If this looks adorable to you, you should probably play my game.

My game “Only One Chance” is about robots in love and it’s cute! You should check it out: BOOM!

GOOD STUFF

• Consistent mood. I was really satisfied by how all parts of the game work together to create a mood. After composing the main theme on piano, I realized that it would be really nice if ALL the sound was played on the piano, so all of the short sound effects are little arpeggios or what have you on the piano too. The art started out much moodier and darker, but as I figured out what kind of game it was going to be, it became brighter and more charming, which fits really well imo.
• Game as experience. This ties in with my last bullet, but I was thinking about writing games that were coherent experiences that try to express a certain emotion rather than a bunch of features tied together. I really want to make more games like this.
• Aesthetics over features. In my past games, I’ve had a habit of adding new features rather than polishing old ones. Right when I started this game, I decided to focus on aesthetics over adding new features.  That means that the cannons animate, the cannonballs explode in beautiful particle explosions, random yellow particles float in the background (I don’t know what they are, but they look nice), there’s a title screen (the first time I’ve ever added one), etc. I’m very pleased with the overall effect.
• Let the game develop itself. At first I wanted something dark and moody and atmospheric. This was my guiding idea for the first 8 hours or so. But I had problems – I couldn’t think of any way to make that fit the theme. I was also thinking about giving music more than just a background role when I developed the idea that you could have two different things that play different melodies, and when you bring them together the melodies fit together. I thought it could be some sort of music based atmospheric platformer game. I thought more and realized it was a really nice metaphor for love – two people that both have a song that are incomplete without each other. Once I came up with that, I knew I had to use it. So my working idea until the end of the first day was that you would be some sort of robot cupid that would solve puzzles to bring girls and guys together.
  But then after the 24 hour mark I realized that there was no way that I could make a bunch of guy/girl pairs, corresponding theme songs, and level puzzles. I was way overscoping. Plus I was noticing that the interactions I wrote between you and the first girl were really adorable, so I just made it a straight up love story between you and her. And that ended up working really well.
  I thought this gradual strategy of “being guided towards what the game wants to be” seemed to work very well. I wouldn’t have come up with the main idea otherwise.

COULD-BE-BETTER STUFF

• Forces outside my control. I was feeling pretty awful during at least 50% of Ludum Dare. I really think that I could have squeezed this into a 48h game if I had been feeling better – but I wasn’t. There’s not much I can do about that, though.
• The music. The music is certainly not bad, but it was all done improvisationally in the space of like 20 minutes and could have been a lot better if I had bothered to sit down and work at it. I was feeling bad though, and was having difficulty concentrating on it. There were also like 2-3 beautiful themes that I just ran out of time to include in the game. A definite goal for next time is to spend longer on music, and to make a game that is more receptive to multiple music themes.
• Difficulty. Though it wasn’t really a huge problem (no one has really complained), I was surprised to find that the game was a lot harder than I thought it was. I’m constantly learning in Ludum Dare to take how hard I think a section/puzzle is and multiply it by 2, and that’s how hard everyone else will find it. I obviously have a huge advantage, as I’ve played my game way more than anyone else has

GOALS FOR NEXT TIME

• Improve graphics. I’ve improved from last time, but I think I could do much better with more practice. I felt like this was holding me back. I was slow and the results could have been better.
• Spend longer on music.

Play the game!

I wonder is there a list of games who participated and succeded in the #nokill challenge?

I’ve seen so many “you only get one shot” games that I’m really interested what people came up with for the #nokill challenge with this theme.

Even though I forgot to mention it anywhere I actually did a #nokill game 😀 Check it out if you want:

Post me your #nokill games in the comments if there is no list yet

Tags: #NOKILL

I uploaded a video with some gameplay footage for my game “Hammer Control”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7-x4Kkn8Bk

It shows the first 16 levels, with a bonus of level 26 at the end in case anyone wants to see the kind of sick stuff it takes to win at the higher levels.  It gets mighty tough when you’re that deep in the game!

