I thoroughly enjoyed my first Ludum Dare! Rating the games is even more fun, such an amount of good stuff!

As this was my first time, i wanted something really simple, because i didn’t know how well i would perform in the little time given.

A multiple choice part came to mind. I always try to include text in my games, because i want to make morally meaningful games, and text is the simplest way to transport a message – everyone needs a niche!

But that deemed too simple, so i thought about an action part: one screen or multiple? I’ve never done a jump-and-run before, so that was the way to go. And i’m a big fan of procedurally generated content, so i thought about one path you could walk in both directions. One Path in a double meaning: literally, and as a metaphor for the mind – focused, discerning the essence of the human condition, so to speak.

main character

What went right:

– Preparation: one day before the jam i looked into the new Unity 2D features, i.e. i watched the video about the new demo project and made a splash screen. I tried various exports and screen resolution, as not to loose time afterwards.

– Mechanics: as i invented nothing new, it was relatively easy to implement both the action as well as the adventure part. After one stressful day they were more or less implemented, which left enough time for content creation.

– Time management: The first day was really tough, i tried so hard to do as much as possible, but the second day the whole stress left, i could decide how much content to implement, and finished a playable prototype 6 hours before the deadline. After that i used the remaining time to up graphics and content.

– Unity 2D: simple to use, it was not much different from 3D, and though i didn’t understand everything, it was enough to complete what i had in mind, e.g. splicing a sprite sheet automatically was nice..

What went wrong:

– Unity2D: i hoped for an automated method to animate the sprite sheet but couldn’t figure it out fast enough, so i animated the main character manually, but did the routines not general purpose enough for reuse and lost interest of any other animated characters (birds, encounters, more anims for the character) because there were more pressing matters at hand.

– unsing the OnGui elements of Unity for the text-part was a design choice for the sake of simplicity but i knew there were potential dangers and in fact:

* the Linux version didn’t show text at all.

* depending on the resolution of the screen, the text was sometimes off-screen, because i wrapped it manually, as i couldn’t figure out how to use the auto-wrap.

– there is a gap between the action and the text-part i couldn’t bridge, because i filled the questions with random content that came to mind. There is no story intertwined which leaves a disparate taste to the game.

– the final evaluation only takes into account the score from the answers, i was to weary to take the times one fell, the amount of pickups or the years played into account. That’s wrong because in my opinion it’s bad to cut the ending short, a fault often met in old skool games. It is understandable that after crafting a game you don’t have the time and ressources to bring it to completion, but the more you should take that into account.

– answering the multiple choice part went from clicking with the mouse (as per OnGui), to clicking keys 1 -3, as to not having to switch from keys/controller to mouse, but it didn’t implement going through the answers with up-down, which would be the preferable choice of control.

Play it here

Thanks to all, it was great!

Did i ever tell you about the time i ate raw popcorn?

No, seriously.

This was our first Ludum Dare and it was good in many ways. We saw how we work together, we had different ideas and we decided to take a chance. Yes, why not?

We had very simple ideas that could easily be done in 72 hours, but discard all of them to do something a little more unexpected.

And it’s called “Distracted Detective”.
We returned to the old DOS games because we’re nostalgic bastards. We mixed a classical point ‘n click game with a little Carmen Sandiego feeling and voilà.

Be a detective somewhat distracted, somewhat obsessive who can analyze only one item at a time.

It is clear that much could be done better, but we took a leap of faith and in the end it was not that bad. But I’ll leave the conclusions to you.

We say yay to:
– Work together was cool.
– Programming a point ‘n click was easy so I could think a lot about the detective cases.
– Pixel art FTW.
– I found a cool background music.

We do not say yay to:
– In the end, we had very few cases (we wanted around 10).
– All menus were done in a hurry.
– We didn’t have time to put sounds and more music.

Big message:
– Make a point ‘n click game is fun, easy and safe of bugs (but if you find some, we are sorry).
– Is it even legal to drink beer making games? I enjoyed it.
– I have to practice my English.
– More LDs from now on.

Our page project is:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29924

Now let’s play all games!

Click To Play

Hell Yeah:

This time I had fun.

I really did.

Nothing else matters.

