Sorry it took me so long to announce my LD compo entry, One Minute to Live! The game is a defensive survival shooter game where you have ONE minuite to set up your defences by draging them to the desired location to protect the machine! After one minuite, the zombies will rush out to destroy the machine! You have to take controll of you player and shot the zombies to defend the machine, The defensives can only hold out for so long.

Controlls… Drag defensivs to desired location. Hold down to move across the screen while in defensive mode. Arrow keys to move, and mouse click to shoot while in defend mode!

Please rate! This is my first LD compo and im very excited! Thankyou!

This game is harder than it looks

So, this was my first Ludum Dare ever, and this is my entry:  Save Zoe.

– So, what is it?

Play as Baroo the Bear and carry Zoe away from those shady shadelings!
Can you get to the end of the level and get the Best Ending?

– No, really, what is it?

Okay, okay. Save Zoe is a platformer of sorts. There’s only one level, though. Or millions, depending on how you look at it. The level is randomly generated each time you fall to the water or lose your 3 lives. So, we could say that for each individual level, You Only Get One chance to beat it.

You’re trying to save Zoe. Those dang shadelings are trying to chase you both down, so you better run!
Zoe has Only One life, though. So you have to be very careful. Since you’re carrying her, she can’t really avoid projectiles. It’s on you to protect her.
But don’t worry, this isn’t a boring scort mission.
Zoe is actually useful! Even if she can’t run, she has her trusty slingshot with which she will rock down some of the shadelings and their projectiles. So that’s another reason to take care of her: She makes the game easier for you.

Oh, and did I tell you? The games has two different endings depending on how you finish it. Good Luck and Have Fun!

You can play Save Zoe here.

Hey, what happened here?

 I will polish the game further and re-release it in a couple of weeks, completely free.

Also, I’ll blog a post-mortem soon , this was a really fun experience and I learned a lot from it! Can’t wait to share my thoughts with You.
EDIT: the post-mortem’s been up for a couple of days now, here it is.

That’s it for now, Thanks for reading!

First Ludum Dare, spent the last 4 days learning unity so I could participate this time. Its just a basic platformer with one level, after abandoning an idea I realized I couldn’t figure out how to carry out, I only had a day to work on it. Let me know what you think.

Well, now that my game is out and finished. I can say my words about the game I have created.

As I didn’t have much time, and was working alone, I couldn’t create a plethora of content. I quickly realized this limit and my idea ended up with making a really difficult game. The main issue was tying in the theme with the game itself. This ended up in a poor last minute decision of allowing the player to have only one checkpoint where he or she felt like placing anywhere. Admittedly it made it keep to the theme, but poorly so.

What went well.

Collision, my archnemesis, it works fairly well, some entity-entity collision issues sometimes, but nothing major or gamebreaking.

Graphics, while I wasn’t shooting for making an extreme artistic creation, i think it came out well aesthetically, the graphics are repetetive, but i never found it to be an eyesore.

Level loading/saving/creation. The world editor saver and creator is open to anyone to use. As I did not have the time to properly implement a system of keeping track of levels to keep many of them (due to XNA having no real function for keyboard input to text without a whole lot working around)

What didn’t went so well.

Limited entities, the hazards are rather limited sadly, if I had more time there would have been a larger variety in obstacles

Restrictive jumping, the sensetivity between making a short jump and a long jump is all too high. the few that playtested it before release always jumped into the blade traps in the ceiling at some places due to not hitting the spacebar fast enough.

Maps. The map took a lot of playtesting to make sure it would actually be possible to go through, so sadly I could only create one of it

.

Play it here!

Day zero was the night of the theme announcement. Eight of us sat around and bounced ideas off of each other, trying to identify what people would immediately think of (“one shot,” “one life”) and then move on from there. While wondering about objects that were inherently unique, I thought of the Olympic torch, and rapidly got to a concept where you are a primitive tribesman trying to carry a precious gift of fire through a raining jungle fraught with danger. In fairly little time, I had a 3D capsule moving around terrain tiles in Unity, with fire reflecting off normal maps generated with Crazy Bump. It was a promising start, with the potential for procedurally generated levels.

