There are few games that use the gaming medium as the powerful force of change that it can be.

Currently, there exists a diverse selection of games that someone could choose to play: from simple platformers about heroes saving princesses to first person shooters about gangster rap on Venus. Yet, this diversity is extremely constrained to subjects that ultimately do not matter. Where are the games about social anxiety, dropping out of college, falling in love, losing your parents or feeling jealousy? There is a whole array of experiences that are common to most human beings that are not being explored by the medium. There is also very little discussion (through games) about global issues that are relevant today, such as global warming, consumerism, privacy or hunger and poverty. How amazing would be it for a game to clearly show the relations between people’s lives and world starvation? How buying an iPhone affects underage workers in China? Or how not caring about things that don’t affect your daily life (such as the NSA spying issue) can lead to decreased freedom of expression and freedom of choice?

There is a prevalent idea among game developers that games are supposed to be fun. Most players agree with this notion, but it doesn’t mean that games have to be devoid of any humanly or globally relevant subjects. It’s not a binary situation, an either/or type of deal. Games can be interesting to play and at the same time explore issues deeply (Papers, Please is a great example), but this takes effort and risk. The chance that people will not understand what is being said, the chance that a game won’t be financially successful, the chance of being called “pretentious”… And so, collectively, game developers choose to go for an easier path of certainty and fun. Quoting Alan Moore:

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

The gaming medium has the unique capacity for making certain feelings emerge in the player, and therefore has a higher capacity for empathy and projection. Game developers should abuse this uniqueness more. The industry (especially the indie scene) shouldn’t strive for dealing only in fun, but also in experiences. Fun is not the only thing you experience in life. So why should fun be the only thing that you experience in games? There’s a great podcast episode about this on the Infinite Ammo podcast. It’s episode 20 with Kayla Kinnunen and (if you wanna skip) it starts at 1h 43m 30s. And there’s also a great talk about this from Jonathan Blow (he’s immensely better and more organized in his thoughts and in the way he makes his points than me, so watch it!):

Drain

With all that said, for this Ludum Dare I decided to make a game that talked about population growth, consumerism and global warming. The idea is pretty simple: there is a planet (where gameplay takes place), there are resources and there are beings. Beings need resources to not disappear and to reproduce. The goal of the game is for society to thrive (have lots of beings alive at the same time) before the world becomes too poluted or before there aren’t enough beings alive for it to be feasible that that society survives.

The goal that I had as a designer was to make sure that the game made it possible for people to more easily see the relations between the three topics I wanted to talk about: population growth, consumerism and global warming. I think I managed to do this in a number of ways:

• A being connected to no resources will eventually disappear, saying that if people don’t consume things they cease to exist (this can be interpreted (in my head at least) in two ways: directly, people who don’t eat will die or indirectly, people who don’t consume objects are not, in a way, part of today’s consumption based society).

• When a being connects to a resource the being grows larger, and if a being is too large it creates another being. This says that people need resources to create more people and that, if that new person doesn’t want to die, they will also need to consume resources.

• When a being connects to a resource, the resource grows smaller, and if the resource is too small it will disappear. This says that resources are not infinite and that people consume them in order to survive.

So far the points made are pretty obvious, but at the same time it’s nice that there is a clear way of stating those obvious truths about life on earth as gameplay mechanics. Using those obvious facts as a base, I suddenly can say more complicated and nuanced things (much like you can start from axioms and go on to prove all sorts of crazy stuff in some mathematical system):

• When too many beings are connected to one resource a city is created. This city randomly spawns more resources and beings. This tries to talk about how having some reserve of resources can bring more people together to some specific place (basically how the rise of agriculture (renewable resources) led to the rise of population centers).

• Growing your population to the final goal of n beings means that pretty much all resources in the planet need to be used, that some beings will overuse some resources (and therefore some other beings will be deprived of that resource) and that the planet becomes a complicated mess of connections everywhere that makes it harder to see what’s actually happening (much like we fail to see the connections between our lives and the environment).

• Many beings die because the player simply didn’t have enough time to get to all of them, since they start becoming smaller (and therefore harder to click) as they go on without being connected. This talks about how sometimes (or most of the time) the problem isn’t much about resource consumption but about resource distribution.

