By Daniel Nascimento

Click here to play Antidote

This was my first time participating on a Game Jam, and it was a fantastic experience to me. It kinda happened by luck/chance. It was 1 hour before the theme announcement, and I was reading my twitter feeds when I saw a tweet from @ChevyRay looking for artists to collaborate on Ludum Dare 27. I had heard about it before, of course, but never really thought of joining due to my lack of coding skills. Soon enough we were chatting about it and waiting excitedly for the announcement of the theme.

As I had no previous experience with Jams, we were already talking on how we should do the art for our game. We both decided that low-poly would be the way to go, both to get things done fast and keep a simple, reproducible style going.

Once we got the theme, “10 Seconds” we went into brainstorming mode, throwing a bunch of ideas back and forth.  We had talked before about which games each of us like, and we found common ground on “dungeon looting” games, so we started there. Soon we had the idea of an explorer that got poisoned while exploring, and only had 10 seconds to survive, having to find “antidotes” that would prolong his life. With that idea, I had a Indiana-Jones type character in my mind, and went to Maya to start blocking him out, just 30 minutes into the clock.

I decided to get the animations done before sleeping, so I would be able to only worry about props and enemies on day 2. Did some really quick and dirty placeholder animations and crashed in bed (I was pretty sleepy already).

I managed to send Chevy the walk, idle, and hurt animations by 1:52am, and went to bed.

By Sunday almost all set props were done, so we started the day by finishing off some bones, rocks, plants and other dungeon decor that we could use make the floor/set more interesting.

When that was out of the way we figured we would spend the rest of the day doing enemies/enemy variations and whatever else Chevy needed for new ideas (Like that chest we did at 11:14am).

Good part of sunday was dedicated to enemies. We choose flying skulls, slimes and plants because those wouldn’t require me to do a proper rig and animation, they were animated on the engine itself by Chevy. Most of the variations are simply different textures with a Lattice deformer applied to the model and some vertex-tweaking. That allowed us to make lots of enemy variation in a small amount of time.

By the end of the day while Eliza was working on the Plant enemies I put together a scene in Maya for the main menu and another for the game over screen. After that I made a variation of that scene with the explorer getting poisoned (we were thinking of having a small 2 scene explanation before the game started, but we ran out of time to add it). Meanwhile Eliza was working on the logo and by 12:49AM we had this:

After that we went to sleep.

Monday was the last day for us, we had completed the list of props/assets we had established on Saturday morning, so we weren’t so sure what to do. We then decided to work on some of the enemy ideas we discarded when brainstorming enemies. Those didn’t have time to get coded into the game in the end ;[

At 1:22pm on the last few hours Chevy asked for a few more Scenes, for Credits and for the “Win” situation. At first he suggested I just posed some enemies in funny ways and named each enemy after one of us, but I thought it would be funny if I could get our faces into some explorers.

The Credits Pic ended up not having enough time to be in the game.  (That’s why the credits button is not working when you click on it xD). The “WIN SCENE” was made really quick, when we were running almost out of time.

All in all, by the time we submitted the game was looking quite nice. Despite not having shadows Chevy was able to adjust the lighting to look quite nice, even better than the Color Corrected screenshot I sent him. He also added some fake-sprite-shadows underneath things, that helps sell it. I’m quite proud of the overall look of the game, and what we were able to accomplish in so little time. The feeedback we received so far made me very happy

I would like to throw some more pictures over here to show some more details of the modeling (Click for larger version)

Huge 11mb 4K x 6K image with wireframe/texture of all assets if anyone is interested:

I’m really glad for being able to participate in this, and will definitely try my best to join the next one (Hopefully with such an awesome team as I had this time ^^ )

Tags: postmortem

I spent my weekend at the picnic. Monday’s morning. I started painting comics “”Adventure Time”” listening to the audiobook about zombies.Suddenly, Artem (our producer) called me and said, I had an excellent opportunity to make the comics begining and ending of one cool game.I was agree, ‘cos I knew Artem for a long time. But!I couldn’t notice a trick) Artem gave me only 8 hours to do the job.

I was taken aback! I dropped everything! I didn’t eat and drink,couldn’t meet my girlfriend from her work.I was painting, and painting, and painting.. It was great to invent main character that looked like a heat on the stipe. It was unreal to make quality path, that’s why I colored pen scetch. Horror was in next situation. I spent 5 hours drawing the begining and I had only 3 hours to finish another comics. I must draw our team on a final picture and it was harder than main character. Team mates sent theirs photos for me and I started off drawing. The allotted time was ending but I had!

Funny moment! Our game designer Yaroslav turned from blonde to brunette!The fact is that he spent black-and-white photo!I was in a hurry and made him black-haired by mistake) I note that I know how Yaroslav looks like))I found out my mistake two days later, when I logged in skype)The result was a funny joke for our team chat.

Tags: artwork, comic, postmortem

If you haven’t already, please play and rate our game, Hyper Furball!

Our title screen.  Cute, huh?

