The post mortem we wrote about our Ludum Dare 27 game (Bomb Defuse Simulator 2013 [click here to view]) made it to the front page of Gamasutra today!

We’re really proud of what we managed to accomplish within 72 hours and would love it if more people would see what is possible within 72 hours using existing technology.

If you want to know more or just want to get in touch, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook. We’ll be working with this technology in the near future, so follow us to be the first to hear about it!

Hey guys,

I wanted to say thanks to everyone in the Ludum Dare community. This is my first time doing anything like this, and everyone has been really supportive and welcoming for all of the first-timers, and I really appreciate all the support that has been shown. I put together a different mix of the music I created for my LD27 entry and figured I’d share it with the community.  Check out the track on my SoundCloud page and let me know what you think. Thanks again, everyone!

Richard Was Afraid of the Dark – Audio on SoundCloud
Richard Was Afraid of the Dark – Ludum Dare entry page

Day one

Theme: “10 seconds”. Nice! Having a filmmaking background, time is such a big concept to me. I envisioned a game where the scene changes each 10 seconds. Playing with montage inside a game seemed like a great idea, but too complex for my first LD attempt. Let’s keep it simple, said to myself.

Draw the sprites on grid paper and use them without any manual postprocessing. I had this idea in my mind for a while. I’ve been planning to use it in a videogame workshop, targeted for children. In the context of LD, it would allow me to forget about tweaking graphics, and concentrate on programming. To reference a sprite, I would just use the grid coordinates. This went better than I thought: took me 20 minutes to have it working with two lines of bash script. Line one scans. Line two optimizes the raw scan and converts a defined color to alpha. Is there a better way to understand alpha masking than painting the mask with your own hands? I hope to bring the workshop to reality!

Having a few testing sprites, I wanted to start playing with them. I decided to go for html5 and javascript and I had been researching JS game libs and graphic libs that handle the canvas in a high-level fashion. I went for CreateJS because it looked promising. And here comes the most stupid thing I did. After playing with CreateJS I disliked the lack of color filters (it has, but weren’t working well for me). So I spent more than 5 hours switching to another JS lib, just to go back to my last commit of CreateJS. Conclusion: fear the Black Hole of Libs!

Other thing that went wrong the first day: I spent one hour doing a development setup that I ended throwing away. Namely grunt + typescript + auto-compiler ts -> js . The compiler was slow in my computer (about 10 seconds heh) and I was not using the features that TS has over JS, like types or inheritance. Next time I will follow “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” more strictly.

With all these frustrations, I went back to a blank sheet of grid paper. I started to imagine.. freedom, things flowing, wind, light things carried by the wind.. wind changing direction after 10 secs! Wind that makes the scene and the gameplay change!

Now I had something to stick to, and at least it was slightly in the direction of my first idea. I drew the leaf animation. I ran the scan script, and saw the leaf jumping in the screen. Wee! I took a few frames of the same animation and made it fly with the winds vibration. At least I was making progress.

Day two

Considering the frustrations of the first day, this one went smooth. But I was heading for the compo and I was running out of time. So I decided to go for just two scenes: sky and lake, above and below. Even with that simplification, my code had many bugs. Good enough for a first try, I said, but I won’t submit this time. Maybe next LD I could make it. /me is sad

Day three

Monday. I did my normal 8 hours job. Then I went for some fresh air and started to reflect about the previous two days. And the idea for the menu appeared. I have to finish it! I said. I have to apply for the Jam! Went back home: three hours left. The more exciting three hours I had in a while. I wrote a list of items, ordered by importance, and started to eliminate them one by one. Made the intro screen as a present to myself. Fixed the most annoying bugs, adding visual debug on collisions and displaying the game states as text over the screen. Made a lot of tweaks.