• The more time goes on, the higher the number of beings you need for your society to thrive. This talks about how complexity and specialization of labor in our society makes it so that there is a higher amount of knowledge (and therefore people) needed for us to maintain life at our current levels of comfort.

• The more time goes on, the darker the map gets. This talks about global warming/pollution. The more those people are there consuming resources, the more they’re producing waste and changing the environment.

And so, with those simple rules I said some pretty interesting things about the world. People who weren’t aware of those things before may become aware after playing the game, and hopefully they’ll start changing their actions so that they more closely reflect this new knowledge. This probably doesn’t happen that much (it’s hard to imagine that everyone who played it got all that from the game), but it’s nice to imagine that someone got it and that that someone changed their opinions or actions about one or more of the subjects talked about in the game,
as that is the ultimate goal: being a force of change for good in society.

What Went Right

• Presentation was not bad. I’m not an artist at all, but I managed to make basic shapes look rather interesting. My inspiration came from this game:

• Gameplay was simple, I had enough time to finish it and make it visually interesting. Contrary to past Ludum Dares, where I chose an idea that was way too complicated, barely managed to finish it and had no time for “details” (making it visually pleasing, play test, tutorial, sounds, etc…).

• Some guy wrote an article about the game. This really caught me by surprise because I wasn’t particularly pleased with the game (it really isn’t that fun to play and the main mechanic isn’t that interesting either, despite having a good message), but apparently games with strong messages resonate a lot with people, so that’s pretty interesting to learn!

• With only two sounds I created a pretty fitting and good mood for the game. The heart beat makes sure the player is connected to the beating planet, beings and resources (they all have a very visible “beating” effect to them), and the background noise makes sure that there is a slight sense of urgency (at least in my head) present.

• I managed to make a reaaaaally decent tutorial (probably even better than the game itself). Compared to other Ludum Dares, where I gave no instructions whatsoever.

What Went Wrong

• Bad camera controls. I didn’t have enough time to test the game with other people, so while I knew that the camera controls weren’t good, I sort of pushed it down the stack of things to do and in the end forgot to pop everything. Lately I’ve been trying to avoid doing this and getting to problems/bugs as they happen instead of pushing them for later (in a depth manner instead of breadth), but it’s hard sometimes.

• The game isn’t fun. I said that games don’t *need* to be fun, but it’s better if they are at least a bit engaging/challenging/fun. My game doesn’t have any of that. It’s simply there to be played once/twice and to make a point. I know that games about connecting things can be engaging (because I’ve played similar ones, even though they ultimately had very different mechanics), but I didn’t have enough time to figure out how to make that in two days…

Lessons Learned

• Presentation matters A LOT. Make sure your game is visually pleasing. I’m a terrible artist, but I managed to make something that is kinda OK to look at by simply playing with tweens and alphas. Make sure to try out lots of different ways of drawing simple shapes so that you always have some tricks that make your game stand out a bit.

• Meaningful messages resonate strongly with some people. Even though your game will probably not be of massive appeal if it’s about depression, it will resonate very strongly with people who are/were depressed. So in a competition like Ludum Dare, don’t be afraid to talk about subjects that aren’t of massive appeal. People are forced to play and rate your game, so it’s a more concrete way of ensuring your message will be heard by at least a few people.

• Experience! I’ve been programming games pretty much every day for this past year, so it stands to reason that I have more to pull from when I have to participate in competitions, which ultimately means that it’s easier for me to get something “good” out there. So the more games you make, the better your next games will be (if you challenge yourself, of course).

Conclusion

This was a pretty fun one. I’ve seen lots of games that are really interesting and polished. The one thing that always bothers me about LDs is how nice people are. People have a huge tendency of not pointing out obvious issues and only focusing on positive feedback. You can’t do anything with positive feedback other than feel good for a while. You can only improve through “good bad” feedback, the type that points out your mistakes and ways to solve them. So, don’t be afraid to be a bit negative sometimes. If you can see an obvious way to improve someone’s game, say it! If someone can’t handle getting criticized then they won’t improve, and if they don’t want to improve then why participate in the competition in the first place? Why even be alive if you’re not levelling up? why even bother playing games when you will just die and forget them

So it is FAR from perfect, but I figured better to let the windows have a chance to play. If it is completely unplayable I will fix it further just leave a comment.