This is my 5th Ludum Dare entry, and my second time working together with my artist xellaya.  Things came together really nicely, and I’m really proud at what we managed to do in the 72 hours.  Here’s what the game looks like:

Scratch that mushroom!

Let’s go over what went well and not as well this time around…

What went well:

Settling on a good concept
We threw quite a few ideas around before settling on our sidescrolling RPG with the “hyper mode” mechanic.  Initially we were thinking about doing a Warioware style 10-second minigame collection (nothing new, but probably still fun), and were also seriously considering doing something along the lines of Off the Leash.  The idea thee was that you keep running to the right and have various obstacles and powerups that slow you down and speed you up, and you have 10 seconds to reach each checkpoint.  I was all set to start working on that when xellaya pointed out that there really wasn’t anything new about what we were making.  I thought about it some more and I agreed that it probably…wasn’t that exciting.  Friday night came and went and we still weren’t sure what we wanted to make, but eventually my train of thought went to “we should make the 10 seconds as intense and crazy as possible”, and from there I got the idea of a side-scroller where hyper mode basically involves you steamrolling a whole bunch of enemies and leveling up a bunch.  It ended up working really well, and I think it uses the theme in a way that’s clear, functional, yet non-cliche.  Awesome.

Liberal copy-pasting of code
There’s kind of a delicate balance when it comes to high-speed coding.  You don’t want to be clean and neat with everything, because it just takes too much time, and you’re only working with your code for one weekend anyways (not to mention, I’m the only coder here)…but you don’t want to be -so- messy that you end up introducing bugs and making things hard for yourself.  I ended up copying a lot of code from my LD26 entry Minimalist Mayhem, which I also did in Flashpunk, and that sped things up a lot, as I already had code for flashing the screen (with fadeout), and I didn’t have to think about the proper way to create/recycle objects in Flashpunk or anything like that.  There was also just a lot of one-off code that ended up getting duplicated, like the code for the parallax backgrounds–after doing that once, I just copy-pasted it each time xellaya finished a new set of backgrounds and I didn’t even have to think about it.  Yes, messy, but as long as you’re careful, it all works, and it’s fast.

Messy?  You bet.  But it meant not having to think about it at all.

Polish!
So many, so many Ludum Dare games are lacking in polish, but it makes such a big difference.  It’s what makes your game seem AWESOME.  That’s why it’s so important to pick something that you can execute easily, because once you finish the main execution, you can spend all the rest of your time making you game look pretty and fancy and smooth.  Screen transitions, sound effects, cleaning up your UI…all these nice little things really add up.  I’m really proud of the intro and title screen, for example–first impressions really count!  I was really excited when I put in xellaya’s graphics for the title and synced it all with the music…so proud!  Did I have to implement a jukebox screen with scrolling backgrounds (that cycle through the 4 different levels!) and colored stars flying around?  No…but it’s really neat and awesome, right?

The Jukebox screen, where you get to listen to my music!

Team Experience
We really worked together well this time…I’m an LD vet by now, so I know how things go and I basically didn’t run into any big hiccups at all, aside from a FlashDevelop “out of heap space” compilation error which disappeared every time I restarted Flashdevelop (phew!).  I even hacked the Flashpunk Text class to get the outline effect on all my text!  I’m comfortable with Flashpunk and I’ve gotten really really good at making game soundtracks in constrained time periods now–in total, I wrote all the music in around 7 hours’ worth of time! (all that training from One Hour Compo paying off!)  xellaya was also much more set up for things this time and we didn’t run into any of the miscellaneous troubles that we had last time for Marriage Quest (pngs being exported without transparency, etc.).  We used Dropbox to get artwork from her machine onto mine; don’t know why we didn’t do that last time.  It’s important to play to your (or your team’s) strengths when you’re thinking up a game…xellaya likes drawing cute things, and I really excel with 9-bit chiptune music, so it was great that we ended up with something that allowed us to use our talents to their maximum potential.

Scheduling
We both had the whole weekend to work on our game, which was awesome.  No other stuff to worry about, no imminent tests or projects, no getting sick, etc.  Awesome.

What went not quite as well:

The Level Up screen

UI Design
I did better than last time (Minimalist Mayhem just had a single huge screen with all the instructions on it)–I was especially proud of the “mash space” animation that shows up on screen the first time you enter hyper mode.  But the level up screen isn’t really that intuitive…in fact, the checkboxes ended up making everyone assume that you can use your mouse to click on them.  Which…still confuses me, to be honest, but maybe that’s just because I’m an oldschool console gamer and I think everyone else is weirdos in the way that they think.  I don’t really know how this could have been better, but I didn’t spend that much effort really thinking about it.  I guess I’m just not that great at UI design.  xellaya didn’t really have the time to think about this either, though, so in the end we just did what we could, and I think it’s at least functional.  It’s not great, but probably not -bad- either.