Finally, a bit late but.. I submitted! Of course not all the items in the list were done. Here is what I missed:

– humorous ending after N levels/transitions
– incremental difficulty: speed up things while advancing levels
– visual feedback of the wind direction employing smaller leaves
– real wind sound fx or acustic guitar sound fx
– music
– improve the HUD

Conclusion

Inmediatly people started to comment on my just-submitted game. Lots of great feedback! Was worth to participate. Antidote made a screen capture while playing the game for the first time. Can we have a more valuable feedback than that?! The whole LD experience involved me, I’ve been playing, voting, and commenting hundreads of games. There are many great ones out there. This is an impressive experience!

It was Saturday. I had just spent a whole bunch of hours getting basic things set up and working on some art.

I had come up with a basic concept for the main mechanic in my game the day earlier and at this point had some basic code for playing around in a level with it.

The main mechanic I had at that point was a platformer where you had 10 seconds to live but there were door/portal things that would switch the direction of gravity 90 degrees. It was fun to play around with in my test level. But a thought crossed my mind: How am I going to increase the level of challenge through the 10 or so levels I had planned? I mean I could throw in spikes or something, but what else? After a level or two of that might get old. How would I come up with more puzzles and keep the player hooked by having something  fresh every few levels?

The main mechanic needed some tweaking.

I’ve read/heard that if you can’t come up with at least 5 good puzzles that use a mechanic then you should ditch that mechanic.

I had run into this situation; I couldn’t think of any good puzzles beyond one or two. I knew that I needed to change.

Luckily I had been messing around with the concept of the game being on an alien world, and I had come up with a few plant looking sprites. Here’s the concept art that the game was spawn from:

See those purple door like things? They were the door/portal thingy mechanic.

Anyways Luckily I had drawn the green thing next to the purple thing, because I had a brain wave. Why not have the character sprout from the green things and the green things could give the player different elemental properties!!

Immediately I came up with a bunch of different things I could do with that idea. You could have fire or water breathing or … the list went on.

I knew this was a better mechanic.

In the end I’m glad I ditched the other mechanic because the game turned out pretty good. I’m really happy with it at least.

If you haven’t given it a try here’s the link

So i probably shouldn’t be writing this while drunk but i have other things to do and if i was any more sober this probably wouldn’t be happening.

OK!

First Day

following tutorials

I followed a tutorial about how to make a maze game(lets face it resources are resources. ) I had no idea how to make a maze game but i’ve wanted to make one for quite awhile now. So this was the perfect opportunity, of course i had to keep my goals very small, since i’d be learning to make a game i’ve never made before. I also… Have no idea what i was going to say there. MOVING ON.

Second Day

Now i couldn’t clear my weekend for the LD so following the tutorial and getting a working prototype carried over to the second day, INEVITABLE. Shit happens. Here is where i tried to figure out how to export a jar that people would actually be able to play, by this point i had a working prototype slightly lamer then where i wanted it to be, but the basic building blocks of what i would need. Problem, last time i played with java i couldn’t get it to work on anyone else’s computer, so this became an all day afair.. basically ate up all the time i had to work on the ld. But i did manage to start some basic AI for our “predator”

I also made sounds! but implementing them required slick which would have made it harder to export and not worth the time. So the sounds never made it :/

Predator – (and molding the game)

So it occured to me that i could use the 10 second time in two ways for my purposes, that was the either make a time limit to complete the maze(it works but it’s kind of boring and probably frustrating) This was my plan B, my plan A consisted of creating a predator to chase after the character after 10 seconds, the only real issue was creating an ai that would work for our predator. This is around when it occured to me to use a mouse as our main character and cheese as a finish line(all art assets were made on the fly) But going back to the AI, it was actually a bit of a pain even though it’s not really AI. I decided to make the cat run in a random direction depending on it’s options, i also wanted to make sure it never ran in the direction it came from whenever possible.