Team Ludusamo

Yo!  Im  making a game and i suck at art! sooooooooooooooo i need some1 to do it 4 me cuz  im too lazy too learn art!

________________

wut i need dun:

Character

enemy

main menu

mabey more

________________

Oh yeh! its an top down shooter!

(:

I was without internet access for most of the LD weekend – I submitted the game itself from a McDonalds in the middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin – so I wasn’t able to blog about my work on “Digital Toilet World” much as I developed it. So, I’m finally actually writing about the damn thing!

(Here’s the game’s page, by the way)

“Digital Toilet World” is an adventure game set in a virtual server world under attack by viruses. You are the cleaner, an agent of justice on a mission to purge the world of the viruses. Doing most of the actual fighting is your adorable monster companion. The catch? Your companion must poop often, and there’s only one toilet in the whole world. That’s such shit.

This is my first time actually completing a game for LD, and I’m really, really pleased with the outcome. As crude as the game appears on the surface, this is one of the favorite things I’ve ever made. I’ve always wanted to make a punk-style game similar to those by Porpentine or thecatamites, and LD was the perfect opportunity to do that. The game also takes some heavy inspiration from the game Digimon World for the PSX – a terrible but personally much beloved game with a hilarious monster pooping mechanic. I finally decided to add a touch of bullet hell gameplay on top of these influences, creating something totally unique.

I spent the weekend developing this in a vacation house in Wisconsin with some friends. I ended up not being able to start until noon on Saturday, and wanted to make sure I was in a place with internet access on Sunday with plenty of time to spare in case of mishaps, so this was really rushed, but it still feels complete. It could use some music, and if I make a post-compo version, I’ll definitely add some. There’s also a typo that still bothers me… please forgive it. In any case, this was probably some of the most fun I’ve ever had making a game. Watching my friends play test it and get worked up whenever they had to rush the monster to the bathroom was one of my most satisfying moments as a game dev. I don’t always get to see other people play my games, so it was a real pleasure to see them genuinely enjoy it. Positive feedback has been overwhelming so far, those of you who’ve already played it, thanks so much!

So, again, the game’s page on LD is here. I’d love it you’d tell me what you think! If you want to play more of my games, my blog, Sassy Echidna Software, is over here. Thanks to those of you who organize this event, and thanks to the rest of you for playing. Good luck in the judging, everyone!

Tags: alex higgins, bullet hell, cyberpunk, digimon world, digital toilet world, Ludum Dare 28, monster, poop, punk, sassy echidna software, toilet

… even though I didn’t submit a game.

But first, I’ll state the obvious- the theme was a complete disaster. It sucked so bad, and if it didn’t then I suck (which I know I don’t, so it must be the theme). Even if the theme wasn’t so bad overall, for me it was just uninspiring. I kinda knew that it was going to be selected, so I really can’t use the excuse of “couldn’t think of something good in time”. Now, when we look at all the submissions, we can see that it really wasn’t as good as the last two themes (this was my third LD, in a row). There are a lot of games with the “one bullet, recollect and reuse it” mechanic, and although it might be interesting to see how many different people implemented this mechanic in very varied ways, I don’t feel that this is really the essence of LD, or the theme aspect of LD.

OK, so now that I’m done with my little rant, on to the story. Much to my dismay, I couldn’t think of any ideas that seemed interesting enough for me to try out. Either I’ve raised my standards, or I was just completely dry that weekend. Anyway, I didn’t wanna resume work on my WIP game, which I promised myself I wouldn’t touch during the LD, and then I remembered that I had entered this LD with one thing in mind- try something completely new, the harder the better.

So I decided to code a ray casting engine. Sure, it wasn’t that hard, but it was still a lot of fun. And for two days, I think I did a pretty good job, too (mind you, this version was compiled today, but the only improvements I made were bug fixes and some optimizations). The thing is, it isn’t a game, only the skeleton of an engine. That’s why I didn’t submit it (that, and the fact that it would’ve been ugly trying to tie it to the theme).

I really liked working in 3D (well, pseudo-3D at least), it invoked memories of my early childhood, of watching my dad and my brother playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. In fact, I liked it so much that I might just end up making a 3D game for next LD. See you then!

