Does anybody know what a good Default Score would be for a game. I am new to Ludum Dare and I am just Wondering.

Does Anybody know a good score?

If you do thanks in advance 😛

Since we only get to explore one idea during Ludum Dare, there are a ton of ideas that get conceived and then immediately tossed. To preserve those, I’m listing some of the one’s that I though of during the compo, and after.

Ten seconds of oxygen

I’m kind of surprised that I haven’t seen this yet. Maybe it was avoided since it seemed obvious to a lot of people. Some kind of aquatic themed platformer, where the character can only hold their breath for ten seconds.

Ten second flop

Credit to Justin who was at the MADE for this idea. You’re a top racecar driver, and you’re contacted by the mob. They let you know that it’d be in your best interests to lose the upcoming race, but to make it look legitimate, you can’t lose by more than ten seconds.

Ten second votes

Stretching the definition of second a bit, you are some sort of legislator in a body of 21, and you really want to get a bill passed. In order to do so, you need to collect 10 second votes from the others by bribery, favors, etc.

Ten second distress call

You overhear and record a ten second distress call. You have to track down the source of the call by listening for clues in the recorded version, and comparing that with the city that you’re in (e.g. train horn in background).

What were some ideas you all ended up passing on?

!WARNING! May contain boobs (LOL, I mean stage 9 contains)! !WARNING!

“Ab Solanum” – Ludum Dare 27 Compo game entry page

So we are few days after Ludum Dare 27. This was my first LD 48 hour Compo and I can say I am really satisfied with my game (above You can see pretty screenshot of stage 3). So far comments are mixed and people commenting are torn between “Great graphics!” and “It hurt my eyes”, I literally have no idea what to think about it 😉

I was working on my game for about 26 hours, I produced exactly 3278 lines of code, 41 graphic sprites, 2 font files, 10 map data files (png files), 9 sound files and 1 music theme 3 minutes 24 seconds long. Ab Solanum was created using Microsoft’s XNA 4.0 (C# language).

Things I used creating my game:

• IDE : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express
• Graphics : GIMP 2.8
• Sounds : BFXR
• Music : PixiTracker

I think 26 hours is my maximum. Starting Saturday after 11 hours of coding I could not concentrate enough to produce anything worth a dime so I started creating music. I did not know PixiTracker before, but after some time I loved it sooooo much! Finally I came out with nice music theme fitting my game exactly how I could imagine it! I got some really kind comments about my music as well, thanks for that! You people are really awesome!!

When I started to think what kind of awesome game I should create I came up with wonderful idea… I wanted to incorporate all of the final round themes keeping “10 seconds” as the main one. One game stage would be all about one selected theme which would give whole nice shiny 20 stages. So it is Sunday, I am finishing 6th theme and suddenly realizing it is already 3 pm and… “well I am f*&#ed”.. Ultimately I came up with only 10 of them, pitty, it would be real blast if I had enough time to finish them all!

Thanks for reading, I will go back to rating games now, there are over 1800 more to go for me (oh my). I will be flattered if some more of You will play and rate my LD48 Compo game! Here is the link: CLICK

First of all : here’s my entry, since this is what I’m going to talk about.

Now : How the fuck did this happen ?

Warning, it turned up to be a long story (but there are pictures and all, so it might be fine)

Chapter 1 : The « Awesome » idea

Usually, on Ludum Dare (it’s my 7th), I go to bed early on Friday, then wake up early on Saturday to discover the theme and think about it in a cafe (I’m in France, so the theme is announced at 3 a.m). This time was a bit different though : instead of going to bed, I went to the bar and had some pints. Then some wine. Then some more pints. Maybe a wee too many pints.

I was feeling the theme would be « 10 seconds », so I started thinking about it…and then I had this awesome idea :

What about…10 seconds…in the life of a ROCK ?!

Uh oh…

AWESOME, isn’t it ?You know…because rocks live a long long time…so what they would consider to be 10 seconds would be a much much much longer time for us….like a whole lifetime…so I would make a very very long game, while most of LD entries would be very short…funny…

…at least when you’re drunk.

I eventually went to sleep at 2h45 (to avoid spoilers), woke up, and saw I was right : 10 seconds was the theme indeed. Haha ! It was 9 am and I already had my game idea (and what a great idea!) This Ludum Dare was going to be piece of cake ! (sarcastic laugh from future me)

Chapter 2 : Hit by a rock, in the face

some mocks-up mixed together

Seriously, my « 10 seconds in the life of a rock » idea wasn’t THAT bad. It wasn’t that much about a rock, but about what was happening around it, and what was happening was the whole lives of two human being, meeting on the beach as kids, playing around the rocks, growing up, falling in love, having quickies behind the rock, having kids, whom would play around the rock, getting old, remembering when they were playing around the rock, dying, mourning, dying. And that would be only 10 seconds in the life of the rock. A way to show that our human lives aren’t that important after all, or on the opposite that they are important after all…I don’t know.

No, this idea wasn’t that bad…

IT WAS JUST FUCKING STUPID !

But I still think this scene was kind of cool

First of all, I wanted to write 50 scenes for the games : 10 time period (each seconds) with 5 points of view. 50 FUCKING SCENES IN 48H ? Was I still drunk ?!

But yeah, in the end, I could have lowered my ambitions and wrote less scenes, but there was an another big problem :
– A game is supposed to be interactive.

– The player is supposed to be a rock.

Do you see it now ? Is there anything less interactive than a rock ?

Believe it or not, it took me a whole day to realize this.

Oh noes! What I’m making is all fucked up!

At the end of the first day, I stared at my computer screen, full of graphics, full of dialogues, and realized this wouldn’t go anywhere. I gave up, for the first time in my Ludum Dare history, thinking nothing was still better than a shitty unfinished « game »(which is totally wrong by the way).

I went to the bar, drank more pints.

Chapter 3 : The providential tweet

I spend the next morning trying to convince me that it was ok, that failing at a Ludum Dare didn’t mean I was the worse loser, that I didn’t even care after all…and it worked. I had given up on my LD game and it was Ok. That is precisely what I wrote in a tweet at noon. Then I had several kind answers telling me « come on ! Make something anyway », « try something else », « I want to play your game », but I didn’t really care because, as I said, it was OK now.

Until @leafthief replied to me

@Oujevipo Move on to a shorter, smaller game. I myself am starting just now – so let’s do this! http://t.co/s5xKlYLf7z

— Stefan (@leafthief) August 25, 2013

I don’t really know leafthief, I only played one of his games and really enjoyed it, but the day before I told him off (not seriously) for not making a game for this LD, telling him a wedding during the week end wasn’t a good enough excuse (when, in fact, it is). And now, he was telling me he eventually started working on a game ? Ooooh I felt very bad. If he could make a game in half a day at a wedding, I could make one in half a day in an awesome LD real life gathering filled with awesome people. (But now, in the end, I’m sad to see Leafthief didn’t submit anything)

Chapter 4 : Still too ambitious

I wonder if they’re really reading…

So I started working on something totally different, from scratch (or almost from scratch : I kept the characters’ faces). The scene would take place in a cafe where two strangers meet and, maybe, eventually, fancy each other. The player would play the boy, of the girl, and all he’ll have to do is to control his looks with WASD (looking up, at his journal, at her, away from her). I wanted the player to create his own story, by catching the other one’s eye, staring at her, or avoiding her eyes. I wanted the story to be totally mute, and the player totally free to imagine it. The ten seconds would be the ten moves of the player (no timer), then the game would be over. If you have played the submitted game already, you would recognise some similarities with the first scene, except I wanted the whole game to be the first scene, and I wanted it to have many path, many endings, and thus…many sprites.

“this will do for now”

For example : the boy could stare at he tits, then she would give him a dark look, then he would be embarrassed…or he could read his journal, be astonished by the news, and miss an opportunity, once again, I had many ideas, and felt it would be great. But once again, I was too ambitious. I only had like 12 hours left, and even if all the sprites were already drawn, I didn’t know how to create a good system to manage every stories. 10 moves x 4 possible moves…that’s a lot of possible path, more than 1.000.000 in fact. Once again, I was discouraged, and once again, I gave up.

Chapter 5 : Don’t. Think. Make.

…but this time it only lasts a couple of minute. I had to make a game. I transformed the original idea in a cooperative multiplayer game, each player playing a character’s eyes, I didn’t script any « story » except the characters blushing then smiling when they look at each other, I decided this was the way to win…and I still had some hours left.

*spoiler*

So I transform the whole game idea in a warioware-like game, I created two more mini-games, still happening at the cafe (lighting a cigarette, taking each other hands), and added a twist in the end to make it funny and fit the theme a bit more….aaaaaaaaaand it was done. Just in time (except there was an awful bug, but hopefully Laelien helped me to kinda fix it at the last minute. Play his game and cry  )

Epilogue : What’s left

In the end, I’m very proud of At the cafe. Partly because I managed to finish it in time when everything seemed lost, and partly because I think I nailed something, and this is the first scene. The scenes 2 and 3 are shitty, I was just filling the game with content. The 4th part is funny, but it’s just a lousy sex joke. Overall, the game isn’t very good, and for many reason, but that first scene…I think there’s something strong in it, it might not be very well made, but it’s there. And the comments I have so far tend to confirm it. I think the second idea I had, the one with the looks, was the best one, by far, way better than the mini timed games I submitted. I wish I’ve had it at the beginning or the 48h, maybe I would have made something great with it. For the first time, I want to re-work on my LD game, I want to explore this path I might have open, and who knows, maybe I will do (but I’m already very busy with projects)

I know At the cafe won’t be as well ranked as some of my previous LD compo games , and I know why, but I like it much more than most of my previous ones, because it taught me a lot of things, and the most important one is :

Don’t get drunk before Ludum Dare, you stupid !

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Hey guys, time for a postmortem on my game 10 Second Spike.  You can check it out here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=8229

So when I first heard the theme, my first thought was: Warioware!  Then I immediately dropped the idea, and thought of something else.  Usually my LD entries are the results of several failed ideas until one finally works, or can be made fast enough to reach the deadline.  This time I worked on my first real idea, and that was 10 Second Spike.  Every ten seconds a trap would be sprung and would need to be avoided.  I thought the idea had potential so I started pixelling.  I made the main character, without hands of course, because I stink at animating hands.  After that I started making tiles, using the tetris-esque style that I had started to really like lately, and made several different palettes for different areas.  Finished most of those and started mapping.

I decided to use spikes as my first trap because, frankly, they were really easy to code.  I had originally intended to do all manner of traps, but as it turned out, I didn’t have enough time for that.

This weekend was my first weekend in college, and as a band geek, it was also the last two days of band camp before practice.  So there went most of the day, and there is the reason I didn’t finish Spike for compo.

So yeah, that’s enough “backstory.”

Overall I’m pleased with how it came out.  The game itself is kind of a jerk, reminiscent of I Wanna Be the Guy, which was more or less how I intended it.  There is no indicator as to where the spikes pop up, and touching a spike leads to instant death, so I understand how it could be frustrating.  However, I did want to create a semi-creepy aura of paranoia, which I think I was moderately successful with achieving.  One has to tread carefully and remember where all the spikes are in order to get to the end.

As far as the art goes, I’d say it is one of my better looking games.  So yeah, it’s an art style of games I like to play, so I was inspired by that and used it in my game.

The music was okay.  I originally was going to go with making a countdown clock, but I thought that music might better fit the tone more, and once the player figured out when the music was going to end they would have to sit through the couple of tense seconds before the spikes would appear.

So, in conclusion, 10 Second Spike is a hard game, but that’s okay in my book.  I personally like hard games, and that sensation of being victorious is much more pronounced in beating a hard level of game.  I feel much more accomplished beating a level in Super Meat Boy, than I do after beating a level of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, for example.

Also, I’m planning to make a full version of this game.  How long that will take, or if it will happen is questionable, but I’m going to give it a shot.  I’m going to increase the graphical and animation quality to make it a much more lush and vibrant world of death.  There will also be different types of traps, and it will not be instadeath.  Most of the time there will be some sort of indicator of the presence of spikes.

I’ve started redesigning the main character, so here’s what he looks like at the moment, although that will probably change.

From left to right, there is the current character, the new character, then the new character wearing a backpack.

I’ll try to post more regularly on twitter as long as progress is being made, so if you are interested in the game, feel free to follow me.

Until next time,

toaster

This was my first Ludum Dare, but my fourth 48 hour game jam. in the past couple of months. I think now I’ve more games made in game jams than not! I always work flat out, and push myself, but I think I’m pretty good at knowing my limitations (which there are many). I’ve never not finished.

My game was called Ten Second Clone. Every ten seconds you are cloned, and that clone moves how you moved and shoots when you shot for the 10 seconds before it came into existence. You can play it here.  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25172      

It was always going to be a challenge having the enemy just act out your movements without making it easy for you to make it easy on yourself. And for the Ludum Dare version, I failed. You can get about 30 kills just by standing on the spot. It takes too long to get going.  However, I have been working hard on the sequel 5 Second Clone! There are more changes than just the timing. Now you can’t shoot through clones so you can’t just line them up and get them one after the other. After 3 shots the clone disappears for good. Now if the clones reach the bottom of the screen, you turn into a clone of your clone!

If you played Ten Second Clone, and quite liked it but thought, it was a bit slow, you really need to try 5 Second Clone http://www.dreamofsleeping.co.uk/games/fivesecondclone/ Obviously you can’t rate that game as part of the competion, but there it is anyway.  I’m going to be adding more to it. Hopefully better graphics, some sound effects when you die, but I think it’s a fun game now.

Hello again!

Thank you to all those who gave me advice on the optimisation on Pressurized, but especially to Lightmare Studio for actually taking a look at my Source to find the problem! 😀

Thanks to them, my game’s one potential “Deal Breaker” has been fixed!

File size has been reduced from 110 MB to 16MB

So if you have been put off by my file size or simply haven’t played my game, I would greatly appreciate any feedback given 😀

Here is my Entry!

Many many thanks,

PS: Check out Lightmare studio’s entry here.

Taha

Here’s a video I put up of my LD27 / LD48 entry, Ten Seconds of Thrust.

