I’ve played a lot of games. A LOT. And rated them. But I just wanted to check that it’s allowed? My C number looks really weird (as in really high compared to some other people.) I’m aiming to play as many games that work on my computer as I can, while I can. After a certain amount, are you supposed to stop rating and only play?
The Link.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27229
Minor bug fixes, etc.
My earnest advice and goal for next time is to have a working demo BEFORE the time limit is up! This way I don’t cause so many inconveniences when I have to keep re-uploading. Hope you check it out! Report any problems and i’ll get on it asap. I run on a windows so if one appears on another system, do let me know so I can run some scans 
Have a smiling Darla while your at it.
Bun Out!
Tags: 2013, LD #27, THE WHiTE ROOM, Visual Novel, VN
This is a repost from my personal blog, but figured I might as well throw it up here too! I tweaked a few things to make it applicable to this audience.
Day 1
The event started at 9 pm for me. I feel sorry for those of you overseas! I spent about two hours thinking through different ideas and working out how I could implement them before coming up with an idea inspired by the game Lemmings. I thought it would be cool to have something where you are directing characters to some sort of goal. For the theme tie in, I was imagining different methods of directing the characters, that would last for 10 seconds. I figured I would find more ways to tie it to the theme as I went.
I needed an idea for my characters now. At first, I thought of the minion characters from the movie Despicable Me. They seemed like a perfect fit for a lemming type role. I knew I couldn’t just copy that idea, but I opened up my graphic editor and started working on a walking animation, picturing minions in my head.
I’ve never done character animations before, but a quick search online showed me the basics of how to draw walking legs. Soon enough I had the basics down. But I needed my own character. The iconic yellow minion with blue overalls wasn’t going to cut it. I started thinking about construction workers in general, with their orange work pants and googled, “orange jumpsuit” for some inspiration.
It wasn’t long before I saw a picture of an astronaut and all the sudden it all came together. The setting would be in space on a ship. The crew of the ship would need to navigate their way across the ship, with doors randomly opening and closing, and other random events like fires, airlocks opening to outer space, etc, happening on a 10 second cycle. You would be given tools to open and close doors and redirect the crew.
By 4 am Saturday morning, I had my character animation and a few other graphics complete.
Saturday morning by around 10, I had eaten breakfast, walked the dog, and was ready to work. I knew I had spent a lot of time so far on just my character animation and still had multiple graphics I would need. I’m not a graphic artist, so it was slow going. But I decided I better start programming and get some of the game itself done. I had chosen to use the Unity 3D engine. I had only jumped into learning Unity about a month ago, and had even put up a tutorial for it based off what I had learned. Pretty basic stuff, but I was picking it up fast. I worked Saturday till about 6pm when I needed to head out for a bit. I was back and ready to work around 9pm and had another good session of coding and graphics. By 4:30 am Sunday, I was ready to call it quits for the night.
Saturday felt like a good day of work, but I still had a game that had no user interaction and was not even tied to the theme yet. There was a space ship with rooms and crew members walking around it. They would stay contained to the outer walls of the space ship, but were walking through interior walls as they pleased. They were also getting stuck in right corners. I needed to turn the simulation into a game, tie in the theme, add player interaction, add a start menu and credits/score screen, and polish and fix the bugs. I had a lot of work left.
Sunday I was eager to get started and got back at it by 9:30 am. I had done a lot of the graphics but still had a few things to make. I quickly threw together some doors and then jumped back into programming. I’m actually really pleased with the progress I made on Sunday. I hit very few slow downs and my game was pretty bug free. I got all the collision detection finished, albeit very crudely programmed. But it was there and working. I finished up door interactions and got them opening and closing randomly on 10 second cycles.
My plan for user interaction was to use a playing card type system. The player would have a “hand” of 4-6 cards. Every 10 seconds they would be dealt new cards to fill their hand back to 6. These cards could be move tiles, to redirect the crew, door open/close tiles to open and close doors, fire extinguisher cards to put out room fires, etc. By this point, I realized random fires were not going to happen. And I wasn’t going to have time to implement airlock doors and animate the crew being sucked out. For testing purposes, I had also allowed the player to open and close doors simply by clicking on them. So I decided the card system would just be for move tiles. I quickly put together the graphics I would need and went to work on the redirection logic. Again, I was pleasantly surprised how quickly it came together. The most difficult part was getting them to work well next to doors, and making sure the different actions the character could take were processed in the proper order.
Around 6pm I had finished up all the game functionality I wanted (about 3 hours before the end of the competition). I then spent the next 3 hours polishing and testing the game. Fixing any small bugs I found, updating graphics to make sure the color palette worked well together and making sure the web version of my game was up and running.
