The 28th Ludum Dare has been the first for me. I really wanted to attend this game jam and now I did and this is the first huge win for me. I built something in 48 hours, specifically a video game about choice, a hostile environment, and lack of resources.

Don’t forget to play and rate “Loop Desert”.

What went right

• I finished the game!
• I loved to use the Crafty.js engine as the main tool to develop the game, I would thank for this @starwed and @kevinsimper two of the most productive Crafty.js contributors.
• I was happy with the final concept and I conceived it quickly enough.

What went wrong

• I used pixel art as I’m not an artist and it was the only way for me to get the job done in 48 hours.
• I didn’t publish anything (posts, timelapse) during development because I can’t manage coding and sharing together.
• I would have done more work on music and sound effects but I hadn’t enough time.

Note: I made this game at H-Farm, one of the official gatherings of the jam, the only one in Italy. I’d like to thank Hackatron for the organization of the event, great job guys.

Tags: Crafty, crafty.js, desert, html5, LD28, loop desert, Postmortem ld28, you only get one

I find its a little odd to make a post compo version considering the game doesn’t have any game breaking bugs in it. But none the less, I really wanted to do it, because I felt like there’s a lot of easy little touches to make it a much more rewarding experience.

This was my first Unity game, and while I fooled around a little in Unity before the jam, I didn’t really expect to make a point and click game, which isn’t a genre I’ve developed before, and thus had a few tricks to learn.

As of now, the post compo version features:

* A box behind the hover text for actions, which makes more readable under many conditions.

* A neeeattttooooo possession animation, as well as a floating animation.

* Less chance of being lost at sea.

* A fixed text box.

* The bucket list pops up and makes a noise when you complete an item, which creates a much better a much more obvious sense of feedback and accomplishment.

Game jams can be brutal, head bashing, long hours til your eyes refuse to stay open but you force them to anyway, experiences. They can also be extremely rewarding and fun and you will probably learn something along the way, or a lot of somethings.

One Minute To War Title Screen

I started this comp quite a bit late, struggling with coming up with a game that fit the theme. Idea after idea was scrapped, as I just was not feeling them. With 23 hours left in the 48 hour compo, I finally came up with something I was happy with and could run with. I began my official comp work sometime around 9pm on Saturday. I actually slept from 3am til 9am, feeling like I would need the rest before the big push. After waking, I worked right up to the deadline.

For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to learn a completely new engine/language at the same time. I’d never used Haxe, FlashPunk, or HaxePunk before, and after reading a blog on the Ludum Dare page talking about several different engines, I decided to try HaxePunk. I went through the process of installing it, installing FlashDevelop, and running through the basic tutorials, and then was off to writing my game!

Learning a new language under extreme time pressure definitely has it’s downsides. Sometimes I struggled with the most basic functions that anyone seasoned in a language would know instantly, but due to the time crunch, I had no time to try and figure out how to do them properly. Example: I wanted to write a for loop, assumed it was like other languages, and after a couple of minutes gave up and made a poor mans for loop out of a while loop. Another example: I never figured out how to properly get the current time passed in millisecs, so I wrote a pretty hacky time system. It got the job done at least.

One of the biggest downsides was the total lack of experience with what features did or did not work in the various platforms the language could output to. Text didn’t scale right in Flash, and the random number generator failed completely in Html5. The Windows version worked for some peeps, and not others. I ended up baking the text into images and attaching those images at runtime to random pieces of paper, where-as I had planned on just having the text appear in-line as strings in the game and hiding the codes in the text.

On the upside, I feel like I can easily write new code in HaxePunk now with no fear. The language is really well put together, and felt super easy to use. It error reported quite well into the compile console( I never got it compiling within FlashDevelop, and frankly just didn’t have time to bother ). Also, I love more code based languages, so it was really nice to not have to enter an IDE and use drag and drop features to write a game. In the end, I ended up with a game, and HaxePunk really didn’t let me down.