You can play it here: bit.ly/14wot3t

Anyone know how to capture the sound from a screen recording in Quicktime on OSX?  I can’t for the life of me figure it out–all I can do is get it to record the microphone, which is not what I want.

Anyway–can you avoid being a SPACE FATALITY??!?!!?!?!

Post some comments on features you’d like, I’m going to make this into a full blown game over the next few months.

Hey guys !

I just published a web version on our game, “Fragment”. Works well with WebGl, thanks to LibGdx libraries !

However, this version is still experimental. Music can become unsync with graphics And you really have to listen the music to win this game !

Click here to play NOW ! (Web)

Don’t hesitate to vote and post feedbacks here  You rocks !

Created a page for the game which will be developed further

http://www.indiedb.com/games/theres-a-hook

Since I’m lazy to make a gameplay video, caranha made a (video) review of my game… So I thank him a lot for this

And for those who want to play this game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=2043

And also play caranha’s game
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=7847

That’s all, okay let’s play more games.

Hello All,

My friend SineRider and I got together and made a remix of the music from my entry for LD27. It’s quite over the top compared to the subtleness of the game, because music. The best way I can think of describing it is “galaxy rock” or “slow trance.” Free download, so enjoy!

Tags: music, remix

The Run is done for a few days now so I’ll better write my post mortem before I forget the small hurdles. First, let me introduce The Run shortly.

You are playing a small slime and your goal is simple. Get to the rooms exit by walking on floor, walls and even the ceiling. The facility your trapped in is in a bad state so be aware of toxic liquids. Be also aware of traps, since defense systems will detect you after 10 seconds in a room and will be trying to stop you from reaching the end. Though, it is possible to finish the levels even when the 10 seconds are over. How fast can you beat all five rooms?

Play and rate now

What went right

• Head first
  I started this Ludum Dare game by doing most of the game-design before writing any code to save me from thinking about basic decisions during coding. This worked out great and I could focus on the code while coding.
• Doing pixel art
  Doing 8×8 pixel art again was the best thing I could do. I finished the assets pretty fast and I’m pretty happy about how it turned out. With more time for preparation I’ll may try WebGL next time.
• Fixing the screen size
  Not having to care about dynamic screen resizing like in my LD25 game was a huge simplification since I could expect a fixed resolution when coding. Next time I’ll may be flexible again but for this game it was perfect since the screen size equals the size of one room.
• Gameplay decisions
  One hing that was clear to me when I started working on this games code was that I didn’t wanted to make a hard 10 seconds limit. That’s why I implemented the traps. The original goal was that every room has a prisoner that you CAN free for the price of losing time and having to get around the traps. The prisoner was later replaced by bottles since I ran out of time for doing their sprites. The controls were doing well except of relying on physic.
• Flexible input system
  I’m happy with the way I implemented the input handling. When a key is pressed or a button on a known gamepad (and gamepad mode is enabled) these are mapped to actions like “left”, “right”, “jump” or “use”. So the entities don’t care where the input come from or how it is proceeded, they only need to check if they need that action. This would allow touchscreen controls as well.

What went wrong

• Leveldesign in the text editor
  My biggest mistake was to make no ingame level-editor. To edit a level I had to Alt+Tab to the editor, change a letter and Alt+Tab back to the browser and reload the whole game. A simple toggleable editor mechanic would’ve result in much more levels. Another problem was that I started doing levels 3 hours before deadline.
• Rely on physics
  When I decided to do the whole stick to the wall mechanic I did not thought it would be this hard. I had to rewrite the players physic three times before it got kinda bug-free. I also made the mistake not to give it away to players early. Thus some players had problems with the controls I didn’t see.
• Redoing the basics
  Another mistake I did was to implement the state manager and thus the menus and screens during the last six hours. I also missed the chance to do a real statistics screen (with death counts and such) simply by losing time due to the initial plan to not use libraries covering the basic stuff like bitmap fonts, state managers and controls. I’ll either use an existing library or do my own next time.
• Not finishing features
  The game has basic support for XBox 360 controllers, though this requires manual activation. It would’ve been much better if I had integrated game controls selection into a start screen (“Press space or start…”). Same applies to some in-game features like death counting by reason and the collectible bottles that have basically no use at the current state.
• Keeping it silent
  One major mood breaker is, that I didn’t create any soundtrack to the game is completely silent. A little loop would’ve helped the game to build a more intense atmosphere.
• Naming
  The Run is too unspecific for this game, since the character is a slime without legs. May I should start naming my game next time not in the very last hour.

Tags: post-mortem

Play the post-compo version here!

Just a quick post to say “Escape the Underground” has a post-compo version released, based on Jools64 and N0_Named_Guy’s feedback.

Added:

• Subtitles to introduction (removed voice over, it was rather annoying)
• Death counter
• Feedback when the stompy thing hits you
• Level starts when you press a key, instead of straight away

Fixed:

• Checkpoint spawning in ground sometimes
• Factory levels slightly more difficult

In future versions, I’ll be adding loads of cool stuff, including gamepad support, key configuration, difficulty levels (make it easier for noobs :P), easier to control, variable jumping, and fancy menu backgrounds.

Thanks for playing, and if you haven’t already, please rate my game? I will get round to rating a lot more games soon!

-The Good:

The Music:  “I think it went well this time round – used VCR6 for a bit more freedom, gained a little understanding of FamiTracker “music theory” and will definitely be using in future. Music could’ve looped a bit better. Will NEVER compose in beats of five again.” ~MK, composer

The Gameplay:  For once we managed to create a game with a nice difficulty curve, as the bosses got progressively harder, but not too hard.  We had also added challenge modes, for a more difficult experience if the game was too easy(And lets not forget easy mode, which comes complete with a pretty pink ribbon and a keyboard cat cover).

The Tools:  We knew our tools from the start, even if Jello didn’t have a proper level editor.  This allowed us to be more proficient whilst creating the game.

The Death:  After creating the third boss, we had noticed an unintended effect:  If the boss dies from a bullet, he dies red.  We decided to make this a thing and when the boss dies(except for the second boss, who falls).  This is also partially true with the blue representing laser charge, but this was an intended effect.

-The Bad:

The Crash:  Early on we had discovered a crash, which was seemingly random.  At first we thought little of it, since it was kinda rare, but it progressively got more annoying.  In an attempt to fix it, we changed the world system to something more state based.  The crash was still there.  Since the crash only occurred when changing worlds, we had assumed it had something to do with it.  We were not far from it either, after a little debugging we had found that it occurs when streaming music from the disk, so instead we changed all of the music to static.

The Name:  As with most other games, we had a little trouble naming it, so we called upon our friend Suyo to aid us.  After a few minutes Suyo came up with “Supersonic Attack Squad,” and went from there.

-The Ugly:

The Idea:  We spent a good amount of time on the first day coming up with ideas.  We said no platformers, since we didn’t have a proper level editor.  After a few hours we decided on a boss rush sort of game, except all of the bosses were beaten in ten seconds.  We probably spent way too much time coming up with the idea when we could have been making it

The Cookies:  On the second day, we became addicted to cookie clicker.  All three of us.  Don’t ask why, it just is.  It hampered our efforts by quite a bit, and we had to change from the original planned 6 bosses to only 4.

Graphics:  The system used for AFD was much different than our previous games and didn’t have the usual restrictions. This led to a lot of free-hand which is something Ace should never ever ever never do. Ever.

Composer’s comments: hi would you like the FTMs to poke around with in FamiTracker yes you would here are the FTMs

Well our first LD is over, we’ve made our first ever game together as a team, and we’ve got the obligatory platformer out of our systems

Technical stuff:  Made with Haxe 3.0, Flixel, Flashdevelop, GraphicsGale, sfxr, Autotracker, Excel.

The level that no one can complete!

What Went Right

• We finished a game in 72 hours without killing each other!
• The toolchain worked really well, Haxe, Flixel & FlashDevelop felt very familiar despite not using any of them before the warmup.
• Use of Microsoft Excel (hardcore mode!) as a level editor.  There are obviously some very good tile map editors out there, but learning them would have taken way more time than setting up a spreadsheet with some conditional cell colouring.
• Bringing in a third person for brainstorming and powerup graphics on the first day.  Thanks Graham!
• We anticipated that the main source of bugs would be unexpected interactions between multiple powerups, and set time aside to get this working properly.
• Almost all of the powerups we came up with initially made it into the final game.
• Staging the powerups and level progression to ease the player into mechanics without explicitly telling them. Combining different powerups gave us a clear sight of what obstacles a level needed to have, and a convenient “to-do” list for the 20 levels we built.
• Targeting web – easier for people to play off the bat, rather than having to install or download or compile, it just works on most platforms.  Having never built a Flash game before, this was surprisingly painless.
• The platformer controls and the level design we thought went well, it felt polished and enjoyable to play, even when getting squished every 5 seconds 😀

Cryptic instructions hidden in the levels

What Went Wrong

• Difficulty with scaling the character & collisions, as well as the timestep changes interacting poorly with the collision logic in Flixel.  Getting it running at 60 resolved most of this, but there are still spots where a random bit of wall will just make you explode.
• Lack of experience with the IDE & HaxeFlixel meant the initial setup wasted about an hour.
• Music was a bit of an afterthought, we tried a few different packages to create the music eventually settling with Autotracker.py.
• Collisions. The collision logic wasn’t quite doing what we expected it to, and we wasted time re-implementing certain collision features that were already present in Flixel.
• We had smooth interpolation for the scaling of the character, but had to take it out as the player kept getting stuck in walls during the scale change. In the end we had to bodge in level-specific fixes.
• Not understanding transparency in GraphicsGale – a lot of time was spent sucking the backgrounds out of sprites using Photoshop.
• While we’re pleased with making a platformer that feels nice to play, the genre is obviously well-worn as a Ludum Dare standard.  We defaulted to this because we knew we could get the game finished in the 72 hours, but it’s kind of old hat to people who’ve been doing LD for a while.

Wheeeeeee!

What We’ll Do Better Next Time

• Familiarise ourselves more with the tools, as well as deciding in advance what software packages we are going to use rather than flailing around!
• Artwork – practice creating artwork for next time, it had been a while since Bob had done any serious artwork and the simple 5 minute sprites that we knocked out were OK, but could have been better. Paul plans to learn some pixel art techniques too!
• We need to have alternatives for different game types, HaxeFlixel was good for rapidly building a 2D game, but it would have been nice to have the option of 3D.
• Work out how to use Flixel properly, rather than having to hack bits of code together to bend it to our will.
• Get together some flexible game ideas that we can adapt to the theme, instead of just defaulting to a platformer.

LINKS:

Please play our game, and let us know what you think!

Watch our timelapse video!

Play these awesome games that we’ve tried over the last few days!

•  Tracewire
•  Explosion Time
•  Vampire the Buffet Slayer

Tags: flash, Flixel, haXe, jam, postmortem, timelapse

Well, our first Ludum Dare Jam is behind us now, and even though it didn’t quite work out we still managed to gobble together something (almost) playable, or hopefully atleast enjoyable.

I was really disappointed that I couldn’t make the physics work and so I upgraded the game to use Box2D (my second venture into Box2D programming, first was yesterday!) and guess what; it makes things almost too easy! Here is the link to a (windows) build that is much closer to the vision we had in mind when we set out to make this game. Hopefully we can take the things we learned and apply them in Ludum Dares to come!

What went right:

• The story. We came up with something that fit with the theme and was at the same time quite enjoyable.
• We knew our tools. No extra time was spent learning our tools. It might’ve been useful to grap Box2D earlier though when things started looking pretty grim regarding the gameplay…
• We managed to make something, even though it wasn’t anything special!
• The art got a lot of praise in the comments so I guess that went alright.

What went left… I mean wrong:

• Scheduling. I left the collision code for the last day along with polishing and minor additions, bad choice since I hadn’t really done any complex / physically (somewhat) accurate collisions before. Maybe I also overestimated my capabilities.
• Planning. Especially the gameplay should’ve been planned more thoroughly, and we should’ve tested the basic gameplay ideas more to see if it would be any fun.
• Testing. While writing this post a friend of mine spotted a bug in the intro / outro. Just because I have seen the intro working many times already doesn’t mean it won’t break when the code is altered.

Tags: Mortem, Post, postmortem

I really don’t like the word Post Mortem. As to me,  it implies the project is dead.  I think,  it is something you do once the project is complete and either a success or a failure.  That way you can reflect on what you did, and improve or add another trick to your bag to be used in other projects.   It seems that in terms of projects created in this competition, it is only the beginning where your creation can go.  Personally speaking, I have found Ludum Dare to be a great way to spring board accelerated game development.  I believe Cherry Bomber has great potential to be a cool, fun, and hopefully successful mobile game(Ive already started testing)… If at the least web game somewhere that people will enjoy playing.

Why would we spend the greater part of 48 to 72 hours glued to a computer toiling away?  We like to make games?  Yes, of course…. but by no stretch of the imagination is it easy… at least not for me.  I think the real reason is because we want to share those crazy thoughts and ideas we have in our minds with other humans… and make a connection… And this is a great platform.  It also cant be under stated that we want to be successful.  We like making games, and I am sure we all aspire to be able to do that as a means to our financial well being.

This was my first Ludum Dare.  I am astounded at the number of entries submitted.  Actually I find it somewhat intimidating that the competition is so high.  To me this signifies a real change in the games industry.  I think the production bar is low enough that large teams for development are really not an option anymore.  This is actually a great thing…. It means that we all have the power to create the thing that we have been imagining for so long…  So let’s do it.

We are Indie, we are strong.

Wallpaper of our team by michax

Here it is! Thank you for keeping up our passion for this game!

voting page:  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=17178

The Intro

My first Ludum Dare – then suddenly my first Ludum Jam. Let’s be honest – this didn’t work out, but the end result was worthwhile, nonetheless. I’ve done a few jams before, but I’m basically still a baby programmer – still a lot to learn.

The Good

* Art – This came together fairly well and the submitted experience looks rather nice (folks other than me like it too!). Palette and colour temperature worked, lighting was fairly successful. I’m very happy with the combo of pixel art and PS1-level polygon modelling – I think this’ll be worth pursuing in the future.