But one person I emailed a link to did get to level 25, so it can be done.  But I think he’s a real gamer, so don’t feel bad if you get stuck on level 14 like most people.  😉

The entry can be found here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=30865

In the 72 hours given ,i came up with a “decent” game but about 30 minutes from the turn in time…

I failed to realize how java reads the jar files and thus dint accommodate the Resources for that. Therefore, whenever the game was ran it had no files to read from which was part of how they came ran! Days later, i realize my problem and have fixed it and am here to offer the download.

Although i was able to turn it into the competition as a finished game, i learned a lot and cant wait to do it again! All these games look and play great and i hope next time too make some just as good!

Thanks all!

Download Link:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mpo32szqedjihbd/Human.rar

Side Note: Extract the whole folder and then run the jar!

Leave feedback please

So Wall of Fingers has been done for a few days now and I’ve been slowly gathering all of my thoughts on it, so I felt it was time for a recap! This was my first LD, and third game jam (I recently participated in 1GAM and TAG).

four pages of rough concept stuff:

What Worked:

Scope – I needed to make sure I could actually create the game I was planning in 48 hours. I’ve been wanting to make a game like this for a while (wall-of-death platformer) so when I saw the theme I figured it would work well for a sadistic game like this ;).

So I kept it simple: 5 levels, 2 masks,  choose 1 mask per level, 1 life for the entire game. For sound I decided to do a song for each level, and sound effects for all basic movement, death, level completion, pause menu, etc. because I am insane and regurgitate sound and music. Overall this was a modest scope and I thought I had control over it (more on this in the “What Didn’t Work” section).

Sound – I had a blast working on sound, doing sound for games give me an excuse to nerd-out on random theory junk. Since I was doing one song per level, I decided to make the timing for each song sequential from 6-10:

LEVEL 1 – 3/4 (6)
LEVEL 2 – 7/8 (7)
LEVEL 3 – 4/4 (8)
LEVEL 4 – 9/8 (9)
LEVEL 5 – 5/4 (10)

Art – It was weird and kinda creepy and the color palette was obnoxious so that’s win-win-win for me.

What Didn’t Work:

SCOPE!? -I left out a lot of things in the initial planning stage that I ended up adding slowly throughout the game’s development. Not the best idea. For instance, I wanted to have sounds for many different aspects of the player’s movement. A bit into the game, I decided on having sounds for jumping, landing, wall jumping, and flying. I had all of the sounds recorded, but the landing sound was never implemented. This was because I kept having to troubleshoot other issues, and I was worried that focusing on something minor like the landing sound could hurt progress on something more important.

Ultimately this wasn’t a huge deal, but if I planned out the sounds in the early stages I would have at least been able to confront this issue earlier on and decide what to prune before things got out of hand.

Another thing I didn’t really establish in the conceptualizing stage was what other assets / platforms would exist in the game. I guess at first I assumed there would be none (which I should have kept it at) and the whole game would be centered on running / jumping / wall jumping /flying. Though for some reason I was feeling like I needed to add more “stuff” to the game to make it more interesting in the last 1/3 or so of the jam.

So I decided to add bouncy platforms, disappearing platforms, and magnet platforms. I made the art / sound effects for them and scripted them into the game, only to realize that I would have to reshape a lot of the levels simply to allow these new platforms to be used properly! This would’ve been a lot of extra work and in the end I decided to keep only one of them (the bouncy ones) and that was for a specific reason (which I go over in “Know how you intend the player to play the game”).

Adding junk to the levels AFTER they have already been designed – This goes along with scope, when designing a level I should know exactly what assets will be used any how: is this the first time the player is using this asset? If so then I need to introduce it properly, if not then I need to slowly introduce new / more difficult ways of interacting with it, etc. Because of the platform fiasco, I added a lot of unnecessary stress later in the game’s development.

Difficulty Curve – Huzzah, six games under my belt and I still suck at designing difficulty curves! It’s okay, this is probably my current biggest flaw as a game designer so I know it will take a while before I get it. The game can be beat in about 3 minutes, though some who played the game played it for a least 20 minutes. This makes me happy knowing that some people were willing to put that amount of time into my game, though for every individual who has the patience there are probably several who will most likely quit and rate it after the first or second death. The latter are the people I need to reach out and appeal to.