Gameplay Variation
The gameplay for our game is…”decent”.  I wasn’t entirely happy with the simple attack/block mechanic that I had going on for normal combat, but I knew that it would end up being okay in the end because that’s not really the focus of the game anyways–the focus of the game is having fun with ridiculous crazy hyper mode!  Still, I wish I could have made normal combat at least a bit more interesting somehow, though I’m still not sure exactly how I would do that.  I think in the end I didn’t have time to push for enemy attack variations or anything like that, and xellaya didn’t want to do a lot of animation…if we had spent more time on this, the polish level would have suffered.  So this is not really a mistake, per se, but still wish it could have been better.  This is probably the main point that might hurt our ratings.

Not Enough Playtesting
Yeah, yeah, super common problem.  This always happens, really.  It’s important to get feedback and have people play your game, but…when your heads-down trying to cram in the last few features (Breaktime mode!), it just ends up by the wayside sometimes.  I think I really lucked out that the game isn’t horribly unbalanced (at least, in a way that makes it not fun), because I really didn’t have that much time to spend on that and tweaking the enemy strengths and the upgrade requirements.  I did spend a -decent- amount of time on it, which is why leveling up takes about the right amount of time and everything, so I didn’t do too bad here.  But I feel like this was a danger area that I managed to sneak by on.

All in all, we did a great job, and I’m really proud of how things turned out.  Our game is quite fun, and I’ve been trying to see how fast I can complete it using no continues

My best so far:
Normal mode, no continues – 4:15
Hard mode, no continues – 4:40

Please leave your feedback and comments!  Oh, and go check out the soundtrack download too!

Tags: flash, flashpunk, LD27, ld48, postmortem

It’s been a few days since the end of the competition, so I decided that it’d be a good time to write a post-mortem.  This was my second ludum dare, and I think that I did an okay job this time around.  The game ended up being a stealth-type game where you have a set amount of life, which constantly decreases.  Killing an enemy slightly increases the time, and getting hit decreases it.  In each level, you have to take out a marked target.  If you want, play my game here: On Borrowed Time

What went well:

Graphics:  Sure, they weren’t amazing, but I was able to make them in not too much time and they seem to be pretty well received.  Also, I did the last LD in 2D, so 3D graphics were sort of a step up for me.

Sound:  I thought that I did a decent job with the sound.  The sfx were done pretty quickly, but I think they work.  The music is pretty minimal, but I thought that that worked well in creating a theme.

Controls:  This was one of the biggest complaints about my last LD entry.  Of course, it’s easier to do controls for a top-down type game than for a platformer, but this was one of the areas that I wanted to improve in.

What didn’t go so well:

Time management:  For a good third of the competition, I didn’t have anything remotely playable.  Also, I ended up having to rush at the last part of the compo, which brings us to…

Levels:  I was really disappointed with the amount of levels that I ended up with.  Really, there were only 3 substantial levels.  Plus, the biggest level was 16 x 16, when there was potential to make more expansive levels.

Those features that I wanted but couldn’t fit in:  I had wanted to make more than 2 types of enemies, like one that stood still but rotated, and one that maybe shot a projectile at you.  I also had this idea that after each level, you go to a sort of “black market,” where you could choose to keep the time you collected to help you out in later levels, or trade it in for upgrades or weapons.

That one bug:  On the last day of the compo, I was trying to get the background music ( a .ogg file) to play, and it kept throwing an exception when I tried to load it.  I spent a good hour trying to figure out what the heck was wrong.  For some reason, it eventually started working, but I still have no idea what the problem was.

Distribution: Distribution can be tedious.  Enough said.

So anyway, I thought this went well for the most part, and I plan to get a post-compo version up within a little bit.

Have you ever asked yourself what would happen if you could go up to 10 seconds into the past, undoing all actions by yourself and others in that time?

Have you ever sat down in the dark, all by yourself, asking what would happen if you suddenly were to be transformed into a green ball?

What about those late nights you’ve been awake, not being able to sleep because you’ve wondered how it’d be to be trapped in a seemingly endless, uniform cave, full of pits of some kind of bright red goo, possibly lava?

If you want, read my blog post about the game I wrote :3

After that, feel free to check out the LD page.

This was my first Ludum Dare, and it was fantastic! Stressful, but fantastic. At points my partner wanted to quit and at points my brain was fried, but we pulled through. And we made a game! If you haven’t already, check out “Run, Bun, Run!” I appreciate any ratings and/or comments immensely! So now it’s time to break down what happened.

Positives:

• We got out a game; a full game, with menus and everything.
• We made a great choice less than a day in to scrap our original idea and start over; it was way too hard to do, and super intensive in both code and art.
• We’re getting tons of positive comments (and feedback)! All of the comments (we got a lot, around twenty-five or thirty) we’ve received have been positive, praising the art and music. Some also offered some great feedback, which I will be aggregating here and reviewing before the next Ludum Dare.