But something didn’t feel right. At one AM, six hours after the competition had started, I was moving around my world and realized it wasn’t fun. It worked, and it would be challenging once more gameplay was in, but it felt claustrophobic and tense. I think there’s a time and place for that, but if you aim at that target, you have to crush it. Falling short would just result in a comical failure that undercuts itself at every turn.

What broke my momentum completely was the realization that dynamic shadows are a no-go in Unity if using an Orthographic camera. Shadows were critical to the mood, and while I’m capable of creating 3D assets in a weekend, it would soak up far more time than a friendlier sprite-based solution. Tired and emotionally drained, I shut down the computer and left.

On the drive home, I thought about how people would be going through these games like popcorn, and how the games I enjoyed playing were light-hearted and fun. So why the hell was I making a game about a frightened Mayan warrior pounding through the Yucatan in the middle of a night storm?

I had to have an orthographic camera to keep art costs in line, and I wanted a sense of speed and motion. A knowing smile crossed my lips as I realized I would be following one of our medium’s ancient and accepted forms: the platformer.

After four hours of sleep, I returned to the lab, created a new project in Unity, and got to work. By midnight, I had a game with:

• A platforming hero run by physics
• A torch that burns down a stick for fuel (providing a handy in-game meter)
• A realistic fire that dims and eventually dies
• An ability to “blow” on the fire and see it blaze back to life
• Rain that stopped you from blowing on the fire unless you were under shelter
• Terrain that was low friction if a) stone and b) under rain
• Procedurally generated levels that had inputs like total length, number of platforms, gap min/max, height change min/max, enemy placement, rain shelter, big blocks, etc.
• Two enemies
• Game progression (start, level 1, level 2, etc. end)

Here’s a timelapse of all that being put into play. Tomorrow I’ll post the art portion. Thanks for reading!

BONUS FRESH PRINCE DANCING GIF (if you enjoyed the ones in the video)

Play it here!

Tags: compo, timelapse

This is totally the best game I’ve played yet:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=5433

Exploit a galaxy, collect triangles… Consumer: you only get 1 galaxy!

Just had to say that… seriously , go check it out!

Tags: best game ever, galaxy, jam

We have our first gameplay video created by @DanielSnd (including even a bug screen! Hahaha This happens only in the web version of the game).

– VIDEO HERE –

– GAME HERE –

First day after the end of Ludum Dare and we are very happy with all the results! Awesome games with different gameplay and amazing art!
Really Cool, you are all AWESOME!

Yeah, this has been a really stressful period, but I’m glad I finished it with one hell of a learning experience; LD28!

As the title implies, this game is my first:
– Game released to the public;
– Game made as a dev student;
– Gamejam I went in solo (second game jam I ever did);

It’s still a bit buggy, it has no art, and the mood I wanted to set isn’t there at all yet. I do think I’ll update this game (if I get the bugs out and find out how I do the rest), since I really dig the concept. Click here to see it (and give feedback, maybe? :3). I just need to work more efficiently but I will have to find out how, since a lot of code structure basics are strange to me yet.

I’ll get better one day. And I will have a game finished in an other LD (because I will definitely want to join the next one)! Also, all your games are really awesome. Love to play them!

The last few Ludum Dares I have had the chance to watch people livestream play my entry as well as others, and it has been quite a learning experience.  I thought I would pay the community back by attempting to stream my playthroughs of your games with the help of my brother.  I plan on starting the stream around 8PM EST until 10 or 11PM.  If you are interesting in having me play your game leave a comment and I will give them go tonight.  Hope to see you then!

This was our second Ludum Dare jam entry and we worked as a two man team.

We had this idea to craft the game around having one space voyage for the pursuit of knowledge about other planets. We wanted to get across this idea of humanity and how what you find out “there” would reflect something about yourself, even though it’s alien.

Here’s a link to the game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=26775

It was a tense ride creating this one, we got all of the main mechanics we wanted in the game though. There were a few sounds and things that didn’t get in on time, but overall we are very happy with the amount of work we got through.

We would highly appreciate any feedback on the game!