So i had to keep track of which direction the cat was heading from and heading to, Then i used a random function seeded by time to decide which direction the cat would run in. Realistically it shouldn’t be much of a challenge but given the limited possibilities for directions, the cat is capable of becoming a nuisance. I gave every direction a value and used a random number based on a range determined by open directions minus the direction the cat came from,  each open direction(represented by a number) was saved in an array and the direction was decided by the random number. This is complicated to type out, so it was really a pain to implement. That took roughly the rest of my ld time to get implemented and working right. This occurred between day 2 and 3 of the jam. Besides a little nightmare scenario of forgetting to add the assets with the submission, this was the last thing i did for the jam.

What i did right

• I made a game i’ve wanted to make for a long time, it really helped motivate me to finish
• I used Java(a familiar programming language) my past experience helped some things become much easier then it could have been.
• I sacrificed a virgin to the Northern Gods
• I had realistic goals(i did want multiple levels though)
• I finished the core game mechanics first
• I wasn’t fussy about my art, could have wasted a lot of time on them.
• I got out of the house and did stuff, probably kept me from getting drained

What i did wrong

• There was a lot i didn’t know how to do which i lost time for that could have been useful for making the game better, so some prep before the comp might have helped me there.
• Life gets in the way of my game making. (Damn you life!)
• I haven’t accomplished much since the compo(i’d love to improve it but refer to previous item)

What i would like to do to improve the game

• The art pretty obviously could use some improvements, i’d like to create some animation for the game.
• Sound would be nice
• a better movement scheme, one tile at a time just isn’t going to work especially with the animation i’d like to add. Although i guess i could have them move one tile at a time and just run tile to tile. That’d be kinda cool.
• I would like to create a random level generator, it’d add a LOT of re-playability to the game, but even a few more levels would be a big improvement. One level just isn’t enough.
• And it would be REALLY cool to have an android version of the game but that could be a pain to do.
• I think at this point i’d consider the game “complete” any other improvements could be left for some kind of sequel.

10 second lead

Finally, my first game is on the web. I participated in Google’s CS4HS summer camp in this july at Özyeğin University and since then I was looking for this day to come. This is my first self-made game, made in 5 days with Processing.       Here is the links. For linux, download “linux 64” folder, go to that folder in console and input: “./Dungeon_Warriors”. I believe it should work both on 64 and 32 bit.

It has a “how to play” menu, you can look there for controls. You can jump to platforms under them(normal mod only) and drop by pressing down. The platforms are created randomly, so it’s normal if it’s too small or far away from one another. In hard mode, both players can heal themselves.

Game requires two player, you can play even if you don’t have a numeric keyboard.

Hey guys! Sorry if this looks like spam, I just wanted to tell you all about the Humble Bundle!

The next Humble Bundle is out! It has some really amazing games. (Fez, FTL, etc.) Check it out! Did I mention it is pay what you want? You can select how much goes to charity, the developers, and a tip. Pay above the average and get two AMAZING games, plus get future games!

It is a really nice deal, and it helps charity. You can pay whatever you would. check it out!
https://www.humblebundle.com/

Finally made a post-compo version! I was planning on uploading it a week ago, but a series of very unfortunate events forced me to delay it. Not to worry, though- I got it to be even better!

New features:

• KEYS! Some levels have keys in them. Get them all to unlock the door!
• Switch blocks! Turn a blue block on by going through it! Passing through a block solidifies it.
• Save your progress! Indeed, yes; are you stuck in a level and you don’t feel like pressing the enter key to skip it? No problem! You can exit the game and reenter where you left off!
• Rebind keys! Don’t feel like playing with the arrow keys this time? Set it to WASD instead! If you feel adventurous, know that most keys are bind-able, and you can even set a key to do multiple actions!
• Sounds! That’s right, there are now generic, sfxr-generated, retro sound fx, just the way you like ’em!
• New levels! Obviously.

The game creates a folder in AppData/Roaming on Windows, and something called “user.home” on OS X and Linux. I’ll add a “delete all save files” option in the game itself soon.

Just a reminder- the game has a built-in level editor! I gave the specifications for its usage on the entry page.