Forgive me for being ‘that guy’, but as a regular LDer I’ve come to find myself disliking this one particular thing: Titles of links get split between lines! It’s just a small pet peeve of mine, but I was thinking — if the fix is simple enough, and other people aren’t a fan of it either — that it be fixed and titles of links (that go over the edge) instead start a new line. Just a thought I’ve been meaning to bring to your attention. Don’t mind me!

We’ve been really excited to see some of the feedback we have gotten on our Jam submission, but were curious where to go from now. After successfully completing the this Ludum Dare Jam, the three of us felt that we work really well together and feel that we may be able to take on more.  Come check out or game and let us know in the comments what you think.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=30008

If we were to do something extra, would you like to see an implementation running on our CAVE system? Or perhaps would an Android version be something you would like to see? I know many of you do not have an Oculus and Razer Hydra to play our game, however if we used the accelerometer in a phone, we could mimic the tracking that occurs within our VR version of the game. That being said, I have yet to find a 3D game work well on mobile.

Coming up… an autopsy of our game and the development process during our 72hr adventure.

It’s taken three goes, but at last I’m actually happy with the outcome of this LD. Myself and fellow jammer Gredgie only really had 48 hours for this jam due to commitments on Monday, so we had from Saturday morning until Sunday evening to wrap up everything bar the most polishiest of polishing.

After waking up to find out the theme, we sat and mused (panicked) for almost a full hour before we struck upon our idea. You’re in a plane, it’s crashing, and there’s only one parachute. We asked ourselves if the theme was too morbid, but then decided that if we just made the game out and out ridiculous, we’d be okay.

So off we went, myself using my familiar environment of C# and Monogame via VS2012, Gredgie sticking with the ever-faithful Photoshop and his Wacom.

We spent the first day designing the plane, using a cut-away internal view and creating a tilemap using Tiled. We put the player in control of the plane’s pilot starting in the cockpit at the front of the plane and with an exit door at the rear. We went for a right to left scroll direction simply because that’s how I was imagining it in my head.

By adding parallax-scrolling clouds in the background, and random camera shake, the scene started to get pretty immersive. Then I had the idea of rotating the plane at random to put it in a nosedive, and to introduce sliding physics in the direction of the slope. All easy stuff to do, but it contributed to the feel greatly.

I took a small amount of code from a previous game to deal with animation using Spine and added the plane’s passengers (one for each of the seats laid out on the map). I then added a simple punch attack that knocks back the player/the AI passengers. The AI was then given four distinct states:

• Panic (default behaviour)
• Attacking/being attacked
• Going for the parachute (when they get close enough)
• Going for the exit (if they have the parachute)

The aim of the game was set ins tone: Grab the parachute, and get to the rear exit. Knock out the plane’s passengers to give yourself time to escape. The AI all follow the same MO.

Day two was all about setting up the intro and outro of the game, and adding as much graphical polish as possible. The game has three possible endings:

• The plane crashes, nobody lives
• One of the AI gets the parachute and opens the door (everyone else is sucked out of the plane and dies)
• The player gets the parachute and opens the door (the player floats to safety while everyone else dies)

On Monday evening, I had a few hours left so I added some beat-em-up style weapons. We ran out of time for Gredgie to finish the graphics before submission though, so the weapons and parachute objects are still pretty much placeholder. That’s the only bit about the game I’m not 100% happy with, but time is time.

Response to the game has been awesome thus far, and now I’m busy keeping up with rating everyone that’s kind enough to leave a comment. I’m pretty chuffed with it to be honest – it’s short, fun and darkly humorous.

Play our game, dammit!

The Team:

Drone! is the first Ludum Dare entry of two aspiring Game Enthusiasts/Designers/Programmers/Artists from Austria.

The Difficulty with ideas, the box and time pressure

The things we agreed on were to use sprites, pixel art and pixel lightning. Technics both of us had very little, to no experience beforehand. When we first read the theme it took us about 12 hours until we had some ideas to get startet. We tried so hard to think outside the box that we were not able to come up with ideas that translated well into a game. Thinking outside the box – while having limited time is very hard!
The final game was a step back to the basics. You only get one minute to get to the rescue pod (which was a good way to keep the scope as small as possible). The only “twist” on the theme was that the drone has to get No.1 (the char with a big one digit on the breast – how smart 😉 ) and rescue him.