One Minute To War Gameplay Screen

As for the game, there is so much I wanted to do, but with only a little more than half a day at best of real dev time on it, I failed to implement them. You cannot flip pages over, as I intended, the codes float/lag behind the pages making it really easy to find them, and there is no real end, the game just gets harder and harder. I wanted to add different types and sizes of pages, sticky notes, business cards, and books. Also, some levels were intended to have keys you had to find and place into the key-slots, as well as multiple codes you had to enter in a specific order. The theme was wrapped in as you only get one minute to find the code and then you only get one chance to press the abort button or you fail. I think in a further implementation of the game, the 1 minute rule would change with the levels. As of this writing, I have no clue how I would end it, and I’m not sure I ever even thought about it during the contest. It’s more like older games from the arcade era, they just go and go until you fail, but I’m not sure I’d want that to be how this one plays out.

Overall, I feel alright with what I made and I had a lot of fun learning HaxePunk. I’d love to expand upon it somewhat more, though I’m not sold that it is a solid long-term mechanic. Game Jam games for me are an outlet to explore and experiment with creating gameplay experiences I don’t normally get to create.

You can checkout the game on the ludum dare site here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=26768

Thanks for reading and keep game deving!

@Squibbons

This Ludum Dare was a strange one for me. I spent the entirety of the first day just… making games. I lacked ideas and simply made whatever sounded good at the time. This vicious cycle continued for about a day until the (seemingly obvious) “you only get one bullet idea” was suggested.

What went right:

• We finished it! That’s the most important thing of all to me.
• The game lacks any major bugs.
• Multiplayer is fully functional and fun (in my opinion anyway).

What went wrong:

• Originally the game was going to have a mode dedicated local multiplayer mode where one person would use the keyboard and one would use a controller. Unfortunately I don’t own a controller so it came as a shock to me when I heard that the controller support I added in was supposedly broken.
• I feel like the game lacks polish. Especially with the GUI (this was later fixed in the post-compo version).

Overall I enjoyed this Ludum Dare simply because I managed to make quite a few games (although all but one were scrapped) and because I feel that I’ve created a solid entry.

Entry

Post-Compo Version

“And the theme is… You only get one”

“Seriously? We’ve chosen THIS?” When I opened Twitter last Saturday morning all I saw was tweets that complete resonated with my own thoughts: there was SO many awesome themes and we have chosen something… something… argh… “I can’t even!” But the panic attack didn’t last for long. After almost 30 minutes of brainstorming I came up with the idea I always wanted to implement — to play with parallel worlds. Last time playing with them led me to light depression (which led me to mini-Ludum Dare and opened Jam Yesvember).

What went wrong:

• I got sick. Seriously, I was waiting for LD for so long and I just got sick right on Friday! That’s why game maybe doesn’t look complete or something. I felt pretty bad, so I couldn’t work 24/7 (which is bad, so maybe sickness saved me…). But I played guitar, watched some movies and had a great time with my family. I don’t even know if it can be count as “wrong”.

What went right:

• Everything else. Seriously. I don’t have something epic that I can blame now for being an obstacle to the glorious ultra-indie-leet-game. IDE was ready, project setup took me only 5 minutes, code writing was fun, testing was fun. Maybe I was too slow when I made graphics (but, hey, it’s me, I always slow at GFX :D). Most important: I had fun. Because, this is why we are here, aren’t we?

Summary:

• The game looks exactly how I imagined it. It’s, maybe, the first jam project, where no features were cut before the deadline. Maybe it’s not ultra-fun, but it proves (to me, mostly) that this concept is very alive, promising and can be something greater.
• And most important: it was my first big Ludum Dare. I was afraid of a deadline-failure (especially when HTML5-version refused to build at first, and then had serious music issues and problems with Google Drive hosting), but after submission I felt very… very clean, very happy. I did it. I. Did. It.

Aftermath:

• Right now I don’t know what I’m going to do with parallelsync. Honestly, after all the comments I got under the entry, I’d really like to develop it to something bigger. Because, why not?

