This time around I used Unity, so actually have Mac, Linux and Web versions of my game to fill up the other download slots on my entry! That of course has meant I had no space for my timelapse, so here she is:
Please consider rating my game here too!
Since many people liked the soundtrack in Polytonia, it can now be downloaded:
Click picture to download the music from Polytonia
Hey Everyone,
My partner Knotfolds and I have been working tirelessly on a Competitive Multiplayer Dungeon Crawler called Dungey for quite some time now… If you’d like to check out some dev, I’m livestreaming right now @ Twitch.tv/0Creds
Thanks,
– 0Creds
Some feedback and experience while playing made me update the game with the following. Tell me what you think!
Version 1.1 changelog
=====================
– The map is now 3x bigger
– Bulls spawn interval is a bit higher, getting shorter with level progression
– The shaman now says “But you only get one weapon!” so it’s clearer.
– A waypoint is shown when the weapon is offscreen.
– More random bushes!
– Added random rocks so you’ll bet irritated with your weapon being stuck (c’mon, the map is bigger now!)
– Added a little nice effect when the bulls magically turn into a beef (die).
Download it here!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=30300
Thanks,
Fogs
ferfogs.tumblr.com
Here’s a timelapse of the whole compo, 60 seconds per frame.
And here’s the result:
The music you hear is the actual song you “compose” as you take the role of Maestro the composer, in Polytonia.
All feedback is greatly welcome, and will be useful when I keep on developing this later on!
My entry can be found here: Pointless Game
Timelapse is really long since I worked almost all 48 hours.
So after 48 of what I can only describe as brutal crunch time I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t submit my game to the Ludum Dare. About an hour from the end with nothing but tea for food and having coded for nearly 32 hours straight I was faced with serious debugging problems and realised I couldn’t ship the game on time especially since I still had to package it. I could have opted to code for another day and submit to the jam but having stopped I lay down to sleep and woke up nearly 18 hours later so here is what the Ludum Dare community lovingly calls a Post Mortem:
The Good:
Bulk First Coding. I got a lot done. Even though it wasn’t enough I got a lot done. Maps, combat, inventory and all of it was defined using static arrays, loadable from text files. Rather that my usual thinking about the most efficient path I just coded and it was good.
The Bad:
Having to work in the middle was bad. It disturbed my sleep schedule and drew time away from the Dare, next time I will take 2 days off work.
Sleep. Oh god sleep. Usually when I code overnight I remain or increase in coherency but over the course of the Dare I found myself becoming less and less productive. I slept an average of 6 hours per night the week before and even less on the day before and during. It was horrible, I reached all sorts of existential dilemmas and it was really bad for morale. Partly it was because I scheduled preparation for the Dare really poorly and ended up going overtime most nights but also just plain stupidity. Next time there will be a rigid sleeping schedule: Rest before, code as much as I can, Sleep, Do the final stretch.
Planning. Perhaps the biggest mistake. Not planning my code was good but not planning the development properly was the killing blow. My planning process was literally: I have an idea, lets make it. Unfortunately what I didn’t realise was that my envisioned concept was built mostly around a Fire emblem/Advance Wars style combat and map system which, as a package, seemed smaller than the sum of its parts. And more importantly I failed to identify and focus on the core elements of my game or what tied it to the theme. I started programming face first: The player sees the map first lets make the map but what was the core was the combat and inventory, if I had no map I could still get a game of just increasingly tougher fights with an inventory and have it ship but instead I was stuck writing all of that in till the last second to make the game feel relevant. So next time. Plan. Proper plan.
The Ugly:
Perhaps my most rookie mistakes were in the preparation. I wasn’t quite comfortable with my tools and it was painful.
I don’t think the moment where I found I couldn’t use TrueTypeFont or Textures in unison with simple colours the way that I thought you could is on the stream but it was horrible. Without text its very hard to convey to the player any sort of context or meaning and I let it slide but I should have tried to fix that more. I guess at the time I knew that I wouldn’t get to make textures and I decided to focus on the rest of the game rather than text but in hindsight text was incredibly important. Even if I managed to bug fix without text nothing would make sense.
The other thing was packaging. After I woke up and ran around for a bit I tried to actually package the game and it took me two hours to get it working which, if I had to do it in the dare, would have killed me on the spot.
What Next:
I’m probably going to bug fix and finish the game. After the dare I also figured out that the idea that I was interested in completing wasn’t so appealing to me but a friend of mine gave me some inspiration to actually have a think about it and I might actually get it finished.
Despite not finishing I still enjoyed the dare greatly and there’s no doubt in my mind about the next one. I learned a lot about Java, programming, the game dev community and myself and even if it drove me half into my grave I can’t wait to go again.
