Check this Video out: http://youtu.be/0DcB_uEEmYE

Our game at 3:59 min. !

Dumb waiter was a great project and we felt we learnt alot from it. Everyone that has played it seemed to love the game and we have had almost 270 people play the game so far. I wanted to write up this quick post on how we created the game.

Time Scale of Project (Hours Spent *Overall Between 2 People)

• Design: 3 Hour
• Prototype: 3 Hours (Player Movement, Basic Physic Catching)
• Gameplay Coding: 12 Hours
• Level Building: 14 Hours+
• Menu Building: 2 Hours
• Other Art: 3 Hours
• Balancing Refinement: 2 Hours

Screenshots of Work in Progress:

Lessons Learned:

• Working in team can be alot more challenging at times as you need to go back and forth with data and more communication (decisions)
• Team can also make work easier as there is less load so it can be spread across people.
• Get gameplay working first before you start doing other areas
• Work on everything first and then polish at the end. Don’t try and make it all perfect intially

Play Dumb Waiter

Hope You’ve Enjoyed Post,

Please play our game and give feedback.

 WHO TAKE MY COOKIE ?!

•  I don’t know…. Ask him !
•  I hate this girl ! That’s probably her !
•  Don’t lie to me… You know, I’m your friend.
•  I know that she loves him but she hate her, but if he love that girl is he hating the other ?
•  Om nom… I didn’t… Om nom… Take any… Om nom… Cookie.
•  Alert ! This person his hiding one or more cookie !
•  I’m invoking you spirits…  Help me to find who stole my cookie !
•  It would be a shame if this photo spread the Internet… So I’m asking you : Who take my cookie ?

ONLY ONE COOKIE ! Play now !

There have been streams all week, but not everyone had time to watch them or even get their own game played. So I thought I’d stream games today (not only) to give those people a chance.

Add your game too!

I’ll be starting to stream around 2PM GMT which is ~1.5 hours from when I am posting this. Here’s a graphic showing the timezones and clicking it will bring you to the timezone converter to check your own timezone.

Click to go to worldtimebuddy.com

I’ll be streaming for a few hours, depending on how many people are around, here:

http://www.twitch.tv/timtipgames

Hope to see you and talk to you about our games

This year was the first time I had attempted a Game Jam and I enjoyed it so much I entered a few more (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). I’ve slowly progressed from using C#/XNA to Unity as it has a much faster turnaround for tens of pretty obvious reasons. FHS is playable here. Alternatively here is a video of it being completed.

Inital Design

The deal in FHS is you have a little tutorial section at the start introducing you to various special powers like a double jump, but then you can only select one to carry through to the main platforming section. A lot of the design was inspired by Monty on the Run, an old platformer I originally played on the Amstrad 464 (but was available on pretty much everything), probably most known for its amazing Rob Hubbard BGM. At the start you put together a “survival pack” of items, which are essentially keys and if you have the wrong ones the game is unwinnable. While a bit of a rubbish mechanic in Monty (although I do have much love for the game overall) it served as a good base for a You Only Get One idea. My enemies being gigantic angry mugs was also a nod of acknowledgement back to Monty.

Design Changes

The biggest change from the initial design to what I finished with is the number of powers. This was the full range of abilities I was initially going to try and implement:

Double Jump, Jetpack, Air Dash, Swim
Sink, Ladder, Shoot, Weight.

Of these I actually decided to only implement four: Double Jump, Air Dash, Weight (different mechanic), Sink (using the Swim icon) and I’m really glad I cut this down. Not only because it vastly reduced the amount of work I would have to do, but because it let me target the level design more specifically at certain powers rather than something mostly generic and catch-all with little bits of “oh, this is easier with power X” which would be less interesting than paths like going up from the start to 3-screen a double-jump specific section. Also, it let me select the extremities and not worry if one power was going to be viewed as a less effective version of another (e.g. sink vs. swim). If I could choose a fifth I think it would be ladder, which was just going to create a vertical stack of one-way platforms,  as that’s another pretty unique mechanic  you could create bespoke platforming for.