Another complaint I received is the “You Only Have One Life for Five Levels” aspect, which kinda breaks my heart but I totally understand why people don’t like it. Right now my games tend to have this “if you can’t play it then oh well” attitude, which I’m trying to avoid. I like hard games and I want my games to appeal to like-minded people, but what if someone want to like hard games but can’t get into them because the difficulty curve is too steep? Or what if someone thinks they hate hard games until they played one that had a strong difficulty curve that allowed them to get into it?

I’m learning that being accessible and being “watered down” are not necessarily the same thing. That by properly introducing my game I can appeal to a wider audience, while still allowing the more “hardcore” fans to appreciate it (more on this in the “Future Changes” section).

Bugs n’ Stuff – I’ve had a report of the player going through the world after grabbing a mask, so yeah, that’s not good XD. It seems to be a pretty rare occurrence too, which is bad for a bug because that’s means it will be difficult to recreate and just a difficult to know if it’s fixed. Luckily I may have an idea of what’s causing it, so I’m hoping to avoid this in future installments.

What I Learned:

SCOPE!! – When I’m planning I need to plan EVERYTHING and how it will be used. Know what needs to stay and go BEFORE actually working on the game. Don’t plan on adding stuff later on because I think I have the time, get what was planned DONE before ever considering this (THIS IS IMPORTANT).

Know how I intend the player to play the game (and how I will teach this) – I like giving the player choices to make in a game, it gives them an excuse to play it again if they enjoyed it. That being said knowing HOW to present the choices to the player is just as important as providing the choices, because if they don’t know they have a choice, is it really a choice?

After implementing the mask mechanics into the game, I thought it would be cool to eventually allow the player to make three choices: mask A, mask B, or no mask. Choosing no mask to beat the level is essentially “hard mode.” This choice is possible on the last two maps. Since I thought of this after the initial level design I altered the levels a little bit to make it possible to beat with no mask. The bouncy platforms really helped with this.

That being said, how did I make this choice to player apparent? Well, I didn’t really. On every level leading up to the 4th one the player needs a mask, so why would they try to beat it without one? In a future installment, I’m thinking of making this choice more apparent through the level design: At the start of a level have an upper path that is hard to get to that leads to the two masks in the level, and a more accessible lower path that leads to a one way drop that forces the player to continue the level without the masks. This will hopefully introduce the idea that it is intended to give the player the option of playing without the masks. If a level NEEDS to be beaten with a mask, have the mask in a location that forces the player to pick it up to continue.

So what I picked up from this was to understand how I want the player to play the game AND how I will teach the player to play the game (this also involves teaching the player to understand their choices, and teaching them how to recognize when they do and don’t have choice).

Future Changes:

To manage the difficulty curve:

~I will increase the number of levels (most likely to 5 groups of 5)

~When the player dies, they will restart in the level they died in, not the first level

~After beating the five levels, there is an optional “challenge mode” unlocked for that group. This is where the player must beat all five levels with one life. The player can complete these challenges to unlock new levels or level groups.

~I will most likely avoid all platforms, unless I go for more levels. I want to have a lot of time to introduce new mechanics to the players and not rush them into it too much. This way I can be a bit more confident that they can handle more difficult levels eventually.

To the sound:

~The music can go in a couple directions. If I’m going to have 25+ levels, then I need to ask myself if I’m willing to make 25+ songs. Granted they will be pretty short, probably under a minute each, but there are alternatives. I could also do one song per group of levels, with each stage playing a single instrument of the song, and the final stage playing the completed piece with all instruments, but that requires more planning.

I will probably go with one song per level for now, since it will be fun practice and I may be able to find ways to make each level visually different in some way to pair with the music. We’ll see.

~I will get that landing sound in there!

~I want to sync up the song length with the length of the levels better. Right now they are somewhat close, but figuring out a basic formula that will allow me to determine how large a level needs to be to finish when the song does should help a lot.

Misc:

~I’d like to fix any current bugs that exist

~I’d like to (eventually) tweak art and animations a bit.

~Maybe have some collectible objects that give the player incentive to replay a level with different masks / no masks. These could be used to unlock more levels or other stuff.

Thanks for reading / skimming! Thanks for the feedback! Thanks for having game jams that make me less lazy! This was an awesome experience and I can’t wait for the next Ludum Dare!