This has definitely been an amazing experience for my first ludum dare. For my first publicly released game actually! Although I found its extremely hard to find a good screenshot for this game because of its nature. Its nearly impossible to encapsulate what to expect going into this.

I’ve gotten people telling me that they genuinely got scared and enjoyed the game. That means more to me than I ever thought it would. I’ve always dreamed of having people play my games and having a good time but to have it happen is something that’s impossible to put into words.

If you have a couple minutes I hope you can try my game and tell me what you think of it: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29094

Play Here

I talked a bit about my entry in the postmortem post, but some people might still feel the lack of a tutorial. With this post, I’ll try to create a sort of manual and strategy guide to the game, that tries to go from the basics to the tricks. First of all, a disclaimer: THE AI IS BROKEN. Yes. Crushed to little pieces by lack of experience. It may stop working or behave strangely (such as attack things far away), but this guide will consider ideal conditions for the game.

Interface

The interface is pretty simple, just what needs to be there.

1. Gold and income counter: Displays your current gold and how much you’ll get with the current active farms (see Gameplay, below)
2. Warning toast: Displayed when there’s a problem (out of gold or missing requirements)
3. Action pad: When you have a tile selected, shows its name and the possible actions for it
4. Action button: Shows the hotkey, name and cost of an action. Can be clicked or used via the hotkey.

That’s it, really simple and straightforward! Now onto the tiles!

Tile Types

Farm Fortress has a total of 7 different tiles, each with its unique function and characteristics.

From left to right, this image has all tiles in the game:

• Grass: Everywhere in the picture, it’s the base tile form which you will build your little plantation empire.
• Farmland: Created from grass, costs 5 gold, but requires at least one house to be able to build, and can be planted on. (see Wet Farmland)
• House: The main structure of the game, costs 60 gold and is created from a Foundation, must be defended at all costs, and boosts farm incomes (see Gameplay). Can also build fences to the adjacent tiles.
• Foundation: The base structure from which you can build Houses or Towers, costs 10 gold, but does nothing except block pathing.
• Tower: Defensive structure, costs 20 gold and is built from a Foundation. Attacks nearby invaders, but misses most of the time if they are moving. Has the highest attack priority of invaders.
• Wet Farmland: Created by planting on a farmland, costs 5 gold, exists for 5 seconds then returns 4 gold, then reverts to dry Farmland. Whilst wet, a tile counts to the periodic income, being the only form of profit in the game.
• Debris: Exists when any tile (except grass) is destroyed by attackers, can be cleaned for 15 gold so you can build on the same spot again.

Gameplay

The game revolves on building farms, planting them to generate income and expanding defenses for security. When you reach a big enough farm, invaders start spawning, and your only option is kill or be destroyed. You start with 100 gold, so you can set up a simple farm of just one house and some cultivable land, then plant on your land to get gold to build more houses or farms, as well as towers so you don’t get razed by pillagers.

Income

The income system is fairly complex, and is better explained in a methodical way:
Every five seconds, you get gold based on the number of farms and houses you control. 2 gold per crop, multiplied by the number of houses you have.
So, if you have the starter kit of 1 house and 3 farms, if you have all of them planted you’ll get 6 gold, plus the 4 for each crop for harvesting them, totalizing 18 gold, which is enough to replant all of them and saving a bit for the next harvest.
Since this cycle is rather fast, you can pile dozens of gold pretty quickly, allowing you to build more farms and increase your income even more.

Building

In Farm Fortress, you build things initially from tiles, but later you get some more advanced things, such as fences, that start at your house and expand one-by-one in the chosen direction. You can build by selecting a tile then clicking or using the hotkey for a action.
Anything you build can be destroyed, and it is your responsibility for cleaning up and rebuilding things.

Attackers

The survival part of the game, they spawn in couples as soon as you reach 6 farms, then two more for each two new farms you get. They have a very specific attack priority, so keep an eye out and design your defenses accordingly. Their sole purpose is to hinder your production and eventually destroy your farmhouses, if you let them do so. If you ever reach 0 houses, you lose.

Tips and Tricks

Note: This section may contain information that removes the exploration of the game’s mechanics, read at your own risk!