Having looked at some entries in the dare its good to see what people are working with and its comforting to know that I’m not so out of my element as I felt. I saw some guys make a lovely looking dungeon crawler with the LWJGL for the jam and it made me think about working in a team for the next one instead, even if I do like the idea of finishing a game on my own
And it also made me realise how stagnant my own projects have been. I’ve made more of a game in 48 hours than I have in 2 years and I feel kind of ashamed, daunted and inspired seeing what I can do and what those who I participated beside can do.
So whats next is only the beginning.
For those actually interested here is my game as it was at the end of the dare including source. It’s horribly buggy right now so don’t be surprised if it takes a couple of restarts to get working. Its technically ported to mac and windows but if you don’t have 2 mouse buttons you can’t do much:
CLICK PICTURE TO PLAY
The past few days I’ve been fixing bugs and tweaking things in COR, Please check it out again even if you’ve already played it!
Thank you so much guys!
(Click the picture to play)
-ENDESGA
At H-bomb we’re all back at our jobs and preparing for the holidays. Fortunately, we’ve got all these games to play and rate whenever we have free time.
The idea for XenoSerf.
We absolutely feel this is a more original game than any we’ve done before, and we’re not entirely sure where the idea for the game came from. You could say there’s elements from Stronghold or Crusader Kings that the game parodies, but we don’t really feel these games have ever been references for us. A more likely source for the concept is just us daydreaming/doodling in History class years ago.
The concept emerged pretty quickly : You are a peasant, raising animals for your lord, who then uses the animals as his personal army. But if you’re sneaky and smart, you can raise your own army of farm animals without your lord knowing — and then overthrow his evil rule. But you’ll have a hard time with that without enlisting help from the other peasants.
We came up with the concept as a group. It appealed to everyone immediately during our initial brainstorming session. We all wanted originality, humor, and generally to create a weird and fun world for you to discover.
Then when Matthieu, our artist, initially created concept art for the other farmers that you must, for lack of a better word, seduce, the first one he drew was a redneck alien wearing a trucker hat that looked a bit like it had walked out of a Calvin & Hobbes sunday strip. That’s how many elements that were much more associated with rural America than feudal Europe made it… into space, where we’d decided from the start the game had to take place.
We’ve thoroughly enjoyed creating our farming-themed japanese dating sim wargame in space, and we’re very proud of what went right.
There will be a post-mortem soon! The game is not as finished as we’d have liked it to be, so we still have to analyze why, and what issues we need to correct for future jams.
The team that made XenoSerf!
– Haru is our game designer and wrote dialog for the game. He loves all games, especially if Batman’s involved somehow. Twitter
– Paul is our programmer. He likes Bastion, and thinks it should top everyone’s lists about everything ever. Twitter
– Matthieu is our artist and animator. He likes JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, whatever the media. Twitter
– Oded Welgreen composed the music for XenoSerf! He is on Twitter and Soundcloud, and we invite you to play his cute and hilarious Github Game-off entry Super Fantasy Queue.
– Max is our sound designer, and is on Twitter. He’s also composed the music for our previous jam entries, available on Soundcloud.
– Nico is our background artist and did the game’s gorgeous world map. He says he’s not a gamer, but we know better, because he will murder you at Motorstorm Apocalypse. Twitter
– Ben wrote dialog for the game. He likes to show you his pokemans, whether you want him to or not. Twitter
So, my game has some known bugs that cause crashes. Are these allowed to be fixed and reuploaded, granted that no game content changes, just fixing of these fatal bugs?
(sorry for my poor english, I’m brazilian and I don’t speak english very well)
Hello ! I’ve just recorded a video and upload it. You can see the video below, I hope you enjoy it
Mama is Sick can be played here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=30729
My first Ludum Dare! And my second game jam ever.
This post will cover what mine and @GarrickWinter (Guerric Haché)’s game is about, a summary of the process we went about making it and the top 3 things done well and the top 3 things we could improve on.
Quick description of our game (taken from the instructions screen):
“Mama is Sick” is a resource-management, hard-times simulation game.
YOU ONLY GET ONE DOLLAR A DAY to look after your family (thanks to a generous family from overseas) while papa is away and mama is sick.
Buy food and water to make sure the food, water and health bars of you and your family don’t reach zero or death will occur.
If your education bar reaches zero, you won’t graduate high school.
You have to last 50 days until papa comes back. Will you manage to graduate? Will everyone survive?
You can work in a clothing factory to earn 50c a day, but be careful not to miss too much school. You also need to study at least three days a week or risk not being able to graduate.
As soon as the theme was announced, Guerric and I decided to make a list of 10 game ideas based on the idea. This is always a useful exercise, jam or no jam, because it means you get to think up a few ‘less-inspired’ ideas, throw them out, then go with a better one.