Stuff to improve on:

• Make sure everyone on your teams knows all of the rules beforehand. About a day into the compo, I found out that some of my artists work was edited versions of copyrighted images, as she didn’t know that that was not acceptable. She then had to redo all of those sprites, which almost prompted her to quit. This all could have been avoided with proper precautions.
• Too many menus! We had a ton of menu screens (nine!). Too many. Keep it simple. Have only the essential menus, and try to keep a standard navigating method between them.
• Keep your game fair. The enemy spawning behavior I wrote wouldn’t prevent the enemies from spawning close to where you spawn, which often led to you dying rather quickly, which becomes frustrating. I ran out of time to fix it, when I could have just wrote that prevention in the first time. I could also have added a marker to tell you where a wolf was approaching from. We tried to do that with growling sounds that only played when near a wolf, but that game no indication about where the wolf was.
• Try not to shoehorn the theme into the game, if possible. Build the game around the theme, and try to do something innovative, which we failed at.
• Don’t settle for “close enough”. One of our menu screens listed a requirement that wasn’t actually required, but we decided that no one would really care, so we never changed it, which I would greatly have liked to.

In this post I’m going to talk about difficulty in games and future of my LD27 game, ShuffleLand.

First of all, thanks again to all of you who tried and rated my game (ShuffleLand) yet. I’m very aware of the fact that it’s too hard. Too hard for this age of gaming… I’m used to things like Dungeon Master, Prince of Persia I, Doom, Blood and many more (you know, when you have only three or four games on your ‘dos era’  PC, you are very happy of the fact that these games are hard — it means that you’ll get so much fun as possible of these games.. trying over and over)… In the fact, I find my LD27 game very hard and difficult too (I didn’t planned this as feature though). But as I promised in my “I’m in” post, ShuffleLand is going to be ported on Android platform (sometime). Don’t hold your breath. There’ll be much more content, joy and elegance in the finished game. Now I can only promise you online level editor, multiplayer, easier levels and maybe a little bit more. I’m also aware of the fact that audio isn’t as good as I planned (I didn’t have time to made it right )…

But, after all, this is Ludum Dare, right? Nobody expect that games here will be the best you can find (or create), it’s all about our experience, vehemence, enjoyment and 48 hours of bestiality. Programming and creativity. I’ve enjoyed my first Ludum Dare event and I’m looking for the next. Thanks for reading this. I’ll be very happy If you leave comment on this as well.

I thought I’d do something a little different and make a video post mortem about my experiences in Ludum Dare 27 and creating my game, The Ones You Love.  Hopefully you find it entertaining and enjoyable.

Play The Ones You Love

Rate The Ones You Love

Hello everyone!

5 people have been given The ENDESGA Design Award.

This Award has only been given to those who have impressed me for their entertaining design and game-play in their game.

Congrats to:

1: Hourglass – DoubleS

(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27170)

2: Clockwork Cat – patrickgh3

(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14266)

3: Slip – Sakuyan

(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13803)

4: Potato Lagoon – rezoner

(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=21594)

5: The Duellists – jay griffin

(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26325)

Well done, you definitely deserve it

-ENDESGA

The new instructions menu.

We’ve updated the Post-Compo version of Hourglass, hosted in Kongregate, and added a better instructions menu with more info on the lore, the effects of the balls and the controls. You can now retry just by pressing R, too, so there’s that.

Check out our Ludum Dare page here and the Kongregate version here.

I have updated my entry with a postcompo version.

• Improved control & platform collisions.
• Fixed: some levels start position too close to enemies,

Play & vote Film Leader game

Please just don’t ask why I feel like all my titles should be in uppercase, there is absolutely no valid reason. Anyway.

Last week was my first Ludum Dare, and, actually, my first game at all. I had been learning Lua for at least two weeks before doing this, so one might say I was an absolute expert. Expert of newbies, that is.

But, hey, I’m actually really glad ! Here’s how things went :

– Roughly five minutes after the theme was revealed, I had my idea and it didn’t change. One of my massive flaws is that I tend to want to do too much, and it’s not really something one can do during a jam. 😛

– Ten hours after that, the game was functional. Ugly, boring, just as fun as a Derrick episode. ( […] I just Googled Derrick… 90 minutes later I’m reading stuff about Mount Everest and Ice Age 4. Dang, back on topic. ) But it was still a game.

– Actually the 38-or-so next hours were mainly me procrastinating, adding one or two features when I felt like it. One of the most memorable was the recording of the sounds… 5 AM on sunday with half of Bapteme du Jeu sleeping next door, and me, yelling in Hugo’s mic… Realized halfway through that I was being REALLY loud, hence the weird ” one “.

– And finally, during the last hour, I added level 5. Just because of one or two people who beat the game like it wasn’t more complicated that toasting bread. Please, understand. My PRIDE was at stake here. And that’s why you’re all suffering on level 5 – for the few brave ones who endured my hellish voice until then, that is.

Notice that I’m not mentioning sleep. That’s because I didn’t get any rest. For 65 hours. Except for a ten minutes nap, waiting for my computer to reboot. I think it’s a pretty good way to jam, if you manage to do it and not procrastinate too much… Well no okay it was dumb. But still, I’ve been pretty productive, and it’s great !