• Plant your farms just before the timer is up, to minimize gold loss due to expired crops.
• Attackers will focus your defensive structures, then aim for farms and finally your house, so you can make a layered system that is just the inverse of this sequence to guarantee safety.
• Building additional houses in the early game might be a tad boring, but increases drastically the further income.

And that’s it! Thank you for reading this far, have fun!

PLAY FARM FORTRESS NOW!

OK, this is my game for this LD!

A sandbox mix of Terraria, Populous, that old game “Diggers 2: Extractors”, Dungeon Keeper and From Dust. I tried to be 100% bound by the theme, and decided on “you’re a Goddess, and you only get one Follower”.

Since there’s not a lot of gameplay, it’s still too early to say if this has potential. If it does, please let me know. If it sucks, ditto.
If you have any requests/ideas or know how to make an A* Pathfinding algorithm that works for platformers and doesn’t make my AI look dumb, please PLEASE chip in 😉

It’s my 5th LD and I loved every minute of it. I had two panic attacks during my 3 days of making it, but anti-anxiety medicine are my friends these days anyway.
The most rewarding part was, even though I’m an illustrator I actually spent more time coding than doing graphics! Like, a lot more.

Timelapse and Post-mortem coming soon.

Game Created in 72 hours

FLstudio for the music
Adobe Photoshop for the art
Construct 2 for the code.

PLAY IT HERE

Ludum Dare 28 started for me when I woke up(around 12:00 am) and my dad told me Notch was streaming his entry.  After watching for a short while I decided to check out the competition itself and thought “Eh, I could just throw some crap together just for the hell of it.”  Out of this effort came an abomination called “Paper or Plastic,” made within the last few hours of the actual competition and before the Jam.  http://gamejolt.com/games/strategy-sim/paper-or-plastic/20145/

I realized after uploading this brilliant game, that if I actually put some effort into it, I might be able to make something almost  worthy for the Jam.  So I started a new project based on the classic “Which one do I shoot” scenario.  It took me the last few hours of that night and the rest of the following day to create the game I titled “Imposter”(I looked it up, both spellings are acceptable :D)  The result was a micro-mystery of sorts where the player would have to choose between a list of randomized questions and look for subtle differences in the answers to root out the imposter.  I think I may have stopped to eat one piece of toast before the jam ended.

This was my first semi-complete project; an actual functioning game with buttons, sounds(music provided by GreaseMonkey with whom I talked in IRC,) and everything.  It’s not much but I’m kinda proud of my first LD entry.  This has given me motivation to further develop my skills and break through the mental barriers I’ve spent so much time putting up.

Can’t wait for next year!

I’ve made a timelapse of the making of my entry “Moon’s quest”
which you can play here
 

I’ve also made a graphic, which shows me some interesting things.

*Apparently, I’ve spent as much time on the concept as I have on eating things.
*For the first time, I’ve spent more time on audio than on graphics. I spent 7 hours on music, but I did end up with 8 tracks.
*Scripting an RPG takes a lot of time. Even in gamemaker.

A proper post-mortem still to come!

This will be my first post mortem… post… so anyways, here goes!

edit: This is for Hamlet btw…

The Good

• Sprites! Always a fun part of game dev for me. Got a few basic techniques down that I tend to stick to. This tends to make the pixel art portion of these go pretty quick for me. I’m also pretty much in love with ASEprite. I seem to get a lot of great comments about my pixel art. I hardly consider myself an “artist”… I’m just usually pretty good at emulating other work. If I can recommend anything to a fledgling pixel artist… LESS shades of color. I try to use around 3 in most cases. Dithering those colors generally makes for a nicer “pixel” look.
• 

  Seriously. Piece of cake.