* Particles – Shuriken, I could marry you. The others will say you should be filed under Art, but what do they know? You’re special. You have only to smile and suddenly there is Animation and atmosphere. *sigh*

* Programming – Again, nae bodder. No real programming challenges, but some good practice. Lots of animation-by-way-of-code, which is a fast way to give a scene a nice sense of life.

* Ludum Dares! Ludum Jams in disguise! – I’d given up after the first 48 hours, then read somebody’s post where they mentioned that they were switching to Ludum Jam rules. And suddenly I could see – THERE WAS TIME! Glorious, bounteous, forgiving gulfs of time!

All of which makes…

The Bad

…all the more bitter.

* Inspiration – Read the theme and thought oh, that’s fun, that reminds me of the Lars Von Triers movie ‘The Five Obstructions’, I wonder if I can make a game based around the first obstruction? No, that’s a mad idea. I’ll sleep on it and have millions of better ideas tomorrow.

Except I didn’t.

Normally I have hundreds of ideas for jams and this theme – Ten Seconds – was an especially good one! But – NOTHING. All I could think of was trying to build a multi-camera, multi-character adventure game where the player would have to layer and stack character interactions as control cycled between characters on a 3.3333333 second interval.

But, Rev, that’s a CRAZY idea for a gamejam!, you exclaim. What about the scope?

* Scope – And you’re right. It makes me angry that I’ve fallen for this again. Approaching Ten was clearly a two-artist/programmer man job. And I knew this going in. But damned if I could think of any other worthwhile ideas (at the start. Natch half-way-in, I could think of hundreds). Rrrrg.

* Design – So I didn’t even really like this idea and I was always trying to think of a way out of the problem… Which distracted me on design, which meant I lost time each day to just sitting down with a notepad and scribbling. That said, eventually I came up with a very slight story (GAH a story-led game for a gamejam, bad idea, bad idea) which I was reasonably happy with. By this time, things were pretty much doomed – I’d spent far too much time dawdling around with the art and fiddly little details and I was unlikely to get the gameplay in – hence the published version of Approaching Ten.

The Conclusion

The lessons learned here are: 1) BRAINSTORM HARDER at the start and only start on a game idea you’re really excited about.  2) If you have to go with an adventure game, don’t go to the computer until you have your story and puzzle design. 3) This art style is promising. 4) SCOPE HARDER.

…Still. Can’t wait for the next one. =)

Yours,

–Rev

I’ve played a lot of games. A LOT. And rated them. But I just wanted to check that it’s allowed? My C number looks really weird (as in really high compared to some other people.) I’m aiming to play as many games that work on my computer as I can, while I can. After a certain amount, are you supposed to stop rating and only play?

The Link.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27229

Minor bug fixes, etc.

My earnest advice and goal for next time is to have a working demo BEFORE the time limit is up! This way I don’t cause so many inconveniences when I have to keep re-uploading. Hope you check it out! Report any problems and i’ll get on it asap. I run on a windows so if one appears on another system, do let me know so I can run some scans

Have a smiling Darla while your at it.

Bun Out!

Tags: 2013, LD #27, THE WHiTE ROOM, Visual Novel, VN

This is a repost from my personal blog, but figured I might as well throw it up here too! I tweaked a few things to make it applicable to this audience.

Day 1

The event started at 9 pm for me. I feel sorry for those of you overseas! I spent about two hours thinking through different ideas and working out how I could implement them before coming up with an idea inspired by the game Lemmings. I thought it would be cool to have something where you are directing characters to some sort of goal. For the theme tie in, I was imagining different methods of directing the characters, that would last for 10 seconds. I figured I would find more ways to tie it to the theme as I went.

I needed an idea for my characters now. At first, I thought of the minion characters from the movie Despicable Me. They seemed like a perfect fit for a lemming type role. I knew I couldn’t just copy that idea, but I opened up my graphic editor and started working on a walking animation, picturing minions in my head.

I’ve never done character animations before, but a quick search online showed me the basics of how to draw walking legs. Soon enough I had the basics down. But I needed my own character. The iconic yellow minion with blue overalls wasn’t going to cut it. I started thinking about construction workers in general, with their orange work pants and googled, “orange jumpsuit” for some inspiration.

It wasn’t long before I saw a picture of an astronaut and all the sudden it all came together. The setting would be in space on a ship. The crew of the ship would need to navigate their way across the ship, with doors randomly opening and closing, and other random events like fires, airlocks opening to outer space, etc, happening on a 10 second cycle. You would be given tools to open and close doors and redirect the crew.

By 4 am Saturday morning, I had my character animation and a few other graphics complete.

Day 2

Saturday morning by around 10, I had eaten breakfast, walked the dog, and was ready to work. I knew I had spent a lot of time so far on just my character animation and still had multiple graphics I would need. I’m not a graphic artist, so it was slow going. But I decided I better start programming and get some of the game itself done. I had chosen to use the Unity 3D engine. I had only jumped into learning Unity about a month ago, and had even put up a tutorial for it based off what I had learned. Pretty basic stuff, but I was picking it up fast. I worked Saturday till about 6pm when I needed to head out for a bit. I was back and ready to work around 9pm and had another good session of coding and graphics. By 4:30 am Sunday, I was ready to call it quits for the night.

Saturday felt like a good day of work, but I still had a game that had no user interaction and was not even tied to the theme yet. There was a space ship with rooms and crew members walking around it. They would stay contained to the outer walls of the space ship, but were walking through interior walls as they pleased. They were also getting stuck in right corners. I needed to turn the simulation into a game, tie in the theme, add player interaction, add a start menu and credits/score screen, and polish and fix the bugs. I had a lot of work left.

Day 3

Sunday I was eager to get started and got back at it by 9:30 am. I had done a lot of the graphics but still had a few things to make. I quickly threw together some doors and then jumped back into programming. I’m actually really pleased with the progress I made on Sunday. I hit very few slow downs and my game was pretty bug free. I got all the collision detection finished, albeit very crudely programmed. But it was there and working. I finished up door interactions and got them opening and closing randomly on 10 second cycles.

My plan for user interaction was to use a playing card type system. The player would have a “hand” of 4-6 cards. Every 10 seconds they would be dealt new cards to fill their hand back to 6. These cards could be move tiles, to redirect the crew, door open/close tiles to open and close doors, fire extinguisher cards to put out room fires, etc. By this point, I realized random fires were not going to happen. And I wasn’t going to have time to implement airlock doors and animate the crew being sucked out. For testing purposes, I had also allowed the player to open and close doors simply by clicking on them. So I decided the card system would just be for move tiles. I quickly put together the graphics I would need and went to work on the redirection logic. Again, I was pleasantly surprised how quickly it came together. The most difficult part was getting them to work well next to doors, and making sure the different actions the character could take were processed in the proper order.

Around 6pm I had finished up all the game functionality I wanted (about 3 hours before the end of the competition). I then spent the next 3 hours polishing and testing the game. Fixing any small bugs I found, updating graphics to make sure the color palette worked well together and making sure the web version of my game was up and running.

Final Thoughts

Like I said earlier, I had a ton of fun with this. My wife was great, letting me program all weekend. I’m currently working on a game for iOS, but I’ve never released anything publicly yet. So it was extremely satisfying to complete a working game and put it out there. I’m really happy with the way the game came out. There are a few things I want to change eventually. I feel the game is a bit too hard right now and there is a bit too much randomness. The movement tiles lasting only 10 seconds is not long enough and would really help with the difficulty if they lasted longer. So I will definitely tweak those once judging has ended.

I also didn’t get around to doing sound, apart from a single effect when you save a crew member. I used CFXR to make my single effect but was unable to come up with anything else I liked. I had wanted to make a sound effect for the doors opening and closing that I would play every 10 seconds, but it just didn’t happen.

Apart from those issues, I think the game turned out great. I calculated in the end I worked about 30-32 hours, with about 12 of those spent on graphics. I’m still amazed at how much I was able to accomplish in that amount of time. But as impressed as I am with myself, all I have to do is check out some of the entries you guys have created, and I’m blown away at what some people are able to accomplish!

Feel free to check out my entry and let me know what you think!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=25089

That was a close one! After last minute problems our game was submitted closer to the deadline than ever before. (3 minutes before submission hour :P)

With our fifth Ludum Dare game down, we would like to present to you:

Trench Coat Tunes

You play as C.T Plaear, a fashionable music connoisseur with a magical cassette tape player.

Trench Coat Tunes protagonist, C.T. Plaear

This competition we tried to focus more on interaction with and exploration of the play environment. This included things like almost all game objects being physically reactive, to needing to find hidden items like keycards and passwords to progress. We also experimented with a combination of 2D and 3D art style, and like how it turned out for the most part.

We ended up with a bit more difficult of a game this time, with players often needing to find the best path through a level if they want a chance to progress past the difficult security guards.

We’ve already received some good feedback, including:
– Player movement is too slow/not as tight as we would have liked.
– Instructing the player on what they need to do could have been done better
– More polish in a few key areas (as we would have liked) could have made a world of difference.

Thank you all for the great responses, and as always we had a great time with this event!

And again, we hope everyone with check out Trench Coat Tunes.

Ludum Dare 27 was a massive event I’m sure a lot of you really got excited over.

If you’re still in that game dev mood, then come watch me develop my game Stonemen in Unity.

If you’re starting out and want to learn something, or are just a better programmer and want to embarrass me, Come join!

Streaming at: www.twitch.tv/jellycakes1

Hello! I just uploaded the timelapse for my entry “Defense of the Zorion!” Check it out!

If you haven’t already, play the game here!

Happy gaming! 😀

Tags: motivation, screenshot, timelapse, unity, unity3d, update, video

My interpretation of the theme led me to a puzzle theme. I have made platform, shooters, pac-man-like and 3d games, but  I never made a puzzle game before. The experience was better that I could think.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=24602

Now I’m getting fun playing the other games. And I surprised that I found no one other puzzle! Maybe this is the most uncommon game category?

Hey Everyone,

I’ll be working on a Dungeon Crawler MMO for the next few hours, and possibly pull an all nighter! If you’d like to join in: Twitch.tv/0Creds

Hope To See You All There,

– 0Creds

We had a problem during the night, but now the public server is back and working

PLAY NOTIEMPO !

When the time came, and the theme was set, I was initially dismayed. It was … not one of my favourites. Oh well.

Fortunately, I knew I needed some things working in XNA, regardless of what I did, so I could just start coding, while watching Ludum Dare screencasts at Twitch. so, I wrote an engine which rendered textured quads, and set up the camera so that I could set them on screen with pixel precision.

Some 9 hours in, I finally started getting  an idea I liked.

The initial concept was, that you’d play a hero, who’d have to stop a disaster, every 10 seconds, and rush to the next one. I imagined a caped character, saving planes and trains, stopping robberies and alien invasions.

Well, that wasn’t going to get done in 39 hours. So, time to simplify.

The times I’d played Arkham Horror, or the last time I spent over-analyzing the setting in Sailor Moon, probably cued something.

What is there was just one  disaster type, that of interdimensional invasion? You’d fight the creatures rushing in from portals, and… stuff. I was kind of fuzzy on the details, but closing the portals or taking the fight to the enemy should be an option. Initially I had civilians whom the monsters would attack, and locations the player could visit, but time pressures -> snip.

Onwards, with the post-mortemizing!

What Went Right:

Quite a bit. I was about 90% satisfied with my experience and results, although this was my first LD, and my second build-a-game-over-the-weekend participation.

Starting with the Engine.

Certainly not always a good idea, but in this case, I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to do – I didn’t want to do any modelling, but I wanted to have access to rotations and whatnot. This was also my XNA learning project, and I made good use of the first nine hours, despite having no idea of what I’d make.

That being said, I had to rewrite the core of the thing, as my initial version was badwrong. Of course, I figured the correct way to do it immediately after a good night’s sleep, when the competition had finished.

Simple Design

Not having an overambitious design cut down on time needed, and I stil barely squeezed the minimum in, within the time limit.

Focusing on Finishing and Staying on Target

To get a game, not a game demo, I needed win and lose conditions. I sort of got there – if I’d just slapped a “you win” screen in front of the player, when they reached the final battle portal stage, it would have been complete. Now, while there’s a distinct lose condition, there wasn’t clear win condition. It has a screen showing controls, and even some sound effects.

It’s not just a tech demo, but an actual, if tiny and not very entertaining, game.

Coder Art

I like drawing, and I’m not horrible at it. I intended to leverage that, but I slapped in some quick placeholder art — which ended up being pretty much final. It’s aesthetics grew on me, like an alien fungus. I didn’t end up spending much time on it, just adding tiny little animations, which made things quite lively enough

Tiled

The Tiled editor, while very simple, is great at quickly putting levels together, and I know some simple tricks with it, so that was fun.

What Went Wrong

Not that much, really.

Using 3d.

Not in and as itself, but learning and building took a huge chunk of time, which I could have avoided, if I’d just stuck to blitting. As it turned out, I didn’t really need all those 3d features at the time.

Of course, now that I’ve rewritten the engine and so forth, I’m starting to see some benefits from the 3d engine in the background, but for the purposes of the competition, it was redundant.

Getting Zero Peachy Keen Features Implemented

I had a plan to give players power-ups depending on how they performed during each 10-second segment. Various attacks, heals, and other neato things. As I got none of them in, the player was left with two basic attacks, both which are kind of meh.

Using CamStudio for Timelapse

Not a big thing, but I lost first three hours of video due to hitting esc at the same time as CamStudio offered a save dialog, and that was that. ’twas a pain, mostly.

Afterwards, I familiarized myself with Chronolapse, which is much better regarding timelapse recording.  I also lost a few minutes fighting with CamStudio, which may or may not count.

(I linked the timelapse videos in previous posts, if you’re interested)

Not Paying Enough Attention To Rules

I didn’t know there was a hour’s grace time to upload the product, after the actual competition time was done. I could have put in a bit more work on the game had I known that. Ah well.

Level Design, or Lack Thereof

My test level end up being pretty much the final one. I could have made the gameplay much more pleasant by simply redoing the level’s layout. Few things are as permanent as those meant to be temporary.

Still, I’m not very good at level design, in general. Need to improve there.