Another big change was the amount of enemies and scope of the level design which all fell drastically as the deadline loomed. I think the level I have is pretty cool, has that Jet Set Willy sense of exploration to it perhaps, but it certainly could’ve been much bigger.

Regret!

I really like some of the features introduced with Unity2D but their tutorial does some really suspect things with input checks in Fixed Update (don’t do this you’ll drop inputs), circle colliders for a 2d character, only checking the ground in one place, etc. I went in a bit overzealous, in hindsight needlessly so, and because I’m a pretty green/terrible coder I reinvented the wheel a lot, which is kind of the opposite of what you want to do in an event like Ludum Dare. O ye of little faith.

Also, the way I handle levels is pretty stupid with an object per tile read in from a text-file. I was definitely going for speed rather than efficiency and I don’t currently know of a good tile solution that uses Unity’s new 2D stuff. Because it’s an external file the web player does not like it and, while I tried getting the web player to behave for a little while messing with the www class, in the end I realised I could be playing with this all day and I had a game to make. My last full Ludum Dare game was also executable only so maybe it’s not the end of the world, but it is pretty silly for me to not have a web version available.

Finally, most people who play my game immediately ask “what happens if I go through all the exits?” Nothing. Nothing happens.

Last weekend was a tough one, I’m going to explain y’all about it, but since it’s almost Christmas I’ll say it in a poetic way:

One day, little Rodrigo was lying on his bed,
out of his shirt, there was his tummy,
it was growing fat ‘cus of the french bread,
he is surely turning chubby.

After minutes of scrolling he saw a mail
“Oh shit! A Ludum Dare jam!” said after looking his phone
I think it’s a good time to make a game,
thank God it begins just when I get home.

He gets ready for the event one day before,
Grabs-n-picks two bottles–four liters of Coke,
he pays and gets out of the store,
“Man, this is so much, I’m surely going to choke!”

He goes on his way, exhausted, for all he had to carry,
a computer, books, clothes and bottles of Coke,
he took the bus and walked through a forest that was scary,
“It’s creepy, really! I’m doing this at nine PM! This is not a joke…”

…Well, actually it’s because he’s a pussy,
but when he crosses that road he gets pride:
he does fourty minutes of bus and thirty of bus, not that cushy.
After walking with his stuff he finally gets to arrive.

He puts evertything in order to get ready and takes a photo ‘cus he’s a wench,
finds out that the jam begins at three AM for him,
“Gee, that’s what I get for trying to be french,
well, I should begin with energy so I should go to sleep”.

Nevermind because he had a dinner that he had to attend,
“Crap, something always turns up when I have to jam!”
He goes and always looked to his watch, until the end.
“Fuck… I need to sleep because of how tired I am…”

The moment finally comes but he still sleeps like a champ,
it’s past three AM, but he is still tuck
eventually, from nowhere, on his leg, he gets a cramp
“Aaaaaghhh! What the hell?! It hurts! Fuck!”

After crying like a bitch, he manages to climb,
he reaches his watch that was on his right,
“It’s already six AM! Look at the time!”
So he just runs to his computer and logs to the site.

“You Only Get One…”
The jam theme was finally announed, as it said one sign.
“Wow, you guys really chose stupid shit for a jam”
He had to hurry to think for a game to design.

He takes a shower, washes his hair and dick.
“What am I supossed to do?”
He tought something really bad, really,
and he tought something further as he drew.

“You only get one…. soldier?”
Even he knew that the idea was crappy.
He began the project and saved it on a folder.
It was bad, but didn’t matter ‘cus it made him happy.

Cokes down,
codes up,
he used new tricks that he learned by playing around,
worked nonstop until he finished his cup.

One day goes,
the other one is on, stressed as fuck,
he wore the same clothes,
I think they even had muck.

After testing his game, without knowing why, it crashes,
“No, no, NO! What the hell?!
All I’ve made is going to be trashed!”
The faggot was so mad that he began to yell.

After toying around he fixes it on a whack,
“I don’t even know how”
It’s okay now, but he almost had a heart attack.
“I feel like the best coder right now”

After a while more he finishes,
“I can’t feel my brain….”
He has to take a shower ‘cus he smells like the fishes.
“It was a pain, but good as hell! I’ll do this again”

Even if you understood or not, that was my experience through the Ludum Dare 28 jam. It’s the first jam game that I can consider “not a complete piece of crap” and I’m really happy about it.