The Game Mechanics

The player has one minute to navigate the Character (1) using W (up) A (left) S (down) D (right) to the end of the level. The way is blocked with closed doors which are opened at consoles. While standing in front of a console the player has to hold the Space bar and enter a random generated code – consisting of the letters W A S D.
If the code is entered correctly the door opens and the player is able to advance.
To add pressure to the player he is also attacked by random numbers of aliens. In order to defeat the aliens the player has to navigate around and target them with his rescuer – the drone – using a left mouse click on the alien.

The Problems

Everything in the game was created from scratch. Every line of code and every asset. We also tried the new unity features like the animator or the 2D feature, but they dont support pixellighting and our shader skills were not advanced enough to come up with a shader solution. Therefore we faced a lot of problems while working and implementing stuff. We also had no real workflow or pipeline defined. Which let to nearly every task taking longer than expected. There are a lot of things we had ready but couldn`t be implemented in order to submit in time.
Like Sound and particle effects – for more player feedback – or animations.

Conclusion

We are very happy with the final game.
We also know that the game has issues – which would not be there if we have had a better time and workflow management.
If we are able to define and mangage those things better in the future, we are able to create more polished games and maybe submit them before the last 2 minutes (pfff – it was realy close this time)

Final words

We worked a lot over the weekend but we also had a ton of fun and we learned even more.
The Ludum Dare community is awesome. Reading the first positive comments is an incredible feeling – thanks to everyone!!!

Happy holidays and see you in April!

Alfi and Lukas
NoNoBattle

play

I am quite excited about how my first foray into development with Unity came out.

So far, my abstract little game has been well recieved. It features randomly generated creatures and music that I think gel really well with the theme. The only thing I wasn’t able to get done in time was the scrolling background particles that make it easier to see that you can move. Was really easy to do, just put it off until last minute, but I added it in a post compo version. Check it out and rate if you like!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=7245

The Bombay Intervention is a collaboration between Jason Mize and mildmojo. Mildmojo’s completed a few Ludum Dares before, but this was Jason’s first. Jason took care of music, writing, and shared design duty with mildmojo, who coded the game in Unity 4.3 (javascript) and composed some of the sprites.

DESIGN in the abstract

Set, a card game about pattern matching

You play as a time traveler, working your way through a spotted history on missions to clean up the worst of the (fictional) disasters.

Your view of the past is through an event wall that shows you when events will occur during your trip. These events could be as mundane as a bus driver heading to work or as important as a world leader coming to power; you only know that patterns in the wall lead to catastrophes.

If you freeze several events in the same general place and time, you prune that timeline out of history. Prune enough contributing timelines and you’ll find that the crisis collapses without causal support.

The original kernel of a game idea was inspired by the card game, Set.

What went well

The game features a dynamic soundtrack. Jason wrote and recorded three original pieces of music, each of which has four parts (see his description below). When you begin a mission, you only hear a single part. The other parts are selected at random and added to the soundscape when you complete a stage by making a match. We weren’t sure it would work, but it’s really exciting to hear in action.

Gameplay

Unity’s new 2D sprite system makes it trivial to turn images into game objects and, even better, compose layered sprites from lots of sub-sprites, each of which can then be independently addressed in code. Each timer prefab is a background square, dark text, light text, and a flag, all of which can be controlled separately if needed. It’s so much easier to do this stuff visually in Unity’s editor.

mildmojo: I typically work in languages with dynamic typing, so I picked Unity’s javascript syntax. While not type-free, it saved an untold amount of C# ceremony and let me just get things done. Heresy to some, but it makes using coroutines and anonymous function callbacks (aka lambdas/delegates) ridiculously easy.

I’m pretty happy with the simple ShuffleDeck class I threw together for randomization. It works like a deck of cards; you shove a bunch of stuff into it and call draw() to get one or more back at random. Like drawing from a deck, you won’t see items repeated again until you shuffle() or you draw() the last item and trigger an automatic shuffle. Some people do this for dice-based games like Settlers of Catan to avoid streaks or “hot” random events that keep occurring. I wrote it to pick mission names (seen at the end of a level), but ended up using it for country flags, music choice, and picking parts within a song to play and layer. Big win.

Tweened animations are the easiest way to add polish. Tween the hell out of everything, then start stacking the tweens. iTween worked well enough.