Get it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=22590

This is not the last update this game will be getting, either. I plan on completely reworking the 10s gooback system into something more flexible and deep. I’ll be posting here with new updates.

Logic Bomb’s post-mortem version is now also available for download on the new website:

http://logicbomb.lastdigitofpi.com

As previously stated the following features have been added to the game post-mortem (after a lot of comments from you!):

• The random level generator has been updated to produce a lot more difficult levels than before. Difficulty is also increasing now with a more appropriate rate.
• I added a tutorial for beginners to understand how to play the game.
• Music was added and a longer beep sound to indicate that the time is up.
• Also now there are three difficulty levels:
  • Newbie: You have time for 30 seconds
  • Specialist: You have time for 10 seconds
  • Insane: Like “Specialist” just that all wires don’t show their activation state

I hope you have at least that much fun with the game that I had implementing it

Finally getting around to doing a postmortem on Ten Seconds of Thrust!

It is my first Ludum Dare 48hr Solo Compo Entry.
(though I’ve participated in a couple of group game jams and they where a BLAST!)
I would have to wait until a 90deg day in Seattle to write this…

I’ll prob have to clean this post up later (or not).

Pre-Game – Strategy and Intentions

• Rapid Game Prototyping Knew I didn’t have much time to participate so choose tools that i could get something done solo in little time.
• Low barrier to Entry – I  like the concept of getting something out quickly to showcase a technology and lower the barrier to entry for people who would like to be creative…
• Ubiquitous to create and play –  I’m also using older computer systems so wanted it be playable on almost anything within the browser.
• Wanted something Visually appealing and interesting play
• Playable and posted in time allowed

Tools

• InkScape –  awesome and powerful. free vector drawing package (svg) ported to most systems (also exports to png)
• Stencyl – drag and drop code blocks like MIT scratch, good for beginner (or rusty) programmers. exports game to flash (free) and others (paid).
• Linux Desktop – free os, with lots of free tools.

Theme Vote and Time

Not my first choice on a game theme…

forgot I had someplace to be on Friday evening so, either cancel it or just go into it knowing I’d only have a limited time to work on things… hence working with tools that can produce something quickly…

I’ve done this before… just not with a game… I can pull this off….

(see Thought to Thing in 1hr or Less) and (Thought to Thing in 2hrs or Less)

I didn’t even know what the theme was until Late Friday evening.

The Good

48hr Solo Compo  – the good distilled…

• Total creative control
• success (or fail) due to your own efforts
• spend as little (or as much) time on something as you decide
• no obligations other than to yourself (and those who may play it)

This has possibly turned into…

Rapid Game Prototyping with Stencyl and Inkscape in 8hrs or less…

and now the ramble about the game…

Theme and low time actually worked to an advantage… not knowing what the theme was until late Friday night.

having to brainstorm and make a decision quickly and on my own actually worked well.

I really couldn’t even get to a computer to work on things during a good portion of the compo but that wasn’t much of an issue early on. I could see the game play and some of the basic level design already in my head well before sitting down at a computer. so most of the game ended up being (virtually) pre-built before I was able to sit down and actually create it. however, eventually you have to sit down and goto work on things.

also knowing I’d have limited time in front of the screen helped me to work with the limited pallet so to speak.

prior commitments kept me from spending too much time in front of the computer and forced other activities like… take a walk, fix dinner, visit with friends…

having played around extensively in Inkscape and some in Stencyl (particularly in tile creation)… made level design, layout, visualization pretty effortless and fun.

after finally getting down to the coding bit… it eventually all started to come back (I’m multi year rusty at coding). was almost as much fun as doing the graphics…

got a lot of positive support from GF on tackling (and finishing) my first Solo project… something to show others at our local after LD27 meetup. and talk about at PAX Prime the following weekend.

The Bad

The solo compo can be a lonely endeavor…

Really missed the group dynamics in game creation.

