So, I finished a game. It is Dodge, which is nigh-identical to my LD26 entry, because not many improvements can really be made.
I also took it to market, if you can call it that. What I really mean is that I took it to GameJolt (Here it is).
As for making $1… Well, it seems to be harder than you’d imagine. After about a week and a half, I’ve accumulated the grand total of $0.01. Jubilation!
Intense times!
Dammit, how does anyone do this?
It’s a pleasure to announce that ZoOp! is now available (worldwide?) on the AppStore!
Here is the trailer:
And a few screenshots:
Although the game was almost ready at the beginning of the month, it was still lot of work to make it available on the AppStore. Overall it has been a great learning experience, a bit painful though. I mean we all like to write code and/or do arts. But what about marketing?
So what now? Basically I’m sending mails and creating threads like an headless chicken. Trying to make as much noise as I can. I feel like a small ant in a huge colony 😀
We’re glad to see that an article about our game Alien Cortex, submitted to the october challenge, has been written on http://indiegames.com/2013/10/alien_cortex.html !!!
That’s so cooool and gives us the motivation to make more (better and better) games 
You can pre-order our game for $1.49(instead of $2.99) and support his development via our website: http://www.atraxgames.net/sym/#buy
or on Desura: http://www.desura.com/games/sym
Playable demo: http://www.indiedb.com/games/sym/downloads/sym-demo-v04beta
here’s the trailer:
It’s been a while since we actually released our game, I just never got around to posting about it here. We weren’t originally intending to do the October Challenge but when I saw what it was I decided to enter our game into it.
Elemental Balance was created for the Fight Magic Run battle (which unfortunately disappeared ]:). So here it is! It was created in 48 hours with the theme of Balance. After the 48 hours I copied the game over to a new project and worked on it for another ~1 week. Within the time that it was published to GameJolt (9 days) we’ve achieved 14 cents in ad revenue!
Hopefully you guys enjoy it 
We definitely enjoyed working on it.
There’s a few differences between the screenshots and the uploaded game D:
While Ditto and I have been keeping the DreamTeam alive by working on an actual game for the October Challenge (our Indie Speed Run entry: The Old Man And The NSA), I’ve also decided to release a new compilation album that features all of the music I’ve made for Ludum Dare games, LD warmups, and other game jams in general.
Presenting:
GameJams Volume One
21 tracks and a super secret bonus track that will unlock when you download the album… all clocking in at around 50 minutes. Some of these games placed very high in the audio category, with two of them actually bringing home a Gold Medal… something that I never expected. You see, my first Ludum Dare entry had NO AUDIO AT ALL. I was very disappointed with myself and decided to try much harder in the audio category. I worked at it and worked at it until I actually ended up receiving a Gold Medal for audio during Ludum Dare’s 10th anniversary for my entry, ZUNZANDA. So I’m living proof that Ludum Dare is a wonderful way to push yourself into new territory, learn new things, and accomplish goals you never even dreamed of. I owe all of my current and future success to Ludum Dare, and GameJams Volume One is kind of like my ‘origin story‘ of game development, as this content dates all the way back to the very first game I ever released.
So what are you waiting for?! You can hear the entire album and PAY WHAT YOU WANT for the download right HERE.
You can also snag the official soundtrack to DreamTeam’s Ludum Dare 27 entry, EcoStar vs Aeronox right HERE.
Thanks for your support and LONG LIVE LUDUM DARE!
Tags: album, free, game music, music, pay what you want
Daily challenge is to collect 5 letter which fly like powerups do. Once you collect them all, you get some coins to buy powerups. This is a way to get easy free coins just by playing the game. I was inspired by Subway Surfers when creating this.
Missions are various tasks for player to complete to earn coins. Coins are used to buy upgrades and expendable items like shields, bombs, etc. Missions come in sets of three, and you need to complete all three tasks to earn the reward.