Eeeh, eh… ENOUGH GAY RHYMES, PLEASE, AND LET’S TALK ABOUT THE DAMN GAME ALREADY. CAN WE?

So, again, this is a game entry for the Ludum Dare 28 game jam, a challenge where you or any other developer struggles to create a game with a selected theme in less than 48 hours. This jam’s theme was “You Only Get One”… Really? I’m so pissed by how closed this theme was, and I’m not taking just for myself, you should have seen Twitter at that moment.

My work place, btw…

Anyways, I worked on a little title called “One Man Army”, which appeals to the jam’s theme as “You Only Get One… Soldier!” To me, the idea of one soldier versus a whole army isn’t that bad, but when you put it into a game… it’s very cliché.

You can’t learn much about the game’s story because I didn’t have enough time to put it into the game. So let me tell you a little about it:

The game takes place on a country called Republic of Chekolosgeria, which is in war. The only problem is that they only have one soldier (giggle), so these folks right here, the Doctor and the General take their only soldier, Duffy, and convert him into a super soldier… Duffus!

Smart-ass, award-winning idea. About the gameplay, it was going to be completely different, but then I changed my mind during the development of it. Right now it looks like this:

Basically, all you have to do is slap the enemy soldiers so the burst and explode all their body parts.

I’m so happy with how it ended looking. I knew the explosions and body parts flying around was a very important thing to add to the game so I had to learn how to use physics. Yep, that’s the first time I ever used physics on a game and it probably took me more than half day to just make the physics.

It’s a great thing to have on any of your games, remember: your game can never have enough particles.

That’s it I guess… You can download it here:

But here’s the link to the Ludum Dare entry so you can vote for it to win if you liked it. I really don’t expect to win because I think the idea is really dumb, not original and not really appealing to the competition’s theme at all but do what you feel like.

Thanks again for reading yet another long post of mine, finishing this game felt so great for me, you should really try the next Ludum Dare if you don’t know it already. Anyways, I’m out.

I’m over 150 games so let’s have a look at 5/5 “humor” rated games.

Toast!

Humor. Who can discuss it?

Go long!

Ha ha ha ha! I don’t know why I’m laughing ! HA HA HA HA!

My champion!

So in this game you are a cute blue little cat and you get to play a football match, you alone, against 11 gorillas all faster and stronger than you. I laughed so hard at how unfair the whole concept of the game is, and of course at how it connects to the LD theme. The best thing is that you really get to play the full match as if it was a classic football videogame from the 90’s, well, except you get stomped upon by gorillas every two second and you end up your first match with an humiliating score.

Without lots of talking, In this series of small videos I will be showing how I do my mini games, quickly and almost perfectly.
And here my entry if you like to play, Apart from the UI missing to show the collected shapes, and the player slow speed, the game is amazing. I will change this problems when the vote get finished.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=18142

For more Tutorials, games and animations. I will appreciate if you subscribe to the channel, and follow the updates here :
Site:
http://www.mamoniem.com
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/mamoniemworks
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MuhammadAMoniem

More fun than “firefighter simulator“, with more adventure than “farming simulator“, you can now live the daily routine of a space postal service agent in :

Space Postal Service

What went right :

A one button game :
Creating an easy usable interface is surely something really complicated, therefore a one button game was quite a challenge for me. I wasn’t really inspired by the theme and when I though about a one button game, the conveyor belt came automatically in my mind.
I think the result is correct since I succeed in not trying to put too many actions on that unique button, but instead I’ve created various situation changing the purpose of the few actions.

A meaningful decor :
During the first brainstorming, I had planned to put all the info needed by the player in a sort of big display in the background. And to put in the foreground a dummy control board with fake lights and displays. When I start to really designing the scene, I realized that it would give some stupid result to concentrate all the data in one angle and to drive away the attention of the player with a lot of useless items.
It was way more natural to use the control board for what it should be, and I reckon it works pretty well.