You can visit my entry’s page via this link. Thank you very much, hope you’ll enjoy it. Have fun! Oh, and I’d be happy if you rate it and leave a little comment for me. I love the feedback.

My Ludum Dare jam entry: The Selene Project

Youtube short teaser video

One of the ideas I have had for ages was a game about meaningful choices… choices that would have real impact. I started mulling over ideas and eventually landed with the concept where player needs to think what kind of society he wishes to build.

I tried to remain supportive: whichever choices player would make, she would be understood. I kept questions prettyedgy and gave “only Yes/No answers” on purpose. I wanted player to think on which side she is leaning into, and make her pick based on that. I mulled over thinking if there should be “maybe” or “no comment” choices but eventually decided to simply keep it Yes/No and then have some confirming questions to test if player really thinks that way.

It was also in my hopes to provide some questions that might get people to think their own behavior in our real, existing world.

Naturally I had grand plans about sooo many different endings, but at least there’s a few really different ones available. Due time limitations I had to decide what would be really important and this left me with 3 layers: there’s 2 totally different paths, then one of these paths has several generic outcomes depending on what you choose and eventually there’s additional layer that can be reached only by providing 4-5 very specific answers.

I’m pretty proud of the project I did. The time schedule was soooo challenging… but I reached all my goals so I’m very happy about this (game concept, story, meaningful questions, voice acting, different endings, and some pretty nice space environment — and most importantly: people seem to enjoy the game).

The 28th Ludum Dare 48 is my first game-jam. I decided at the stroke of midnight and after seeing the theme that this this time I would finally be competing. The experience has been a great eye-opener for me about what it takes to make a game in any length of time, and it’s been a great win for me to meet with so many people that were willing to give my game time and say something nice or constructive about my work. You can find my game here, if you missed it or would still like to give it a go.

What went right:

• I finished the game in time for the competition It was a busy weekend for me with a birthday party to go to and work to get done. I got plenty of sleep still and managed to finish the game in what I thought was a fair amount of time. I wouldn’t say the game took more than around 16 hours of my 48, which includes all art, music, sounds, and programming.
• I decided to use GM:S I started the project in Unity and just decided to switch to GM:S which I thought would expedite the process of making it. I was right. I think the game would have taken a lot more time in Unity, fidgeting around with their 2D support and getting the code right on first go.
• The idea I thought of a lot of mechanic-based ideas in the beginning, most of which were implemented by other developers numerous times. When I thought of this idea, I decided to go with it. It’s not really something I thought I would make, either. It’s not a completely simple game mechanically, so there was a lot more programming involved than I would have liked. Still, people were intrigued by the idea and I got a lot of support on Twitter for it.
• Mood and visuals I got a lot of complements on the look of the game and people liked the music and sound effects. Funnily enough, the game wasn’t pixel-art in the beginning and was instead a more comic style shown below. I decided to try Rezoner for music creation and it worked in a pinch. I created the music in 15 minutes and two sounds were created with it as well. BFXR was used for my sounds and worked great.
• I tested my boundaries I suck at any sort of random generation, and I needed to use a lot of cross-referencing and code to complete the game. Some part of me would have rather leaned on simpler mechanics like built-in physics or a pre-made platforming engine, but I didn’t My code ended up making up the whole thing and it was really tough for me to figure out how to solve some of the problems I ran into, but also really rewarding.

What went wrong:

• The dialogue system Close to finishing my game, the dialogue system seemed to be working great. I was designing something that would give each character their own specific dialogue while also offering hints at the killer. I was really happy with how it was turning out, but time ran out, and the system was repeating dialogue between characters. Because of the mechanics this meant it was sometimes very difficult to find the correct killer of the captain.
• Not user-friendly I consider my game to have a lot more rules than a lot of jam entries. I’m actually okay with this quality to the game. The problem in user-friendliness comes with a lack of an in-game tutorial and a unified selection system. The game displays some selections differently from others. As a designer, I should have applied the process of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), but I was in a rush in the last hours.  This is the number one complaint I got, and one of the first things I will fix if I decide to go any further with the game.