Coder Art

On the other hand, this was another thing, where an investment of, oh, 3-4 hours would have given me much more stylish graphics. Not that I had the time, due to spending most of the first day building the engine.

My LD27 Entry

Tags: postmortem

———————–

FSCK is my jam entry for Ludum Dare 27 !

People are having a blast playing it, and now all people on Windows can join in on the fun!

Check it out and let me know what you think

Thank you!

Download Here!

Hi! I just made more adjustments in my post-compo version. Play it and tell me what do you think. 😀

Link: The First Odyssey.

so i used abundant-music.com to generate music and found it hard to find a good midi converter,  in the end i used cowon media center. But i wanted to have 8bit sound origionally but as i said it was hard to find a good midi converter that wasn’t a trial version or some other catch.

Today I found GXSCC is a japanese software in english, but does the job asides from the odd crash, but for a simple conversion its perfect and i would recommend it for future use, especially in future ludum dares

link: http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-SanJose/8700/P/GsorigE.htm

my ludum dare entry

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

Has anyone done this before? There seems to be no tutorial on this,  and Unity documentation is terrible concerning multiple controllers.

Hi!

I’m trying to write a postmortem, but so far I’m not very good at it.
The first day I started the stream on Twitch. If you’re interested, you can watch the record. But it will be available some time (problems with uploading).

In the game was more important animation and sound. So I’m not worried at the expense of code. It there is very little and it is very simple. And anyway I am very bad programmer. So I decided to focus on the atmosphere of the game.

I had an idea in my head to make the main character of the game by myself. Just fun to see myself as the main character in the video game. The character really took over some of my habits from life.  He pulls it out from his pocket like me.  It’s fun. It’s like I went for a walk and fell into my dreams.

[ME]

[REAL ME]

Only a little more than an hour before the end of LD. The game as a whole was ready, but there was a very important part – the music. This is the basis of my game. And if I had not had time to make music, then I would not have made the game. Just would not make sense to load the game on LD without music.

And luckily I was able to do everything! Yes, I wanted to make more sounds and music, but the time is not left.
All in the game musical compositions 8, 4 individual sounds, 11 phrases (when something cosmic talking with us.)

The game turned out not as what was supposed to be, but it was a great experience for me. And it was fun. I love LD.

I will try to write a few more facts about the development (of course if you are interested).

And yes, my English is very bad, sorry for that.
Thank you!

[ PLAY AND RATE MY TENTH ADVETRURE ]

Tags: adventure, ME, post-48h, post-mortem, postmortem, words

Hi fellow Ludumites,

I finally got around to publishing my Android game “Hedgehog Wars” to the Google Play store and the Amazon App store. So it is easier than ever to try my game out on your Android phone. Just follow the links from my game entry page below, or simply search for “Hedgehog Wars” in the stores.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18183

Now I really need to get serious about rating lots of other games! That is my mission objective for this weekend.  

To give you some background information first, I am a researcher working at “Technische Universität Darmstadt” in the field of Serious Games with a strong interest in games in general. After talking about it a few times with my colleagues, I decided that it was time to take part in a Game Jam myself two months ago. Because I found the idea of having other participants around in order to exchange ideas intriguing, I asked my supervisors if we could organize a local event at our building and invite some of our students as well. Thankfully they supported this idea, so this postmortem will take a look at two different aspects – organizing a local event in an university context and making our first jam game simultaneously. Spoilers: In the end everyone agreed that this won’t be our last jam.

The university event

Our local event

To keep the experimental spirit of the jam, we didn’t want to impose any restrictions on the participants. This did not only include topical freedom, but also the technological. We explicitly invited participants with no preexisting knowledge in game design and creation and did not differentiate between student and university staff participants (after a joint brainstorming session we formed mixed groups only based on game ideas). While seeming natural, this decision had many implications in the context of a university, most importantly that it is almost impossible to grade such kind of event. In this case students cannot get credit points for their work, which prompted concerns that we would not find any student participants at all.Thankfully that wasn’t the case. Quite the opposite: We found 15 students, which was a great number for our location. But more importantly, these students were exactly the kind of people we had hoped for. The absence of grade meant that everyone had a great passion for (creating) games and that there was no pressure to get a result matching some additional grading-releveant criteria. Therefore everyone was highly motivated and eager to experiment, learning new skills on-the-fly. It also created a friendly environment without competition-based thinking, where the groups were willing to show their intermediate results and exchanged feedback regularly – which is often neglected when everyone is striving for the best grade. And last but not least, this informal structure minimized the organization effort and allowed the organizers to take part in them jam themselves.

All in all I am extremely pleased with the atmosphere during the jam as well as the results, which turned out to be great for a university with very few gaming themed lectures (in my opinion). I also found it amazing how much the everyone learned – the contribution of the supposedly “inexperienced” participations was well beyond what one could have expected. Big thanks to everyone who took part in the event and I’m looking forward to the next one!

Our game “A Maze Thing”

A Maze Thing

As I already mentioned, I also took part in the development of the game “A Maze Thing”. This Unity-based game is built around the idea that you are in an enemy-filled maze, where you have a radar to counter your limited vision. This radar however updates every 10 seconds only, so you always have periods of uncertainty between this updates.
While I am very proud of the result, especially because it was our first jam entry, there are quite a few lessons we learned along the way:

• We did no proper project setup, so our team (5 people) ended up using different folder structures which got quite confusing in the end.
• Testing started very late because we integrated our separate parts only after they were finished. This left us not enough time for finetuning and balancing the gameplay.
• We assumed that a game working in the unity editor would also work as a build. Discovering to late that this was not the case (having two scripts with the same name) almost prevented us from submitting an entry altogether.
• In the end we simply forgot some small details (a quit button, using a default seed showing all room types we build) which wouldn’t have cost much time to implement but which would have improved the game quite a bit.
• Since there is no time for optimization, performance should be a concern right from the start and one should favor simple graphics / algorithms over complex ones.
• We did not plan our strong points (like the level generator) – they simply emerged because the guy responsible for them invested much time in it. In the end it worked quite well, but I feel that we could have picked our focus more deliberately.
• Some tasks took more time than necessary due to learning / technical difficulties. While being fine for our approach (we had no ambitions on “winning” and were eager to try some things we hadn’t done before), this would have to change if we were shooting for a more polished game.

I’m very curious on how much we can improve for the next jam by working on these aspects – and on the feedback we already received for our entry. Many thanks for the comment!

Games created at our local event:

If you are interested in the games which were created at our local event:

• 10 Up
• 10 Seconds to Apocalypse
• 10sion
• The Most Important 10 Seconds Of Your Life
• A Maze Thing

PS: Please note that despite posting this text from our group account, this post reflects my personal perspective only.

Christian Reuter

Tags: game, local event, postmortem

for all those who have asked me here is the English version and removed grey message box

Is it possible to add an improved (highscores, better transitions, etc.) version to our entry (and keep the original one) ?

This will be my first postmortem ever, but hopefully it won’t be too bad..

I’m happy (and a bit surprised) that I finished my entry this time. I was close to giving up at a few different times, but in the end I’m quite happy with the result and glad that I stuck with it. My biggest obstacle this LD was the lack of time. I usually spend a lot less than 48 hours because I like to sleep and other things around the house needs attention. This was even more true this time since I have a newborn son (3 weeks old). Apart from getting my sleep during the night, I also had to babysit when my wife wasn’t available and we did a few trips for a couple of hours each day. I knew this would be the case before hand so when trying to come up with a game idea my biggest problem was that I always felt that I wouldn’t have enough time to complete a somewhat finished game based on the concept. A few of my favorite ideas had to be scrapped for this reason. In the end my game is a very simple game that is very different from my original idea, but still quite fun.

The original concept was a turn-based strategy game where the player had to survive in a maze where the walls were moving every 10 seconds. The final game is more of a fast-paced action game where the walls move every couple of seconds and new enemies and gold is spawned every 10 seoconds.

What went bad

• Theme – the 10 second theme was definitely not my favorite and I had a hard time coming up with an idea that I felt was good enough and that I could finish in time (see above).
•  Motiviation – After the first day was over I was seriously considering not finish my entry. I was still thinking of using my original game idea and I just couldn’t figure out how to make a fun game out of it. And I felt that instead of spending the whole sunday on something that would never be finished/fun I could spend it with my wife and son instead.
• graphics – The game doesn’t look toooooo bad, but I still wish I would have had enough time to replacing my placeholder graphics with something a bit higher quality. I’m no artist though, so chances are it would have look quite bad anyway!
• Target platform – I tried exporting my game to HTML5 from GM, but it didn’t run at all in Chrome, ran awfully in firefox and ran okay in IE10 (no sounds though). Because of this I have only uploaded a no-install windows version. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to run for all people.

What went well

• Game maker:Studio – I’ve been using GM for the last two LDs and I definitely have a love/hate-relationship with the application. It allows me to create games very quickly which is important (see above again). But as a programmer, I find the GM scripting language quite awful and I miss doing some “real” programming.
• Sunday
• Music – For the first time I created my own background music. It is of course a very simple piece of music, but it was fun to make and I’m happy with the result. PixiTracker was a lot of fun to work with as well!
• Result – My LD entries are never the best looking or sounding, or the best polished games. But I usually think that I succeed in creating something that is quite fun to play. I think that I succeeded with that this time around as well.
• Mood – I think the blinking red lights, the background music, and the moving walls, all work well together to create a specific mood for the game.

What I will do different next time

• Game concept – My concepts are usually similar to each other (last three involve shooting, 2/3 involve zombies, etc) and often use a common game style (platformer, top down shooter, etc) where the theme doesn’t play too big a part. This is partly because I want to do something simple that I’m sure to finish. It is also partly because I don’t do many games outside of LDs, so last LD was my first platform game, and this LD was my first top-down-shooter. In the future however I want to come up with a game idea that is more directly tied to the theme.
• Coding – I probably won’t use GM next time. I want to write a base library and write some real code!
• Web platofrm – I feel like I lose out on a lot of people trying my game by not offering a web based version. Next LD I will for sure offer a web based version (probably Flash since I’m thinking of using Haxe and OpenFL).
• Juice – I want my next entry to be very juicy!
• Community – Finally, next LD I’m gonna try to be more involved with the community (reading and writing blog posts for example).

If you haven’t tried my game, feel free to do so and I’d appreciate an honest comment!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=11705

Tags: post-mortem, red-alert

Hi, guys!

Just to let you know that the postmortem we made for our game got featured at Gamasutra!

If you haven’t played Antarctic Glitch yet, you can do it HERE.

Cheers!

Tags: antarctic glitch, beavl, postmortem

I’m pretty happy with how the game went for a few reasons.
This is actually the 3rd or 4th time I’ve participated, but only my first entry because I always seemed to give up on whatever I was making due to unforeseen problems, aiming for something beyond my ability or simply quitting  from laziness. Not this time and for my efforts:

It’s a thing

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=7411

Most people that played it seemed to enjoy it and there were only a few bugs, nothing too game breaking.

What went bad

• I chose technology that was not compatible on a few computers because it gave a minimal performance boost.
• I spent most of my time beautifying the dungeon wall rendering and ended up with heaps of textures.
• A few features were added in the last few hours in a desperate attempt to make it feel finished, but the lack of thought and rushed implementation was noticeable.
• The footstep noises need to be more varied and quieter because the f*ck me off when I hear them.

What went well

• I actually finished the game to a playable state.
• The programmer art isn’t horrendous (I hope).
• Most of the sounds work well and add to the game.
• The dungeon generation isn’t the best but it does its job.

What I would do differently

• I would actually make a warm-up mini-game because I took longer than I should just trialling techniques.
• I should spend at least an hour making a menu screen with help.
• Get some friends to playtest at various intervals for quality assurance.

Although there were many features I didn’t get to implement that I really wanted, I am still happy with it.

It would mean a lot if you’d give her a whirl!

Tags: post-mortem

Well, I’ve never done one of these before, so here goes nothing.

What went right

Long brainstorming session

I was fortunate in having a group of friends help me brainstorm ideas when the theme was first announced. About a dozen ideas were thrown around, some interesting and some worthless, until I finally settled on this one. My first few ideas were tempting but also ultimately crappy, so being able to bounce back ideas with other people saved me from falling into the usual trap of doing the first thing that fell into my head.

Playing to my strengths

This isn’t the first roguelikelike I’ve made, and for good reason, aside from loving the genre: I’m not any good at art, at all. In almost any other genre, I’d be forced to spend long hours putting together terrible art, but fortunately this wasn’t an issue for me here.

Not reinventing the wheel

For level generation and field-of-view computation, I used rot.js, an excellent set of utilities specifically designed for roguelikes. I probably could have managed without rot.js, but when you only have 48 hours, why not limit the work you have to do as much as possible? Using rot.js also offered the huge advantage of giving me something vaguely playable within an hour or two of starting, meaning that I could spend the rest of the competition working on making gameplay as fun as possible.

Addictive gameplay

My main objective with this game was making it as fun and as fast-paced as possible. To this end, I made death be completely harmless, let players immediately create a new character in one click and jump back in the game, and provided a silly soundtrack to accompany the dungeon romp. When my playtesters (er, friends) started to refuse to give me back the computer, I knew that I had stumbled onto something.

A little bit of flair

Roguelikes are inherently rather bland visually, so small touches to make the game look good were important for the player experience. Things like smooth lighting, a shiny experience bar, and a memorial to dead characters at the end of the game were all relatively quick to implement and provided a nice distraction from the big-picture stuff for me, while making the game look much more polished. Don’t skimp on the small stuff!

What went wrong

No good plan for the second day

Most of the game features (timer, dungeon exploration, combat, character creation) were completed in the first 24 hours, which made me very optimistic about the next 24 hours. However, while there were a lot of things that I wanted to do (including items, spells, and more interesting monsters), I spent so much time debating about what order to do them in that I wasn’t able to work most of these features into the game. In the end, my second day consisted mainly of making levels and creating the boss fight and ending, as well as doing a lot of playtesting and minor tweaking. Next time around, I’d like to budget my time a little more effectively, especially for the second day.