We ended up with a list of 12 items:
As soon as Guerric said ‘dollar’, we both knew it was what we wanted to do, and we started spouting off the potential things we could do with it.
Both Guerric and I are passionate about social activism, with my particular interest lying in feminism, so whenever we design together, we try to use mechanics to explore a social issue.
We also knew that given the time-frame, we had to design a game that would play to our strengths.
Guerric is basically a wizard programmer, but neither of us had worked with Unity properly in a few months (we both attend Vancouver Film School, studying game design).
Meanwhile, one of my goals is to be a narrative designer. Neither of us are artists, although my basic photoshop skills do tend to outshine Guerric’s adorably shoddy programmer art :P.
So we knew we weren’t going to do an open-world 3D game.
After settling on the ‘Only Get $1 a Day to Look After Your Family’ mechanic, the rest flowed pretty easily. We knew that interface design was going to be one of the most important things to get right for our game, so that was the first thing I worked on.
We worked on our mechanics for the first day and a half before I even got around to touching the narrative, which I did by writing a few pages of character design, then writing out the interactions I thought family members would have with each other.
Guerric, in the meantime, was busy figuring out how to optimise the GUI elements I had given him to work with.
We started putting in audio on day 3, leaving us with a full day to play-test, fix bugs and working on extra polish.
THINGS DONE WELL:
1. Planning and Documentation:
I wrote nearly 8000 words of documentation in total during the jam, with classic document titles such as ‘Audio To-Do List’, ‘Halved Numbered Narrative’ and ‘Guerric’s To-Do-List’. If you want polish for your game, make lists! Plan! Think ahead! We utilized Google Docs during the jam, meaning when I was play-testing, I could quickly point out a bug, add it to the list, then Guerric could cross it off the list when done.
2. Team-Work
Synergy! Just kidding. But seriously. The last time I had a working relationship this good was when I was in a band and my singing partner and I could improvise in harmony.
When you work with people who are interested in similar mechanics, passionate about similar issues – productivity triples. You don’t waste time arguing about meaningless items.
Guerric and I think of ‘Mama is Sick’ as our game. Not mine, not his. Even though elements of it were tasked to one person responsibility-wise, we still communicated everything we did to each other, constantly asking for feedback. Guerric proof-read my narrative and reminded me of elements to include in the GUI, I helped him think of programming solutions – synergy!
3. Play-Testing (and Scope)
On the second night of the jam, Guerric sent off a half-finished prototype to our friend Danilo. Even though it was nowhere near ready, this proved invaluable as it helped answer some questions that Guerric and I had been asking ourselves, such as, ‘Are the character stats bars enough? Does the player also need numerical values displayed?’ This helped relieve some of the worry we had. On the flip side, it also gave us confirmation for changes that needed to be made.
Furthermore, I was able to play-test the narrative 3 times – and would you believe that at one point, our game ran 90 days long instead of 50? On my first play-through, I reached day 56 when I realised, hang on. I don’t want to do this anymore. This is getting tiresome. Shit. I need to cut the narrative in half!
But none of this play-testing would have been possible without proper scoping. We knew our abilities, we knew the time restraints, and we knew what we had to do.
THINGS FOR IMPROVEMENT:
1. Tutorial
I feel like this is something that can almost never be done perfectly, as you’ll always have that one player who gets confused about something you hadn’t considered.
During the ‘Girls Like Robots’ post-mortem presentation at Unite this year, designer Ziba Scott mentioned that the tutorial should always be made first, and that by following this principle, he discovered that he had already made a third of the game.
In the past day of playing other Ludum Dare games, I’ve found that the most common gripe people have is that they don’t understand how to play the game – whether that be confusion with the interface, what the goal is or the controls. And it’s a huge barrier for getting people to properly play-test and rate your game.
So although we spent a good few extra hours putting in things like hover-text explanations of GUI elements and an instructions screen, we definitely could do more – like an animated opening tutorial day (that would take a better artist than me to implement).
2. Don’t Learn the Engine on the Day
Although Guerric and I both have experience with Unity, we only took a brief period of time the day before the jam started to familiarise ourselves with the latest version.
This leads to precious minutes being spent learning how to use certain elements of the engine during the jam that could be spent otherwise.
It also leads to mistakes that can’t easily be fixed.
For example, I made all the GUI elements 300 dpi for a 800 x 600 game, when I should have made them 72 dpi. This led to an unnecessary decrease in picture quality, that was somewhat circumvented by a fix one of my old teachers recommended.
3. GET AN ARTIST
Oh boy. So yeah. I’m not an artist. All the GUI photoshop work I did could have been done better, in a shorter period of time, by an artist, had we had the foresight to bring one onto our team. That would have also freed me up to do things I’m more passionate about, like narrative and mechanical design.