Buuuuut:

The theme! OMG What have you, who upvoted it, been thinking!

I will try not to use tools that are promising but very buggy again.
That moment when you realize that not all things saved to a file are restored upon loading is pretty scary, but I have been able to work around it. I should contact the author because I probably know all existing bugs now

As usual the christmas party at work has to be the night before winter LD starts…

I start to get some routine with LDs. That’s a good and a bad thing actually.

In one level I used a background-color that is similar to the Unity default background-color. But I haven’t used Unity. I will never do that again cause people don’t like it.

My game has things to explore. Quickvoting mode will still work but you won’t get the whole picture. So please take the few extra minutes to finish the game should you try it.
#YOGO4EVER

Click To Play

Well ok … only on my Vita :).

But you can play the game on Win/Mac/Linux and Chrome:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=10298

Watch the Playstation Vita video:

Tags: crankgaming, Love, love2d, Playstation, PSM, Vita

Hi everyone,

I’m getting closer and closer to actually entering a Ludum Dare competition!  =P  This past weekend I wrote a platformer with a fun door effect in Flash/AS3 with Starling and Nape physics.  I only got to spend about 8 hours on it and couldn’t quite figure out how to work in the theme.  I spent a bit of time trying to write collision detection before integrating Nape.

Anyway, click to try it:

LD28 unfinished – Zeldario? =D

Let me know what you think!

Cheers – Jeff

Just one more turn (please!) – Postmortem

I’m back to life again, so it only feels appropriate to write a postmortem. Just one more turn (please!) is my fifth LD game, and this has probably been the one that I’ve had a hardest time with so far, to the point that I considered quitting in some occasions.

Play and rate it here!

The game came to be after I failed shaping some fun mechanics (or even plot) for the main idea I had been thinking about: something abstract about choices in life and how you only get one chance for each of them. As I was getting stuck I decided to throw it to the rubbish bin and come up with a better idea. I ruled out another one partially inspired by Battle Royale and the random weapon that is assigned to each of the students, too. Luckily, memories of games such as Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, X-Com or Fire Emblem came to the rescue, and together with the theme I managed to combine both things to create a turn-based strategy game where each unit only had one turn (which actually makes the game a bit more of a puzzle). It sounded feasible, it sounded interesting, and it had potential to be fun. How did it turn out, then?

What went wrong

• Physical/Mental exhaustion: I came home late at night after a Christmas party with the people from work (and before that I’d been exercising, too), and I woke up on Saturday after 4 hours of sleep, hangover and really tired. This is definitely not the best situation to work , and as time piled up it only got worse: now put into the mix some unrelated personal issues and obsessions of mine, together with my perception of how development was progressing, and the final result was not one nor two but three panic attacks throughout Sunday. By the third one the pot was boiling and I seriously thought that I should leave it there. I have some anxiety-related issues (AvPD, to be specific), but panic is almost news for me, so I was feeling worn out from both the long hours and all that other crap, even a bit scared and quite demotivated, all of which had a very negative impact in the game end result.
• No Planning: On the last LD I decided to keep a detailed backlog of features to do, which really helped define priorities and keep things on focus. This time I had nothing like that, just some scribbles on a notebook, and then I would work in whatever I would feel like at the moment. I paid for it.
• Insufficient gameplay: Lots of features related to the core gameplay were only partially designed (for example, how would the turn play out, if enemies should counter, if all the ally units should move before the enemies, if the player and AI would alternate,…), and many more (unit stats,  more unit types,… the list is way too long)  got left out because of lack of time. Also, the number of levels is really short and easy, but I didn’t have time to do much more.
• Lackluster graphics: While I like the character designs (if few, and with only one simple animation), and the backgrounds on their own aren’t completely terrible, they don’t really blend with each other, so the result is quite subpar.
• Sound: I’d hoped to compose some music this time, choose or create some fitting sounds and help with polish to help with immersion. In the end I just used Autotracker and randomly clicked for a couple of minutes on Bfxr. :/