• No one to bounce ideas off from
• coming up with everything on your own
• no show off what you doing (and get their help/feedback).
• no one to take up the  slack when you are short on time (or talent).

granted I got some feedback from GF… she would have loved to have helped… but nope.

Time crunch, lack of sleep…

couldn’t sleep well Friday night… so had to sleep in on Sat to catch up and be functional. so had a couple of hour to work on things before next time commitment and actually see the sun… got a couple hour in Sat before noon doing graphics, but really didn’t get to working on game until late Saturday night… and only for a couple hours at that.

The Ugly

yea.

GF was very supportive in my tackling a solo project… however… she just started new job, so she required TLC. poor communication and scheduling on my part (the game jam is THIS weekend?!). all lead to way too much stress. even without the solo compo or jam it would have been a difficult weekend. and afterward fallout from poor sleep schedule, life stress, etc. … getting too old for this.

my great push to finish the game (just before the deadline) involved having to hack together the timer countdown code… I really need to spend more time in the Stencyl code base to figure stuff out… and not on such a crunch… maybe a few hours a day. don’t leave things like this till the last min… or Ten Seconds… as the case may be.

oh… and so bloody exhausted that literally botched the after LD27 show and tell… almost didn’t make it due to melt down stress.

ToDo Differently

• Practice more with Stencyl Coding (hr or so a day till awesome)
• Schedule more time
• concrete communication about plans with others
• do jam instead of solo
• spend time after compo to polish game (and post)
• have others playtest during jam/compo

Done Right

• Tool Choice of Stencyl and Inkscape
• publish to web
• waiting a bit before code/build
• honed Inkscape skills before hand.

Done Wrong

• no laptop availability
• time and personal commitments
• not  enough code familiarity to write w/o extensive research

-L

p.s. as a side note… would do the tiles (and collision detection) differently… I’m prob the only one to find the bug… but collision blocks need to be bigger to keep from allowing your ship to sometimes pass through the wall and end up behind… (would require and complete level and graphics rebuild).

Wow, I think I might have just found the game of this LD. Too bad it is so late!
The game is called Exploratite Mitae, it is a simple and beautiful game. It is about getting oxygen. You only have ten seconds of breath left, and you have to travel to different bubbles for more.One of the things I LOVE is that there is no UI so it is super clean! This game made me oddly sad.Hmf. It sort of made me feel little and powerless. Anyway! Check it out for sure, I have no idea why it is not CRAZY popular.

Share it with your friends too!

Game (Image works too!)

What would you guys say wins a medal nowadays?
I have never won an LD medal, but if I did, ohhhhh boy, if I did… If I won an LD Medal I would be king of the world, that wouldn’t just mean this game thing is a hobby, nah man, I would be a somebody. It would definitely drive me for the next LD, and just in life in general.  (I totally apologize if I am kissing some major butt here. It would just mean a lot to me.)

Speaking in terms of the coolness category:

(About;)

-How many Gold Medals are given?
-How many Silver Medals are given?
-And last, how many Bronze are given?

And as a general estimate;
How many games would have to rate to qualify for a Gold, Silver, and Bronze? (Rough numbers are fine hah.)

Thanks again guys!

~Blade

Here’s my first attempt at a post-compo version of Ten Seconds of thrust, AKA Death of a Spaceman.  Play it here.

You can check out the LD48 entry here.

New features:

* New levels: Vertical, Horizontal, and Maze levels.

* Enemies and obstacles! Mines, seekers, and laser gates!

This is totally untested and needs a lot of tweaks and additions, but I’m thinking of polishing this up a bit and tossing it on Kongregate or something.

(http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24994)

Work on our game has been finished for a couple of weeks now, but I wanted to go back and take a little bit of time to review the ups and downs of the project.

What Went Right

• Brainstorming Session  I think our brainstorming session on the first night of Ludum Dare really helped us to get off to a great start. Once we knew what the theme was going to be we set one rule: “no ideas can be rejected during brainstorming.” This led to some really fun discussions about ideas we might have initially dismissed. This was key to our success with the project because our ultimate idea “counting to 10 perfectly using your internal clock” was one that we were about to pass on were it not for the brainstorming rule!