Jason Mize:  I recorded all the music by plugging my Yamaha DGX-640 directly into an iPad and using Garageband.  I’m traditionally a guitar player and would have recorded via either direct line or mic.  The keyboard gave me a much cleaner sound and made mixing much simpler.   It completely removed troubles that I’ve had in the past with background noise, static, and fuzz.  I made the drum tracks with Garageband’s built in drum machine.  It was easy to use but lacked complexity.  I played the other tracks myself.

Since each 2 minute song needed to be divided into 4 tracks, each of which could stand on it’s own or be layered randomly with the other 3 tracks, I composed the pieces as jams with short melodic lines with variations.  My logic was that if I made the melodic phrasing too long, then having the track added in the middle of the phrase would be confusing to the ear – the listener wouldn’t have any musical environment to make sense of where the tune was.  I think I made the right call there.  Layering the tracks in random order worked even better than I hoped.

Initially I had trouble making all the tracks capable of standing on their own.  Once I realized that I needed to pair any tracks that were overly eclectic or melodic with a grounding bass line composed of roots, the whole thing came together.

What didn’t go well

mildmojo: Getting out of the Software Architect frame of mind. I should’ve just thrown global scripts on the camera like everybody else does rather than using generic class singletons. These work great until you need to use coroutines or iTween callbacks. Coroutines only work on classes descended from MonoBehaviour, not ScriptableObject, and the result is that functions with `yield` calls are just skipped. No errors, they just don’t run. Super frustrating to debug.

Lining up the sprites in a grid was unnecessarily obtuse. Let me save you a whole bunch of time: get a sprite’s bounding box in world coordinates from myGameObject.renderer.bounds. Put your camera’s lower left corner at (0,0) and get the screen dimensions in world coordinates from Camera.main.ViewportToWorldPoint. With that, you should have all the info you need to position things in code.

iTween is so focused on GameObjects that it doesn’t know how to take a callback to run on anything else and doesn’t support lambda functions; you have to have a real function defined in a behavior script attached to a real GameObject. So for a while I was kicking off tweens and using `yield WaitForSeconds` to pause until the tweens were finished rather than using iTween’s `oncomplete` callback. I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS. HERE BE BUGS.

I found a workaround, though: have iTween call back to a function that can run a function object, and pass the anonymous function as an argument through iTween.

Jason Mize:  This was my first game jam and I completely underestimated how much time everything I needed to get done would take. A lot of graphics that I spent time in the beginning thinking through and planning in my head didn’t get made because the music and text writing took longer than anticipated. Next time I think I’ll have a better idea of how to pare the basic project down to just the minimum needed to succeed and not think about anything other than that until it is built. Then move on to embellishments.

What didn’t make it

Jason wrote a lot of extra phrases to be shown at the start of each mission and when each stage is completed, but we didn’t have time to code up the UI to use them.

We ran out of time to do ramping difficulty over multiple chained missions. The idea was to start with a small board with only one flag, then expand the board and use two flags, then require matches to match a provided flag, then start scrolling the rows of timers so that you might lose a locked timer if you wait too long to pair it with others. We expected to have at least 10 missions by twiddling those factors. The mission in our entry is middle-difficulty, maybe 4 of 10.

There’s lots of room for UI paint. Plenty of room for visual polish.

♥ §§§ ♥

Please come on over to The Bombay Intervention! Let us know if you stop by, and tell us what you think.

If you haven’t yet, give the game a try!

Play it here!

Nothing to say, really. It was a very busy Sunday. =)

Play it here!

Here are a few postmorterm thoughts on my game, E pluribus unum:

The idea: Including the last two LD’s, this is the third game I’ve ever made. In my first two, the part I failed to accomplish was creating something that was fun to play (more specifically, something that resembled a game). So I needed something that was both simple, and had a clear game mechanic that was enjoyable to play. It took about two hours of staring at the screen until I roughed out the concept of the game where you match multiple patterns by clearing a grid.

The name: The hardest thing, by far, was coming up with a name. I knew that I did not want to use the word “one” in the title. I also wanted the name to communicate how I had integrated the theme. I then thought about the Latin phrase “Ludum Dare”, and then it clicked: I know a Latin phrase with the word one! The translation of E pluribus unum is “Out of many, one”, which fit in perfectly with my game mechanic of creating these patterns out of the one surface. I then immediately started doubting myself thinking that at least 20 other games would use the same name. Ultimately, it was a lot of worrying over nothing, as I’m the only one with that name.