Conclusion
Overall, I’m super glad that Guerric asked me to do this jam with him. I’ve had an amazing time, learnt lots, and am proud of the game that we’ve produced.
For me, the most rewarding part has been reading the comments that the community has left us, and I’ve certainly learnt a lot through playing the games of others, and the amount of talent and creativity crammed into this weekend by thousands of fellow designers awes me to no end.
Mama is Sick can be played here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=30729
Tags: appletomypi, care family, garrickwinter, guerric haché, hard times simulator, jaymee mak, jaymeemak, mama is sick, mynameisjaymeenotamy, one dollar a day, ongui, post-mortem, resource management, unity, vancouver film school, vfs
-Added Post Mortem Game!!
-Post Mortem Game has AutoTarget Helper as “Right click”
-“M” key mutes the awful music and sound effects
-“R” key resets the level
-Rebalanced the Boss fight
-Put in new and cleaner background art
Check out the new shooting system!!! It’s really fun 
@hyungkim7
-Sakuyan
I’ve had a couple days to relax now and do a few other things, and it’s interesting to look at the game a bit more objectively than when I was making it.
The thing I most enjoy about the Ludum Dare is that I’ve been coming away from it having learned something more often than not. Either a simple trick that I thought of in the process, or some more general things I can apply to a game later, perhaps the next LD.
This time round, the main goal I had was to try and do something a little different than the last couple of times. I had some very good ideas beforehand for the Corruption and Creation themes, but in the end You Only Get One came up and I had to spend a couple of hours brainstorming for a proper concept.
As the game stands now, I think that there probably could have been better concepts to use, but I’m still pretty happy with the results.
Good Stuff:
– Using Construct 2. It’s always emphasised for beginners that using a tool you know is the best option, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s quick and simple for me to get the mechanics down, and the default behaviours can be modified easily to suit my needs.
– Getting the mechanics down first. All the technical stuff was out of the way before I worked on any graphics that weren’t placeholder. It gave me a lot of breathing room for level design, and there were even a couple of things I programmed in that didn’t make it into any actual levels.
– Using tile-based graphics. Before getting interested in actual game development, I liked making tilesets for Jazz Jackrabbit 2. As a result I have a lot more practice in that area of development than others, letting me get something satisfactory down quickly. I do need to get away from using dull grey graphics, though. That’s a rather unintentional pattern emerging.
Room for improvement:
– Using Tiled. Contrary to Construct 2, I have never used Tiled before in my life. C2 recently added tilemap support, and also importing tmx files from Tiled. However, I just had no idea how to use the program beyond what common sense tells me, and C2 does the essentials just as well and without having to swap programs.
– Making a tile-based game. As mentioned above, tilemap support for Construct 2 is a new feature. The drawback to this is that it’s still within the first few updates where there are bugs and issues. I found a bug not long after I started using the tilemaps that crashed Construct completely. Luckily, I’d been saving fairly regularly, so not much progress was lost, but repeated crashes don’t help development. The issue has already been fixed, so props to the C2 developers as usual for their frequent updates, but it comes back around to sticking with what you know.
– Sound. Sound has always been the last thing I add to a game. I’ve had little practice regarding music, and for sound effects all I have is SFXR. Still, this time round the sound effects were added in literally 15 minutes before the deadline and it shows pretty clearly. Perhaps next time I should take the lack of sound into consideration for my design plans.
– An irritating main mechanic. This is obvious pretty soon. The idea was to take the controls from the player, only let them have one button at once, and then repeatedly give them useless abilities. The intended impression was to be almost taunting, but eventually giving the players all their hard-earned abilities at the end. As it is currently implemented it just gets in the way.
Overall, I’d say this was a pretty good Ludum Dare. I’m looking forward to playing other people’s entries, assuming I can get some more stable internet. I’ve seen some fantastic-looking stuff while I was making my entry, and It’ll be good to see other people’s takes on the theme.
The main things I’d take away from this for the next Ludum Dare, or my next prject in general:
– Keep things simple. Stick with what I know, or more specifically what I’m good at. Learning new things is great, but often should be kept out of a project that needs to be finished on a deadline.
– Keep a consistent art direction. The sprites in this game were considerably less polished, and felt a bit out of place compared to the tiles.
– Don’t frustrate the player. With heaps of games to be played in the LD, if I want my game to stick in people’s memories then they have to enjoy it, plain and simple.
– Take sound into proper consideration. Sound is an important part of an action game, and at the very least you don’t want your sounds to be annoying the player.
TL;DR:
Ludum Dare was awesome, and I learned a bunch of stuff.