Not enough replay value

Well, you beat the boss, and then the game is over. Several playtesters told me the game needed to have a way to continue playing after the boss fight, but, given how messy my second day was, I declined to implement this at the time. I did eventually address this issue by adding an Infinite mode to the post-compo version though.

Dungeon annoyances

I didn’t spend enough time making sure that all dungeon stairs are reachable within 10 seconds. Sometimes the stairs aren’t, though they should still be reachable if you have a faster character (speed > 1.0). And I’m pretty sure there’s a (small) chance of the boss appearing in an unreachable location on the final level, though I haven’t personally seen that. Regardless, I should have spent more time ensuring that every game is beatable, regardless of luck of the draw.

Not enough lore

The game’s story consists of two paragraphs of flavor text that I hastily cobbled together as the minutes were counting down. I suppose it’s not that big a deal for a game that seems to have more in common with Quake than with Rogue, but it still would have been nice to have an actual story.

All in all

I’ve taken part in three Ludum Dares before, but this was by far my most successful one: I made a game that most players found to be fun, which is a feat that I have never really achieved before. Next time around, I will hopefully interpret the theme a little more creatively, and I hope to address my biggest issue from LD27: insufficient planning of secondary game features. Still, I’m pretty happy with Ten Second Roguelike. Let me know what you think!

The goodies first !
My Game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27175

[EDIT] I’m stupid and just realized that is was forbidden to use someone else music in the compo entry (Ooooooops!).  I won’t win (and didn’t thought I would anyway after looking at all the good games !)  That’s okay, I had to read the rules. My bad ! Sorry everyone!

Hey there !

I’m Lachhh from Berzerk Studio,

I just want to give my personal super kinetic manga pirate thumbs up to Ludum Dare,  it was my very first entry and I loved it !

A big thank you to Ludum Dare, I had a really fun time

I don’t have much to say actually, so this post will just be random fact and thoughts about my experience.

Fun fact :  I told my wife I wanted to enter the contest the day before it started,  asking her if she could take care of the kids for 2 days. She said yes, but decided totally-voluntarily-as-a-free-will-human-being to get sick the day it started, so I had to either abandon the idea or do the Game Jam on Hardcore mode : Alone, with 3 kids.

I chose the Hardcore mode.

It’s really weird to have a boy’s dream job AND and being an adult with responsibilities.

As for my game,  I had a cool idea at first, but the reality struck me right in the face,  I’m a coder, not an artist.  I’m used to work with awesome artists at Berzerk and got spoiled over time, but yeah,  since I was alone I had to go with an “Atari” “Commodore 64″ feeling for the game to be interesting.

I loved the result though,  there’s only 3 level and 3 different enemies, but the feeling of the game is there.  I found myself playing several time in a row just to listen to the awesome song.

Random Personal advice : My biggest weakness being the visual,  I always want to shift the attention of the player on something else. The music is usually what I put on the front.  In this case, each level is synchronized with the music, each 10-seconds verse represent a level in the game.  My point here, try to hide your weakness by making the strongest elements of the game on the front.

Which is why I didn’t put screenshot of the game in this post. A screenshot alone would just show the cheap visual of the game, exposing my weakness on the front row.

How I turn my biggest weakness into a big joke.

By the way,  soundtrack is by Shawn Daley, and KeithChiptunes listen to their stuff, it’s brilliant :
https://soundcloud.com/shawndaley
https://soundcloud.com/keithchiptunes

So yeah, try it out by yourself, a big thank you again to all and all the comments I got on the game, you all rock !

THE GAME : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=27175

ENTRY-> HERE

So a few days has passed since deadline. I’m glad from all comments people have left me about my game. Got some great feedback and I thought I’d do like many others and write a short Post Mortem.

This was my first Ludum Dare and as I can’t draw or code Twine is the best engine out there for me as I can write atleast.

“The 10 (other) Seconds Journey” wasn’t my first Twine game but it’s one of the first.

INFO

The game was done in approx 5-6 hours.

Engine was Twine.

Used Google Web Fonts.

Graphics made by PaperBlurt.

The BAD

I feel I should’ve tied the 10 parts together in a better way as some people got confused, basically adding some kind of transition or similar. I also want to change the choices made during the Rock Hudson-part based on my girlfriend’s feedback. Finally maybe music would’ve been good and maybe use puns in another way. (The part with Rock Hudson is something I’ll change after the competition when I got an “OK” from Ludum Dare, but now it’ll be as it is).

The GOOD

I feel I got that quick pace and flow I sought to get. I also, somewhat like the design, as it feels just as it was: a game made in 5-6 hours. I believe I got some funny stuff in there too (Hitler, Baseballers and Titanic). I think one of the best stories is the countdown where I’ve implemented some parts from myself (you know the “dad part”) and the same go for the part regarding who you feel “second to”.

Hope you like the game, and please get back to me with thoughts and comments and feel free to check out my other stuff at the link below!

More stuff from PaperBlurt (Julius Olofsson) -> HERE

On Twitter -> @PaperBlurt

Tags: interactive fiction, LD27, ld48, Twine

Darkness loving Xenomorphs invaded and severely damaged your ship. With the ships’ generator failing every 10 seconds, you have to use timing and sacrifice to save as many crewmembers as you can. To make your escape quota of course, so the damn ship’s AI lets you leave.

That’s Love Your Pets in a nutshell. Love Your Pet aims to be survival horror puzzler slash meat grinder in a scifi setting. It preys on the constant threat of the invisible evil, and on the player being helpless in the dark.

the main mechanic in the game is the duct grates, and avoiding those grates. Scattered about the map are grates with Xenomorphs in them. Crew members passing the grate wakes the Xenomorph. During the next blackout the Xeno will attempt to devour a nearby Ensign. The lights flip on and reveal a bloody corpse and a bloody trail leading to the vents.

Simple no? Grates equal death. Death equals horror. Or so I thought.

This is what really happened.

For maximum effect the player needed to be at least tensed up enough to dread the lights going out, only to be freaked out by the sudden fresh corpse.

In reality this did not happen. Prior knowledge of the grates is critical to the player understanding and getting immersed in the game, and this mechanic was simply not obvious. I hinted to it in the narrative of course, and the blood and damage to the grates helps, but since the action happens in darkness the players eyes are never drawn towards the danger.

How can we fix this?

To remedy this in the post compo version we need to educate the player beforehand to help build tension, and draw the players focus to the ducts, and the inherent danger. 

• Expelling particles (steam) / spores from ducts.
• Bright Lighting on the duct.
• Infestation near first threat areas.
• Pet signals.
• Sound effects!
• Crew dialog
• Foreshadowing with narrative, sfx.

A clear threat should help build tension better and enhance the survival horror theme.

Next up: Don’t Forget Adding Content!

I was so excited this morning to see our game Mr.President featured on the front page of Giantbomb.com, my favorite website in the whole wide web.

For fun I made steam Greenlight page as well. So we would love your support to make more weird games!

Tags: dive, Mr.President, Richard Matey, save

Several days after the end of the jam, it’s time to write a short (now that I finished to write it, it’s not short) post-mortem. People who tried my game seems rather satisfied and they have enjoyed the game. I’m globally pleased with the result of my work too even if all isn’t happened perfectly. You can try my game if you want understand what I’m talking about : The Curse of Chronos.

What’s went wrong

Gameplay : I decided to spend my first two hours Saturday morning to find an idea and create a short game design document. My first idea was to create a game where you play a terrorist who trigger bombs and have ten seconds to back off before the bomb goes off. Another idea I had was a hero who has the power to see the future ten seconds in advance and can use it to change it. These ideas were ok but I wasn’t completely satisfied and I had still one hour of thinking.
I finally decided to create a rogue-like where the player has only ten seconds at the beginnning of the game. Each action like walking, talking to an npc or fighting costs time and there’s also objects which can increase hero’s amount of time.
I worked on this idea and Sunday evening, the engine was over. The hero could walk, pick-up objects, kill monsters. At this time, I noticed  the gameplay of my game was rather poor. The only thing the player could do was moving as fights where automatically resolved. At the end of day 2, my rogue-like was became a simple exploration game without I notice it.
The game is not bad but I’m a bit disappointed because I’m sure I could do more interesting things with this concept. And I don’t know why but I find definitely that the gameplay of my game is poor.

Time management : I was really well at the end of day 2 concerning the deadline. I had still a lot of things to do on day 3 but I had the time to do it. And one day later, I published my entry 3 minutes before the deadline after 3 hours full of stress and tension.
I was really pleased at the end of day 2. I had a good game with good graphics and music. I think I was a bit less focus during the third day. I spend one or two hours to do other things than working on my game, thinking that the biggest part of the job was done.
At midnight (3 hours before the deadline), I begin to be a bit worry because I had still a lot of work to do. I was forced to work fast and therefore not really well. I give up to create a second music track and I hadn’t the time to balanced really well the difficulty. That’s also the moment where I begin to detect some bugs I haven’t noticed before, still increasing the amount of work to do.
I had been forced to work hard until 3am after a really long day. It was not really good especially because I could avoid it if I had keep focus during the day 3.

What’s went right.

Keep healthy habits and sleep well : In France, the Ludum Dare begin at 3am Saturday morning. For my first Ludum Dare in April, I decided it was a good idea to go out Friday evening and go back home at 7am completely drunk. I began my game only at 5pm.
I manage to avoid it this time and I take a good sleep Friday evening to be ready and fully well-rested Saturday morning at 9am.
I also take 8 hours of sleep each night. I take the time to take a shower and prepare some good dishes for my meals. It seems obvious but it’s really easy to stay focus during seven or eight hours in a row and burn out before the end. It’s truer for the jam which goes on for three days. To my mind, these moments like take a shower and eat good meals are really important to take a break and keep your body and your mind healthy.

It took more time than drink sodas, coffee and redbull during 72 hours, but I think it’s better at the end. Furthermore, it’s often after this sort of break that your succeed to fix this damn bug which annoy you since one hour.

Audio : I use two hours to produce the only track of the game. It last just one minute. I thought it’s a bit short. I was afraid that players find a bit repetitive to listen the same music during all the game, that’s why I would like to add another track. After all, it’s enough long to avoid this problem and nobody seems complain about it.
There are several sounds in the game to accentuate some actions done by the hero like pick-up an object or kill a monster. They are ok and rather effective, I think.

Graphics : I’m really pleased of my tiles and sprites and players who tried my game seems too.

Dialogs in English : Dialogs are really important in a game like this. I write the dialogs during the third day, so very fastly. It’s a bit difficult to write all these dialogs in a language which is not yours because you’re not always sure to use the correct word at the correct place. You also cannot always faithfully transpose what you would like to say. So I tried to keep the dialogs simple and used stereotypes and humor. Old men who are only obsessed by fishing, guards who are all cowards.
I’m satisfied about the result even if I could do better if I haven’t wasting time during day 3 as I said above.

Theme : I was pretty disappointed when I know what’s the theme was. I thought that the only sort of game you can do it with it was : you have ten seconds to do that, you have ten seconds to finised this level, you have ten seconds to…, and so on.
I tried 60 games until now and some of them follows this scheme. My two first game ideas was like this too (see above) but I manage to find something different and I think it’s the challenge when you have a theme : to see the theme in an original way. Among all the games I played, my favourites was those which were able to use the theme in an original way and don’t stop at the common solution which everybody will find.

Scenario and quests : I find the scenario really early when I was still thinking about game mecanics during the first two hours. Chronos, the god of the time put a curse on the hero and left him only ten seconds to live. The goal of the hero is to lift this curse. It’s quite simple but it’s enough to make a good main quest. The challenge was to use cunningly the dialogs and the settings to guide the player without he noticed it too much. The common mistake in this sort of game in open-world is to completely direct the player and he has absolutely no freedom.
Except at the beginning, where the player is a bit directed for the tutorial, I think I succeed because the player can do absolutely what he want, in the order he want but he is not release in the world without any indications. He can even go directly to «final boss» even if he will have difficulty to defeat him. Side quests are optionals but help a lot to do the main quest.

Conclusion
I’m really happy of what I did and players who played my game seems enjoyed it. I will know continue to try games of the Ludum Dare. I’m doing my best to try games of all the people who left a comment about mine.

Tags: LD27, post-mortem, tips

You can read the full post-mortem on my webpage, with additional media and commentary. I made this version more concise. (No really, I did, I swear.)

NOTE: This post-mortem contains major spoilers, so don’t read it until after you play the game.

Overview

10 Seconds in Hell is a first-person game with simple object interaction and an enforced time limit. The compo theme (“10 seconds”) pushed me to try something I’ve wanted to do for some time: create a game that is extremely short with a large number of endings. A game short enough the player doesn’t mind trying a million times to find something new.

The game takes place in one location: what appears to be a second story bedroom. The unnamed antagonist threatens to come upstairs if the player doesn’t come down in ten seconds. After some time the antagonist begins walking; when he opens the door to the room, the game ends.

There are three objects the player can pick up: A photo, a baseball bat, and a gun. They are all hidden, obscured by magazines and stacks of irregular boxes labeled “junk”. There is a phone that can be interacted with but is useless. There are four different locations that affect the ending, depending on where the player is standing when time runs out: The central area, next to the window, beside the bed, and in the closet. These are non-obvious at first, but the last three are hinted at through voiceover cues as the player walks around the environment. There are three special actions the player can take that also change the outcome: She can jump out the window, she can open the door and go downstairs as requested, or she can block the door with the aforementioned “junk” boxes. The first two options end the game immediately, and the last one buys the player extra time to explore.

Even with a starting point as simple as this, the game provides numerous endings. These non-interactive segments unfold like a radio drama: The screen fades to black and the story is told through dialog and sound effects. Unless the player jumps out the window or opens the door herself, the ending is generated based on the world state (objects collected, location) via a series of if-then statements. Mathematically speaking, 10 Seconds in Hell has 20 endings. However, some of these endings have only a single line of dialog difference between them, so one could argue that there are fewer truly unique outcomes. At any rate, the results were diverse enough to encourage players to keep digging for hidden endings, even if they found the experience truly unnerving.

A Lot of Emotion from Very Little

And boy, did they find the experience unnerving. And I quote:

The first time I played this, I felt really scared.

This is definitely disturbing. Great job of creating a menacing atmosphere.