What went wrong :

Coding graphics :
My weakest point will ever be the graphic part. One of the unique way I can create graphics is by code (drawing is not for me). On one side, vector coded graphics are quite easy to modify when they are done, but on the other side they are really long to write and they are not really nice.
As a result, I really lost a lot of time writing every assets, I wasn’t able then to add all the graphics I wanted (I’ve planned some explosions and particles effects), and the overall graphics are pretty bad.

Difficulty curve :
Since my second LD, I’m struggling with difficulty curves, I’m always doing it wrong. That time wasn’t an exception. I’m always divided between making something challenging, but not too difficult since LD audience doesn’t have much time to play a unique entry. The game results really easy at the beginning and the last level is too hard. The player misses the feeling of progression, of improvement of its skills.

Not in the mood:
I know it will sound impossible, but I wasn’t really motivated for this LD, and it had an impact on the game. The direct consequence was that I was less efficient, it took me more time to do things. Thanks to my past LD I know a bit how to deal with time management (I found LD is an incredible way to learn about time management), therefore I succeeded in finishing my game, but it’s lacking a lot of stuff (animation, descent graphics, descent sfx, descent intro/outro).

Timelapse of Space Postal Service :

Hi all, I wanna share an AMAZING fan art by my almighty friend Gustavo Santos (@gustavo__san – follow him!).
It’s the best gift I could get for Xmas. Thanks G.! 😀

You can play CROSSBORE here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29702

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=2490

For this LD I released my game, intervalo (interval in Portuguese). Here are my thoughts on what worked, on what didn’t and my future plans for it:

What went well:

-The main mechanic. The mechanic works like this: the player is rotating in a circle. There’s a period of time where you press enter in a certain timing. The first time you press enter it will set the direction, the presses afterwards will change the player’s texture, which permit to pass/colide with certain blocks. After the period of time where you press enter follows a period where the game will replicate your presses.

I’m happy with how the mechanic turned out. I thought of it at the end of day one when I was having dinner, it came to me when I wasn’t thinking about the compo. I guess next time I need to have an original idea I just need to distract myself.

-The graphic style. While it’s not super flashy it is clean and modern.

What didn’t went well:

-Music. Heeeh, or should I say the lack of it. It was a mixture of “didn’t have time” and of “doing music is my archilles’ heel”.

-Explaining the main mechanic. Some people got confused on how the game worked, so I should have done more to teach the mechanic to the players, considering the uncommonness of it.

-Potential that wasn’t executed. The game is six levels long so there’s not much into it.

The future:

I’d like to make an improved version of it. Basically a polished version with more levels and mechanics.

Closing thoughts:

Overall I’m glad I participated on this Ludum Dare. Not only I had fun while making intervalo as I’m thinking to expand its concept without the rough edges.

See you next LD!

Tags: #NOKILL

Its been great getting a response for my game. Thanks guys.

If you have not played it this is the link;
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=31868

This is a cool growing effect I did for it. If you play the game the plants also sway in the wind.

So I now have a list of changes from all the feedback you guys as well as others have given me.  I also thought i would show you what the game looks like in unity when when game is being played.

Thanks for the feedback. 😀

The changes that I am going to make are 

///////////////////////// LIST OF THINGS TO DO! /////////////////////////

/// BACKGROUNDS ///
/// Randomise them
/// Create more background textures 😀 (As many as it takes till the game breaks)
/// CRY HARD WHEN DONE!!!
///
///
/// GAMEPLAY ///
/// Change the controls.
/// Add in tap on the screen to jump as well as left and right
/// Mouse Click position as well as tap
/// the leaf needs to rotate along the floor
/// The leaf needs to feel more floaty and double jump as well (Wall Jump)
/// Add in things that Damage you as well
/// If you go into the water there needs to be a splash
///Make a Whole Game Loop (LOOOOOOOOOOOOOP!!!)
/// The objects that fall need to not be spawned in they need to be reused (Optimisation)
/// Add in the random leaf DECAY
/// Make the red come up faster make it more noticeable (flash as well)
///
/// ART THINGS ///
/// make the leaf go from green, to yellow then start decaying at red/brown
/// rain shouldn’t be so intrusive, i could hardly see the leaf when it started.
///
/// LEVELS ///
/// Create more levels to randomise in and out
/// Hill’s, Cave’s, Hard Death Zones(This should be the last thing you do!!!!)
/// Do more art Add in grass and small leaves as well make them sway in the wind 😀
///
/// MUSIC ///
/// Going To Need THIS!!! – 8 BIT HARDCORE RAVE MUSIC
/// (Why? i can’t do music) Get a music guy to do it