In this postmortem, there are a bunch of things that I want to hit upon. First I’ll give a description of the game. Then I’m going to talk about the theme of the game vs. the theme of the competition. Then I’m going to go into what I couldn’t do due to time running out, and what I couldn’t do due to lack of skill. Finally, I’ll talk about my general experience making Follow the Sun. Suffice it to say this postmortem will ruin part of the game for you if you haven’t played it. If you don’t want to get story-spoiled, play it first before reading on!
About Follow the Sun
Follow the Sun is a short, 3D game where the player controls a child charged with rescuing the king. At the start of the game, the main character, a child named Kayin, sees the face of the king in the sun, asking Kayin to save him from the corruption that has befallen the land. To do this, the king uses the last of his strength to grant Kayin a power to cleanse the corruption, but it will only last until night falls. The implied goal is to make your way to the king, killing the red corruption along the way by using the granted power.
However, and here is where the spoiler part comes into play, there is something deeper going on that I could not quite show off in this version. The king speaks of a great evil that is coming to the land, but in reality, that evil he speaks of is the player. The player is being led along by blind obedience in an authority figure, and it is Kayin who is corrupted, not the red entities the player is charged to destroy. The unstated goal of the game is supposed to be to recognize that the player is killing people with the power given to him, and then to refuse to follow the king’s orders by going home. More about this in the later sections.
Theme
The theme for Ludum Dare 28 was “You Only Get One” and this was difficult to work out. Actually, when the theme voting was going on, I was fairly sure that the winner was going to be “Corruption” due to the large number of votes it got in the early voting rounds. I was brainstorming ideas for corruption before the competition started, and then decided to make sure I could make the idea fit in with any of the top ten themes. The ones that would have been the worst fit were “Duel” and “You Only Get One”, and well that’s what it was.
The theme really threw me for a loop. It was really strange as a theme, and I didn’t want to be making a game that just focused on something like having just one life or having just one use of a weapon, which is what everyone was saying they were going to do. So I fit the theme into my idea with more esoteric concepts.
On the simple side of things, the player only gets one weapon. This actually wasn’t the original idea, but it ended up being that way. In the more complex realm, though, there are two very loose fits to the theme. The first is that the player only gets one evening to reach the king (time flows slowly through the game and after ten minutes the sun sets and the game ends. It was going to be one hour, but there was not enough game for that much time and I wanted it to be noticeable.
In addition to that, the theme also fits because the king only has one chance in Kayin, and places his future on one child. Technically, the player also has only one chance to make a decision, follow the task given by the king, or disobey him. The game also currently kicks you out of the game if you reach any ending, but that was not in the original design.
With the theme fitting in on more of a high level than a low level like most other games, I’m sure a lot of people will end up not seeing how the theme fits in. It’s partially my fault. I shouldn’t have been brainstorming ideas before the theme was revealed. A fun fact about this, though, it was because I came up with a game idea that I decided at the last second to participate in Ludum Dare, so I suppose any game is better than no game.
What Got Left Out Because of Time
There were a lot of things that I didn’t get to because time wasn’t permitting. For the first part, some of the other possible themes lent interesting additions to the game that never made it. One of the potential themes was “Four Elements” and I had the idea of giving the player one choice of four powers, but after having so much trouble with getting one attack working, I decided that I only had time to make one attack.
Something else I wanted to include but did not have the time was related to the enemies. The enemies have very basic AI, they can chase the player, flee from the player, wander about randomly, or just sit there. I had wanted to have the AI switch from wander and no movement to one of the other modes, if they see the player kill someone. This would have reinforced that what the player was doing was “wrong”.
Another way I wanted to show the player that they were doing something “wrong” was to have a point at which the player able to see at some point that they were killing people instead of removing corruption. One way would have been to have a mode where the player could refuse the king at the end and then have the king chase the player home, seeing the death they caused as they went back. I could have also made is to that if the player went left at any time, they would see the reality and then have to choose. I had a system in place for tracking where each death occurs, but I didn’t have enough time to put that kind of a mode in place.
I also wanted to put in a better indicator of the time and the direction of the sun. At the moment, you have to rely on the shadows and lighting to figure it out (which go away if the player has chosen the fastest graphics settings). A GUI showing the direction of the sun and the time left would have been nice, but again, I didn’t have the time for it.
The area design was also very lackluster. I wanted to have obstacles and whatnot in the areas, and perhaps bigger areas, but I just had enough time to throw things together for level design. Not the best thing to do, but I had playable areas at least.
One thing I’m really sad about not having in the game is sound. I really wanted to make a good soundtrack for the game, and have some responsive sounds, but I just ran out of time at the end. There’s still a music managing object in the scenes for running music, it just doesn’t do anything.