Very creepy. You had me on the edge of my seat.

A dark but great interpretation of the theme.

This is chilling. It’s very powerful.

All this despite very simple graphics:

The interactive objects are literally cubes with texture maps of the names of the objects. Everything else in the room is low-poly and has a simple diffuse map. I don’t even use global illumination, instead opting for fake bounce lights.

Our antagonist, the one who creates the menacing atmosphere, is a pill shape with a little tag that says “EVIL” on it. You could do this game on the PS1. And yet the game caused reactions such as this:

Trying to hide in the closet and happening across the gun [was]… intense.

A gun that’s a cuboid primitive with the word “gun” slapped on it.

Why This Even Works

Why is the game so effective at provoking emotion? The answer is simple: Abstraction. The player character is never defined. The antagonist has no face, merely an object representing his location and the word “evil” as a hint. The “porn magazines” scattered about the place have no actual content on their covers. The photo has no image on it. The antagonist is never visually depicted entering the room; you only hear him enter after the screen fades to black. The game does not explicitly tell you why you are here, what happened before this moment, or what will happen after the ending. There is a gun, but you don’t decide when it goes off. We don’t even know that the voices of these people are real.

The closest we get to an explicit clue is at the very beginning, when the player character narrates, “I replayed the scene in my mind over and over, wondering how it could have gone differently. The only thing I remember clearly was the room where it happened. Everything else was a little hazy.” Thus the abstraction: We are exploring the player character’s mind, exploring possibilities. We will never know for sure what actually went down. And perhaps those voices sound so flat and artificial because she doesn’t want to remember every disturbing detail.

This is the oldest and most effective trick in horror: Don’t show the monster. The viewer’s imagination will always concoct something more terrifying and personal than anything you can depict. The player can’t help but project her own experience onto the player character. She can’t help but put a face—a personal face, unique for her—on the antagonist. By using symbolic imagery, the terror happens in mind of the player, not on the screen. This is a game of ideas, not of lush scenery designed by an army of 3D artists for the player to admire.

So was this disturbing world of abstraction my master vision all along? No! I didn’t plan for any of it. The art style was a direct result of the time limit imposed by the competition. Were it not for the 48-hour timer ticking away, I would have modeled the world thoroughly out of sheer adherence to convention, and the game would have suffered for it. Once I put the first slapdash “object name” texture on a cube in the name of efficiency, however, I had a hunch this might actually be a good direction. After I placed the poly plane with the word “EVIL” behind the antagonist, I knew for sure this was the way to go. I had also planned to replace the computer voices with real voice acting, but I think the synth voices add to the unsettling nature of the game.

How It Could Have Been Improved

There are a few places the game didn’t work out so well: It is unclear that object use and contextual voiceovers are temporarily disabled during the introduction, while you can still move around and drag objects. There is no way to skip dialog. There is no way to know if you’ve found every ending. The game could have possibly been improved by randomizing item spawn locations. On the purely technical end, there are some rough edges due to my lack of programming skill, such as the mouse cursor remaining active when playing the web version. Subtitles would increase accessibility. Finally, given the time, I could have put more work into making each of the endings truly unique.

Tags: post-mortem

So I made the game “How Low Can You Go?” and I honestly had a lot of doable visions for it. Unfortunately I was using a new library at the time so I couldn’t get everything done. I uploaded it only because a couple of friends told me to, I did not actually feel that it was worthy :P.

I was pleasantly surprised at all the great feedback, even though the game has very minimal graphics, content, and no music or sounds. I have started work on a post-compo version which I hope to incorporate a lot of the feedback and my original ideas in.

Anyway…

What went well:

-Relatively easy theme and idea

-I’ve gotten good enough at coding that nothing was difficult for me

-I had a lot of fun hanging out at Ryerson’s Game Maker Union

What didn’t:

-New library with new complications

-Not enough time left for graphics and sound

Anyway, really fun, and hope to do it again 😀

Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=20256

I think it’s now properly multiplatform, so it should work on Linux, Windows 8 and all that. I think.

Anyways, the page is here.

Cheers.

Hey, still didn’t try Flooded Dungeons?

It’s stressful dungeon crawler, where you should reach the next floor in 10 seconds. Okay, a bit more than 10 seconds.

Run through dungeons, collect gold, smash crates and monsters, buy items in shop, improve equipment, gain expirience and get level ups, heal yourself using potions, explode walls and enemies using boms, grill deeper as you can! But beware the water flow!

My own record is the 54th floor:

PLAY HERE

I have added fixed Windows version and Mac port.

Changes (in the Windows Fixed and Mac versions both):

• New FPS limiter
• Showing FPS in top of screen
• Z/X/C -> A/S/D because of german keyboards

Please test Mac version of the game. I don’t have native machine with MacOSX and worked under VMWare.

I’m interesting about FPS on native MacOSX. If it’s about 57-60, all is OK. Otherwise please write your FPS in comments.

This was my first ludum dare and i will definitely be in again! I had so much fun and learned loads.

I always have a few projects running but I never manage to finish any of them because I have too grand plans. The great thing about ludum dare were that i needed finish in 48 hours, I couldn’t think “Well, this took 9 hours, didn’t do shit, but I will thank myself later!”. I had to learn to “kill my darlings” and to do it fast! I am kinda surprised that actually finished! The game I made is far from good but I couldn’t be prouder!

Some things I will try to remember til’ next time:
1. Start with a small idea. I mean really really small. I thought I did that this time but cut half of my planned features anyway. It’s less of a pain to go from smaller to bigger then the opposite…

2. Make a really crappy but functional game first. What is needed to make the game even playable? Add that first.

3. Try the game on more than one computer. I had loads of problems with people that couldn’t play it or had really weird behavior.

4. Don’t drink yourself to sleep half into the competition. I went on a party and had to make most of the game while trying to keep my stomach on the inside..

Thanks for a great ludum dare!

Play my game, Rocket Rampage

I have built a post-compo version of Frozen Braid! This game version does not change the gameplay itself, but it adds the option to play by e-mail or over a chat program with file transfer or with carrier pigeons and thumb drives.

Here is how it works:

• Find a friend and agree who plays red and who plays green
• Select “start game” > “play by mail” > “create map”
• This will put a map file in the game directory. Mail the generated map to your friend
• Your friend must copy the map into his game folder
• Select “play by mail”>”make move”. Use the map and colors you agreed on. Your friend must do likewise
• This generates move files. Mail these files to each other
• Copy other move file into your game folder
• Select “play by mail” > “game outcome” with the map you played on

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=7968

Web port of is Dark Interval is live!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=5234

Also the standalone Windows and Linux builds have the memory leak fixed.

So I decided to spend some time adding and polishing my entry, Lokopolis. I added a few things, including online scoring (via GameJolt), more traps and a harder mode! Hopefully it’s been worth it, as I find the game really fun, which is unlikely for a Ludum Dare made game.

You can download the new release over on GameJolt, as well as the LD version too!

I also uploaded the music that I created for the game if you would like to have a listen. You can find that on the GameJolt page too.

I’ve finally recovered from the weekend an feel its time to write a “post mortem” for my game 10 Second Physics.

So first off I want to say that I had so much fun and learned so much during the weekend all thanks to you guys in the Ludum Dare community ,thanks to everyone who has rated ,commented and played my game. You all made my first Ludum dare a memorable experience.

So lets crack this body open and find out how it died!!!

-The Good-

• My own character movement script:

This was one of my main goals when entering the competition. I wanted to implement my own player controlled movement script as I find the default one for the unity engine to be a bit too awkward. Now I know the controls aren’t the greatest, but I’m proud of what I achieved here .

• Level and Puzzle Design:

My favorite part of making games is designing levels. Ever since as a kid when I would design levels for “Tony Hawkes Pro Skater” I have loved the prospect of designing clever levels. One thing I like about level design is that you have the power to control the players emotions or thought patterns from how a single line can create a feeling of urgency to how a complicated puzzle may confuse you and make you spend more time on a level. I had a good time coming up with puzzles which to me seem simple but to someone who has to process it all in one go it may convert what is ten seconds for me into a whole minute to work out what to do. When I decided to make it puzzle based and not action based I looked at a few articles online about puzzle design, this was probably one of my best decisions I made about this game.

-The Bad-

• time management:

During the Jam I often found myself not sure what to work on next or how long something would take. This was noticeable on day 1 when I didn’t give up trying to implement character animation after three hours working on it and when with three hours left I dedicated two hours to music that was never used.

• GUI

I had intended to make some pretty GUI but ended up with an awkward menu screen and a default font timer which was probably not needed after all.

-The Future of 10 Second Physics-

I had so much fun making the game and so many other ideas for features ,levels ,puzzles and even a bit of a story shown through comic strips that I have decided to keep developing this for a few updates. I want to implement some GUI and better controls too. The snazzy logo at the top of this post is going to be in the title screen from now on and I plan to design more menus.

Thank you for this unforgettable experience everyone.

A Culmination of Learning Experiences

Play my Ludum Dare 27 entry Bomb Squad

This is my second time participating in the official Ludum Dare competition.  Overall, I feel like my skills with Unity have significantly increased since the last competition, when I submitted Amish Brothers.  Since the last competition, I have submitted a game to each mini-LD, and each game developed taught me something new about Unity.

Bomb Squad Timelapse video

This time around, the theme was “10 seconds”.  My idea was a game where you play as a bomb squad technician, where you have 10 seconds to disable each bomb.  If the bomb explodes, the objects around it will be propelled away and add to the property damage value.  The objective is to keep the property damage as low as possible, while avoiding bomb blasts which damage your suit.  If your suit reaches zero percent, then the game is over.  Additionally, you must “cut the wire” that matches the color of the bomb, otherwise the bomb will explode and you will take damage.  For more details on my design decisions, see my Bomb Squad Day One entry.

Bomb exploding next to a wall

For this game, I knew I wanted to use Unity’s physics engine for handling the explosions.  I first started learning about Unity’s physics engine when I developed Earthball for the mini-LD42.  When the bomb explodes, it applies an explosive force to all of the objects in the game, including the player.  I found that this starting causing problems when there were over about 600 objects in the scene.  When the objects were exploded and scattered everywhere, the slowdown didn’t occur.  It was only when the objects were stacked, which I believe is because when the objects are stacked, they are continually colliding with each other, which requires a significant amount of processing power.  The player is also affected by bomb blasts, but I feel that if I learned how to use the “ragdoll” physics in Unity, the effect would have been much more impressive.  Currently, the player just has a cube bounding box, so the player looks very stiff when thrown by an explosion.

The ground is just a terrain object (like I used in the test Giga Guy game that I developed), but I always have issues with my models falling over when going up the terrain, therefore I just left the game area flat.  However, I was able to use the blended terrain textures to make the ground look much more pleasing.

I used Blender again for rendering my models.  There were really only two models that are in this game, which are the player and the bombs.  From my LD27-warmup game North Avenue Adventure, I learned how to properly project my mesh to a 2D layout, and how to modify the unwrapped vertex “islands” properly to generate an image layout to be textured in Gimp.  I am happy with the model that I created, but I would like to go back and add more details later.  However, I found that it can be difficult to modify a model in Blender once all the modifiers (mirror, subdivision surface) have been applied and the armature added.  I also think I could have done a much better job on the bomb model, since it is just a stack of cylinders.  A spark particle system on the bomb would also be a nice touch.

My mini-LD43 game, Marching Band Simulator 2013 taught me more about composing music in games.  However, for Bomb Squad I decided to go with Garage Band on my Mac laptop for composing the music.  In my previous entries, I have used PxTone Collage which is a great tool, but the blips and bloops it uses cannot compare to the music that can be created with Garage Band.  For the complete soundtrack, please visit my Sound Cloud page.  The only problem with Garage Band is that I had to export my songs to iTunes to get the audio file, and then copy it over to my development system.  It is a bit of a hassle, but I think it is worth the extra effort.

Another game I created in Unity for #1GAM was called Genetic Disorder, which is where I learned how to make the text meshes for the title screen using Blender.  It’s a fairly simplistic process, but the number of vertices must be reduced otherwise the model file size will end up being huge.

Text mesh zooming in on title screen

For the 7dRTS challenge, I created a game called Ninja Squad Commander, where I learned many more Unity tricks.  First of all, it taught me how to center a text object over a model, and how to make the 3D text sharp (by default the 3D text will be blurry).  This was used in Bomb Squad to display the number of seconds until explosion over each bomb.  In that game, I also learned how to make detailed particle systems, like the fire effects, using Gimp to create the fire texture using a gradient and IWarp filters.  The game also taught me how to attach lights to particle systems at runtime, to give the fire a glowing effect which can be seen on objects around it.  Both of these effects were used in Bomb Squad at the location of an exploded bomb.  When I was developing the RTS, I also learned how to determine the distance between two objects in 3D space, since using multiple physics colliders for different events can cause problems.  The 3D distance calculation was essential to determine how much damage the player would take from a blast, and how much property damage is received by an object.  The distance calculation is also used to determine if a bomb is selected to be disabled.  My 7dRTS game also taught me how to make a shadowed font from a text object, which made the static text in the game look much better.

The one new feature that I added that I hadn’t implemented in a previous game is the mini-map.  I felt that it was needed, since the player can’t always see the entire game area, so there would be bombs hidden to the player.  That problem could be helped by adding code to fix the camera behind the player, so that is something I will look into for a future release.  I think the mini-map would still be beneficial, but some players noted that it makes the game a little too easy, so I may eventually take away the bomb color on the mini-map.

Honestly, I can say Bomb Squad wouldn’t have turned out as good as it did if I hadn’t created all of those other smaller games after LD26.  One important factor in being successful in Ludum Dare is knowing your tools and all the tricks before the competition starts.  Trying to learn new technologies during the competition is a recipe for failure.

Follow me on Twitter at @GaTechGrad and visit my website at www.levidsmith.com

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse

Hi!

Here is the entry we talking about: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=5167

The concept came from the fact I once wanted to do a platform game for LD 21 but then I chose NDS as the platform which I wasn’t familiar at all at the time so it didn’t made it in time. But a plain platformer seemd too plain so I wanted a mechanic that can enhance the idea and goes well with the theme. That turned out to be a Tetris + Bejeweled freak and it was quite fitting to the theme and the platformer part.