What went right

• Submitted: Despite all the problems, and even though I’m not particularly happy with the results (I can’t thank @Zener enough for putting up with all my whining via chat), I managed to submit a more or less defined game. The fact that I didn’t just give up makes me a bit prouder of myself.
• Unity3D: This is the first game I’ve coded on Unity (besides a 2.5D prototype I’d done at work some months ago), and I’m really glad with it. It’s very usable and lets you build content and functionality really fast. As a counterpart it takes some control away from you (which is somewhat important for me as a programmer), but for this project I didn’t actually need that much.
• Idea: Again, the final result is not exactly what I had in mind, but the idea has potential. I would like to  try to think a bit more about it and then extend it.
• Despite what I mentioned on the first point on the “What went wrong” list, the moments when I managed to get in the “zone” coding helped me get distracted from everything else. I tend to see programming  as puzzles waiting to be solved, and that “game” aspect of it is one of the reasons why I love it.

Play Shine here!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=11391

 Phew! The Compo is over and I’ve finally gotten some sleep! I found this theme really difficult and I spend way too much time thinking of idea for a game, but fortunately I managed to get the whole thing done on time without having to leave out anything. Here’s a small tale of the game’s creation:

What went right:

The game overall! I am extremely happy how the game turned out, I got 8 full levels of platforming and everything is working just fine, there should be no major bugs. In my previous entry Duke Dashington controls were bit clunky, but I think I perfected the gameplay for this one. Funny enough, the game turned out to be much more different than I had originally planned.

When I was first brainstorming game ideas, the original version of Shine was called Single Spell, the game was more traditional platformer, where in the beginning you could have chosen from one of three spells: Fire, Ice and Wind. There would have been Forest, Cave and Castle levels with puzzles for each magic and you would have to clear the game with the one you picked up in the beginning. Gameplay would have been different with each playthrough. Fortunately I realized how short time 48 hours actually is to make levels for 3 different magics and how huge amount of work testing them all would have been, so I decided to scrap the idea.

Unfinished graphics for the first level of Single Spell, before I scrapped the idea of multiple different levels and changed the name to Shine.

I decided to simplify the idea to just one magic instead. Then I remembered my old plan for a game where a girl tries to find her way out from the darkness carrying a lantern. I decided to change the game to focus on lighting your way in the darkness.  I had already drawn some forest stuff, but I decided to change the setting to only take place in single location, the Castle, to keep things simple and not waste too much time on different level tile graphics.

Lucia’s original design vs. her new one

I was thinking of ways of controlling of the light and came up with a magical light orb that you could control with your mouse. That would be both simple to make and control in gameplay. I made the orb to explode if it ever hit walls, platforms or went off screen. This gave the game nice puzzle element, as you are now controlling two characters with their own restrictions. I also changed the game’s name from Single Spell to Shine, because I like simple names and it was more fitting considering what you do in the game. Next I was trying to design a look for the game’s main heroine. Quite some time ago I took part of Noble Kale’s pixel challenges and one of the characters I drew for it was black haired magician girl. I decided to base Shine’s heroine’s looks on her, but changed the new character to blonde to make her stand out better from the dark background. I decided to name the girl Lucia, after Saint Lucia, because the name made me think of light. Then I wrote a small story trying to justify why she is traveling through such a dark place.

Screenshot from the finished gameplay of the first level of Shine

What went wrong:

I started this Ludum Dare extremely tired, even though I had slept pretty long in previous night. I couldn’t think properly, so I went back to sleep and woke up to brainstorm some ideas maybe 8 hours after LD has already started. I spend about 12 of the first hours just sleeping or trying to come up with Shine’s concept, didn’t end up using any of the graphics like the forest I had drawn and I ended up with battling with some really basic stuff like how to make the orb collide with platforms while allowing the player to pass them with no problems. I also spend way too many hours trying to make the light orb follow mouse smoothly, just to discover that making it was actually very simple after all and I had been making it overly complicated way for hours. Sigh. I probably spend way too long on the intro sequence too than I probably should have had.  If  I had started earlier, there could have been many more levels.

I was originally going to plan on streaming my game deving, but because I started Shine so late and I was not sure if the game will turn out well at all, I was too nervous to actually stream. I was trying many new things and streaming can be very distracting, so I wanted to just fully focus on my game. I did get my game done nicely on time, so in retrospect maybe I really should have streamed, my game would have been much more known.