What I would do differently:

• Spend more time on the competition, or move to the jam My problems could have been fixed with more time. I haven’t uploaded a post-comp version because I’ve been busy too. I didn’t regulate enough time to fix the dialogue system or add in a tutorial so the game remains imperfect. In my spare time I will fix it up, but I knew going in it was going to be rough and perhaps should have settled with the jam instead of the competition. I had other ideas about what the game would be, but had to cut them short because of my time. Clues would be included and the scoring system would have been deeper – all the wouldofs in the world don’t really matter, though.
• Spend more time on prep some of the issues I had would have been fixed if I just expounded more for myself on how I was going to handle the mechanics. A lot of it, for me, was “Shoot, I still need to have x system.” Then I was rushing to finish that. I think good prep is the foundation for good design in general. This seems especially true in game design.
  
• Make something with less code focus / use more examples I wrote a lot of the game with my own code, which isn’t great. If there’s such a thing as programmer art, then there’s certainly artist programing, which is what I felt I was doing. The systems held for the most part and I have few true bugs as my dialogue problems come more from design issues than poorly written code; however, in the future I might try to lean on other open libraries so I can finish things faster and make sure things work how I need them to.

Final words: 

I got so much more support for my game than I ever thought I would. Indie Statik had my game in a list of featured LD48 games, some cool people retweeted it, and I got a lot of love here on Ludum Dare’s page. In a time when I’m really questioning my ability to make games, it really put a smile on my face and gave me a lot of drive to work harder next time. Even if the game didn’t turn out how I wanted, even if it wasn’t as fun as I expected, I’m still glad I just made something instead of saying I was making something all the time. I have to take this time to THANK LUDUM DARE AND THE GREAT DEVS HERE for giving me a great time and something to be proud of.

Hello!

So I made this game called Underbyte for the jam this year. Once again I was ridiculously ambitious, missed the 48 hour deadline and submitted it to the Jam at silly-o-clock with a stinking headache and amazing sense of accomplishment. I’m really proud of this one as it’s been a bit of an end-of-year Wot I Learned Doing Gamejams test for myself, and I think it’s fun!

The good:

* Overall I was aiming to do some specific things this jam, and focus on that mystery ‘x’ factor known as ‘feeling’. Manic platform shooters seem to be in my blood, they’re great fun to make and I already had a crack at it earlier in the year with “Invertigo”, which wasn’t too great in hindsight. Overall I’d learned a lot of tricks about particle effects, animation, knockback, screen-shake and control tightening that I wanted to apply to something, before diving in to a fuller title in a similar vein.

* The pixels are better! I started this year with a complete lack of knowledge of how to do tiles, and over the jams I’ve been slowly getting my head around things. Not to say the art is anything more than “barely functional”, but I’m on the path to getting my arty skills up to speed. Maybe the first step of the path, but it’s a start!

* Music + sound. People seem to love the soundtrack, which makes me very happy indeed!

* Serendipity. I stumbled across the smash-two-blocks-together-to-destroy-tiles mechanic by complete accident early on, and thought it worked really well! Further investigations neeeded for sure.

* Stencyl. Ooh I love me some middleware, and I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this (much less so quickly) without Stencyl being a very neat engine! Thanks Team Stencyl!

The bad:

* Level design. I’m getting better at this for sure after cranking out loads for my last entry, but the flow still isn’t quite right for me.

* The animation. Yeahhhh… not my strong suit. C-, must try harder!

* Theme intergration. I originally wanted to put in some ‘?’ blocks that gave you random power ups, but only ever one of each. Then I ran out of time trying to desperately polish the game for release, and just didn’t get to implement the feature properly. I stuck in a key to activate a one-time invincibility. It’s crowbarred in, but it kinda works, I really wish I had left time to implement something much more interesting!