You can play the game HERE!

You can hear and download the soundtrack HERE!

More games and stuff HERE!

Read it here!

We had a ton of fun making this game and I feel the things that went well totally outweigh the things that did not. We are actually thinking about building this into something more, but then again we feel like doing that for a lot of other concepts as well

Give Magpie a shot!

While I’m writing up my postmortem for Javel-ein, here’s a short video (1:15) showing off the first few levels! My take on the theme was you only get one javelin. You can throw it at enemies, but then you have to pick it up before you can throw it again. It’s a fast paced and fairly difficult platformer and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Play Javel-ein right now!

You can find my LD page here. If you play Javel-ein, please let me know what you think!

(Posted to my blog as well)

This past weekend was another Ludum Dare game competition, and the second one I’ve taken part in (this first you can read about here).  I also organized a local meetup with the Knox Game Design group and we had five games in total submitted by the deadline.  So without further adieu, here is my wrap up of what went right, and what went wrong!

Theme “You Only Get  One”

For my game, YoGo Burger, I used the theme in a few ways.  The setup is, due to some budget cuts, you can only put one topping on a burger.  The customer will either be okay with it, or hate it and this will affect the amount of tip you get.  To make matters worse, if a single customer complains to management you’ll be fired.  To keep this from happening you use your tip money for bribes.

In practice the game is like playing multiple games of Mastermind at the same time.  Customers will get back in line and order a second burger and if you remember what they liked before you can use that to get it right the second (and third, forth, etc) time.  To make it interesting I reset the customer preferences each day, added more customers, and I also upped the value weights behind what they like and don’t.  The effect is you’ll probably be deep in debt and fired by the end.

The design was very emergent.  The initial idea was a Burger Time / Tapper  / Diner Dash clone with one ingredient.  It’s fair to say I didn’t really have a strong direction at the start, but as I added mechanics it began to take shape.  I’m very happy with where I wound up and think that this kind of creative exercise is what the Ludum Dare excels at (even if the game isn’t fun for very long).

Programming in Unity

Just like the last time, I used the competition as an excuse to learn new technology.  You might say this is the wrong time to learn something new, but twice now I’ve done it and shipped a game so we’ll have to agree to disagree.  The new tech this round was Unity 4.3’s new 2D support.

Having working in Unity before, and having read up on the new features, this wasn’t so bad.  Prior to the competition I had started porting my XTiled library to Unity, so I wasn’t completely green for this project.  I had to google an issue here and there, but for the most part things went smooth.  For the most part.  Let’s talk animation…

Unity revamped their animation system for the 4.x release, and it’s now called “Mecanim”.  It’s a very complex, yet powerful setup allowing you to define animations then link them with a state engine and create smooth transitions procedurally.   That’s all good, but I need to move a sprite a few steps to the right and this seemed impossible.  I’m sure spending more time with the system is what’s needed, but I have reservations about any system that cannot handle a simple, common use case well.  If you cannot do the simple well, how am I to trust you won’t make the complex a nightmare?

In the end I wrote a few lines of code to handle all animations.  I’m a programmer, it’s what I do.

Graphics

Nothing good to report here.

I am no longer satisfied making excuses that “I’m a developer” or hearing “not bad for developer art” or worse “it’s so bad it’s good – you nailed the MS Paint ironic art style!”.  See, I’m not trying for that.  I don’t expect to be amazing, but I think it’s perfectly fine to expect decent.  I commonly tell people I’m not “talented” I’ve just spent a lot of time writing code and anyone can reach where I’m at.  I believe this to be true of anything, and it’s time I took my own advice.

So next year I’ll be reading up on art 101 and spending quality time with Gimp, Inkscape, and even Blender.  Check back with me after 10,000 hours.

Sound

I needed exactly one sound effect for my game, so why is this even a section? Because it was my favorite part of the whole competition!

I wanted a cash register sound when a customer paid for their order, but because of the rules I cannot use anything I didn’t make during the competition and this include sound effects.  Normally I’d use the amazing bfxr app to generate game sounds, but it wasn’t really suited for this task.  I grabbed a portable microphone and headed out to hunt samples Foley style!