But other than that, the game turned out very well, huge thanks for my friends who were online most of the time and were around to test the thing and report bugs they found. I highly doubt the game would have turned out as well as it did if I didn’t have them report various issues they found during their playthroughs. Lesson of the story: keep your ideas simple, because 48 hours is VERY short time to make a game and have people playtest your game if possible.

Now I am resting and rating some entries, so go rate and leave comment on Shine, so I will get to check out your game and rate it back!

I made a walkthrough video of my game, for those that have a hard time with it and/or have too much lag to play the game because of their machine’s speed and/or age. I don’t recommend watching BEFORE you play if you intend to play though, because it spoils the game (puzzle solutions). Do note that what is shown are valid solutions to the puzzles presented; but not the ONLY solutions. There are at least three valid solutions for the third (and final) level and the other two (easier) levels have many more than that.

Hi

Heart is my Ludum Dare entry, and now that the cat is fully out of the bag I feel it is time to give an artist’s statement — so to speak.

You Only Get One

Heart is a game you can’t play. Heart is a zelda-like in which you start with one heart. That’s tough, right? What’s worse: you can’t get hearts in the game. Too bad, sorry no hearts. The only way to get hearts in Heart is for other people to give them to you. If someone gives you their heart, you will have an extra heart, but they will be perma-dead forever. They just can’t play.

In the LD28 build of Heart, none of this is very apparent. There isn’t a great deal of weight because there isn’t enough content. So I want you to imagine for a moment. Imagine that you are playing a zelda-like and that it is fun, and nostalgic, and brutally difficult because you only get one heart. OK. Now imagine that fight through that, and you get to the forest with the master sword, only you can’t lift it. It’s too heavy for you. An old tree explains: not everyone gets to be the hero.

For anyone to lift the sword, at least two others have to renounce the privilege of ever playing the game (barring the cheaty-face cheaters: they will always find a way). Not only that: even if you get 3 hearts and are able to lift the master sword… have you ever beaten Zelda on 3 hearts? I haven’t. Some people have, and to them I say “koodos”. Most of us need to get almost every heart in the game. This means you need, like, ten people backing you with their hearts.

Oh and what? You can’t give your heart away until you’ve played through the beginning of the game. Yeah, that’s right. So you can’t just get ten friends to randomly click “give heart”. You need ten gamers who are willing to play part way through a zelda-like with _one_heart_ and then renounce their ability to ever play again. Then, and only then, can you play Heart with a reasonable chance of beating the game.

I’m not done with Heart: this ugly, painfully short, glitchy hackathon of a tech-demo is only the beginning. I intend to make a soulful, challenging, hand-drawn, desert-nomad zelda-like that very few people will play, and that even fewer people will beat. That game will be called Heart.

Because hey, listen: you only get one.

z.

Little update of a post LD version
Player can now die from erosion :

working on a Processing.js version for a web build.

I made a game called Dungeon wish. It’s a 1-minute roguelike. I described it in detail in my notebook. Do not do that when you design for fun! Your intuition is enough. Just start with a basic idea, test it and continue designing from there.

Dungeon generation

I wrote it on the first day. It was unnecessarily complex:

1. One level – 3×3 grid with blocks (4×4, 16 tiles).
2. Algorithm for connecting 3 blocks
3. Algorithm for connecting doors with adjacent blocks. Doors can have 2 orientations: vertical, horizontal.

Instead of this system I should have tested block destruction mechanic as early as possible.

Convoluted energy mechanic

Nobody understood my energy mechanic. I failed to communicate this mechanic clearly through gameplay. But it’s the core mechanic of DungeonWish. When you understand it the game becomes interesting. Only then you can appreciate wish system I implemented.
Basically, energy is the only resource in the game which is restored with fountains. When you loose all the energy, you die.

Magic mechanic

GIF with dungeon magic

Initially green platform was supposed to open doors and trap player. It proved to be too hard to implement with randomly generated levels. So I made green blocks perform some dungeon rebuilding magic. I figured this out through playtesting!

Roguelike with only two items

Hammer and rope. You can use rope to climb down a pit. I planned to use hammer for throwing but never got to that.