Anyway, thanks for all the kind words that have been left so far! It’s already turned up in a few roundups on NAG Online and IndieStatik which is so awesome. And someone’s done a playthrough already which is linked to in the first post, thank you very much to the person that uploaded it! I have plans to keep on going with this game and turn it in to a more complete adventure, so keep an eye out for it!

Oh yeah, play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=20697

My goal for the jam was to simply participate and try to complete the most basic thing possible. I had not yet made any finished games and am still learning programming so I knew finishing a game of any kind was going to be a challenge.

DAY 01:

The Jam started at around 2pm on Saturday (I am in New Zealand) and I got started at around 4:30pm as I had been at a Gnostic meetup for most of the day. The theme was announced and it was an ambiguous one:

‘You only get one’

My initial Idea came fast – within the first 10 minutes of starting: An atmospheric auto-runner with a Rastafarian theme. I quickly sketched out how the game would look:

I envisioned an epic widescreen slo-motion shot of a tiny character running across the screen with a trailing Ethiopian flag behind him and holding a crucifix scepter and crown. Most things I make have pyramids so a chucked a few of them in there to create a psychedelic African landscape. The specifics of what would happen in the game other than running was still a mystery but I decided to just dive into Gamemaker and start creating it.

I started in Gamemaker by just getting some blocks moving. I created the ground object and built a crude level including the pyramids.

– Ground Object

Next I programmed another block that would be the character. This was relatively easy as I have been doing alot of this already in my Shark Slam game and all I really needed to add was a jump button and some gravity and collision detection. When the character was moving sufficiently I added in some temporary graphics for the sky and made a rising sun.

– Rising Sun

I made most of the graphics in Gamemaker and with the mouse. I thought I might go back later and do some better ones but decided to finish the game first and do it only if I had time. Although part of me was really interested in achieving an abstract beauty by just using really raw pixel art.

Next I spent way too long trying to get the aspect ratio right. I wasn’t fully conversed with how Gamemaker’s view system worked and ended up with some warped screens. I noticed most of my problem was due to an optical illusion that made my square character look squashed as it fell out of the sky. This caused me a lot of headaches until I realized it was correct after all.

Once the aspect ratio was sorted I moved onto the next crucial component – the drifting flag. At this point I was starting to get tired as I had had and early morning. I got a particle system going for the flag but it wasn’t working correctly. I was trying to get it to look like it was waving in the wind and also had physics for when the player moved. This turned out to be a major pain. I tried for about 2 hours to get it working how I wanted but it just wasn’t happening. I was getting really tired and frustrated and suddenly felt a panic coming over me. I felt like I was going to fail and wouldn’t be able to finish anything in 48hours. I had a feeling like I really hadn’t learned anything this year and I was useless and this jam was really showing my how incompetent I really was. I wanted to give up. I wanted to quit.

I went to bed defeated.

To be continued tomorrow…

Check out the final game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29051

Hi I’m Ranko and I made YOGO Derpina

The Good

– The game made people laugh. We have this expression ‘vesela‘ which roughly means ‘merry‘ it’s sort of internal joke among my crew, meaning that one of the most important attributes of a game is to radiate merry feelings, to be uplifting and charming in that intangible way that pertains to a product weather its poorly or greatly made.

– Solo. I made it in under 6 hrs after 48hrs of fiddling with bugs and real life.

– No coding. I haven’t the faintest about coding, scripting and the such. Yet thanx to the software I used, game was still made!

– Deeper than expected. While my intention was to show simple life’s truth in allegoric game, strategies players employed show emergent paralells between this game and reality. Some players tried to push Derpina in the corner, but as in love you can’t treat your partner like that. You have to deal with her problems, not push her away. As in life, this strategy proves fatal, because balls bouncing ricochet off Derpina much more, bringing downfall to the easy way out. As in love, in this game you have to give it your full attention and full effort.