What went right :

• The concept, found in a few minutes, and pretty interesting ( that’s what I thought in the beginning. Actually it was the opposite of original, but I’d rather set my goals to ” feasible ” rather than ” Hell yeah, if you’ve got a ten people team on coke for two weeks, you might make it ” )
• The graphics. Honestly. They’re plain simple, it’s pixel art, but compared to what I used to do not so long ago, it’s like comparing Picasso and Da Vinci.
• The sounds. I first thought ” Hey, let’s be stupid. I can’t make any sound by myself, right ? Rather than using the excellent sfxr, why not do something awful, yet fun ? ” Several people at Bapteme du Jeu said they wanted to see how it turned out, so here it is.
• The difficulty. Just what I wanted it to be. You end a level ( except level 1, but it’s a Field trip after all ) with 3 to 0 seconds worth of fuel left, and level 5 can be quite hard, even though you can get through with your hands tied behind your back provided you know where you’re going.
• The fun. Oh god the fun. I had fun making this game, I had fun playing this game, and above all I had fun watching people playing this game ( and getting crazy ). Nothing’s more satisfying, as far as I’m concerned, than a man in a hurry, late on his project, still sitting in front of your computer, yelling OKAY I’M TOTALLY GOING TO MAKE IT TO THE END THIS TIME, to end up laughing as hell because of the game over screen and the overdone explosion. But, hey, there’s no kill like overkill, right ? It’s supernuclear I told you.

What went wrong :

• Jeez, I couldn’t code properly to save my life. Had to make several corrections, because the game tended to blow computers up after a few minutes. Turns out that big ass sign on the top of love.graphics pages isn’t just for show. At least I know now. Thanks to everyone who helped me on this by the way 😛
• My focus. I’ve never been able to focus more than a few minutes in front of my code, but in a room full of people working on ideas, it’s like being 9 again with the latest Pokemon game in the middle of history class. Try and stay focused now. Probably made worse by the lack of sleep.
• The ending. I planned to have Earth FUCKING BLOW UP at the end of the game, like an ultimate laugh at the player’s expense, saying ” Oh, you’ve made it out ? Cool story. Boom. *cue Earth Shattering Kaboom* ” I even had the graphics, or at least a draft, but ended up being 100% unproductive when it came down to ” Do or do not “. So I made level 5 instead. Which is, I think, for the best.
• And I think that’s all… Well I’ll probably think of a thousand more details, but I’m going to start pretending I have self-esteem now.

And that’s for me. I hope nobody got mad at the Game Over messages, they’re meant to be stupid and humorous, like the rest of the game, I actually love you all 😛

Count on me to come again for the next LD or so, I really enjoyed this experience. And for the lucky ones who haven’t blown up their share or SUPERNUCLEAR PHYSICALLY UNREALISTIC HELICOPTERS yet in Hellish Copter, follow the evil rabbit !

PS : Some grammar mistakes might have occurred during the writing of this text. Please do not take them into account, since, you know, I’m french and stuff, and french people suck a languages. ( They do. )  Feel free to correct me if you like ; that’s how one gets better, whether at languages… or game making !

We will honor Hellish Copter’s pilot’s heroic sacrifice. May he rest in pieces.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Read it on my blog here and play the game here.

“Another Ludum Dare has come and gone, and the jammers have emerged once again with a new game. This is the postmortem of my entry, called “Jetpack Jacob in The Quest For Time” (May or may not be named after me).

The basic idea is that you have a jetpack and a shotgun, and have to collect clocks while destroying robots. Yes, it’s another 2D platformer. With a jetpack.”

Tags: Jetpack Jacob, Jetpack Jacob Quest for Time, postmortem

Now with better contrast!

By: Derek Mastromonaco & co.

Click HERE to play Nut Commander : Squirrels In Fear Ludum Dare entry.

Although I would really prefer it if you only did that for sanctity of the jam. If you wish to be entertained, you really should

Play the new release of Nut Commander!

Particle effects and sounds on explosions… it’s almost like you can tell something is happening now :P

POST MORTEM

I did not learn about the competition until about 12 hours before the theme announcement, and spent some time talking to a few people who expressed some interest. We watched the themes closely (in case they moved suddenly), and silently rooted against ’10 Seconds’ the entire day. I had never participated in a game compo or jam before, and was excited about the possibility… especially for ‘Death Is Good’… but alas. One of my teammates had, and has much more knowledge than I overall about how these go, but unfortunately he was busy for a lot of the weekend.

Anyway, after the theme was announced we spent some time moaning, and finally I roughed out a way to use preplanned actions to fit the 10 second theme. And then we slapped squirrels and nuts and physics on it. Shout out to Clockwork Dragons. You are the game I wish I had thought of. ^^ As it is, we got something vaguely Hungry Hungry Hippos + Robo Rally, I think.

Is it even a game if you can’t compete? Jk, Jk!