• Project Scope Management  When we were in the process of narrowing down our concept list we made it a point to factor in the estimated work required to reach the core vision for each idea up for review. This helped us to eliminate a few ideas that the team was really excited about, but didn’t feel we could fully execute in the game jam’s time span. This actually caused us to pass over one of our top game concepts involving a Street Fighter parody where the player needed to avoid an opponent that they had a life lead over for the last 10 seconds of a match. (Maybe we’ll revisit this one later!)

• Visual & Sound Design  We knew that our basic gameplay concept was really simple and we’d have to work hard to sell the game’s atmosphere with our visual and audio design. I feel that we were ultimately able to succeed at this. In a game where the player character spends most of the game’s duration with their eyes closed, a lot of the experience has to be carried by the audio. Holly did a fantastic job on this with an ultra-creepy sound design accentuated with 3D audio positioning. This, combined with the creepy introduction laid out by our artist Mieko’s artwork created the nice “ghost story” atmosphere that helped to sell our really simplistic gameplay mechanic.

What Went Wrong

Language set to anything other than Japanese or English?
NO INSTRUCTIONS FOR YOU!

• No Time for QA!  In our final push to wrap the project up before the deadline, we did essentially no QA on the game. As a result, the very first build that we uploaded still had a bunch of debug features turned on and included a pretty nasty bug that prevented the game’s text from showing up properly for anyone whose system language was set to anything other than English or Japanese. Not only that, but anyone that was savvy enough to mess with the WSAD keys in our first build would’ve found that they could simply turn around around run out of the haunted house!

• No Time For Cool Stuff!  Running short on time led to us having to cut some of the ideas that we had from the original concept. While we were able to get a core set of six endings in, we had to dump several other planned outcomes for the game. Since the core gameplay is so simple and success likely requires several re-attempts, we were planning to have a large number of different endings to keep the player entertained while they retried the game. Some of these even included fun joke endings for when you hit very specific finish times. Ultimately, all of these variants were dropped from the project and failing to get these in was probably the biggest letdown for the team.

This was the first ever game jam for our entire team and the whole experience was pretty amazing. We’re all really proud of what we were able to create together. There’s nothing quite like taking a crazy pile of ideas and actually bringing something to life. Thanks again to everyone who stopped by to check out our game and congratulations to everyone who participated in Ludum Dare 27!

Tags: LD27, postmortem

Well, it was time to encourage me to do the Post mortem of my first participation in the Ludum Dare 10 Seconds to escape

For my first time, I must say it was quite an adventure.
I didn’t participate in the voting of the topic, and I registered just in time to start the competition…

The creative process:

When I get no time to think about the topic of the game, just improvised. I thought of a simple game could be developed in the 48 hours of the Compo.
Finally I devised a puzzle game / challenge against time, based on the theme “10 seconds”.

Tools:

I had to create the game the with what I already had:
– Pixelmator to tailor the graphics.
– Sublime Text 2 to schedule the game.
– Internet for the rest.

Language and Engine:

Perhaps one of the most delicate parts when the challenge to create a game in such a short time.
As a beginner in this field, if I was wrong in this, I could not finish the game on time.

Perhaps one of the most delicate parts when the challenge to create a game in such a short time.
As a beginner in this field, if I was wrong in this, I could not finish the game on time.
After considering several engines with corresponding languages ​​and although at first I thought Java + Ligbdx, I dismissed this election in favor of Löve2D + LUA.

But why? Simply because Löve2D is less corseted than Libgdx and much faster to develop given in part by the LUA language. So with Löve2D I get faster a playable prototype and then I left over time to refine it.

—-

With everything ready to put me to develop, this is what was right and what was wrong…

The right

– From my idea for the game and thanks to a simple template I created for Löve2D games a while ago, could speed up the process and get a playable prototype in the first 24 hours.