At the very end, too, I realized that I didn’t have time to properly boot players to the title screen. I used a lot of static variables, and I didn’t have time to track down which ones were ones I needed to reset when a new game started. This really frustrated people, and it’s the first thing I want to fix in the post-compo version.
What Got Left Out Because of Skill
This was really my first full game made in Unity where the game could be considered finished. As a result, though, there were a lot of things that I couldn’t do because my skill in asset production isn’t very good. I wanted to have enemies that varied in how they looked, but my skill in 3D modeling and animation is very bad. I might have been able to make something eventually, but it really was outside of my skillset. This is also the reason why I never got around to making any kind of special model for the king.
I also had problems with getting particles to work properly. I had wanted to use particles for attacks, but it just wasn’t working. This was also a reason why I didn’t end up with multiple attacks, and why the enemies have no attacks. If I knew more about what I was doing with particles, maybe it would have worked out better, but I just didn’t.
Overall
In the end, I am really glad to have made Follow the Sun, and I’d like to work on it more in the coming month or so. The game could use a lot of polish, and the overall theme of the game should be reinforced. I would also like to migrate the game away from a simple shoot-and-kill gameplay, to something more meaningful, but this might have to hold off for a while.
This game took me longer than my last LD entry, I would have probably done better at time management if I had not tried to do the game at the last minute, and if I had not tried to play much with skills I didn’t have (particles and modeling/animation). Making a 3D game might have been a mistake, too, but I could get away with the billboard style area design in 3D. It would have been much harder to make that work in 2D. Overall, I enjoyed making the game, and I hope I have the time and energy to participate in the next LD in April. If you want to try out Follow the Sun, click here.
Tags: follow the sun, post-mortem, postmortem
Aquila is my second submission to ludum dare. I am pretty satisfied with what I have achieved in 48hours. There are few things that I could have done better but there is never enough time for everything, eh.
My first impression about theme:
The theme ‘You only get one’ didn’t excite me very much in the beginning. My first thought is to fill in the blank ‘you only get one ______’. Of course, the first word that came to my mind is ‘life’, ‘You only get one life’. Then ammo, chance, opportunity and so on. These words are taking me no where. I even thought what if I could make a game where you only get one chance to play the game. If you try to restart/reload the game again the game will tell you “thats it, you had your one chance”. Glad I didn’t do it because someone actually did it :D. Then I started thinking about procedural generation, in procedural generation the game generates a “unique” level per play session and that could fit the theme (you only get one “unique” level). This and I also wanted to try something with procedural generation for a long time. So this felt like the right time. Without any further delay and without having any idea about the game mechanic I decided to start implementing the algorithm.
What went right:
What went wrong:
Overall it was a great jam for me. I fully enjoyed my 48 hours. May be gameplay felt a little less satisfying in a way but at least I have got the foundation laid out. I have some positive vibes about this game but in reality time will tell how much this game will actually grow in the future.
Thanks a lot everyone for playing my game!!
If you havent tried it yet, play Aquila now 😀
Till next Ludum Dare!!
Tags: compo, postmortem, yogo
Based on the feedback I’ve received on the game thus far I thought I’d toss out some tips and tricks for playing the various games that make up Berathen Jam!
[Comment or vote on the game here]
Micro Game # 1 – El’s Quest
This is a homage to the first game I ever made, not counting the stuff I made in Game Maker when I was first learning programming. This is probably the easiest game due to the random number of blocks that can appear in random locations. One to three blocks can appear to try and crush you. A simple press of the arrow keys can save you life and move you onto to the next challenge!
Micro Game # 2 – Berathen Blast
This is an homage to the third game I ever made. It was my first project using Flixel and I loved how easy it was to use rather then straight AS3. This one can be a bit tricky and requires careful placement. The objective is to shoot all of the green balls on the screen, but you only have time to shoot about 2, maybe 3, shots before time runs out. The trick is to use the explosions from the green balls to hit each other. If you place yourself carefully you’ll be able to take out up to three targets in one shot!
Micro Game # 3 – Sword Rush
I originally intended for this micro game to be a stealth game where you had to hide between the trees to avoid detection from unhappy soldiers. I noticed though that making it to the goal in time by itself was more then enough challenge in 3 to four seconds so I decided to leave out the guards. The main problem with this game is that if you’re not careful you can snag yourself on the trees. Though do note that your bounding box is actually smaller then your sprite and you can fit through a lot of tight squeezes. Your bounding box is closer to your feet then your head so remember that as you rush through the forest to claim your prize!
Micro Game # 4 – Mega Tripudio
I originally intended for this game to be a very short platformer where you jumped across a few blocks and collected a star in the same vein as a Mario game, but I found placing the graphics was taking me waaaay too much time so I decided to go for something even simpler. That’s what created this ‘wait for the gauge to fill’ game. I’ve found the flag pole to be a poor indication of when the player should jump and that confused a lot of people. So for my lucky readers… Jump only when the flag on the right side is red. Thats when you have enough strength to break the box.