What went right:

I was very strict with my coding practices during the time allowed because I knew I would have limited time to revisit or re-figure out anything. This turned out to be very astute. In a few cases I was able to get away with just flagging states off multiple times in cases where I wasn’t sure why or when something wasn’t resetting, and the form of my code was able to support this. Over-engineering states for simple cases is invaluable when you just need things to work (however sketchy that sounds…)

What went wrong:

Let’s be brutally honest, I did not manage to publish a game in the deadline. It was a fancy-ish tech demo at best. Too much time was spent on polish without the entire framework in place. User feedback for crucial game actions like scoring points ended up being cut for unnecessary glam.  I would argue that any game that included the options to click “Start” and be told “Hey, You’re done now” was a better game than mine. This was a terrible oversight.

Other than that, the usual stuff went wrong. No one on the team had very much free time (except myself). Sleep caused silly mistakes. I spent 45 minutes looking through someone’s code and changing stuff to try to find a logic bug that could have been solved by initializing the variable. Artistic decisions were made by a programmer (me). Far too much Red Bull was consumed.

New regular gameplay UI.

Post Ludum Dare Release

However, just getting posted what I was able to was immensely rewarding. The sense of achievement, and the feedback from the people commenting on NC was motivating enough for me to fix all these silly mistakes and present you with a brand new, polished gameplay experience! (Ok, there’s still bugs in there. But you can start and end now…)

New Features Implemented:

• Particle effects and sound effects for all attacks
• Start screen with level select and help page to learn how to play
• 8 levels, each with their own High Score table
• Vastly improved color scheme
• Large and move visible squirrel, who cannot get lost (probably)
• Improved and polished physics on all attacks and environment
• Saved High Scores! For Winning Purposes!

In game instructions…

Play the new release of Nut Commander!

In conclusion, Ludum Dare was absolutely worth it, and I have loved every minute of it. Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen and participated!

(Afterthought : It wasn’t until late Saturday that we figured out the interpretation we liked best : “Not 10 Seconds!”. As in, our reaction to the theme; and also as in, let’s say, a game where finishing in 10 seconds makes you lose. Or whatever :P)

There’s a hook was my ludum dare entry here a link to play it

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27122

Summary:
Alright, so this was my 5th Ludum Dare to date… And I honestly thought this would have been a good theme for me, but as it turns out I couldn’t think of ANYTHING for the first like day and a half of the competition, I was literally about to give up and even tweeted I was out… Then at that very moment I came up with an idea. “A typing game!” Something so simple that I could make it in the small amount of time I had remaining, and something that I feel most other people likely wouldn’t make, making it unique in a way. So I began working.

What Went Right:
Mainly, I managed to get the game done in time… As I said in my summary, I had less than half of the competition to make RetroType, and getting it done was the clearly the biggest goal. I managed to do it in time, and as far as I can see it has no big issues, other than pressing enter screwing up everything, but that’s a problem with Unity’s text field and I didn’t have time to worry about it. But I suppose to sum this up, the game works as intended, it’s effective at what it does, and it’s fairly representative of how I imagined it in my head initially.

What Went Wrong:
Well, as I mentioned before I didn’t actually start until over halfway through the compo. Other than that, a big problem as I mentioned was Unity’s built in text-field, because of the way it works, when you are in the field it disables any recognition of the Input command, meaning I could not find a way to disable pressing enter in the text-field, and if you do, it screws you up, which is very annoying… This is probably the biggest issue with the game. Other than that, there were some more effects I would have like to add to the game to make it a bit prettier, I would have liked to add some music and some more sounds, and I would have liked to add a bit more depth to the scoring system. Sadly I had time for none of those things. But other than that, the game worked pretty much as intended, so all in all it went pretty well.

Some Thoughts:
I know that a lot of people (including myself) had trouble with this theme, so hopefully next time we get something a bit more accessible. Also, I’ve been busy all week, so I haven’t really had time for rating games, and it’s also why I just now got around to making a post-mortem, but this weekend I plan on getting quite a few ratings in.
Also, good luck to everyone else, I hope you all do great!

I posted this first on my site tripleVisionGames.com so feel free to swing by there!

Gas and Air – a Post Mortem

This was the worst weekend for a game jam.

We’re in the middle of moving house, I had tickets to a football match, it was my Mum’s birthday and we were having a celebration tea and, on the Sunday, we were driving the 100 plus miles down to Stratford-Upon-Avon to stay with family and due to leave at 9:30 in the morning.

Factor in the hangover I had planned on both the Saturday and the Sunday, and I figured I probably had something like 6 hours of time at my computer. 6 hours! It was probably going to take me that long to think of an idea!

Like I said, this was the worst weekend for a game jam.

Time Boost!

As it turned out, I did actually manage to double that 6 hours with the help of a couple of early mornings (this was tough with the evenings’ excessive consumption of wine) and an extremely apologetic delay to the journey on Sunday. Still, with 12 hours it was going to be a bit of a push to get anything decent done. What I needed was a plan.

Sadly, I’m a little bit crap at this planning lark and I really didn’t have time anyway so I just made a quick list of what I could do to cut down the time I needed at my PC to put the game together. The usual suspects came up:

– Small scope.

– No, smaller scope.

– Nope. SMALLER.

– Yep that’s more like it.

– Ok maybe have at least 1 mechanic in there.

– Simple art style.