The Bad

– Features lost. Trying to fix the bugs and failing at that cost me more than 48hrs so many features were cut off, making the game a bit plain. Some complained about it being too easy, and yea I could have made more levels or thought of more features (like Derpina moving around by herself). I also wanted to make silver and golden balls change roles as decoy and real thing depending on conversatino you wuold have with Derpina before each level. Ah well… it goes to “Derpina 2 The Return of Derpina” files I guess…

– Interaction. As a writer (my primary skill) I tend to rely on the power of words much too often. Games are about interaction and ideas are much better communicated in exchange between the player and the game. Again, if I would have more time I’d make nice interactive intro, maybe an interactive tutorial or smthg.

– No web version. Alas lack of coding skills means I had to rely on dev app’s only export feature – Windows (.exe). Would have been nice to have at least Flash version as well…

Kind regards, see you next time,

Ranko

Usually when the theme is announced, which is 9PM in my timezone, I try to think up an idea,  get some rest, and start work in the morning. This time, however, I had several other events that I need to attend, so I started  around 10 PM Friday night on my idea.  I’ve always wanted to do a gardening/grow game, and I felt it would fit the theme pretty well, so that became my task for the next 48 hours.  My idea was that you would get this seed in the mail with a letter explaining that it is a unique one-of-a-kind seed which, when grown, could produce some unique fruit/berries that might have very interesting properties.  I really wanted the plant to be in 3D, but after playing with Blender for the first hour or so, I gave up on it. Trying to get the plant to grow using a 3D model was something that I did not think I could tackle in 48 hours.  With the 3D experiment a bust, I went to Paint .Net and began to create my 2D art assets.

While I’m not an artist, I felt ok with how the graphics turned out. It has sort of a lo-fi old C64 game feel to it.  I ended up losing a bit of time fixing a few bugs I found in some 3rd party libraries including one that appeared about 5 minutes before the submission deadline. That was a bit stressful, but I got it sorted out.

The stories, 2 for each berry type, ended up being the most work.  I first wrote down a list of berries you could grow along with a couple of sentences about what happened when you either sent it to the lab for examination, or ate it. Then I proceeded to add each of them to the game fleshing out each story which, in a few cases, got pretty long. In the end, I managed to get 15 berries into the game. That’s 30 separate stories. A few of them are pretty short, but that’s still not bad for the time given. Click HERE to play/rate “The Seed”, and check out the video below to see a time-lapse of the game being created.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KikEmgVzRdo

Play the game here!

So we did it. For our very first participation, that’s quite a success. 72 hours (a bit less because we had to attend school on Monday) was shorter than expected and, as any newbie I think, we did a lot of poor choices.
Yet the game is out, it’s kind of fun to play and it was a very nice experience overall.

Common! Play with us!

What went right?

• The timed roguelike concept turned out to be funnier than expected. It was our only valid idea when we ran out of time to choose a game design. We had thought of “you can only get one true love” where you’d be in a room with a lot of people and you’d have to reduce your choice to one; stuff like that, but nothing seemed really fun to play… Turns out that adding a time pressure on the classic genre makes it all new again, and most people we’ve seen play were screaming when they had only a few seconds left to the counter.
• The hall of fame/Score system has started a new competition inside our classroom, with amazing scores! If we had an online leaderboard (we had enough time to add it to the game), the emulation would have been even more active.
• The stuff system with no inventory and the fast-choice system is great, and totally in line with the rest of the fast-paced experience.
• No major game breaking bug that we know of, at least. And that is some sort of miracle given the fact that 30 minutes before release, the game crashed on an 8th of the equipment.
• The monster variety was really a big worry during the development, we had only 3 sprites for the enemies… Turns out that displaying their equipment was enough to forget about this limitation.

What went wrong?