In the end I used a bell from my daughter’s bicycle and the opening and slamming shut a wooden drawer full of screws, bolts, and nuts.  I then edited and combined those samples in Audacity, speeding up the playback by about 150%.  The end result was a very convincing cash register ca-ching!

Music

While I’m a horrible graphic artist, I am “decent” at music.  This time I wanted to use my own guitar playing (as Dylan and Levi have done), however I’ve never actually hooked up a live instrument to FL Studio with my current audio gear.  This led to a frustrating session of attempted guitar recordings before I decided there wasn’t enough time left to keep fooling with it and went with all synths – something I’m pretty comfortable with.  (Yesterday I tried again, and it turns out I made a very simple mixer error).

The music inspiration came from the depressing, you-can’t-win-gameplay and reminded me of Papers Please.  To get in the mood I loaded up some depressing Russian folk songs and waltzes until I had the right state of mind.  Not going to win a Grammy, but I think it fit the game well.

YoGo Burger Theme on Soundcloud

And finally, as it tradition, here is a time-lapse of me making the whole thing – 17 hours compressed into 3 minutes!

Tags: LD28, music, postmortem, timelapse, unity

Take on the role of the great composer Maestro, and start your musical journey to finish the song.
And remember:
~There is only one true masterpiece ~

Play Polytonia

Slight Spoiler Warning:
Reveals the song, but you still need skill to pass the game.

link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwWMSyL0E_M&feature=youtu.be

game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=27122

I’m currently trying to remake the game in unity 2d so it will be playable on multiple platforms including the web.

SHIFTER

Hey guys! I wanted to thank everyone who’s played my game so far and left their feedback. The reaction has been far more positive than I’d expected and I really appreciate all the suggestions that people have given. I’m hoping to take some time next year to improve and expand the game, so I’ll keep you updated. A couple things that I wanted to pass along:

1) I put the music for my game up on Soundcloud (free downloads are enabled). It’s not a long track, but I really enjoy how it turned out. Check it out: https://soundcloud.com/john-pennington/shifter-theme.

2) A post-compo version of my game is available on Kongregate. It’s mostly the same as my compo entry, but I made a few small tweaks and enabled stat tracking. I’d appreciate it if anyone could check it out on their site and give a rating (preferably positive). As I develop the game further next year, this is the version that will get all the updates. Check it out: http://www.kongregate.com/games/atmospherium/shifter

I’ll be out of town for most of the voting period (who knew Christmas was in December?), but I’m trying to play as many games as possible in the mean time. If you don’t see a comment from me on your game, it means that your game was the very best and I couldn’t think of any constructive criticism. 😉

Fellow dares,

after the first full day of playing and voting for Creator Saga Story Tycoon, I say I really happy. Two reasons

1 -people that are playing a lot (but I will comment it in another post) and are are really liking it. It gives a very nice morale boost and personal felling of accomplish

2 – people are giving feedback. The players are commenting everything they liked or disliked, not only a generic thumbs up.

Thanks for every player that gave me a minute to write about it. TAHNKS.

If you are still having a social life is because you didnt play yet the game.

Check it NOW!

regards,

Bruno Massa

Gamenific

So, I usually try and record my first impressions when I play a indie game for the first time, as a fellow developer I know how good it feels to see someone else playing your game, and how much we can learn from it, seeing where they fail, and what they end up missing/not understanding.

This is my channel with the videos I record: http://www.youtube.com/user/danielsndgamevideos/videos

Last LD I made a Google Form and asked for people to submit links to their games there, and went on rating and recording through that list.

This time around, I figured, I always end up rating back whoever comments on my game so… I could just use that as a list

So, if you’d like for me to rate/comment/record my first impressions on your game, just leave me a comment on: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=27274

I’ll start my way through the comment list tomorrow ^^

In case you haven’t played yet: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=7658

So, my second Ludum Dare is in the bag and in my opinion, I think it went A LOT better than last time. The game is significantly more polished and I’m very pleased with the end-product and reception to said product so far. So now its time to share my thoughts:

What Went Right:

Game Concept and Theme: I really didn’t want to go the obvious way with Ludum Dare 28’s theme. “You Only Get One” was a good theme but there were some pretty common avenues I could take with that. Though not necessarily bad ideas, I wanted to be unique in my game design. But how? Mainly, the theme struck me as one that could key in on consequence. Having “only one” wasn’t supposed to be merely an inconvenience; I wanted it to mean something gameplay wise. One of the ideas I thought about was a system where you might have multiple robots, where one was randomly assigned to you at the beginning of the game and, should it die, you might not see it (and its special abilities) again for many playthroughs because of the random select. Unfortunately, this would have taken a lot of time to put together, both mechanics-wise and art-wise, and I knew pretty quickly it wasn’t a very viable option for me or the artist. But I liked the idea of having multiple robots with different abilities, and from it stemmed the driving idea behind “Batteries Not Included”: you would have multiple robots, but you could only use one at a time because you only had one battery. Though swapping characters isn’t particularly new, that idea combined with the shared battery gauge I felt gave me a solid interpretation of the theme and a good basis for gameplay.

Coding and Workflow: Teaming up with Max Glockling Games from Stencyl meant that I could focus on my strong point: programming and logic. Sure, I used placeholder graphics a lot at first, but up to that point I’d sort of underestimated them. Problem is, in the past I’ve been reluctant to use them; knowing my artistic abilities on pixel art and what have you, I was leery of assigning a certain “level of detail” to my art prematurely per size. However, this time I could shoot some dimensions at the artist and he would come through. And I must say, looking back it’s a little eye-opening to see just how efficient I was as a result. On Saturday, with art not so much a concern for myself, I was in the zone with my coding. Code, code, NOT art, and more code. Thanks Max! I did eventually take a “break” and whip up a quick musical tune, but mostly it was me coding away and designing levels. I think its definitely shown me in part how I work best when it comes to games, and its certainly something I need to take into consideration for future projects, particularly those where I’m doing everything myself.

Strong Gameplay Mechanics and Overall Level Design: Though I can’t say I necessarily got to fine-tuning everything to perfection, I feel the game is moderately balanced and diversified in terms of gameplay. Each robot has its ability, specific shape, and battery consumption. The combination of all of these gives some good flexibility, even if I lacked the time to utilize every aspect to its fullest. In short, I had a good set of advantage(s) and disadvantage(s) for each robot. Although I might argue the Floater/UFO guy was harder to balance than the other two, there were certain nuances particularly about his tractor beam that I could exploit to prevent him from making the game too easy (and he’s the biggest battery hog for good reason too).

What Went OK:

Audio: No sound effects, but I did get music in there. It would appear though that the music got to be very repetitive and annoying after awhile to some… at least per the responses on the livestream playthrough I was watching. I actually laughed (I wasn’t the only one). When and if I release a post-compo version, I may have to change things up and look into getting some sound effects too. Ultimately though, I think I made it somewhat satisfactory.

Collision Coding and its Quirks: This. This arguably is what consumed the half or so of my coding time. I dealt with this A LOT. I tried to make certain objects pushable under different circumstances. I tried to make it so the UFO guy couldn’t pick up objects from the side with his beam. I tried to make it so the dozer guy could move past certain objects at times and push them when he needed to. And it wasn’t necessarily unusual for me to get past one problem and have it introduce another. Trying to program all these nuances, in essence, around Stencyl/Box2D’s way of handling collisions was definitely a task! But, in the end, I got it to work. Having that clear dedication to coding definitely helped.

What Went Wrong:

Number of “Planned” Levels: I didn’t get to the amount of levels I wanted; I had been shooting for at least 15, and I only got to 12. On top of that, the first 8 were pretty straightforward because they were sort of introductions to different mechanics. That being said, the last four levels picked things up nicely… sort of. That brings me to my next point…

Somewhat Unbalanced Difficulty: Fortunately in the gaming world these days, people seem a little more forgiving of the super-hard difficulty. The people I watched play my devious Level 11 spent probably 20 minutes trying to figure it out (I went on to claim I probably should have made that one the last level instead of what was Level 12). That being said, they found beating the levels quite rewarding when it was all said and done. Nonetheless, with more time I could have potentially balanced the difficulty a bit better. I kind of cringed a bit as I saw them trying to get past even the first parts of the level, but they hung in there and still seemed to have fun while doing it (although on one occasion they cried my name out in “anger”).