– Gameplay that doesn’t require a tutorial.

And that’s about it. If I could stick to the above rules, there was a chance I might be able to get something finished that, while it might be little more than a prototype, would be fun to play and have a decent amount of polish.

All The Small Things

When considering the design of the game, there were a number of things that are important to me as a designer. These are things that I aim for in all of my games, and they boil down to 3 core concepts: Cohesion, good feel and polish. Polish is actually a new addition to this; at least in how much focus I now put on this area. Previously, polish would consist of the last 5% or so of the development process.

This is not enough time.

After pestering game developers at Rezzed for advice (in particular the guys from Vlambeer about going from a prototype to something as awesome as Luftrausers) I was given the following piece of advice:

“Spend a week making the game. Spend 6 months polishing it.”

They may not have been the exact words, or the exact amount of time quoted or whatever, but that was the message I took away. Clearly I was quite seriously skimping on polish! Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to commit 90% of it to polishing the game, which would have left me with an hour for everything else, but I decided I would start focussing on the polish of it from the halfway point.

I ended up having enough time to do quite a bit: sounds (using a gas stove, shoes dropped on the bed and me blowing a raspberry), screen shake (small shake when you have the power on and big shake when you crash), particle effects (with hand drawn particles, naturally), bobbing icebergs, bobbing and tilting oil cans, layered clouds, explosion (each frame hand drawn), reflections and the effect of the reflections as they pass over the icebergs. It was lucky I’d saved so much time for polish! I’ve still got a long list of extra polish I want to add, so that’ll be happening at some point.

Once I had got in the basic coding for the mechanics, most of the time up to that halfway mark was spent testing and tweaking the feel of moving the balloon around the screen. I actually would have liked to have tweaked this a little further, making the screen speed up smoothly based on your x-position, but ran out of time. This is something I’m going to be implementing in the post-jam version, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

Pen and Paper Gaming

You may have noticed that I haven’t covered what I mean by cohesion yet. That’s because there almost wasn’t going to be a great deal of cohesion to Gas and Air. Originally my idea was to control a helicopter flying over Vietnam and rescuing soldiers while enemy troops were shooting at you. A similar kind of control method, although I’d have spent the time tweaking the controls to make it feel like a helicopter rather than a balloon.

I’d also come up with a cunning plan. As the time I could spend at my PC was so heavily restricted, I’d been trying to think of a way that I could still work on the game without being sat at my desk. Other than design, of which I was trying to keep to a minimum anyway, there wasn’t much I could think of. And then I was just doodling, as I tend to do most of the day, and started randomly drawing a hot air balloon that was on an advert on the telly.

That was it! I could just hand draw everything and scan it in. That would buy me countless extra hours to work on the game without needing to be at my PC! And then the ideas all began to pour out. It all seemed to fit together. A hand drawn old map style, a helicopter??? No, something didn’t fit.

I tried drawing a few helicopters but a) they looked rubbish and b) there was a weird disconnect. Then I looked down at the doodling I’d been doing and realised the answer was there for me already: a hot air balloon. It made sense. It fitted. It meant that I could make everything in the design, the mechanics, the aesthetics, the control scheme and the ‘narrative’ (for what it is) all work together.

To be fair I was pretty chuffed. I’m really happy with the coherence of the game how it turned out and feel like it’s left me with a really good base game to build something totally awesome on top of.

What Would I Do Differently?

I felt that my scope for this game, bearing in mind the short number of hours I had available, was about right. There were other mechanics that I would have loved to have implemented, but the time cost was just too high and I would have risked not finishing at all. I’m really happy with the look and feel of the game, but wish I’d spent less time tweaking the controls and more time working on the flow of the levels as they’re pretty much completely random at the moment so you can have an easy and boring run with a massive gap between anything happening (this even happens on the difficult runs).

But the biggest thing I would do differently is refrain from alcohol for the weekend. The hangovers, despite not being major curled over the loo hangovers, had a massive impact on my productivity. Simple things were much more difficult and obvious bugs were even harder to spot than they are when my eyes are actually capable of maintaining focus.

From now on, I’m a teetotal jammer! Although I’ll likely indulge when there’s no game dev stuff planned so by all means feel free to still invite me out for a drink!

Post Jam Plans

The October Challenge is something I have never done. If you’re not aware, it’s a Ludum Dare month long challenge whereby you take a game you’ve been working on and try to make $1 from it. I’m in 2 minds about how to go about this (not sure about taking a jam game to FGL but I think it’s where it will be most suited), but Gas and Air has received the most positive reaction out of anything I have ever made, so I think it’s a pretty good bet that it’s my best chance of making a dollar with it!

The plan is to expand it so that it is more of a full game. I have other mechanics that I intend to introduce, but it won’t be straying far from the more relaxed endless runner feel I was going for with the jam entry. There’ll certainly be more to keep you occupied, more hazards requiring different approaches and more to do. I also plan to have a world map with different areas you can explore, such as the tropics for example.