For the missions I figured that it would be easiest to use the builtin multiline text wrapping. However, the line height is too big, and I could’n find a way to reduce it. At least, not from code. Then I edited the .fnt file generated by BMFont and just changed
lineHeight=33
to
lineHeight=23
I added 5 pixels of drop shadow around all letters after the bitmap was generated initially, so I’m now reducing height by ten (5 pixels above, and 5 below the glyph).
While searching the docs for this, I found something else I missed before: Depending on the font you choose for the game, numbers might not look very nice as glyph for digit “one” can we very slim, and numbers like 11 look odd. To solve this, you can fix some of the glyphs in the font to use fixed width:
font.setFixedWidthGlyphs("0123456789");
This looks really good, but I already did some design decisions that used the slim-glyphs “feature”, so I’m not going to use this.
Hey guys, I just wanted to mention my game which I have been working on for the October Challenge 2013. Two weeks ago I was working on a puzzle combat game for android, Tank Tank: The Tankening. The project was going well but it was taking allot of time to develop the large number of levels I needed. So in order to get a product out for the holiday season I decided to switch my focus to a new, smaller game.
Emergency Landing Disaster is my take on mobile flight simulation. Allot of the current flight games on Google Play feature little to no flight realism, and instead use clumsy physics and movement systems. After coming across a new Unity plugin called UnityFS, I was shocked to realize how easily it would be to bring realistic flight to mobile, and how much fun I would have doing it.
My plan is to create 10 crash scenarios and develop a fun and intriguing game for flight enthusiasts and action 3D gamers. It will be a free title, so my monetization method is Admob smartbanner ads which I never show during game-play. I also hope to add Unity Cloud with interstitial ads for the load-screen; whenever the service matures from private beta.
As usual this project is only possible thanks to Unity3D Pro and the Unity Asset Store with its many talented 3d artists. So far, here is what Emergency Landing Disaster looks like:
Okay, I implemented some scoring, and I still have a shitload to do though…
Here’s a video of what it looks like for now. I’ll change the sprites, reactivate the hitboxes ( and recheck them, ’cause it’s weird ).
It’s playing pretty well with a gamepad.
For the week-end now, I’ll do some more stuff of the game like:
Add the menus, reactivate and debug hitboxes, make real levels ( and not that crap with copy pasted enemies apparitions ), change the sprites, add the almost final scoring system, debug more, and a lot more things.
And I’ll release a beta version on sunday I think.
So, here we go for the video, enjoy:
(Copied from my blog: www.photongamedev.wordpress.com)
Short answer: homework and midterms this week. That about sums it up.
So down to business then, shall we? So first, the October Challenge. I can’t say I’m overly thrilled to say this, but I’m just not sure it’s going to happen. I have quite a few big things coming up school-wise near the end of October. As is often the case with LD, never seems to be enough time, eh (though timing is only half the issue; read on)? But that being said, I’m still planning to work on SOMETHING; I just don’t see it coming together before the end of October,and whether I continue this current idea or not is up in the air.
Which brings me to my next point. Why would I want to drop my idea? Actually, I’m not convinced it has to do entirely with the idea. I’ve come to a bit of a conclusion lately: I’m just not enjoying game-making like I used to in Stencyl. As a nitty-gritty programmer type, a part of me WANTS to work with hard code. And simply put, I’m just not sure Stencyl is at a point where I can really flex the power I want. Particularly, its the data management quirks that really get to me. Obvious things (define my own classes, stronger data scoping control) I can do with hard-coding don’t appear even remotely simple/obvious with Stencyl. Ultimately, its the trade-off of using a particular engine, of course; I want to be sure that I highlight that Stencyl is an incredible piece of software and its some of those streamlined features that kept me around, but for my personal tastes I’m just not sure its cutting it anymore. It’s just not as enjoyable for me.