Though there is a second variant to this micro game where ‘Break?’ appears instead of ‘Break!’ When this happens there are spikes on the bottom of the box. All you need to do is not jump and you will survive the encounter. Good luck!
Micro Game # 5 – Berathen Star
This is an homage to the second game I ever made. It was for the most part the exact same thing as El’s Quest. Only in this game the player can move up and down alongside left and right. This allows for more interesting enemy placement and I also decided to make the game as colorful as possible. The enemies in this micro game show up in three different formations. But if you carefully move slightly up or down you’ll be able to move pass your enemies unscathed.
Micro Game # 6 – From Darkness
This game is an homage to an unfinished game made by my co-programmer at Berathen Games. Like the original game I intended to have the blocks occasionally glow green. Stepping on a green block is instant death. However given the small time frame available I found that the time needed to properly position your jumps was just not there. However this game can still be a bit of a doozy. The player character is a really heavy guy, as in he falls pretty fast. To counter balance this I suggest jumping, before moving to make it easier to reach the next platform. Give this game a few tries and you should have a good feel for the jumps.
Micro Game # 7 – Infernal Consecrators
I played a lot of arcade games as a kid and one of them had you collecting a bunch of junk and growing bigger, granting you the ability to absorb things that previously would of destroyed you. Remembering that old game I decided to throw this together. It’s not initally clear, unfortunately, from some players perspective what is safe and what isn’t. When you start the game you can eat all the tiny evil red things. After eating two of them you will grow in size and be able to eat even bigger things. Reaching giant size is how you win this minigame.
This game has three variants and the hardest one is when only five creatures spawn. For this challenge I highly suggest dodging between the two big guys and eating the two little ones behind them. Then move backwards and eat the two behind you. You’ll be pretty pushed for time if you try to eat the big guy that spawns by himself to the right first.
Micro Game # 8 – Berathen Bomber
I am a huge fan of Bomberman games so I absolutely had to toss something together to show that adoration. I wasn’t able to make as many variants to this micro game as I would of liked to this one due to the time restaints so you only have to look out for the same threats. The bombs are going to explode and you need to move out of the way. The bombs explode in the shape of a ‘+’ reaching all the way up and to the left (where you are). You can either make your way to the bottom right of the screen for maximum safety or you can be a daredevil and hide in between near the exploding bombs. If your low enough on the screen then the bombs high to the right can’t hit you and vice cersa. Good luck!
Micro Game # 9 – Divine Space
This game is a throwback to something I made in Game Maker a few years ago. In that full game you have to switch between color modes in order to dodge specifically colored shots, but I found that to be a bit too intensive for this minigame. Instead I decided to go for a simple ‘shoot the target’ minigame. Unlike the Berathen Blast game the thing you need to shoot moves randomly left to right. If you don’t aim carefully you can waste a shot missing. I’ve looked at the code about 100 times over and over again and his movements should be 50% random in either direction. But I’ve found from countless playing sessions that the ship seems to always start the round moving to the left. If you move just slightly to the right and fire off a shot you should nail him no problem.
If you miss that first shot then it gets abit more difficult because at any point he can randomly move to the right, but there is always a small pause before a direction change. Your best bet on hitting him is going for him the very second he changes direction.
Micro Game # 10 – Street Instinct
This one is based off the many fighting games I’ve played over the years. The objective of this micro game is to defeat your opponent with a special move. I was gonna allow you to use a ‘super special move’, but time just didn’t allow for it. Anyways follow the controls at the bottom of the screen to the letter an you should be fine. When the game tells you to input FIERCE any of the action buttons will do. Space, X, or Z. Though for those of you who are mashing directions, you can only use your special move when you’re in the projectile (right-direction) stance.
Feel free to switch between stances after you’ve won the battle though. I do it all the time because I think it’s cool.
Micro Game # 11 – Hackin Pipes
This is one of my favorite games here and I’d love to make this into a full game one day. Or maybe a bigger mini-game inside another game. I wantedto add more variants to the game, but again time is always my enemy. The objective in this one is to connect the pipes on the left side of the screen with the pipes on the right side of the screen. If you carefully watch the pipes that scroll through the middle you should be able to see which pipes make the connection. Then all you have to do is press a action key to stop the flow.
Also if you pay attention closely you’ll notice the pipes have different colors along them. Certain colors show what they match up with, but other pipes heavily show off a certain color to throw off the fact that they don’t connect at other parts. Use these colors to your advantage to know which pipes to ignore!