Everything I add will all be in the same art style as I do feel it helps it all fit together really well. I’m quite looking forward to doing some hand drawn animation for stuff like polar bears and whales spurting water at you. Should be fun!

Anyway, I should stop writing now as I’ve got plenty more entries to get playing, rating and commenting, and so do you! So let’s get on with it!

Here is your chance to get a free review of your game, right here on the blog. The review will be quite lengthy and focus on your entry, the progress you have made through the different Ludum Dare and what the future seems to hold for you and your game. You don’t wanna miss it!

So how do you win then, you ask? Easy, you simply beat my game. But there is a catch of course. There are nine different endings of my game. Simply post the ending rank you get in the comments, and the first comment of each rank wins a review. If, however, I am a not able to play your game out of technical reasons, the winner of that rank will be the next in line.

Good luck!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=13137

Tags: contest, review

One odd thing about this compo is that I wasn’t able to get the weekend off from work for it. As such, I wasn’t planning to enter at all, but, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men get effed, awright. The vagaries of my work schedule as they are, I spent fully 24 of the 48 compo hours at work, leaving me with a lot less time to work on my entry than could be desired. I’m not sad-sacking, you understand; this is just the infodump that you get in the opening cutscene before the real fun begins. Speaking of which:

• Chose (and stuck to) a good, workable scope. Since I had so little time, it was extra-important that I restrict myself to a project that I could design and implement in only a few hours, and I think I did an excellent job of that. I immediately disliked the idea of creating a game that lasted only ten ordinary seconds, since it was far too blasé an interpretation of the theme. But a little dash of relativity, and all of a sudden a ten-second game was a much weirder concept, while still not being very hard to implement.
• Abandoned the serious writing in favour of snarky writing. You wouldn’t know from the finished product, but the original draft for this game called for it to be some serious drama about a giant space war or some rubbish like that; it was about bringing first a retrovirus, then a magical artifact, and then a bomb with the timer already running into the future to save the galaxy from some horrible space menace, and it was desperately dull and uninspired. The ice cream didn’t come in until I was creating the “game over” screen, and realised that what I was writing was bland; then I thought of some other thing that could go wrong if too much time passes. Melting ice cream came to mind, and put the whole game on the path toward silliness. It also meant…
• Dessert Planet tie-in! As soon as the ice cream was in the game, the Dessert Planet became inevitable. Sure, it’s just a mention in the ludicrous backstory, but that’s branding! That’s important! Or so they tell me.
• Actually made the game winnable. This is pretty unusual for me. Usually my games are either designed without a win condition or are just ludicrously hard. Genius began life ludicrously hard, but then I cut down the obstacle spawn rates by one third across the board and decreased the number of days to win by, uh, 80% (for some bizarre reason, it was originally five years instead of one). The net result is a game that’s challenging, but that you can probably beat in just a small handful of tries. Some players have even achieved a perfect run!
• Came up with a good title. Title is one of the last things I do on my games, and it’s usually chosen by some sort of stream-of-consciousness-until-I-giggle method. I started by riffing off on Einstein, got to genius, and then finally found something giggleworthy. And thus the title was born!

• Spent way, way too long on the background. The background is five different layers that all scroll at different speeds, and it took like an entire hour to make, and the whole reason for that is that my original (single-layer) background had a visible seam. So instead of doing the sensible thing and redrawing that one image so it didn’t have a seam, I added layer after obfuscatory layer until the seam wasn’t noticeable anymore. Probably spending 12% of all the time I had on the background was not optimal. It’s pretty, though!
• Ran out of time before I got to the sound. This is closely related to the above. I cranked out a simple bonk noise in sfxr to denote collisions so the game wouldn’t be completely silent, but it was 3 a.m. and I had to be at work at 7 and I went to bed instead of making any music. I think this was an objectively correct choice, but regrettable all the same.
• Way, way, crazy too many magic numbers. Math is hard and I’m a dope, so a lot of my calculations were done by the elegant method of “plug in some numbers and change them until they work.” With a little more time and a little less stupid, I could have cleaned it up a bit, but as it stands it’s very very ugly.
• Shipped with a giant, deal-breaker bug. My wife discovered this bug literally seconds after I posted my entry. Apparently, I had it set to run the timer even while the title and such are displayed, so sitting on title screen or the story for long enough automatically wins the game. I don’t think anybody else actually encountered this bug, since I fixed it quickly, but it’s a big deal and I found it perfectly game-development-ish that it was caught immediately after I shipped the thing.
• Should have married for money. Then I’d have been able to take the weekend off and work on the game!

Overall, I’m quite pleased with this entry. It’s pretty solid fun, and I even managed to learn a few new things doing it, despite how simple it is! And, frankly, it’s super fun just to do the compo anyhow.

Hi,

It’s my first Ludum Dare participation, and it’s rating time.

Is there any way to filter the entries by technology and/or compatibility ?
I’d like to quickly see which games I can play (I have a Mac), and which sources will interest me (I don’t have Unity, for example).

Thanks.
Nicolas

PS: Don’t forget to check my entry (JS+HTML5 Canvas, no framework) : Make Way !