Like I said earlier, I had a ton of fun with this. My wife was great, letting me program all weekend. I’m currently working on a game for iOS, but I’ve never released anything publicly yet. So it was extremely satisfying to complete a working game and put it out there. I’m really happy with the way the game came out. There are a few things I want to change eventually. I feel the game is a bit too hard right now and there is a bit too much randomness. The movement tiles lasting only 10 seconds is not long enough and would really help with the difficulty if they lasted longer. So I will definitely tweak those once judging has ended.
I also didn’t get around to doing sound, apart from a single effect when you save a crew member. I used CFXR to make my single effect but was unable to come up with anything else I liked. I had wanted to make a sound effect for the doors opening and closing that I would play every 10 seconds, but it just didn’t happen.
Apart from those issues, I think the game turned out great. I calculated in the end I worked about 30-32 hours, with about 12 of those spent on graphics. I’m still amazed at how much I was able to accomplish in that amount of time. But as impressed as I am with myself, all I have to do is check out some of the entries you guys have created, and I’m blown away at what some people are able to accomplish!
Feel free to check out my entry and let me know what you think!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25089
That was a close one! After last minute problems our game was submitted closer to the deadline than ever before. (3 minutes before submission hour :P)
With our fifth Ludum Dare game down, we would like to present to you:
Trench Coat Tunes
You play as C.T Plaear, a fashionable music connoisseur with a magical cassette tape player.
Trench Coat Tunes protagonist, C.T. Plaear
This competition we tried to focus more on interaction with and exploration of the play environment. This included things like almost all game objects being physically reactive, to needing to find hidden items like keycards and passwords to progress. We also experimented with a combination of 2D and 3D art style, and like how it turned out for the most part.
We ended up with a bit more difficult of a game this time, with players often needing to find the best path through a level if they want a chance to progress past the difficult security guards.
We’ve already received some good feedback, including:
– Player movement is too slow/not as tight as we would have liked.
– Instructing the player on what they need to do could have been done better
– More polish in a few key areas (as we would have liked) could have made a world of difference.
Thank you all for the great responses, and as always we had a great time with this event!
And again, we hope everyone with check out Trench Coat Tunes.
Ludum Dare 27 was a massive event I’m sure a lot of you really got excited over.
If you’re still in that game dev mood, then come watch me develop my game Stonemen in Unity.
If you’re starting out and want to learn something, or are just a better programmer and want to embarrass me, Come join!
Streaming at: www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1
Hello! I just uploaded the timelapse for my entry “Defense of the Zorion!” Check it out!
If you haven’t already, play the game here!
Happy gaming! 😀
Tags: motivation, screenshot, timelapse, unity, unity3d, update, video
My interpretation of the theme led me to a puzzle theme. I have made platform, shooters, pac-man-like and 3d games, but I never made a puzzle game before. The experience was better that I could think.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24602
Now I’m getting fun playing the other games. And I surprised that I found no one other puzzle! Maybe this is the most uncommon game category?
Hey Everyone,
I’ll be working on a Dungeon Crawler MMO for the next few hours, and possibly pull an all nighter! If you’d like to join in: Twitch.tv/0Creds
Hope To See You All There,
– 0Creds
When the time came, and the theme was set, I was initially dismayed. It was … not one of my favourites. Oh well.
Fortunately, I knew I needed some things working in XNA, regardless of what I did, so I could just start coding, while watching Ludum Dare screencasts at Twitch. so, I wrote an engine which rendered textured quads, and set up the camera so that I could set them on screen with pixel precision.
Some 9 hours in, I finally started getting an idea I liked.
The initial concept was, that you’d play a hero, who’d have to stop a disaster, every 10 seconds, and rush to the next one. I imagined a caped character, saving planes and trains, stopping robberies and alien invasions.
Well, that wasn’t going to get done in 39 hours. So, time to simplify.
The times I’d played Arkham Horror, or the last time I spent over-analyzing the setting in Sailor Moon, probably cued something.
What is there was just one disaster type, that of interdimensional invasion? You’d fight the creatures rushing in from portals, and… stuff. I was kind of fuzzy on the details, but closing the portals or taking the fight to the enemy should be an option. Initially I had civilians whom the monsters would attack, and locations the player could visit, but time pressures -> snip.
Onwards, with the post-mortemizing!
Quite a bit. I was about 90% satisfied with my experience and results, although this was my first LD, and my second build-a-game-over-the-weekend participation.
Starting with the Engine.
Certainly not always a good idea, but in this case, I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to do – I didn’t want to do any modelling, but I wanted to have access to rotations and whatnot. This was also my XNA learning project, and I made good use of the first nine hours, despite having no idea of what I’d make.
That being said, I had to rewrite the core of the thing, as my initial version was badwrong. Of course, I figured the correct way to do it immediately after a good night’s sleep, when the competition had finished.