So what’s the plan then? At least initially, I’m going back to my roots with Python and Pygame. Though I know that may raise the question of speed and performance, at this point and time I’m not too concerned about it. I’m going to try and build a personally-coded library on top of Pygame for my game-making needs and see how that goes. I’ve learned quite a bit, actually, from using Stencyl, and I feel better equipped to start more from the “ground-up” approach. And who knows? There are a lot of opportunities: in the future I could look into learning C#, as I know the popular Unity engine runs off of that. I think, at least for now, Python will suit me just fine; I know how to work with it and I have designed two rough games in it before.
So in short, I’m not going away. I’m still in the rough design phases with my Python coding (per my school and personal experience, I’m trying to get this whole “planning” thing down a bit better), but the gears are turning a bit more vigorously than they were before. And if you like Stencyl, don’t worry! I’ll probably still be around the forums and may still post some Stencyl-related materials on my blog here and there.
So there you go. Photon out.
—————————————–
Must admit though: I’m seeing a lot of stellar looking stuff (my eye has been caught my that drone game in particular)! Hopefully I’ll be playing some of it in the near future!
There is 28 hours until IGF submission deadline and I plan on getting all of my base mechanics, art, bugs and sound finished before then.
What is my game?? It is an JRPG-RTS hybrid. The over world, party mechanics and inventory are those of an RPG, while battles, dungeons and other such events are handled as a Zelda Four swords with more than four heroes… or Pikmin where each pikmin is customisable.
It is meant to be played with ONLY a keyboard or a gamepad(USB Xbox controller), no mouse. This is done by your main units controls being on the left side of the controller/keyboard and the rest of your party on the right side. It’s kind of hard to grasp with when you start but you get better after a little bit.
There is a typecast menu to give orders to specific units since there is no area select. If I was fighting an Ent that’s spraying parallizing spores around him I would want a long range fire attack. I would press the enter key which would pause the game FTL style and you would be given a few options to chose from ” Magic”, “Range”, “Melee” or “Stat”. You would want to chose “Range>>Magic>>Fire” then you would press enter again and order those selected units to attack. It’s better played than explained.
Also the world, quests and monsters are randomly generated.
I would spend more time explaining but there is barely any time left.
My body is ready.
Weekly challenge will be to collect some amount of stars during a week and get some nice reward, like 8 atomic bombs, 5 shields or similar. I made a nice gold star in Gimp. I tried different particle effects on it and also some diffused star-light, but it did not look really good. So I went back to the particle effect used for powerups and tweaked that until I got something distinct for the star. Stars show up on their own pacing, so you can have both a star and a powerup on the screen at the same time.
I also worked on loading and saving player data. It was much easier than I expected. I expected to have to learn some Android data storage API, but for simple key-value storage, libGDX provides the Preferences class. Just init with:
Preferences prefs = Gdx.app.getPreferences("DroneInvaders");
and then use get(“key”, defaultValute) and set(key, value) to read and write the values.
The only thing I had problems with are the dates. To keep track of daily and weekly challenges, the game stores the date of last play. When player launches the game, it compares that and resets some counters. Theoretically, I could prevent players from changing the system’s calendar to past date, but I don’t want to. What I am doing, is setting new set of daily and weekly challenges when day rolls over and resetting the counters for number of stars and letters picked up.
To make that work, I had to get the day difference between the previous play and current date. It matters whether it’s the same day, exactly one day apart or more than one day. Googling got me to various websites and StackOverflow questions. Answers are funny. Many programmers simply calculate difference in seconds and then divide by 60 * 60 * 24 to get the days, completely ignorant about issues with daylight savings and leap seconds. One could argue that it does not matter that much for a game, but still getting many bug reports twice a year doesn’t sound like fun to me. Some other guys simply count the days by adding one-by-one from start until they reach the end. While those loops might look correct, they still miss sometimes as they do not take the time out of the calculation. If one object stored 01.Jan at 5am, and you calculate it vs 02.Jan at 23pm, adding one day to first object is still less than the second, so they add two and get 2 day difference.
One of the tricks I use in this situation is to always set the time of the earlier Date to be something like 10am, and set the time for the later Date object to 5pm. Since daylight changes always happen at night, this is safe. And we also have 7 hours in between, just in case someone in future decides to do daylight saving changes in the middle of the day.