Tags: leaf alone

Fellow dares,

as promised, I`m working RIGHT NOW on the enhanced edition of Creator Saga Story Tycoon. It will features all promised bug fixes and little enhancements.

as a bonus, i will study how to record a session of the game and publish both as video and as gif.

regards

Bruno Massa

Gamenific

Finally writing a post-mortem. I’ll try to keep it short. XD Also, here’s my timelapse and my entry, Two options.

As always, I didn’t plan anything in advance. I rested for a few hours before the theme being released and when the time finally came I was already waiting on IRC. As soon as it was announced I had no idea what to do with that theme, only that I didn’t want to have “YOLO” in any way in my game (since lots of people were saying it on IRC). XD Another thing that I didn’t want to do was to make a game only playable once, since I’ve already seen a game like that…

I tried to brainstorm for a while but I didn’t like most of the ideas. They were like “only one life (continue)”, “choose only one item from many”, “one invulnerabilty”, “one enemy”, “one level”… and a awesome idea that I scraped because I didn’t think I would be able to make it any fun. That idea would be “you only got one cake”: you are in a cake shop were you can only buy one cake… but you want another! Go take, even if by force! That would have been so much better… I’ll make this game, at a later time…

So I decided to make a game like Lost Vikings: you have four characters but each have only one abillity, which you would assign to each character (kinda of like Final Fantasy, where you can create a party whichever way you want). I drew three sprites but soon gave up on that idea. I simply wouldn’t be able to create levels solvable by any combination of abillities. So I decided to do something else using those character I had already drawn.

It all started with those sprites…

I then decided on the ending of the game, beginning to create a mockup for that level and some tiles. I though that having an alternative path would be really fun, but ended up not doing that… All that on my “first day” – since here the compo starts close to midnight, I usually divide my time in three days: from the beginning to 3 AM (more or less), then from when I wake up to 2~3 AM again and then until submission time. That way I trick myself to feel like I had three days worth of jamming… it’s great to organize the time (1 “day” for idea and prototyping, 1 for finishing the mechanics and basic stuff [most sprites, tiles, etc] and 1 for polishing).

This is what I had by the end of Friday…

On my second day (Saturday, from 7:30 AM) I was able to create most of the levels, the songs and the gameplay already felt really nice. This motivated me to keep working on it. By the end of the day, I had already drawn the final tileset and most of the sprites!

Both the first (upper) and final (lower) tileset

I only had left to do a few tiles (the most troublesome would be the lava), sfx, adding particles and redoing some sprites… and the animation. This took most of my time on Sunday. It’s not something I really like doing, but I knew this game would need it. After finishing the ending, I decided to make a simple intro (which wasn’t really difficult to do…). Then, after making a few more levels I called it complete. Another thing take took some of my time was implementing the button. The way i did it, a button creates a sparkle that, when it touches something, an event is triggered.

Not really the final version, but pretty much it

All in all, I’m really happy with the results. I’m, though, a little ashamed of the way I used (as a friend pointed out to me, it seems kind of randomly thrown there…) and of making a game in a genre I’m used to do. This allowed me to have a working prototype really quickly and I didn’t have many troubles adjusting the controls… I’ve already listened to enough complaints about my platforms to have a good idea about how to do it right… xD

I swear I’ll never again make any game with controls (and gameplay) worse than I did in this one… >_<

But most of all, I now really think that I should had made that cake game… It would have been so much more awesome! Oh, well… a later time…

Tags: postmortem

5 days have passed since we submitted our Ludum Dare #28 entry, better known as “The sidekicks”. Now it’s time to sit back, relax and do some thinking about the jam, what we did and what we learnt.