Collision Problems: Hey hey… guess what? Still had some issues here. One issue was more of a collision box tweak that I thought I had fixed, while the other issue behaved like I would have expected it to but caused undue difficulties in certain situations. The latter happened on Level 11 many times in their attempt, and it was a bit hard to watch, especially since the game has that perpetual, looming battery drain going on that can cause total level restarts.

* * * * * * *

All things considered, I think Max and I managed to make a pretty great product. I’m quite encouraged by the feedback I’ve gotten thus far, and we’ll have to see how the ratings turn out. However, getting to see someone play it over livestream was big, and I’m glad I got to see that. This time, if all goes well, I would like to release a post-compo version to Kongregate. I have some ideas I didn’t get to implement, would like to add some more levels, and perhaps iron out a better difficulty curve; I think there is some solid potential still left to tap. If you’d like to see a post-compo version, say so! After all, I’m making the game so people like you can play it, am I right?

Thanks for reading.

Hidden Prison entry

Hello everybody. We are very pleased with the feedback of our game, Hidden Prison. We know that we didn’t have time to finish it and polish, but we have worked to fix some bugs (critical bugs) and do the game enjoyable (now you can finish it). The main reason of this post is asking you about the possibility to do a remake, only based in the feedback. We believe that our idea es very good and interesting to develop and create new levels, develop the plot, dialogues and do a really complete game.

The main reason to do the remake is to thanks to everybody that played (tested) our game an told us that they wanted more! We think that we can improve the experience with some aditions:

• Better graphics and ilumination system
• Faster characters
• Better AI (We will use the grid system of GM Studio to do the paths)
• More skills
• A good story with a surprising plot and dialogues
• More puzzles, traps, and stealth!
• And, of course, more levels.

We want to start the remake in a few weeks (after Christmas), and I beg you to vote us and help us with your feedback, to try to achieve some advertisement and financing in the future, that REALLY will help to do an awesome game. Thanks for reading!

Tags: Hidden Prison, MechanicMoonStudio

So I kinda failed this LD, as in: I gave up. But let’s not be sad about that, it’s Christmas! So instead, I think im gonna play all of your games and record it! Leave a comment to this post with the name of your game and a link to it, and I will make sure to play it and upload a video of it to my channel: http://www.youtube.com/mrdutyfull

Merry Christmas (or happy holidays, depending on your belief) and I will see you in my next video!

/Sincerly: “Koltiman”/”Kladdax”

In good old Ludum Dare fashion, here’s my Ballkeeper Post Mortem. In general everything went pretty smooth and I’m also quite happy with the result, even though I also see much room for improvements which were out of scope for the 48h compo.

The good:

• No Feature creep! I stayed focus on my core idea and didn’t bother adding much more extras. In the end a slick and elegant design often works better than piling up features.
• It’s a fun toy turned into a game.
• I was pretty confident that I can finish it the whole time, so it was a very relaxed Ludum Dare for me.
• Dart + WebGL + WebAudio is an awesome platform for game development. I also made use of the PointerLock API which worked great for me and is also great for other type of games.
• Simple but stylish geometrical graphics instead of pixel art. I only used one graphic asset, which is a blurry white dot, everything else is WebGL wizardry. Let’s face it, I’m very bad at painting. I hope I sometimes will get better but until then I stick to what I’m best at.
• Don’t develop in isolation. I was very lucky to share the room by 4 other Ludum Dare participants the whole time, so there was never a lack of testers and you could always bounce of an idea to a peer. I made some very important changes which I probably wouldn’t have done without their feedback. Big shout out to headchant, jeremias, vrld and fysx. Play their games!
• SuperCollider is awesome for sounds. You can look in my source file to see how all the sounds were created with source code. (sounds.scd)

The bad:

• I was pretty hung over from a party the first day and I didn’t get as much done as I wanted. On the other hand it might have been helpful for the game design itself, to loosen up. Who knows?
• Unfinished base code. The first half of the first day I still had to finish WebGL base code I wanted to have finished by the start. So the first hours were used to implement low level WebGL stuff, which you probably don’t want to do in a game jam.
• I had enough time to implement more features, but I didn’t. Instead I played the game a lot. I  don’t know if this is a good or bad thing.
• I should have invested more time in the collision model, as it’s very important for the game and has its flaws in the current state.
• Dart is great to write structured web apps. In the end I started to adopt bad coding habits, my code could have been cleaner. But well, it’s Ludum Dare, isn’t it?
• Due to a issue in Dart it doesn’t work in Firefox. I already filed a bug report, so hopefully this won’t happen again in the future.