Simple Design
Not having an overambitious design cut down on time needed, and I stil barely squeezed the minimum in, within the time limit.
Focusing on Finishing and Staying on Target
To get a game, not a game demo, I needed win and lose conditions. I sort of got there – if I’d just slapped a “you win” screen in front of the player, when they reached the final battle portal stage, it would have been complete. Now, while there’s a distinct lose condition, there wasn’t clear win condition. It has a screen showing controls, and even some sound effects.
It’s not just a tech demo, but an actual, if tiny and not very entertaining, game.
Coder Art
I like drawing, and I’m not horrible at it. I intended to leverage that, but I slapped in some quick placeholder art — which ended up being pretty much final. It’s aesthetics grew on me, like an alien fungus. I didn’t end up spending much time on it, just adding tiny little animations, which made things quite lively enough
Tiled
The Tiled editor, while very simple, is great at quickly putting levels together, and I know some simple tricks with it, so that was fun.
What Went Wrong
Not that much, really.
Using 3d.
Not in and as itself, but learning and building took a huge chunk of time, which I could have avoided, if I’d just stuck to blitting. As it turned out, I didn’t really need all those 3d features at the time.
Of course, now that I’ve rewritten the engine and so forth, I’m starting to see some benefits from the 3d engine in the background, but for the purposes of the competition, it was redundant.
Getting Zero Peachy Keen Features Implemented
I had a plan to give players power-ups depending on how they performed during each 10-second segment. Various attacks, heals, and other neato things. As I got none of them in, the player was left with two basic attacks, both which are kind of meh.
Using CamStudio for Timelapse
Not a big thing, but I lost first three hours of video due to hitting esc at the same time as CamStudio offered a save dialog, and that was that. ’twas a pain, mostly.
Afterwards, I familiarized myself with Chronolapse, which is much better regarding timelapse recording. I also lost a few minutes fighting with CamStudio, which may or may not count.
(I linked the timelapse videos in previous posts, if you’re interested)
Not Paying Enough Attention To Rules
I didn’t know there was a hour’s grace time to upload the product, after the actual competition time was done. I could have put in a bit more work on the game had I known that. Ah well.
Level Design, or Lack Thereof
My test level end up being pretty much the final one. I could have made the gameplay much more pleasant by simply redoing the level’s layout. Few things are as permanent as those meant to be temporary.
Still, I’m not very good at level design, in general. Need to improve there.
Coder Art
On the other hand, this was another thing, where an investment of, oh, 3-4 hours would have given me much more stylish graphics. Not that I had the time, due to spending most of the first day building the engine.
Tags: postmortem
———————–
FSCK is my jam entry for Ludum Dare 27 !
People are having a blast playing it, and now all people on Windows can join in on the fun!
Check it out and let me know what you think
Thank you!
Hi! I just made more adjustments in my post-compo version. Play it and tell me what do you think. 😀
Link: The First Odyssey.
so i used abundant-music.com to generate music and found it hard to find a good midi converter, in the end i used cowon media center. But i wanted to have 8bit sound origionally but as i said it was hard to find a good midi converter that wasn’t a trial version or some other catch.
Today I found GXSCC is a japanese software in english, but does the job asides from the odd crash, but for a simple conversion its perfect and i would recommend it for future use, especially in future ludum dares
link: http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-SanJose/8700/P/GsorigE.htm
my ludum dare entry
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27122
Has anyone done this before? There seems to be no tutorial on this, and Unity documentation is terrible concerning multiple controllers.
Hi!
I’m trying to write a postmortem, but so far I’m not very good at it.
The first day I started the stream on Twitch. If you’re interested, you can watch the record. But it will be available some time (problems with uploading).
In the game was more important animation and sound. So I’m not worried at the expense of code. It there is very little and it is very simple. And anyway I am very bad programmer. So I decided to focus on the atmosphere of the game.
I had an idea in my head to make the main character of the game by myself. Just fun to see myself as the main character in the video game. The character really took over some of my habits from life. He pulls it out from his pocket like me. It’s fun. It’s like I went for a walk and fell into my dreams.
[ME]
[REAL ME]
![[ DiscoFish ]](/data/posts/2013/08/a1a2cf36b029a52535493dba21a28310.jpg)
Only a little more than an hour before the end of LD. The game as a whole was ready, but there was a very important part – the music. This is the basis of my game. And if I had not had time to make music, then I would not have made the game. Just would not make sense to load the game on LD without music.
And luckily I was able to do everything! Yes, I wanted to make more sounds and music, but the time is not left.
All in the game musical compositions 8, 4 individual sounds, 11 phrases (when something cosmic talking with us.)
The game turned out not as what was supposed to be, but it was a great experience for me. And it was fun. I love LD.