Conclusions

Notch is designing for fun. It means he has a playable prototype at initial stages of the game. I only had playable buggy version in the middle of the second day. And after I got it playing I understood that some of my design decisions were improper for the game feel.

Overall LD28(LD48?) was great! It helped me advance my design thinking.

Tags: dungeon crawler, dungeon generation, postmortem

Note: relatively long, sorry :<

“You only get one”

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=30298  <– our entry

When the theme was first revealed we (my friend Henry and I) scratched our heads somewhat. We had been preparing for something a little more conventional and had absolutely no immediate ideas about this other than LET’S DO A ROGUELIKE and… we felt like it was not possible to pump out an interesting roguelike in 72 hours that wasn’t already walking well-trodden ground. In the end I threw out the idea of a game where literally every single asset was the number one (self-interest as I was making the assets) and we would work out the gameplay as we went.

We defaulted to a platformer as he and I had a few ideas about how platformers should work that we wanted to test out. In the first 48 hours we hacked together a few basic assets, a character controller and a rough enemy type (including a moving one that never gets used).

The enemies are composed of parts and when killed are switched out with a separate physics ragdoll object and a virtual force is applied to each part to get them to spin away appropriately. The shots are simple fired at whatever angle we situate the shooting gameobject on the little purple one on their heads.

The player is controlled by absolute transform motion in the left and right axes, but has our own jump and gravity code on him. We decided to avoid using full physics to control him as that always ends up feeling a little floaty. He also has completely full air control. Getting his behaviour right took a bit of time, as things like the grounded state are vital to the game’s mechanics and at first they were a little ropey.

His gun also took a bit of effort – I have an obsession with making sure the basic action in a game is satisfying, so we tried to make the act of firing his gun as nice feeling as possible. The screen shakes along the axis of the shot, with the weapon having both impact and exit spray. The enemies are imparted a significant physics force. The gun is also the only actually animated part of the game – it slides back into its base whenever you fire.

The music playing is actually an interesting hackjob – we have a gameobject that is a part of the main menu scene but is set not to be destroyed on loading a new scene. When you go back to the main menu it actually takes you back to a scene named “mainmenu2” which doesn’t contain the object, as otherwise the music doubles up.

Gameplay Concept

We wanted the gameplay to be a smooth and flowing platformer. The idea was that you should be able to complete each level without your feet ever touching the ground (not first time) – in one jump – and that you should be constantly trying to chain together your various abilities. To that end we gave the player resetting aerial dashes and jumps on an enemy kill, and to make interacting with the enemy shots more interesting gave the dash the ability to destroy them and return jumps and dashes also. As you chain together your aerial moves time slows down and you move faster, giving you a nice way to continue your combo and a bit of breathing room. You only get one jump/dash/shot charge at a time, in keeping with the theme.

The levels should be short but quick to restart (hitting r), with death being relatively painless. Obviously, one shot kills you!

So how did it work?

I feel like the basic action of shooting feels extremely satisfactory. However, the platforming itself was much less fun and this is down to 2 things:

a) The character’s movement felt very weightless as you have no momentum

b) the character had no animations

The dash in particular really needed some associated animations. In general, the game is very bad at giving solid feedback – the indicators on the player showing which charges you have are tiny and probably won’t be noticed. There should have been an impact sound for hitting an enemy with your shots, and definitely animation states for moving around. The game needs more of a kinetic feel!

Level design was a serious problem. We only started making levels on the last day, and although we had experimented with the parts of our system we hadn’t really got an explicit feel for the best way to show off the game’s mechanics. Originally I drew up a list of the mechanics and the combinations of them which I was going to use to construct the levels, but sadly I forgot about it. Hence, we just randomly designed levels – and this means the difficulty is EXTREMELY high. The very first non tutorial level requires you to chain together a series of motions, introduces a new mechanic (spikes) and doesn’t let you get to grips with the system at all.

As ever, some external testing would have really helped here!

The spikes are also an interesting one – a few hours before the end I was looking at what we had and feeling like something was missing. Then I realised that we had designed a platformer with ABSOLUTELY ZERO environmental hazards! This meant that things like a fall could never be dangerous because you take no fall damage, etc. So I rushed in some spikes in the very few hours and stuck them into a couple of levels, but having those from the beginning would have dramatically changed the design (for the better, I think, as it would have emphasised the importance of staying aerial).