This time I was going for the jam instead of the compo(first time for me). I find myself completely unable to compose even a basic loop, but at the same time I value this aspect quite a lot and pay a lot of attention to soundtracks in games. So I teamed up with @franklinwebber to use some of his tracks.

Let’s talk about the first day, I got up early, checked the theme, had a hot shower and made some tea, nothing odd for a jam. I began with the brainstorming, but my mind went blank(more than the usual); I came up with a few ways I could use the theme, “You only get one earth/life/bullet/chance/button”, none of them felt right. So I started thinking less about how to use the theme and more about what I felt like doing.

I remembered “lovers in a dangerous spacetime”, an upcoming indie game which looks pretty neat. I haven’t seen any actual gameplay, just the trailer they released some months ago. But just from watching that trailer my mind imagined the gameplay I thought it should have. I went for it, I’d care about the theme later. I pondered about some mechanics for an hour and started prototyping.

I posted my first working stuff on twitter(still using placeholders) and got a message from @aquilicoco, another spanish developer I met during my first Ludum Dare; he happens to be a great pixel artist. We worked together for the GBJAM and that didn’t go out too well. He proposed me to join forces once again and I agreed.

timelapse

We worked very hard for 72 houras, though a great mistake was focusing too hard on coding and art rather than spending more time designing the concept itself. There’s not really that much to say about the development, we worked a lot and we worked hard. We wanted to achieve many things and there wasn’t enough time, so we ended up with just a few hours left, no tutorial and no real gameplay. We had the coop mode with the ship working and everything, but there wasn’t really anything else to do. So I coded the fireballs that appear in the game and made a tutorial, I didn’t have time to balance the difficulty so I thought of a cool feature that would allow people to create their own rules and customize the experience from the settings menu. Unfortunately, a lot of players are missing this two things, which are some of the best stuff our game can offer right now.

Here’s a message to the players: “Every time you skip the setting menu and say that the game is very easy you’re making me sad   You can say that the game isn’t fun and that’s not well-designed, but you can set it to be as hard as you want”

The other great issue was music, the composer had a lot of amazing tracks and composed a few more but I had some tech issues and could only use one.

We submitted the entry and wondered if we should work on a post-jam version. I wanted a lot of feedback from the players so I uploaded another version to Gamejolt and waited for the comments. People are having fun, lots of them are missing the settings menu and the tutorial and some players saw the same design flaws I saw. I wanted more feedback and opinions and we sent the game to some indie websites that chose to feature others games instead of ours.

If we end up making a post-jam version the gameplay will change drastically, we’ll keep the main ideas(the managment of the ship) but we might borrow some ideas from FTL or from some other games. I’d like to make it a fast-paced game keeping the focus on the multiplayer mode. Maybe add some kind of campaign and ship customization or turn it into an arena-based game where you have to defeat the enemy ship.

I’ve got some thinking to do but people seem to enjoy the game and we have amazing graphics and art. I’m likely to make a post jam-version after going trough the design issues. But first I want to see our final Ludum Dare rating and some more feedback. Then I’ll decide if I should upgrade it or go for a new project.

Links:

Entry

Art

Music

Myself

A less scary version of the game

For Ludum Dare 28 I created a game titled The Collector.  The goal was to collect score pips, while avoiding green platforms.  At the end you would fire a bomb that would turn the green platforms into additional score.

What Went Wrong:

– Going into this Ludum Dare I had some very specific goals in mind for my game. It needed to have a score systems, because I wanted to have an online High-Score table. I had other ideas based on the theme, but none that would have had a score. So I went with this and about half way through just lost interest in it.

– While its a minor thing, I wanted to have a slider for sound and music levels, but I’ve never set the volume level in Construct 2 so I wasn’t sure how to go about it, as two global settings.

– Scaling and the positioning of objects. I spent quite a few hours messing with it, but never got it how I wanted. I wanted it to fill the browser area, but when I set it to do this it became a lot trickier to position the objects. In the end I set it to letterbox scale, so when its not in fullscreen (16:9 ratio) there is a black bar to the left and right.