So, if you haven’t played Ballkeeper yet do it now! There’s also a gameplay video.

It’s been about 2 years since I entered my first Ludum Dare and I did a WebGL round up then. Back then the entries were simple, often limited in scope, and the comments were often full of “this doesn’t work” type comments.

How things have changed! Loads of high quality 3D entries plus 2D. Browser support is pretty much sewn up. And even the great Notch has leapt onto the WebGL train.

So here is a round of a few of the best games I’ve found that are made using WebGL.

Seven Eagles, One Lantern

Seven Eagles, One Lantern

A lovely exploratory game where you have to find the Seven Eagle statues dotted around the environment. The Catch? The eagles are only visible in the light of the lantern and you have to leave the lantern on switches in order to access areas. Graphically lovely, and a nice gameplay mechanic.

ACCELERally

ACCELERally

A nice shader effect compliments the simplicity of this game. One touch, one control. Get as far as you can.

Ballkeeper

Ballkeeper

Simple and addictive. There’s elements of both Breakout and Super Hexagon in this game.

Last Minute Christmas Chopping

Last Minute Christmas Shopping

It always makes news when Notch publishes a LD game. But you know what, that’s because he creates good, solid, polished experiences. And he does it from scratch with no libraries. This game seems simple on the first playthrough then you realize it’s impossible without using the boosting mechanic from the tentacles.

Hungry Self Eating Centipede

Hungry Self Eating Centipede

Re-imagining a classic, but this time, your tail is trying to eat you from the back, just as you are trying to eat the food in the map.

VELOCITRON

VELOCITRON

Rez-like game with thumping techno. Simple mechanic, and a good, if short, challenge.

Going Around

Going Around

Finally, a plug for my own game. Going Around is a point and click adventure, solve the puzzles and get Ann out of the house. You only get one hour to complete it. I love the graphical style that Philippa came up with for this.

      Our experience in previous jams has taught us that with the short time frame you need to streamline workflows and divide up tasks.  During the planning phase of Luminess we made it a goal of ours to create a way to make levels so that Evan did not have to hardcode them all.   This would allow him to focus on coding the game and allow Jason and me to design the levels.
 

       So, how do you get sweet visuals like this and be able to make a bunch of levels? Evan’s code loads an image that Jason or I create and checks every pixel for specific colors. Those colors correspond to specific types of walls. Generic walls that do no damage are in RGB Grey=100,100,100. The red kill walls seen here at the right are RGB Red=100,0,0.
 
 
 
 
 

 
       Besides walls, the code also scans for certain pixels and places, PlayerSpawn, FinishSpawn, ColorOrbs, and Enemies. Enemies are drawn into the current levels, their spawns will turn on in an upcoming version. To the left is the drawn image of the level above. The little ‘P’ is where the player spawns and the ‘E’ is to spawn the end portal.
 
 
 
 

      The workflow for level creation is this. We made a template in Pyxel Edit with the precise colors. Solid block tiles for various walls and icons for the spawns. The level is designed and output 8x the size. Evans code currently requires each pixel to be 8-bit, so we open the PNG in Gimp and Image>Mode>Indexed>Convert the image.

 
      We will be making more levels, and adding enemies. I will make a guide on how you can make levels and maybe we will add them to the game! So check back often to play the newer version! Look forward to reading iiechapman’s post on the Pixel Scanning code with SDL_GetRGB(). Also, darfnagel’s posts on his experience with level design and music production.
 
       Check out Luminess!
 

Tags: game, LD28, level design, Luminess, post-mortem

Hey! I’ve finally finished creating the timelapse. As always, it’s quite long… but I prefer that to have things go too fast. =X

And again, many thanks to all of you who commented on my game! You are awesome!