   

• Juicing. I am first and foremost a programmer. Did I draw my sprites to look the way they do because I just love Fisher Price? No. I did it because abs(sin()) makes it REALLY easy to animate their movement. Cover with lerp() and heat to 350… and voila! A deliciously animated  scene, with about 3 real frames of “animation” (the two states of the mouth being open, and the blinking eyes)
• Storyline. Ok, it was a pretty shameless rip-off, but the “storyline” ultimately was more about you playing the role OF Hamlet in a play. Regardless… it definitely cut out a lot of the “what do I do next?” Despite it all, I had way too much fun with the other stuff and only really made it to the end of a VERY summarized Act 1.
• Scripting. If this was intended as a pun, it’s probably more of a reality than a play on words. Here you can see the script that executes to begin Act1Scene1 (which was actually just a timeline in GameMaker). I had objects created for each of the characters… all parented to a “proto_actor” object. Basically, for each one of them, all I did was override the index of their sprite, and maybe adjust their speed and mouth/arm height slightly. I wrapped a lot of my common commands into their own scripts. The result was something that looked less like a “GameMaker script” and more like a script for a play:

[stextbox id=”alert”]

enter_left(Barnardo);
with(Barnardo) {
goto_stage(64,12);
holdprop(instance_create(x,y,Pike));
}

enter_left(Francisco);
with(Francisco) {
goto_stage(108,12);
holdprop(instance_create(x,y,Pike));
}

ninja_a = enter_left(StageNinja);
instance_create(ninja_a.x + 60,room_height-40,Elsinore);
with(ninja_a) {
grab_setpiece(Elsinore);
goto_stage(16,4);
}

ninja_b = enter_right(StageNinja);
with(ninja_b) {
holdprop(instance_create(x,y,MoonPole));
goto_stage(300,8);
}
ninja_c = enter_right(StageNinja);
with(ninja_c) {
holdprop(instance_create(x,y,StarPole));
goto_stage(280,8);
}

enter_right(HamletGhost);
showtitle(“Act 1 Scene 1”);

[/stextbox]

The Bad

• Dangly Stars and Moon. If any of you have actually completed it to the end, you may see one of the “Stage Ninjas” complaining about the moon-on-a-stick not actually dangling off the stick. I tried to use the physics system to handle this, but it ended up not really being worth the trouble.
• Sounds. I did actually make a quick little sound in BFXR for the sound of the actors hopping across the stage. I don’t know if it was my math for judging when to play the sound or what, but it ended up with an awful grinding noise. This was quickly abandoned. Probably better in the end considering I’d have a lot more sounds to make and get added in that I really didn’t have time for anyways. Music? Forget about it.
• Balancing difficulty. This is something I rarely end up spending the time to tune like I want to. I guess it’s probably pretty common for an LD48 format, but pretty much all my entries are easily beaten once you “figure out the trick”. As I was play testing this I had a really hard time balancing punishment for not doing what you’re supposed to with still allowing you to get away with enough antics to still make it fun. The end result still really isn’t there, but then again, I had a lot more planned as far as just HOW bad things were going to get on stage.
• That damn spotlight. One of the features I wanted to add the most, just to emphasize the silly little laments… and I can’t seem to do modulative blending right in GameMaker. Sigh. To add injury to insult, it breaks the gameplay pretty bad on some systems that show it as fully opaque.

The Ugly

• 9:40 PM EST – Totally amped up and ready to go for LD28… from outside, a crash. Our horse has accidentally put her hoof through the wall of our barn while rolling in her stall. Just my luck. I guess it WAS Friday 13th. Wasn’t till around 10:30 that I actually sat down and got started with even thinking about what to do. Horse is better now at least, and ultimately, it wasn’t that much time wasted in the grand scheme of things.
• Work. These past few weeks have been absolute hell with the amount of stuff I’ve had on my plate at work. At least I enjoy what I do and work with really nice people. I really needed this compo. You wouldn’t think that 48 hours of stressful work would be such a relief from… other stressful work, but it definitely was

Honestly… the comments I’ve gotten so far inspired me to actually do a post mortem for once. A big thank you to everyone who played it, whether or not you got anywhere with it.  I’m considering the possibility of actually finishing it, probably with the help of NeonLare if I do. He’s a fantastic composer and artist.

Anyways, I think that’s a wrap… got a lot more games to try out, I probably should get to that. Good luck to everyone else out there! Seeing a lot of cool stuff as usual, see you all again in April!