I’ve made a little video of the game for you but I encourage you to play it as it runs on most platforms and even in a browser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5J6SPu2tgs

You can tell from the video that the game isn’t quite finished. Let’s see in short what led me to this faliure.

What went wrong

Normally the structure came naturally to me while programming and everithing fits just fine and builds on each other. This time I had to rewrite parts of the mechanics several times to support other functionalities better. That taken away a lot of time and momentum. I don’t know what happend to me…

I recently changed my daily routine – or should I say I’ve tried to create one – and it’s not the real problem but it did take away more time from programming as opposed to the 48h is 48h tactic I used to do.

A little depression came from my real life and from the fact that I’m not doing as well as I used to. This ultimately lead to give up on the finishing of the collision checking as it would required to rewrite the whole falling block mechanic.

Advise

Get yourself together and push through no matter what!

Thank you for reading! Please give my game a try and leave a comment! I’ll rate back of course.

Tags: post-mortem, video

I’ll probably be putting up a post compo version at some point…when I go to the edit page there isn’t a place to put the link.  How do I do this?  Can anybody help?

Ian

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 !

Here’s the link to my entry : 10 seconds to save the day.

Before Ludum Dare begins
This Ludum Dare, I wanted to make an adventure game. Not one like Lucas’ Quest Backwards (LD 24) with platform sequences or This is not a minimalist game (LD 26) with puzzles. I wanted to make an adventure game where you only advance through dialogs. I like writing stories, and I thought that such a game wouldn’t be long to code and that it would give me plenty of time to polish the story, the graphics and add music.

Like many, I was convinced that the theme would be 10 seconds. This is the first time in a Ludum Dare that the theme is not a surprise for me. But I hadn’t given much thought to it. I didn’t like it, it felt exactly like “Minimalism” : more of an additional constraint than a theme, and I hoped it wouldn’t be chosen despite its very high score during the first round of votes.

The theme
But it was announced : 10 seconds.
I didn’t know what to do. I tried to find gameplay ideas with 10 seconds, but nothing very inspiring. All 10 seconds based gameplay seemed so frustrating. So I came back to my initial idea of making a story, and I let my mind wander in many directions. I wanted the 10 seconds to be an important part of the story, and not just be the equivalent of “a short moment”.

10 seconds… 10 seconds… 10 seconds event… Give 10 seconds… Stop ! The “Give 10 seconds” trail seemed interesting.
I wanted the characters to be able to give 10 seconds, but how ? Then came this idea of ghosts being able to give away the last 10 seconds of their lives to other dead people in order to prevent a tragedy, and I liked it a lot. I was just worried about not being able to write good enough characters and a good enough tragic event for the story to work.

Day 1
I slept on it (in France, the theme is announced at 3 a.m.). I was still worried when I woke up, so I started writing, finished writing… and I was so relieved I finally came up with something that seemed to work that it didn’t even occurred to me that I could take a few moments to see if the characters and the rhythm of the story could be improved. I wrote everything in one go and never touched it again.

Then I started to write the dialogs. It was kind of confusing because I wrote everything in a plain text file, and after a while it became really hard to distinguish what dialog unlocked what, what dialog was unlocked by what… I started to become very anxious.

Moreover, more than 1h30 had passed, and I had only written what corresponded to 1/25e of my story, not even coded it ! It didn’t look good at all.

So I rushed. When the code was satisfying enough, I started to code the story. Then I realised than a feature was missing : I wanted the player to be able to unlock a list of topics, and be able to ask any character about these topics. So I coded it, and it bugged a lot, and I fixed all the bugs. It took me several hours.

Then I rushed writing the dialogs and the story.

When the first day was over, I had only coded the first point of my to-do list. There were 18 points ! I realised I could never finish unless I cut a lot of the planned investigation sequences. So I did it with regret…

The game at the end of day 1

Day 2
The second day, the hours were flying and the game was only progressing slowly. So I made even more cuts. When I finally got to the end of the story, there were only 4 hours left.

While re-testing the game, it occurred to me that my “topics” features only served once… So I deleted it and added manually the topic where it was needed. Which caused many bugs and dead ends ! Arggg !!!

I only had time left to polish the graphics. I focused on the characters. Drawing them took me all the remaining time because there are a lot of NPC and playable characters and I drew 4 frames by animation.

Almost no time was left for the music unfortunately, so I used abundant-music.com.

What went right
– I never thought I could finish the story, but I did it. Even if I had to cut a lot of interactions with the player, I consider it a win. There’s still a lot of content.
– This was the first time I drew animated non-pixel-art characters for a game, I enjoyed it and I was happy with the result.
– I’m still happy with the story.

What went wrong
– The river of bugs caused by a feature that wasn’t even implemented in the game. I should have taken more time to plan what I was going to do and what I would need.
– I had planned a lot more interactions with the player that I had no time to implement.
– I could have improved the story, but I was already so uncomfortable writing it in the first place that it seemed impossible to me to change it even a little bit, it was like written in stone.

Explain everything or not ?
– I thought that I could leave some things to the interpretation of the player. It was a deliberate choice not to explain why things happen like this in the end. I could have explained it, but it didn’t seemed necessary. On the contrary, it would have seemed kind of clumsy to me.
Unfortunately, it looks like it was necessary. Some players on Kong decided that the unexplained ending made no sense, and therefore was weak.
But some understood, so I don’t know what was the right choice after all.

Testing… my own patience
– Testing was horrible. I had to test the game so many times to fix problems that I became sick of my own game and it wasn’t even released. Seeing the same dialogs for the 100th time, discovering that something is still wrong and things don’t unlock correctly, grrr !!! In the end, I didn’t even read the dialogs anymore, I just pressed the keys in the right order.
Even if I had ways to start testing at a given point of the story, I spent an awful lot of time on testing, I’d say more than 50%.

Plus, the code was very tricky to organize. I like clean, readable code, and it wasn’t. It was very hard to tell what unlocked what and where. It was like being lost in a labyrinth or trying to unlock a complex web. And with more interactions with the player like I wanted initially, it would have been even worse.

When I made a post-compo version for Kongregate, I thought that adding a short animation at the end would make it less brutal, and wouldn’t take a lot of time. But I really didn’t have the courage to work on the game anymore, so I didn’t do it.

Conclusion
Even if I’m satisfied with the game I made, I didn’t really enjoy making it after the “imagine-the-story” part. Long dialog based story are tricky to make (at least for me) and painful to test in such a short amount of time.
I’m not saying “never again”, I’m just saying “definitely not next time”

You can play my entry here. I hope you like it !

Hello peaple , I’m making this post to say what I think about the LD ! (This is my first time, and sorry for my english) some images:

The competion is very fun, I loved participate in Compo, 2000 games ! Oh my gosh , really people, you are incredible, all of our games are good, we are heroes, we are champions for make a lot of games in a little bit time, I earned experiencie in this LD, and I really had fun, in the LD28 I’ll be here again ! Thank you , and thank you too Brazilians makers !

This is my game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=26331

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 31st, 2013 at 8:26 am and is filed under LD #27. 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.

Aaaaaand I’ll try to make it readabe in ten seconds D:

What went right :
– Coding went incredibely well this time. I had just one stupid difficulty one time then it all went smooth, even for the art part.
– All the assets were maid under 2h in a 69 ko spritesheet. Never done it so fast.
– Making a fucking dynamic game coding all sorts of wiggly/sparkly things with game maker.
– coding my first AI

What went wrong :
– bad game design. As always,I try to improvise this game so much that it gets “not-as-good-as-wanted” to play and need tons of tweaking.
– stupidely overambitious as usual. Wanted to make procedurally generated levels just for the exercice. I finished about 1 or 2h before the end with a lot of game breaking bugs that I somehow managed to repair.
– epilepsy warning : People though I finished the game with a huge headache but I really didn’t think this game was so flashy, and I forgot to add a warning screen at the beginning.

Whattada next :
– now I’m really ready to make a fucking cool game.

PLAY THE GAME HERE :3

The first thing that came to mind when hearing “10 seconds” was “kill as many enemies as possible in 10 seconds”.  I started this LD with a laid back attitude.  I had other important things to do in the week-end, such as relaxing on the beach and visiting friends on my last vacation days.  And I just wanted to do something that I personally find fun and inspiring.  To hell with the ratings, which many people think suck anyway (I myself prefer constructive comments over numeric ratings).  So I stuck with this simple but fun idea.  The enemies were going to be totally stupid.  It’s the weapons that have interesting behaviour.

I spent little time coding on Saturday, just fiddling around with graphics and level layouts to see if I could find something that inspired me.  But when I created the bullet bouncing mechanic, I found that this simple mechanic can result in some interesting gameplay, so I stuck with it.  From Saturday night onwards I had a blast creating funny and interesting weapons, which took most of Sunday to implement and balance.

I decided to have the player play through all the levels without the need to “complete” any level before proceeding to the next.  I just wanted the game’s appeal not depend on anticipation of the reward to see the next level for a change, something I got fed up with after playing too much WOW.  The result is that the player is taken through a dazzling array of weapon mechanics and graphics in the span of two minutes.  And hopefully think, wow, let’s try that again!  Or maybe not, then at least the game has been entertaining for two minutes, which is not too far off from the recommended time to spend on a LD game review.

The graphics are mostly procedurally generated, using my sprite generator, and Evolvotron (a linux-only program). I spent a little over an hour on them, and it appears people like them, so I consider them a success.

Sound was added 30 minutes before the deadline.  I decided to have the game trigger lots of “rapid fire” sounds, resulting in a sort of “ambient” noise, which I thought sounded quite OK when I used multiple slightly different samples for each sound. Unfortunately the sound is a little too loud compared to most games, and when it’s on loud, it sounds rather grating and unpleasant, as sfxr sounds tend to do.  As is, the game is probably going to score lower on sound than a game without sound, which I believe scores about 2 stars on average.  So, please turn the volume way down to make the game sound better.  Reminder for next time: lower the volume by 6db for sfxr samples!

Which brings us to some other things that didn’t turn out so well.  First of all, the game is too random, you need luck to complete some levels, and just shooting in random directions is a reasonable strategy.  That’s the most important flaw I think, but it can be fixed.  I am a little surprised I still find it enjoyable despite of that, in fact it has the same kind of appeal as a coin drop machine.  Another is that the game probably lacks character. No cool intro or characters, no compelling or funny storyline.  I am very bad at this sort of thing.  I must admit, I personally don’t consider it important, but I know some other people do.

About the “kill as many enemies as possible in 10 seconds” concept, I wonder how many people though it up, but abandoned it because it was too obvious.  As yet, I have to find a game that follows the same concept.  I do hope to find some before rating ends!

Oh, I almost forgot… play the game here.

I’ve been playing the Ludum Dare games and I feel happy that the majority of the games was made with multiplatform tools.

I’m a Linux user and it’s horrible when the games have versions only to commercial OSs. Linux is the choice if you don’t like to be owned by some huge corporation. And under Linux you are free from the CIA spies

Many Unity developers are exporting the games to Linux and it’s working very well. And web/javascript games are naturally multiplatform.

I see a paradigm shift here. Now we have a world where monoplatform development is not acceptable anymore.

P.S. – Play my (multiplatform) puzzle game entry!

I would just like to inform that under LD 27 I encountered a bug with collision, I could not get it to work. So after 2 hours I asked in the Ludum dare IRC if I could search for information about it and someone replied that I could do any type of research. I knew a good source about collision and I used that information in the game, here is the video:

It’s from The Cherno, for those who don’t know who he is.

He is a great java game programming teacher on youtube.

Here is his Ludum dare entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=14133

Just finished porting to HTML5 and Android!
Sorry Apple users! I don’t have a mac to export with. Maybe I’ll get around to install a hackintosh for exporting to iOS and MacOS 😉

Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=18514

Good news everyone! I might be making a full version of the game! But with a better storyline (pfft, what storyline?) and level designs!

Still streaming!

I’ll review games whose makers are in the chat with priority over others. Currently there are none, so if you login to twitch and let me know your games URL (either via the form or in chat) I’ll play your game right now!

If you like, add your game to the reviewing queue on:

http://ldgames.timtips.com

Hope to see you on stream 

http://www.twitch.tv/timtipgames

Firstly, I’d just like to share the notes I took for the entire weekend of the jam…
and you can play my game here: The Saddest Landscape.

What went well

Established an interesting link to the theme fairly quickly: “10 Seconds” made me think of old school films in which have a countdown such as: link. This then led me to think about old film projectors more specifically a film reel or film negative strip. I thought it would be interesting to create a world that lies within a filmstrip, and that players themselves are in turn telling themselves a story as they play it, this was how I interpreted the theme. I was surprised to find a number of people who thought I hadn’t considered the theme and were unable to see the connection.  There is no gameplay mechanic that directly links to the theme; my interpretation was purely visual and aesthetically which I felt could have been the reason for this misunderstanding.

Making artwork and animating: Creating art and animating are my stronger side so naturally this went relatively smoothly. I feel I do well in establishing a certain feeling or mood in the game and are happy with the results. I didn’t want to do a purely black and white game as my old LD26 game was all black and white; I wanted to have at least some hint of colour. So I went for an old sepia brownish tone which was intended to give an old fashioned kind of feel, that I hope it does.

Managed to submit something: Having almost scrapped the idea midday Saturday to do something that was easier for me to program (I was thinking of a point and click adventure perhaps) I was happy that I stuck at it and managed to submit something that ran relatively smoothly.

A lot of people have been asking me my influences; this is pretty much my main influence. – Link:

What went wrong

Learning AS3/Coding: I’m not much of a programmer but I love coming up with interesting design ideas for games which is why I participate (and to learn). But I got very frustrated throughout programming the game which is why this entry isn’t as substantial as it could have been.

The game mechanic I wanted to implement would have been that the characters could let go of each other’s hands and that when separated one can make it over further to reach gaps and aid the other character across, so basically hints of puzzle elements to the game.

Bugs (oops): I submitted the game with one silly bug I knew about but completely forgot to fix If players hold the ‘up arrow’ key the characters just fly up endlessly. There are also some minor collision issues which are beyond my knowledge of programming to fix so I just had to work around these issues throughout development.