– The engine choice was undoubtedly the best, because I could focus on what really matters and relegate the workflow to the engine.

– Internet is a large base of assets and certainly showed his potential quickly.

– In the process of creating the game I enjoyed as a child

– By achieving the prototype early, I can focus on making improvements, create menus and add music and even create new levels, making the game bigger and more fun.

The wrong

– Being my first time, I had no clear some rules and my Compo became Jam because the assets I used belong to third…

– I’ve not previously studied in sufficient depth the Engine led me to do some silly mistakes.

—-

Overall, my first participation was satisfactory and I’ll participating in further calls.
I had fun and learned a lot. I also tasted great games from other people and I had so much fun and discovered an amazing concepts become into reality.

Thanks for this Ludum Dare!

Tags: love2d, post-mortem

I would like this miniLD to have an educational value, because fun is overrated! Actually, that’s not true! I do want you to have fun, so if any of the rules mentioned below should cause problems and make this glorious event no-fun for you, feel free to screw rules and do whatever the hell you want!

I’m proud to introduce the Low-Level Jam!

[ View | Submit ]

Many developers are using flash and Unity and Love and Python and Java and Ruby and Twine and Game Maker. The point of this jam is to increase understanding of how computers work while executing your game code and have fun and learn in the process. I would like you to create a game using a programming language or tool that does compile into a machine language, meaning that stuff that you write and create is not being interpreted by a third-party script interpreter (like it happens in Java, Flash, Unity, etc) but translates directly into instructions that the CPU will execute in order you have written them.

Native games are significantly trickier to create, thus I would like to ask you not to aim to high! You can make Pong or Space Invaders or Tetris and still be able to reiterate on that adding something innovative. It is possible to make a platformer in Flash in 48h and it is possible to make an FPS in Unity in 48h, but that is certainly not the case for native programming, so keep that in mind!

tl;dr and more

– Make a game in a native environment that compiles into machine code, use C, C++ or assembly language (you can use fortran or cobol or pascal too, but please do not do that)
– Do not use: C#, Mono, Python, Java, JS, HTML5, Unity, Love, Game Maker, Haxe, Ruby, Kink’n’Play, MMF, Flex, Basic, llvm, Lua etc.
– Fail, but learn
– You can make your game for a retro computer/console if that’s what you prefer, and in fact, it will be much easier to achieve this and take out knowledge on how computers work out of that
– The point of the game is to learn how the computer works down there inside, beyond what you can see and to have fun.
– If you don’t like that, just make a game, I don’t care
– If you need more time, use more time

First of all, thank you everyone for your comments. It’s really appreciated to have feedback !

I just uploaded an Android version of Defuse in 10 seconds

You can find it right here

I tested it with the nexus 7 2013.

This is a slightly different version, adapted for android device.
The 3d keyboard of the laptop is now functionnal.

Esc / Back : Quit the game
F1 : Reset the game
F4 : Change the orientation (landscape / portrait)

Please give me feedback

Howdy! Adhesion from team RADMARS here with our postmortem analysis of our fancy LD27 effort SPACE JANITOR: CUSTODIAL MARINE. But first, goodies!

Timelapse!

Soundtrack!

http://adhesion.mu/sic/Adhesion-SJCM-OST.zip

And for postmortems, first up we got spacemars:

Ho hO! I’m really happy with how the sprites turned out for this game. The janitor especially. I feel like I spent too much time on them though :(. The envrionments (except the mainframe room) all game out a bit lower standard than i wanted them to be. But overall really pleased with the whole entry.
The music is stellar as usual, and I think we did a good job shortening up this game to be just about the right length. Our previous entry Tessitron was a bit too short, I think Death Death evolution was too long, Its really hard to find that sweet spot where your game mechanics are interesting, but don’t feel spread too thin.
I agree with emarcotte about moving away from mellon for our future projects though, Its an awesome tool, but can be very limiting (and stressfull on our programmers *_*)
can’t wait for the next LD 😀

And now emarcotte’s:

I was a little sad to go back to MelonJS, it gives us a lot of tools, but it also is so… confining. I think Tessitron was our best effort by far as it was the most free-form. Regardless, Melon gets the job done even if we end up having to keep a stare at its code to figure it out.