6This entry was posted on Saturday, October 19th, 2013 at 10:41 am and is filed under October Challenge 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hey guys!
I thought since this is where I got heavily inspired by the indie scene, this would be a great place to share the start of my Game Dev career.
Today I put out my first real game; Lil’s Big Adventure. Rescue Lil, a little pink ball who fell in a hole from the creepy monsters that block his path.
<- This is Lil
I’ve been working on this game for a while, but there is a reason for this. I created everything from scratch. I programmed everything, I wrote all the music in Famitracker (which is really hard if you aren’t musically trained), and I drew literally everything down to each pixel. Every map is randomly generated with randomly placed enemies for a different experience every time.
If you guys could give it a play and let me know what could use improvements or of any errors that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for reading this
http://gamejolt.com/games/adventure/lil-s-big-adventure/18445/
I’m making this game as an experiment, so I don’t expect to earn much money. This game is going to be free to play, with option to buy coins in the game if you want. I like the way it’s done in games like Pudding Monsters where players can play everything without paying at all. Drone Invaders will be completely playable without paying a dime, so it is not a kind of “pay to win” types. However, I still want to enable players who can’t wait to have fully powered up weapons right away.
I opened the Google Play account without problems. It was $25, which is fine. I just read some blog post where a solution to saturation of Google Play was suggested – it proposed to have $5000 registration fee, so only developers who are serious would apply. I’m not sure if I would apply for $5000, it seems so me that only big studios who are already making money on other platforms would participate.
However, opening a Google Merchant Account is mission impossible from my country. So, what are the options. Well, you can still add payments with services like Fortumo or Centili, but this has two problems: 1. it goes against Google Play terms of use, so you either risk getting your account suspended or you only publish to other Android app stores (there are some 30+ as far as I can tell, and some stats say they make up about 30% of the market, although this seems too high to me). 2. to enable payment via SMS, your game needs to ask for two system permissions which users probably won’t like: send and receive SMS. Although this is the only way to enable monetization in some countries, if you aim for US market, it’s a bad idea.
Third option is to start a company in USA and register account that way. This is of course the right thing to do if you expect to earn some substantial amount of money from your game, but having an US company brings in some costs. There are specialized agencies that can register you a company in Delaware. Delaware is a USA state and a tax-haven. Of course, you can always tranfer the earned money from there to yourself, and then pay the taxes locally on that transfer. I’m not ready for this step yet, as this is my first game and I have no clue if I will make any money of it.
Luckily, I have a friend who lives in US, so we opened an account under his name, and the game will be released under that account. At least merchant account is available for US individuals. I still don’t understand why Google won’t allow merchant accounts from my country, when I’m receiving money from their AdSense directly, without any problems. I guess not all departments of Google have the same policy.
Hi guys!
Begins one week Jam where you can win a Unity Pro license. More information here: http://devcup.nextcastle.ru/?eng=1
Thanks!
I am taking Chemistry currently. I was assigned to make some sort of project to celebrate Mole Day. I decided, “Hey, since I know how to use Gamemaker, I might as well make a simple game.” And that is exactly what I did. This is my Whack-a-Mole game.
P.S. Mole is a unit of measurement. Mole day is celebrating that unit.
Game Download: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ax94l4df3dxyqbd/Whack-a-Mole.exe
Source: http://www.mediafire.com/download/y39bj7oa6vg59kl/Mole_Day_2013.zip
Hey guys,
some news about MinimalShmup.
It’s now time to think a bit about what happend this week-end.
As I say, I thought about releasing a beta this Sunday night.. It’s not going to happend.
Why ?
I worked as hard as I could, something like 25 hours and maybe I could do it if I didn’t find a crappy bug in the game.
At some point ( it looked random in fact, I still don’t know why it did that bug, and I don’t even know if it’s really fixed now.. ) when loading the stage 2, the sprites were absolutely not the right ones.