Ham-let… get it? sigh… good night folks…

So, I’m pretty proud with what I came up with for LD28, my game Glide:

Menu screen

I spent far too long doing nothing at all on Saturday and Sunday both, but I’m certainly happy how it turned out.

Note to self: Simple works well. Also start earlier than 2pm on Sunday!

I’m going to improve the game and upload the new version to Kongregate, and then quite possibly end up porting it to Android (using HaxeFlixel). Good times!

Even though the challenge is over I still enjoy working on this little project I’ve started during the compo.
For now I will just leave you with a small update and a note that I will do a short and propper post-mortem later.

This will most likely not make it in the final cut but it sure is fun finding out these little bugs/features as you go along.

Salutations,

First Ludum Dare, First post, First “completed” project.

Strange how a simple competition can bring about so much more within a person. (Yes. I want to be better than everyone else .)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition describes competition as the opposite of cooperation.

This may be true in the primitive sense but I believe it falls short of the true meaning.  Competition creates a drive to achieve.

Would I or many others like me have completed a project had it not been for the all powerful Ludum Dare competition.  I think not.  In fact, from what I had seen from previous posts, this was the first Dare for a lot of people.  Maybe we didn’t get done exactly what we wanted from our games but what does it matter when we all have become a part of something much bigger than ourselves.  Games: Meant to be created, shared, played and enjoyed.  What a concept to have all art forms bundled into one interactive experience that is, for lack of a better word, transcendent.

We may not have worked together on our individual projects but we have created a community that makes games the way games should be made.  Independent game development has created something much larger than any major game developer could ever accomplish.   This is counter culture my friends and we should all be proud.

Anyway, I wanted to say a few things about what went on throughout this competition.  See, I have been keeping up with Ludum Dare for the past year or so and was very adamant about entering.  Every time the day came I said to my self “well you don’t really have the knowledge to create a game so quickly” and so I would go on with life not caring a lick that I had just opted out of another chance to compete.  After some practice and a lot of studying I felt I was ready to enter.  Of course something came up that was much more important and yet again I did not enter.  Finally when my schedule is clear and I feel I have at least enough skills to come up with something I decide that this will be the one.  To no avail, I find my self doing other things.

Ludum Dare 28: Im ready.

You Only Get One..     WTF!

Well not what I planned for but I guess I will just have to be creative. (Isn’t that what its about)

Upset over the theme I slept. Waking up to no further ideas.  Well a couple but nothing worthy enough for my aspirations. Aspirations? This is a two day comp what do you expect. Okay Ill take my best Idea and run with it.

First things first.  Lets get the technical side down and work on aesthetics later.  Some programming goes on…

Shoot! A problem. Well I might as well give up cause I only have 26 hours left and this will take me days to solve. Yet I press on…

Hell Yeah! I fixed it. Except now I have a new problem.  Well now I really am gonna give up. For some stupid reason I press on..

Okay 8 hours to go lets work on some graphics and maybe some sounds.  Woah! This is a lot more involved than I thought. At least I have a sprite and animation.

2 hours left maybe I can come up with some music and sfx for the game.

10 minutes left.  Okay there’s no way I can get any sounds into the game.  I will just zip it and upload.  (Fingers Crossed)

Ahh..now its time to play some games.  Ooh this ones cool..man this one sucks..wow this one is sure to win.

Check comments…………..Theres a bug!! What? I programmed it perfectly (looking over code…) Oh there’s the problem.  Reupload.

Check comments…………still a bug. Okay I give up. Maybe I am just not cut out for this.  (Depression) Even though I had blindly looked over so many previous dares this one was upsetting because I spent almost 2 full days working on it.  Im not sure I would have spent that much time consecutively on anything.  What is going on here? (Checking my link…) #&!* I uploaded the wrong file.  Lets Hope it works now.

Yes we are competing but we are also influencing each other to create something that can be enjoyed by everyone.

Thanks Ludum Dare for providing an outlet for creativity,

Mandala

You Only Get (to see) One color (at a time).

Color Range is a platformer where every level has several different colored elements,
but you can only have one colored set of elements visible at a time.

Switch between colored sets of elements

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Tags: gameplay, gif, screenshot