What Went Right:

– The User Interface is much better than past attempts, as well as the way high scores are loaded and displayed. After giving up on the game part of the game I decided to focus in on the UI and the High Score table.

– The effect of the background changing. Depending on the difficulty you select the background changes from black to red as time goes on. But the color also indicates the number of platforms left. You start with 255 black platforms, and as they change into green platforms the background turns to red.

– The Highscore table worked the way I intended. The top 10 high scores for each difficulty are shown, additional scores will be shown on a webpage. Before the Ludum Dare my web-hosting was being really slow, but luckily it was all resolved before hand. I was a little worried about having it load the highscore each time you changes selected difficulty. given more time I would have loaded them into variables to display later. But so far I haven’t noticed it taking to long to load.

– Performance this time the game performs much better than my LD27 entry, the FPS seems to be a lot higher. Grant it there are a lot fewer objects being drawn.

– The sound effect for hitting a  green platform is so satisfying sounding. It makes me want to collect them all.

What Is Next:

– I don’t plan to continue with this game, I think of it more as a testing and proving ground than a game. I learned a number of things about Construct 2 from doing this, and explored the limits of the software.

– The possible exception is if I decide to create a new website for my Ludum Dare games (and others) some sort of arcade website. Then I would probably spend some additional time on this game and the others just to polish it up some more. In particular I would like to use a different color for the four different difficulties. Also not sure that green is the best color for it.

Other Thoughts:

– There have been some comments on how my use of color is backwards, and that green should be good and red bad. The argument is that the colors on a stop sign are green for go and red for stop. My counter argument is that in Legend of Zelda (and most games) Red represents health, whereas green represent poison.

Tags: postmortem, timelapse

I haven’t finished a proper post-mortem yet. I want it to add some more than I did last years. But I did collect the first wave of user statistics for my ‎Ludumdare‬ game. The previous times I ran out of bandwidth and this time I used my companies servers with a higher bandwidth.

Seeing the large amount of visitors revisiting the blog I must admit being very proud!

The ‎LD28‬ weekend was during the 14th and 15th of December and the game’s release for public on the 16th. Read a more detailed explanation here: http://bit.ly/1gNTgiT

Tags: dragon, gamecreator, islandworks, journey, LD28, ld48, Ludumdare, strong99

Now that my first Ludum Dare entry has recieved some feedback, I thought I should do a post mortem post. 😀
It’s here to try if you wish: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=28661

MY EXPECTATIONS:
Well this was my first LD so they were basically null. Haha. Seriously, I didn’t even think I would finish a playable prototype.
My original goal was just to try and finish something, other than that, no real goal as far as rankings go.

DURING THE COMPO:
I’m not going to lie, I made some rookie mistakes.
Well first of all, I have the advantage that the compo started at 1 P.M for me, so that was a nice time in the middle of the day for me.
The rookie mistake was that I was incredibly hung over. Haha.
Rookie mistake number 2, I invited friends over to get drunk on the second night. (Although I ended up letting them game and drink while I programmed and desgined levels. 😛 )

The largest problem I ran into, and what some people picked up on in the feedback, is that I had no way to produce sound.
I had no software for it, so I did dedicate a few hours to searching the internet for free one’s and trialling them, but nothing that was what I wanted. (I just want GarageBand to be honest )
So in the end due to time constraints and the lack of software, I opted out of adding sounds.

AFTER THE COMPO:
Wow!
So much positive feedback.
Seriously, I was absolutely blown away by all the nice comments about how funny it is etc.  I didn’t expect anything like it.
Next LD (Which I am 100% participating in.) I need to add sounds. That is my number one goal.
I would also like to figure out how to do animations. I feel like they add a lot of polish to a game.

CONCLUSION:
Thank you everyone who played my game and to the entire LD community to being incredibly nice and helpful through the entire process!
Bring on the next one! Woo!
Now, a message from Yogo bear!

Tags: final post mortem

Many people complained that the bullets in my game were too hard to see. So I’ve uploaded a new version to fix that!

Other small fixes include a much better control scheme on Android and some re-balancing to make the difficulty curve more approachable. Please try it out and let me know how you like it!

Play and rate Dinosaur Rush here!