• Coding. Before we started, we had settled on GameMaker Studio. It should have allowed us 3 to work on the game together in a perfect world filled with unicorns… The harsh reality made us go back: we lacked of experience with GM:S and during the first night we switched to Pure Basic. The bad part is only one member of our 3 men crew had any experience with programming (and none with game), and a lot of poor code design choices were made: we ended up with the worst code ever. But at least the game was done.
• The shield mechanic does not work, and the reason is obvious: you’ve got to wait in a time limited situation. Pretty rubbish.
• A huge lack of feedback, that is mainly a time issue, but most of our feedbacks couldn’t make it to the release; you don’t know when you are short on life or on time, and death is especially surprising.
• Our workflow is pretty much non-existent : we had nothing prepared, no file sharing system and not even a complete development pipeline…
• Balancing SUCKS. We couldn’t do any testing till the game started to be a bit playable (in the very last 4 hours), and most of our formulas were not even remotely working. We settled on too-easy and almost game breaking ones by default, but we now know how to think them. Next time we’ll do better, for sure.
• Level generation is boring. This fact is counterbalanced by the fact that no-one in our team had any idea of how to make a level generator when ours was coded, but we should have done some in-depth studies on existing generators before rushing to code.
• The controls, especially on windows with a keyboard are not working. We should have tested it to avoid using alt as default button (you can use wasd and q/e/space as an alternate and much better solution).

Aaaand that’s all for us. We are amazed that you guys played our little game. Many, many thanks for that; and our next participation will be much better, I swear.

Till then, we are going to redo rogue rush with all the cut-out features ;3

Cya next time

The SchizoKoa Team

This entry was posted on Friday, December 20th, 2013 at 11:40 am and is filed under LD #28. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

We’ve been tracking my Ludum Dare results in order to weaken our strengths this Ludum Dare.

We got off to a bad start in Ludum Dare 23 Tiny World with an embarrassingly respectable 4.14 in Graphics.  Well, we’re not respectable!  So we had to do something drastic about that and that was called Ludum Dare 24 Evolution!

LD24 was a new low-point for us – how could it not be, it being the second entry and worse than the first?

Ludum Dare 25 was predicted to be such a stinker that we didn’t dare enter!  The chart clearly shows our interpolated results would have been disastrously middle-of-the-road, so its all for the best!

However, we became complacent, thinking we’d dodged the LD25 rating bullet as it were, and didn’t keep our eye on the ball; Ludum Dare 26 You are the Villain wiped out our earlier gains and we hung our heads in shame again.

What were we doing wrong?  Should we have gone with a simple 6 hour platform game in 1D without background nor goal?  We plucked the lint from our navels and pondered.

Ludum Dare 27 10 Seconds was masterfully managing the Theme and Audio aspects, but overall far too well received.  As said, we had managed a decent showing in Theme and Audio, and those are now trending safely downwards; but Humour, Fun and Innovation all trend alarmingly upwards and we had to focus on wiping those out this Ludum Dare!

Really, was it time to go use GameMaker or *shudder* Unity or to make Windows-only binaries or blitz the board with speed ratings?

Ludum Dare 28 You only get one is all tender hooks; my first solo entry, Ursa Miner, has definitely wiped our the Fun and Humour categories.  I believe I have successfully exercised them forever, and furthermore I believe my technical Innovation and destructive terrain will be well enough hidden that the bastards who keep playing the game for like 10 seconds (I have the server logs duh) and then passing judgement never even notice!

My game, Ursa Miner.  Please overlook anything mildly impressive:

Thank you everyone who is not a 10 second rater!  That theme was so last year!

I’ve played my way through all the links people have given me on the IRC channel; so if you have a WEB game you want played, its just leave a comment here below

I am still a sucker for the same games, but we are now a step closer to Christmas! Make sure to tool down, and get to playing the awesome games made this Ludum Dare!

Here are my favs:

• Simple Ships: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=31872
• The Hotdog Parable: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=18130
• Creator Story Saga: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=26154

And there you have it! I haven’t played many games, but these are my favourites so far, and, make sure to rate my game as well!

Have Fun,

Luke

First of all you can play the game here  

The GOOD

–The art. For being the first ludum dare for my teammate he did very very well. And having an artist its always amazing. How the game can evolve with nice ideas.