The UI was not fit for purpose. We needed a clear indicator of how much slow mo time you currently have (other than the combo counter) and a CLEAR large indication of dash, jump and shot charges. A shot recharge bar would have been great too. In a game like this you need good visual feedback, and we definitely failed on that front.

Finally, one of the most obvious things was that we failed to put in the instruction “WASD moves” in the tutorial. I simply didn’t think about it, but quite a few people have asked since “how do I move!”.

Conclusions

We really enjoyed the jam and we learned a huge amount. I think the biggest takeaways are the importance of thinking about level design early, making sure that things are easier than you think they should be (because you have played your game for hours and they haven’t), and making sure that the most seen elements of your game (in this case the main character and UI) are expressive and packed with movement and information.

With that said, I am still surprised by how playable the game is. All the levels are doable in one jump (including the nightmarish level 5 which I have only ever managed to do… once). The scoring system works, the music plays, checkpoints work, etc.

Here is the timelapse I made for my game Maverick:

Hi there,

Here is the Timelapse Video for our Jam Entry SchrotBeton. Mostly Coding, since fix_moeller did most of the graphics  (but unfortunately no timelapse).

Greetings!

The Ronin is our entry for this jam. It’s a dynamic action game filled with duels. The game is optimized for mobiles phones, so you can play from Safari, Chrome etc. on iOS and Android (at least).

We took the theme under the following lense : “the player only has one opportunity“. Only one opportunity to slay his enemy. We extended this to “only one opportunity to attack when there’s an opening” too, in order to bring more depth to the game.

Anyway, instead of a classical postmortem, I’d like to write something that could be useful to you dudes and dudettes. If you have any question, are curious about our workflow, tools etc., please send me a message on twitter @ResonantCraft or in the comments !

Kind regards,

Nathan

Newcomer, you dont remember your origin and you past.
The Great Altar called “Phat to the Past” can reveal your doubts.
Collect the Souls to feed the arcan energy in the altar.

Try play it NOW – in Akh

Finally, we have fixed some bugs and we think that Hidden Prison is playable. It’s a game where is important to work in team and select the right character to surpass each obstacle. Some friends think that it remembers to The Lost Viking with top view. I invite you to try it and give us some feedback for a future version in Tablets.

Try it! Hidden Prison

Thanks everybody and good luck with the votation!!

Tags: MechanicMoonStudio

In this Ludum Dare, a lot of things went terribly wrong for us :\

We’re a team of two, so we were going for the 72 hour jam. Before we even started thinking about a game idea, one of our computers stopped booting Windows (it’s a MacBook and we tried to make a third partition with no success), so we were left with one computer.

We started making the game (it also took us ages to come up with an idea) on the working computer and about 40 hours in, we were stuck on some geometry/math problems that we couldn’t solve. So we deleted almost everything we had and implemented the Nape physics engine (it was the first time we ever used a physics engine in general :O)

Because we were running out of time we focused on the very core features of our game (You Only Get One Planet is about aliens and it doesn’t have UFOs). We managed to have a somewhat polished version of our game with about a couple of hours left. We started taking screenshots for the submission only to realize that one Starling extension we use was causing the game to not work at all in the browser. We almost cried.

Finally, we submitted the very broken version of our game, posted about our problem in the Starling forum and went to bed.

Today, one of the extension’s developers provided a workaround to our problem. We finally have a working version up! It was without a doubt a very disappointing (and exhausting) Ludum Dare experience for us. We didn’t enjoy it at all

At least our problems are solved now

Tags: postmortem, problems, yogo

Here is our game with the updated gameplay video!

We are really happy with the results, we were able to put some level design, usually we do not have time to do this, also the feedback were much better than they normally get in our Jams

Well, hope you like the game and give us some precious feedback! =D

Play it here  on PC and WEB versions!

Well then, that was an interesting 48 hours. I somehow managed to create code into something our society calls a “game.” I am surprised that I managed to come up with something (with NO forethought at all), and I like how it turned out. I am still very much a newb at the creation of games, but I have gotten more good feedback then I have expected. Well then…. that’s all…… you can leave now…………….