Development: Unity. Despite Unity crashing on me about 50 times during the Jam, I love the program. There’s simply no way I could have made this game without it. I do c# dev for a living, which helped a ton with the scripting. Also, it’s free. Ridiculous. I used their 2D tooling for the first time, and for me it worked great.

Gameplay: Even with the stated goal of keeping it simple, I kept worrying that it was way too simple, both in mechanic and scope. One thing I focused a lot of time on was making sure that the act of clearing a tile from the grid felt satisfying. The random tones and the particle effects were tweaked until I felt they were just right. The interactions when matching a pattern or completing the level were important as well, as I wanted it to acknowledge the player accomplishment. I worried about the simplicity so much that I intentionally left out any tutorial or hints, beyond the level design. I knew quickly that a person’s ability to fully “get” the game would be if they could clear level 3. In my playtesting, some people got it immediately, and others took a few minutes.

The font: It’s not a font. I made every letter by hand in Photoshop. I’m dumb.

Reaction: I’ve been thrilled with the reaction. Some of the quotes in my comments look like paid endorsements: “a real winner and I’ve never seen anything like it. Bravo!” and “That’s how you design a goddamn game!”

My sincere thanks to everyone who has played so far, and if you haven’t, please take a moment to check it out!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=22624

Hi folks, like a lot of people here, I wanted to make a quick post-mortem about our Jam entry, Nobag.

Play Nobag

Nobag is a game about Nehandertal men which are stuck in a cave and can only take one item with them.

The game is basically a top/down dungeon game like zelda. You choose your item and you explore the dungeon, avoiding traps, killing monsters and finding keys. One of the important feature of the game is that you can play with your friends! In fact, the game support local multiplayer up to 4 players with Xbox pads.

About the team, we are all intern at the same game company and we wanted to take part in this Ludum Dare.

When we were brainstorming about the concept, one of the main aspect was to have a multiplayer game where each player has his specific role and has to cooperate. We create the game with this aspect in mind and we are proud about the game (even if he needs some polish).

Now that our presentation is done, let’s talk about what went right and what went wrong during the creation of the game.

What went wrong:

• The time: We started with a lot of idea to implement in the game. But the more time we spent on it, the less we could integrate. So we had to wisely choose the content we wanted to implement in order to have the best experience possible.
• Working monday: Still about the lack of time, we all had to work Monday, so we were all thinking about making the most saturday and sunday and doing the less possible monday evening. This day lacking clearly held us from implementing things like feedbacks.
• Working through internet and not at the same time: We surely were a big team on this project. But not everyone could stay during the whole production. The effect was that the beginning was very quick and the end slow and the last night, we were finishing it through Skype.So it was sometimes hard to understand each other about what to do.

What went right:

• An organized team: We have the chance to work in the same game company, and we all have our role in it. This allowed us to have a natural synergy  during the project, where everyone knew his role and the role of the others.
• Good choices: The only way to fight the lack of time is to make some concessions. So at certain points we had to make choices like choosing which trap, which monster or even between randomly generate rooms or multiplayer. A chance we had was to make the good choices, choices that could keep the experience of the game even limited content.
• Your comments: The best thing for us surely is getting all the critics and comments we have about the game. We just want to say thank you for everyone who tried or will try the game and even will share his feelings about it.

Thank you for reading, you guys are awesome.

See ya next LD!

You have waited long enough, Your Journey Begins Here

People,

My daily routine is back, but one thing has changed: I am playing my own game with a surprisingly frequency during the work time.

However, one thing that friends said to me personally and LD feedbacks told me is this: why didnt you put a mute button! They are also playing for long sessions, sometimes as a background window, and it would be very very very useful a mute button. At least for the music.

I totally agree. I really missed that. SORRY!

I will invest on the game, including new features and bugs reported and name it as Enhanced edition this next weekend. So thanks for your feedback.

keep praying

regards,

Bruno Massa

Gamenific

I created some extra nasty teaser for my Ludum Dare contribution, just to give you a chance to check it before downloading, trying and (I hope so) rating.

Watch it here!

Hey there, we found there were some game-breaking bugs that were causing some people to not be able to play our wonderful game!!!

Never fear ! We have abolished all bugs and have an updated link to the game.

Try it out!

Luminess Download