure and I had to tie up a few loose ends quickly.

I’m pretty happy with the result simply because it exists and it’s playable. That is enough for my wounded developer heart

Just updated my post too have mac and web compatibility. I feel like an idiot for not doing this so here is  the updates.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27105

“10 seconds left, Mr. Pink Rabbit!” can get awfully messy depending on how much risk you are willing to take. I’ll leave a screenshot here as proof, just to make you wait before I finish writing our postmortem (which I probably won’t post until tomorrow because it’s already past midnight here in France).

Please do play, rate and comment! I’m pretty much addicted to comments now ^^

Here’s the entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24728

Thank you for your attention!

— Foug.

First off, I have a web build up so if you’re not on windows or just don’t feel like downloading anything, go here

Multiple Personality quest is a roguelike where you switch characters every 10 seconds. There are four characters, with different strengths and weaknesses and powers.

The Bad

Overambitious Idea

While the game was really fun to make it was a bit too much to squeeze into the compo and almost too much to squeeze into the jam. I didn’t get as many skills for the characters as I’d like, as well as pretty much no time to balance combat.

Game Balance

Game balance is way off. It’s ok at level 1, at level 2 you get a bit powerful, at level 3+ you get way too powerful, especially if you get over level 5 since I MEANT that to be the level cap but forgot to actually cap it (Which is why you see your character have an “Unknown Sword” or some such when you hit level 6+ Oops). It’s actually possible to finish the game at level 8 and the boss is fairly trivial by then.

This also takes away some of the differentiation of the characters. Who cares if Geoff is a kickass healer if you never need to heal? Who cares if Chloe can root if you one-shot everthing?, Who cares if Dirk has really good armor if nobody else ever gets hit anyway? Who cares if Gloria can teleport if she can one shot everything twice over. (Well I guess you care if it gets you around the dungeon faster :p)

The Good

Gameplay

While the balance is way out of whack past level 1, I think the gameplay idea is pretty solid and with some tweaks could become a pretty fun game.

JSIL

I’ve used JSIL for my javascript ports for the last 3 LDs and each time I use it it seems better and better. Porting this time around went really smoothly.

The Jam

I like how the Jam can be a good fallback if you have too much idea and not enough time for the compo. At the end of the compo period, what I had wasn’t really a playable representation of what I wanted, but I had the extra day to get it working and that made all the difference.

Saving Graphics for Last

Since I had to strip out so many features to fit my coding into the allotted time, this resulted on more code time and no wasted graphics work, since when I started on graphics I knew exactly what I needed and no more than that. If I had done graphics first I probably would have a bunch of dungeon, armor and potion graphics I didn’t use.

If this game sounds interesting to you. Go here and play it.

Tags: postmortem

You might have already played my game

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=5959

Well, I decided to continue a bit on it. Making it work smoother, better balancing, LAN connection. s/tuff like that. So I decided to put in some more characters as well.

Introducing [Put a name in the comments], the Bomber and [post a name in the comments], the spear man. They don’t have names yet so put one as a comment.

The French guy will drop bombs, which will a second or so later. The spear man throws his spear to the very end of the level, but he will need to get it back, to throw again.

Character ideas are also always welcome.

The Ludum Dare game browser has all comp and jam games. I’ve also set it up to update ratings and coolness every 15 minutes. Enjoy! http://ludumdare.itch.io

Tags: moonscript

Hello again!

I have added the “Source code” for Pressurized (quotations because its a .GM81 file for GameMaker 8.1) for the kind people who offered to take a look at it for optimization purposes.

You can view Pressurized, my first Ludum Dare entry, here.

Many thanks,

Taha