–Unity. The new 2d tools let us do all we wanted very easily and fast. The animation system, the sprite import and the polygon collisions did their job. If you haven’t had time to test it give it a try you can create games pretty easily.

–The team. We work very well. One morning to get the idea and from that point all went smoothly.

– We slept enough. We slept 8 hours, so no problem there XD

The BAD

– Having a company dinner the day before. I ended up late and the first ludum dare day I was pretty destroyed.

– No time for everything. We wanted to add a boss for the first level but we didn’t have time. Also the sound as always at the end.

Special Thanks:

Maria for the meatcake

Will for the translations

Ali for the audio

And thats all I hope you enjoy the game

Best Regards

MALHCat and the artist XD

Re: Public Mischief Performance

Achievement unlocked: 8 finished LDs in a row

I set out to make a silly/funny/chaotic game this time. Ludum Dare is a harsh judge, but the audience’s collective face upon witnessing my masterpiece was:

Yep, it seems like my game was actually well-received this time. No “this is confusing” comments apart from the ones made as a joke just to provoke me. Some highlights:

(I’ve been waiting for this comment for like 8 LDs)(this guy streamed it, it was hilarious)

I wanted to make a game that comes close to “performance art” when played. I love games that make me shout and curse and feel like awesome when I finally succeed. In all aspects, this was designed to be a game that’s played in such a lively way, preferably with an audience. After playtesting with you guys and even IRL friends, it seems like I’ve succeeded: I’ve made people laugh out loud. With me, not at me.

Said playtests have also given me ideas for post-LD development. I knew from the start I’d have to jam because I was busy with life, and I also knew I’d take the game further after submitting, so you can treat it as a prototype of something yet more awesome. Check out my design notes for a preview.

The judges are the faces of this game, literally and figuratively. If you simply got a numeric score, it wouldn’t feel as involving. The judge system feels much more like a dialogue between the player and the game, as well as giving the game a lot of personality. Some of the responses appear in highly specific circumstances, some are just plain comments on how well/badly you did. There are a total of 33 responses in the game, including one that appears outside of the judging phase, and one that I forgot to add the sound file for (but it’s pretty esoteric to get and a normal player won’t see it anyway). Gotta catch ’em all.

Another part of why it’s fun is that the game mechanics are pretty transparent this time, no lambda functions or anything. I made a gameplay video of how to use bullet time and nitro tactically, if you still can’t get good reviews after watching that I guess you need to

“””””train”””””

more pffthahaahayehhaharahar.

Tags: mid-mortem because it's not dead yet, nanda kore, trophy shelf

thanks to the awesomeness of cocos2d-html5, it was really easy to port my cocos2d-x jam entry to javascript, which means more people can play my paltry game entry. this version has no new features or fixes: it’s as direct a c++-to-javascript port as is possible (which is remarkably close, thanks to cocos2d-x/html5).

• play the web version!
• ld48 game page

here’s a video of the mac version:

post mortem coming “soon.”

TRY THE THIRD VERSION HERE

UPDATE: There’s now a third version of this game that should address the performance issue for good. This message is referring to the second version that partially resolved the performance issue, but it wasn’t fully fixed. Here’s the original message:

I have managed to get the game to run more faster than before. Turns out to be less complicated than first through. Regardless, this game is not efficient still. Although, it is running faster and less laggy than before. This will have to do for this entry. Next time, I will put more work toward my next Flash platformer to make it run more efficiently.

What I had done to make the game faster is actually quite simple but not obvious: the entire level was caching as a bitmap. That is the main reason for the lag. The second reason is having certain objects NOT caching as bitmap. One are the blocks. Another are the enemies.

Also, I had dropped the frame rate from 60hz to 50hz as a precaution to compensate the large objects loaded onto the stage.

Hopefully this game now runs fast enough to make it more playable. Be sure to (re)try the game out!

Hi everybody ! I’ve finished the translation of my game into english (available here) and I want to thank reverso for his help .

It was my first Ludum Dare and an awesome moment. Now, I will play the others games, they seems very cool !