I think it was because at the beginning I was loading the levels from text files, and then I added a .tmx file parser to load my level created with Tiled Editor, and because it was loading a bit from the .tmx and a bit from the text file, it did some weird things.
Now it seems to be working, but I wasted few hours fixing this, I lost my mind, felt like crap and wanted to burn anything around me.
I also underestimated the amount of time needed to make the menus, and spend some time to try optimising the rendering.
So now, it’s working, but there is a lack of content, and I still need to make the musics for the 2 firsts levels, so I decided to not release anything now, and wait to work on that.
About what was added since the last update:
– I added and fixed the special power, the bomb power and the shield power. It’s working great, and I’m still tweaking the scoring system, but I really enjoy playing it ( even if it took me a while to not die on the first level xD ).
Because I really need to see if the game is working on other pc’s than mine, I’ll still put an alpha version of the game on Monday or Tuesday, so you can comment on it and help me to fix bugs and improve the gameplay and stuff.
Now it’s time for me to sleep, see you guys for other game updates!
Although I have a wast library of wav sfx files I accumulated over the years, I’ve seen other game devs use Bfxr to create their own effects, so I decided to give it a try.
This is nice, because you own the effect 100% and you don’t need to prove where did you get the audio file. Some of the sites I used to download my sfx in the past are no longer online, and tracking people who made those is impossible. For example, my favorite mod music is Aspirating Milk which I found on modarchive. I tried to contact the author via e-mail in the tracker file, but got no reply. It was probably his address at university or something.
Bfxr requires Windows or Mac, while I prefer doing my development on Linux. I thought about running it on Wine, but didn’t even bother to try because I found this:
http://www.superflashbros.net/as3sfxr/
It’s a super easy to use and simple Flash app you can run in your browser. I highly recommend it.
These sfx programs produce various simple sound effects. Some complex sound effect can be created by mixing a couple of simple effects in a program like Audacity. I used it to create sfx for Atomic Bomb powerup:
BTW, I basically completed the game, I’m now testing on various Android devices. I’ll probably do the release on Google Play store tomorrow or day after.
If you happen to have an Android device with an OS greater than 2.0.1 and would like to try out my game it would be greatly appreciated. You MAY need to download the game on a PC and install it manually. Any feedback you could provide would be appreciated. Please comment on the game, bugs, feature requests, etc.
Thanks, J
DL : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8575435/Ribbon.apk
Already suggested additions:
-Smoother line movement
-GUI Scaling for larger screens
-Increase menu scroll speed
-Exit app button
-return to menu option from game screen
-highscores or distances saved
What can I say, it’s been a bit of a bumpy ride making this game.
First things first this is the final game http://www.kongregate.com/games/lparkermg/til-the-infinite-line
And this is the Webpage for it http://til.moon-gate.co.uk/
After finding out about the October challenge I already had an Idea on what I was going to remake my original LD27 game called Grav Nav. Which would have worked but it was pretty difficult to replicate how it worked and I changed focus half way through.I decided to look into maze and dungeon generation to see if I could get any ideas from that but nothing that could be done in the time I had left…
So I looked around at my stalled projects and found one I had called ST W (SingleTrack World) where each stage was generated to a certain length using blocks and decided to Incorperate that.
Inititally the development of TIL was pretty easy to a certain extent with the fact that most coding errors where human error. But the hardest part was the level generation itself when I introduced the difficulties, due to TIL originally being slated for Windows 8 I was pretty worried about the Frame Rate which TIL was running at.
Last night though was really pretty tight. As my self imposed deadline for having TIL up and out there was to be for the 21/10/2013 and that included bits such as testing, building etc. Which I found out that for some reason there were a few errors in building the code for TIL under Window 8. Each time I tried there were errors and I really didn’t have the time to fix them, so I made the last minute decision to switch to building for web. (Which actually turned out better than expected…)
Any way enough from me Have a Play on TIL and have fun. I’m off for a lovely holiday in Scotland.
Tags: game development, Moon-gate.co.uk, TIL