I will try to write a few more facts about the development (of course if you are interested).
And yes, my English is very bad, sorry for that.
Thank you!
[ PLAY AND RATE MY TENTH ADVETRURE ]
Tags: adventure, ME, post-48h, post-mortem, postmortem, words
Hi fellow Ludumites,
I finally got around to publishing my Android game “Hedgehog Wars” to the Google Play store and the Amazon App store. So it is easier than ever to try my game out on your Android phone. Just follow the links from my game entry page below, or simply search for “Hedgehog Wars” in the stores.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18183
Now I really need to get serious about rating lots of other games! That is my mission objective for this weekend.
To give you some background information first, I am a researcher working at “Technische Universität Darmstadt” in the field of Serious Games with a strong interest in games in general. After talking about it a few times with my colleagues, I decided that it was time to take part in a Game Jam myself two months ago. Because I found the idea of having other participants around in order to exchange ideas intriguing, I asked my supervisors if we could organize a local event at our building and invite some of our students as well. Thankfully they supported this idea, so this postmortem will take a look at two different aspects – organizing a local event in an university context and making our first jam game simultaneously. Spoilers: In the end everyone agreed that this won’t be our last jam.
Our local event
To keep the experimental spirit of the jam, we didn’t want to impose any restrictions on the participants. This did not only include topical freedom, but also the technological. We explicitly invited participants with no preexisting knowledge in game design and creation and did not differentiate between student and university staff participants (after a joint brainstorming session we formed mixed groups only based on game ideas). While seeming natural, this decision had many implications in the context of a university, most importantly that it is almost impossible to grade such kind of event. In this case students cannot get credit points for their work, which prompted concerns that we would not find any student participants at all.Thankfully that wasn’t the case. Quite the opposite: We found 15 students, which was a great number for our location. But more importantly, these students were exactly the kind of people we had hoped for. The absence of grade meant that everyone had a great passion for (creating) games and that there was no pressure to get a result matching some additional grading-releveant criteria. Therefore everyone was highly motivated and eager to experiment, learning new skills on-the-fly. It also created a friendly environment without competition-based thinking, where the groups were willing to show their intermediate results and exchanged feedback regularly – which is often neglected when everyone is striving for the best grade. And last but not least, this informal structure minimized the organization effort and allowed the organizers to take part in them jam themselves.
All in all I am extremely pleased with the atmosphere during the jam as well as the results, which turned out to be great for a university with very few gaming themed lectures (in my opinion). I also found it amazing how much the everyone learned – the contribution of the supposedly “inexperienced” participations was well beyond what one could have expected. Big thanks to everyone who took part in the event and I’m looking forward to the next one!
A Maze Thing
As I already mentioned, I also took part in the development of the game “A Maze Thing”. This Unity-based game is built around the idea that you are in an enemy-filled maze, where you have a radar to counter your limited vision. This radar however updates every 10 seconds only, so you always have periods of uncertainty between this updates.
While I am very proud of the result, especially because it was our first jam entry, there are quite a few lessons we learned along the way:
I’m very curious on how much we can improve for the next jam by working on these aspects – and on the feedback we already received for our entry. Many thanks for the comment!
If you are interested in the games which were created at our local event:
PS: Please note that despite posting this text from our group account, this post reflects my personal perspective only.
Christian Reuter
Tags: game, local event, postmortem
for all those who have asked me here is the English version and removed grey message box
Is it possible to add an improved (highscores, better transitions, etc.) version to our entry (and keep the original one) ?
This will be my first postmortem ever, but hopefully it won’t be too bad..
I’m happy (and a bit surprised) that I finished my entry this time. I was close to giving up at a few different times, but in the end I’m quite happy with the result and glad that I stuck with it. My biggest obstacle this LD was the lack of time. I usually spend a lot less than 48 hours because I like to sleep and other things around the house needs attention. This was even more true this time since I have a newborn son (3 weeks old). Apart from getting my sleep during the night, I also had to babysit when my wife wasn’t available and we did a few trips for a couple of hours each day. I knew this would be the case before hand so when trying to come up with a game idea my biggest problem was that I always felt that I wouldn’t have enough time to complete a somewhat finished game based on the concept. A few of my favorite ideas had to be scrapped for this reason. In the end my game is a very simple game that is very different from my original idea, but still quite fun.
The original concept was a turn-based strategy game where the player had to survive in a maze where the walls were moving every 10 seconds. The final game is more of a fast-paced action game where the walls move every couple of seconds and new enemies and gold is spawned every 10 seoconds.
What went bad
What went well
What I will do different next time
If you haven’t tried my game, feel free to do so and I’d appreciate an honest comment!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=11705
Tags: post-mortem, red-alert
For me it’s C = 164 ^^