Not Much of a Game/No Gameplay: I think I ever so slightly bit off more than I could chew as I know very little AS3. This meant that I was able to get a concept out but unable to implement a game mechanic and to design some intrigue levels with a nice curve around this mechanic. However I learnt a ton of new things because of this. What I submitted isn’t much of a game (yet) more of an interactive storytelling conceptual piece and proof of concept.

What is next

I’m fairly happy with the concept and I feel it has a lot of room for potential. I plan to continue working on this due to the nice feedback I have received from fellow devs. I have found myself a programmer and we’re currently working evenings and weekends to maybe make this little prototype into something hopefully substantial. All the artwork/characterisation will be further iterated and touched up for a more unique/established art style based on some very valuable feedback I have received. A solid game mechanic will be put in place which in turn will give some puzzle elements to the game, as well as adding some variety to the twitch skill mechanics currently in place for platforming.

Thank you to everyone who played and for your kind words.

You can play the game here.

Firstly, that was one heck of a competition. It was absolutely down the wire on this one. I finally got my game finished and uploaded with only about fifteen minutes to spare. Close call. I also got pretty sick during the competition so there was that to deal with. But all things considered I had a lot of fun. I pushed myself hard and I feel came out with a good product. I think The Lost Robos is a pretty stylish and fun game, competition notwithstanding. I’m glad I was a part of this and will probably take part in future competitions if I have the time and energy.

What Went Right

Quite a lot actually. I started with the characters and went from there. I wanted to nail the animation so it was pleasant to look at, since those were the assets that would be getting the most focus from the player. I think the tiles turned out quite nicely. The levels manage to look fairly attractive and balanced considering there are only maybe five different tiles in the game.  The gameplay itself seems to be the best attribute of The Lost Robos. We managed to achieve a nice old school, multi-character, puzzler feeling with it that I think makes it stand out a bit as an entry.

What Went Wrong

The biggest, most glaring flaw of the entire game is BAD CONVEYANCE . Many players think the game is glitched or broken, but this is not true. It just suffers from a bad case of me not explaining things in a clear enough fashion. Admittedly I started the game with a big, ugly Wall Of Text, which I’m sure most people just breeze right through. The problem is they miss important control functions and the game never prompts you about them again, which is very bad form. For example when you want to move a Robo you have to select him with his corresponding number. Nothing will move until you select a character. Also, when you die or want to restart the level you have to press R. The game never restarts itself. This was intentional because a level is not necessarily unbeatable just because a Robo is dead or out of juice. But people thought the game froze on death because I didn’t include a prompt reminding you to press R when you were dead. Since this is a competition and people have a lot of entries to wade through, I doubt they tried long to figure out how to progress the game and just shut it down and moved on to the next. That was unfortunate.

The music didn’t quite turn out how I wanted. While the one song in the game is decent enough, I didn’t have the time to add more voices and layers so it ended up sounded a bit thin. Also I really wanted a song to play for the levels, but I ran out of time before I could compose one.

The game does have some bugs as well. I tried to nail them all down, and I’m pretty sure I removed all the ones that broke the game or let you cheat your way through a level, but a few ugly ones still remain.  I won’t go into detail about all of them but let’s just say some weird things can happen when you switch characters in certain situations.

Closing Thoughts

All in all, I’m rather proud of this game and I would love to get more people to play it. I tried keeping up on reviews but it took me three days of constant reviewing to even hit 100. I have no idea how those guys on the most popular list are getting the numbers they are, but more power to them. I’ve seen a lot of good games out there and it’s been a blast playing them all. I’ve enjoyed seeing everyone’s take on the 10 Seconds theme, and I’ve really come across some serious gems. Good luck to all of you, and have fun!

Looks liked it turned into a fierce contest after all. Only two rank endings remain. That’s right folks, rank A and SS are still available. Beat the game and get the ranks and you will win a free in depth review!

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

Tags: contest, review

Hey guys,

We released our game ‘Mr. Moore’s Last Seconds‘ here on Ludum Dare as our entry for the 72 hour jam. This game was made from scratch with no used or re-used assets. The interesting thing is, that we actually posted the game on NewGrounds, you know, just to see what the community over there would think. The creator of ‘Clockwork Cat’, ‘Captain Jack’, ‘Pull The Wire’ and more also did the same. They got the same result! I don’t know about those guys, but I’m overjoyed that our game got Front-Page on NewGrounds. Also, when we thought it couldn’t get any more awesome, Adobe decided to announce it as the ‘Gaming Rocks Pick of the Week’. The game has ~25,500 as of this post, and for us, that’s a huge achievement.

We created a small team called ‘Hexaton Games‘, and we would really appreciate it if you followed us on either Facebook(link) or Twitter(link)! If you have played the game, and you like it, the you would be doing us a huge favour by supporting us and getting the games OST for only $1 (link). We really do hope to make some more awesome games for you guys.

Anyway, I guess the main purpose of this post is to encourage the Ludum Dare developers to post the game on NewGrounds, try and get a little attention from it. I mean, you deserve it, you made a game in 72 hours, and you should all be damn proud of yourselves no matter how big or how small it was. You actually made a game. If you didn’t, or you didn’t finish in time, just try making your ideas a little smaller until you know you can develop them. We personally can not wait for the next Ludum Dare!

You can play the game at NewGrounds HERE!

Thanks,

Joey (Hexaton Games)

Tags: adobe, feature, flash, game, newgrounds

I didn’t finish in time for the main event, or even the jam – but, I will release a playable demo at some point in the future.

Hello people! Remember me and my Ludum Dare 27 game? Of course you don’t! But that’s okay, I didn’t expect you to. In fact, go away, I’m writing this post for myself, as an affirmation of sorts. What? You’re still here? Shoo!

Now, on a slightly more serious note, I am, in fact, working on a post-compo version of my latest Ludum Dare entry, Stator Chronicle, as I consider it to be a rather successful experiment indeed. Naturally, it has flaws, and the feedback that you guys have left is invaluable to me, so I will be grateful if you leave even more, as every new comment either gives me more motivation to continue working on the project or helps me improve the future full game (sometimes both, believe it or not).

This is the first post-compo improvement to the game, wind zones now work as intended, and their “glitchiness” is completely eliminated. Just something I didn’t have time to fix during the 48 hours of the compo.

Like I said, I’m just trying to be assertive here (and my own blog appears to be broken for some php-related reason), so I needed to write this post to make it official: Stator Chronicle is going post-compo. Be excited. Or not. I know I will be!

Tags: announcement, post-compo, stator chronicle

I am writing a C# Monogame 2D platformer game library called Ludum2D. It is going to be an extraction of my engine used in my Ludum Dare 27 game with additional and more refined features.

I am developing it specifically to be extremely fast to make games with.

Features:

Gravity
Collisions
Entity management
Artificial Intelligence
Tile based levels
Particle engine
Hit Scanning
Smart post processor (Effects like Blur, Bloom etc.)

These are just few of the many features it will have.

It is made open source under the GPL license which means if you make any improvements or additions to my engine, I would like if you would make it public so we could implement your patch into the engine.

A port to Java with LWJGL is planned once this version is complete.

Link: https://github.com/oxysoft/Ludum2D

I didn’t get my game finished.

What went right:

• My art. I barely got any done, but it turned out well.
• My second idea. I like the idea, and think it could be fun if it was actually a game.
• Early code. The week before the compo, I started working on a game library. I found that having a bit of base code really helped, and whenever I needed a fairly generic feature (sprites, A*, etc) I added it to the library instead of my main code.
• I can’t think of anything else :/

What went wrong:

• My first idea. After briefly brainstorming, I started implementing an impractical idea for an inexperienced dev like me. I threw it away on Saturday afternoon after bugs that I couldn’t fix got in the way and I realized how impractical it was.
• Distractions. I didn’t have any caffeine and I was exhausted and unmotivated, and even while streaming, my brain was constantly busy trying to figure out some way to distract itself from the task at hand.

tl;dr: No caffeine, impractical idea, distractions.

You can play my game in neverland.

Guruguru everybody !

I’m happy to share with you this  video witch represent the 3 crazy days of Ludum Dare from our artist point of view :

You like it ?
Play and rate GuruGuru

You really like it ?
Follow Aki Aoki on her twitter @Akican and check more of her works on her website : akiaoki.com

Have a nice day !

– Team GURUGURU

Download for Windows

Expanded from the 48 hour version made for Ludum Dare 27.

Patch notes:

-Eyefolk now talk to you.
-150% more crystal voices.
-Protagonist visually signifies pain by iris turning to throbbing exclamation mark with sweat drops pouring out.
-Added 3 more levels (for a total of 10).
-Added Mines (instant kill, big explosion).
-Added Breakable Walls (they break instantly with mines or gradually with projectiles).
-Level select by going to the golden altar and pressing 1-10.
-Changed grassfire spread to perfect (before it was slightly randomized).
-Friendly mode starts you out with 11 seconds and gives 1 extra second per crystal.
-Rebalanced/tweaked existing levels.
-Multishot turrets don’t slow the game down as much.
-WASD support if you’re into that sick shit.
-Fullscreen!!! (switch to windowed with F4)
-You can save/load with F5/F6.

Any feedback/bug reports/etc appreciated.

Shameless Project Link!

With a larger team than our first LD Jam, we decided to get a bit ambitious. Maybe a bit overambitious, if our frantic final hours of development are any indication. We used LWJGL and Slick-Util, and the engine and assets were all built during the 72 hours. However, due to our lead programmer undergoing Oral Surgery the day before the contest started, the assistant programmer losing his laptop charger and having a working weekend, and a heated controversy about mops as game cursors, we lost a lot of development time.

Battle of the Century

Out initial concept was actually very different than the finished product. We started talking about a Medieval Fantasy Village, where you played as a meddlesome local spirit, and had a 10-second window to freeze, rewind, and fast-forward in time, rearranging items in the town to make people fall in love, or catch on fire, or whatever your horrible heart desired. Though it would have been a fun sandbox, we figured the gameplay was lacking, so we instituted a crisis you had to avert in order to win. Then, the setting was revised to a Space Lab, both because Our First LD Project was fantasy-themed, and so we had more stuff to work with.

It’s far easier for things to explode and go horribly awry in Space than it is in Ye Olde Timey Village.

We struggled for a while on what kind of puzzles to introduce into the game. At first, we were going to go with just Adventure Game Style puzzles, which involved making the crew members do certain things. Puzzles like “the door is broken and needs to be repaired by the Engineer. The Engineer is busy being macked-on by the Lieutenant. You had to teleport the Captain there to shout at them both to get back to work, in order to progress.” We had no idea how to make that happen in 72 hours, much less convey it to players in a way that made sense… so we dropped that angle, and instead went for simple item-placement puzzles. We eventually added in another layer of Pipe Dream style puzzles, with the wall circuits that opened doors and allowed you to progress.

Speaking of the Circuit Puzzles, I have mixed feelings about the puzzle design on this project. I wanted to make them challenging, but I’m a little worried that the difficulty curve ended up as more of a difficulty cliff.  The first room made a great introduction; you could see what was happening, and with a bit of experimentation figure out the bit with the fuse, without any kind of tutorial. Teaching the game through gameplay, without tutorials, has always been one of my favorite parts of quality game design, which the Youtube series Sequelitis touches on in a bit more detail (great videos for prospective Game Designers, BTW). On the other hand, the second room was probably one of the hardest in the entire game… at the very least, one of the most complicated ones. I was hoping to introduce mechanics like the room hazards, circuit fuses, and having multiple solutions per room a little more gradually than that… but time constraints sorta tied our hands on that one.

In order to win, you had to revisit and resolve the 1st puzzle 4 times.

As far as graphics, music, and general presentation are concerned, I’m really happy with how the game turned out. The time dilation and time reversal effects are some of my favorites (especially since the particle explosions remember where they happened, and can accurately un-explode as time rewinds). The run cycle on the main character came out pretty well too; since one of the major effects used in the game was slowing down and reversing time, I wanted to make sure there were a lot of frames, so he’d keep moving even when significantly slowed down. Since he was mostly brown, I was able to just animate 1 leg, clone it, and reposition it. It actually came out looking pretty nice, if I may say so myself.

We were hoping to do a semi-animated intro as well, which did a better job of setting the stage; watching the Time Rift explode in a shower of glass shards from the Reactor Core, and then freeze, with the glass particles suspended in mid-air. We ran out of time for that, though… barely managed to even implement animated explosions. You can see the explosions we managed in one of the above screenshots, but my original concept actually looked something more like this:

The explosions are made of a cloud of particles which are generated over time, and each of which “age” through their animation separately. Each particle is colored so that the darker edges share colors with the inner part of the next frame in their animation; that way, when the newer particles overlap the old ones, they’ll look like a continuous sprite. The idea was to generate a large, closely-packed cloud of bright particles offset slightly from an origin point, and give them a random vector. As the first particles animate and fade toward red, slightly fewer new particles are generated on top of them. Then, as the first particles become a large cloud of smoke, and the later batches have become a cool cloud, only one or two bright new particles generate, until all of them fade into smoke.

Even if we couldn’t pull that off, I like the sprites well enough. I might use a similar effect on a commercial project I’m working on right now. Suppose the graphics could also make a decent Flamethrower or Rocket Trail too… hmm…

Anyway, this will be our second LD, as well as my second real game. Definitely going to be trying this again, hopefully next time this rolls around. Thanks to those of you who tried out our game. I hope it’s as fun to play as it was to make!

For several reasons we have some framerate problems because browser, OS and computer. So if you want to help us play the test version normally (and rate the game). Do not forget : you have to tap Ctrl or Alt to move faster (not keep this key in press).

• If the game seems slow, pressing F and copy the message that appears (FPS and CPU usage) and send us by email ([email protected] /* */) with the info of your setup configuration (Browser / OS / CPU / Ram).

• If everything seems to work correctly, please send us an email (iterative [email protected] /* */) with your configuration (Browser / OS / CPU / RAM).

Thank you very much for your help, any comment will be appreciated too.

Play It here !(new testing version)

Tags: game, help