How many times will we fix the same bugs? Hooooly !@#$ — there needs to be a libradmars-melon. Between Brink, Escape, DDE, and now Janitor we have like probably 25% common code, maybe even higher if we actually took a solid look at how it all works. Let’s rewrite the level fade again! We only have 20 minutes left, why not?

One of the things we need to try and do more of early on is the rapid feedback in testing. My most productive times for me were when I could say “Test plz???” I’m guessing this doesn’t apply as much to the creative parts of the project (music, pixels, etc). Perhaps I am just crappy at working in isolation.

I am glad we got something nifty out the door given how little time I had to spend on it. I will try to not end up coding from a friends house again. It makes things complicated. Everyone did great in their role and while the final product feels a little less polished than previous efforts it definitely has more to it in a lot of ways.

And lastly adhesion’s:

Postmortem! This jam went pretty well but there were certainly some rough edges. MelonJS is a very comfortable platform for us now, but we usually end up going pretty conventional which is frustrating. I always want to make bizarre abstract games but it’s so hard to come up with good ideas like that when the theme comes out. I think the thing we have to remind ourselves is, melon isn’t really limiting in and of itself but it’s so easy to do a platformer (or top-down game like BRINK) that we end up falling into the path of least resistance. Next time we have to stretch our conceptual brains a bit more or maybe allocate more time for brainstorming on the first night.

Development went well of course, though there were a bunch of annoying bugs, especially towards the end which took away from playtesting time. It’s frustrating – even though we’ve used melonJS so much we always end up redoing work we’ve done before or running into the same bugs repeatedly (level change, collision, animation…). I’m really itching to collect some common code to make this easier next time (maybe even do a proper post-compo version of my first solo LD game with it too!)

Making the music was great as per usual. I managed my time pretty well (did most of the music on Saturday night) so I had the rest of the time to do playtesting and bugfixing. This time for the music I used the same arrangement (same synths, drums, etc) for all the songs and did everything in the same project file, which made everything a bit more cohesive (though with a little less variety) and saved me a bunch of time. I managed a neat trick with iZotope Iris to make SNES-style sampled instruments which was awesome! Definitely gonna use that again. Plus, doing the sound design was great – every time I get deeper into it and every time it just gets more rewarding and more fun. LASERS!

Overall, yet another successful Ludum Dare from team RADMARS! Expect something wonderfully bizarre from us next time! (I hope…)

Tags: postmortem, soundtrack, timelapse

Hey guys! I am totally in for this MiniLD! I have been learning C++ for a bit more than a month and I made my LD game in it. I will try to do a text adventure in C++ with four rooms. I think I can do this. But I am doing it over the course of the next week. I just started school (OMIGOSH U R LEIK SO YUN!11!!1!) and my workload is a bit much right now. Sorry.

I also have some news regarding my Dungeon Crawling LD game, I can’t release the updated game by the 20th. With school and stuff I have barely had anytime to work on it. I might have put an hour or something into it so far. If I get time I will try and get something out. NO PROMISES Sorry if any of you were looking forward to this, I am just focusing on MiniLD first.

Anyway! More about my game! I drew these plays a while back but I didn’t really make a game about it.

Here is the map (as of now.)

(Sorry if it’s small, click to make big!)
Anyway! I will start this tomorrow.

First Mini-LD… I competed in the last compo which was my first! It went well…

You can find my game here URL: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24652

I will probably program my game in C++ as it is the only one I know out of assembly, I guess I do know a bit of C but im not that good at it!

Good luck to everybody.