Thanks for taking the time to read about my micro games! I had a lot of fun making them all!
Please play, rate, and leave a comment about what you think of it here.
The theme of Ludum Dare 28 is “You Only Get One”, the first word pump into my head is YOLO. I know its literal meaning, You Only Live Once. Well, that’s true, everyone only have one life, if not considering afterlife or something like that. So I made this text adventure game The Story of Your Life.
How did I design it?
First I abstract human to five attributes
In the game, all players’ choices can affect above attributes, and some choices only appear when player’s attributes satisfy the requirement. Mind and Body are random at born, Social Connections, Self-confidence and Property are connected with family.
There’re 4 types of families in this game : Rich, Middle-class, Poor, Abandoned. Character got more attributes at born in better family, but like real world, player can’t choose the family, which is decided by a spinning wheel. Not like the real world, the possibilities of each family is equal, so player can easily get different experience.
Property don’t exist in the childhood period, and there’re many differences among different families, for example
Before entering adulthood, game provides players 4 career candidates based on the attributes. Some good career like scientist need high self-confidence, which is poor kids lacking of.
Adulthood is more boring than childhood, it’s 3 times longer than childhood. Player receive paycheck every 10 turns. Many choices in this period need money, the choices player can’t afford are not in the list.
At the end of this virtual life, game generate a short description based on the attributes at born and death. One gifted kid may died as a gangster and a kid born with silver spoon may have nothing in the end. All of these are determined by 3 factors Family, Luck and Choices, this is what I want to express in this game.
The Bad Design Factors
Feedback
I should admit that this game is a little…boring, the whole process is just pushing different buttons. It would be much better to give players some text feedback after they made the choice, I cut off this feature because the limitation of my English writing skill.
In the real world, it’s difficult to quantify ourselves, so I made the decision that not exposing specific attribute numbers to players, which is a big mistake. I was making game, abstraction of real world. Without specific numbers feedback, players can’t get a clear picture of what they’re doing, it’s really frustrating.
Interactive
I cut off family and special event features for lacking of time and energy.
There’re only 4 options each turn, may confusing players. A better solution in my mind right now is listing all options with requirement, and only allow player choosing the qualified options, then players can choose what they want and know why some options can not be chosen.
Graphic
Graphic is more appealing than text, and bad text (ex. text in this game) can easily ruin the atmosphere and fun. Something like below can be visualized
After all, I’m very happy and getting lots of fun in this Ludum Dare. I believe I can make a better game next time.
P.S. There’s an eastern egg in this game. In the adulthood of middle-class family, one option is Make Indie Game, guess what would be happened after you choose it.
Tags: LD28, ld48, postmortem
Hi folks! I’ve written a postmortem about Lestac, our LD28 entry, and you can read it over at my blog: http://amos.me/blog/2013/lestac-the-making-of/
Don’t forget to play and rate our entry at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=31947
Also, congrats to everyone who took part in the 28th Ludum Dare! You’re all awesome 
This was my 3th Ludum Dare, but it was not so smooth as my first time. My little entry is called Let it snow.
First day
I woke around 6 am and checked the theme. Well, it went wrong here. I just could not think about something other then a platform game with one life, but I did not want to make a platform game. I wanted to make something really simple. After 3 hours thinking about what to make I started thinking about punching the theme in the face. So this idea was turned into a prototype. The way it was played was really simple. The player just needs to press the space bar to get the power level of the punch up. After a few second there is dirt flying up because the power level of the punch was so high. After releasing the space bar the player would fly up and punch the words “you only get one”. The theme would fly into the air and crash into the player after the descent.
Although I was not happy with the result of my first day, I did learn a few new things about Unity3D. Most time I spent on playing around with Box2d within Unity3D. It is a shame Unity3D did not support 2D like it does now sooner. Around 12:00 pm I called it a day for Ludum Dare and took my son to swimming lesson and he graduated to a higher and last level. That made me proud!
Day two
I still did not know where to go with my entry. Until I check my twitter stream and saw a topdown image of a car. It reminded me of DONKEY.BAS. This gave me the idea to start collecting cherries when the words are on the descent, but it was already late around 5 pm. First I did some shopping and well looking for the items on my shopping list the idea of a spaceship popped up. On the way back home I thought snow crystals would better for this time of year. This turned the entry into Let it snow.
What went wrong:
– Could not come up with a simple entry to make. I could not make progress.
– The best idea came late during day two.
What went right:
– My choose of tools. Unity3D is really good for me to work it. The workflow for making 2D games fits all my needs. The Gimp I used for years now, so I can draw something really fast.
– Art style. I really like how the game looks.
– Had enough time to spent with my kids.
– I did not give up!
I will enjoy your entries and give feedback. Happy holidays!