un-Equipped

un-Equipped by wojworks – gorgeous pixel art and satisfying combat

Match Girl by DDRKirby – perfect difficulty curve

Happiness by Fenmar – creepy and rewarding

Babelita by Kuupu – JUST PLAY IT!

Midnight Minigun by jimmypaulin – if you feel like saving humanity from the zombie apocalypse my game could be for you!

Thanks!!!

Finally uploaded a timelapse!

Play the game here

Oh and merry christmas everyone

If you haven’t played it yet, go check it out here. Then come back and give this a read.

I originally told myself I wasn’t going to participate in December’s Ludum Dare. I ended up getting sick from lack of sleep during the last one and it made for a pretty miserable next few days at work. However when Friday rolled around and I saw everyone talking about Ludum Dare again, I said screw it and decided to participate again. I had plans with friends on Sunday so I decided to take it easy and only work on Friday and Saturday.

The Idea
After getting home from work, I spent a good amount of time thinking of different ways to utilize the theme. I try to throw out all the obvious ideas that come to mind. I don’t want to make the same game as someone else, although that’s become a daunting task with 2000+ entries. With the holidays approaching, I settled on the idea of Christmas presents.

What Went Right

• No Stress. With only Friday night and Saturday to make the game, I settled on a small scope and decided not to push myself too hard. It was actually really nice to submit on Sunday morning and spend the rest of the day knowing I already hit the deadline. I knew my tie to the theme wasn’t super strong and so I wasn’t worried about trying to rank highly in the competition. Instead I just tried to relax and create a fun little experience.

• Animation. I’m a big fan of polish. It’s what takes a good game and makes it feel that much better. With such a short time span, I try to work with a small scope for the game so that I have time to add fun animations and transitions that make the game stand out. Since I didn’t work on the game on Sunday, my scope was extra small- but I still tried to add the same amount of polish- I think it helped to make the game feel more complete.

• Controlled Randomness. Randomness is a double edged sword- especially in a jam where a person might only spend 30 seconds playing through your game. For this game, the location of presents, which boxes they are in, and the color of the boxes, are random. With this in mind, I was running into some ugly scenarios, where all the boxes were the same color or all the boxes would be the same shape. By including some limiting functions, I could still put randomness in the game so that it was a different experience each time while also guaranteeing that the gameplay screen wasn’t an ugly mess of colors and shapes.

What Went Wrong

• No strong tie to the theme. My game is tied to the theme, I swear- but it’s not nearly as obvious as games such as ‘One Bullet’, ‘One Life’, etc. This is partially because I tried to avoid obvious game ideas but mostly a failure on my part to emphasize why the player gets to pick another present after getting the previous one right.

• Picking presents that took advantage of the hints. I designed all the hint systems and then tried to think of presents that fit into those systems. My lack of imagination led to the ‘Weigh’ hint being almost completely useless.

• Tall and long boxes could potentially hold the same item. My initial plan was that the player could eliminate most boxes right away based on their shape. But tall boxes and long boxes could both hold pretty much the same thing. Fail.

• Flash garbage collector. I (ab)used setTimeout() with a bunch of native flash tweens for doing animations on the Present Inspection screen. In rare instances, the garbage collector would clean up a Tween or setTimeout() that was still waiting to be called- causing for things to remain on screen when the shouldn’t be. I ended up hackily fixing this but it was a bit of a pain to fix. The last thing I wanted was for players to get a broken game experience because of something like this.

What Went …Okay

• Art. For me, it’s extremely time consuming and frustrating to create. I want things done the instant I think of them but good art takes time and patience- and I have neither of those. If you opened the Rainstick during your playthrough then you have my deepest apologies.

• Sound. Last time I used autotracker, which worked pretty well for a pixel-art style game. This time around my game was made with vector shapes and a retro soundtrack wasn’t going to fly. I ended up booting up Garage Band and throwing a few loops together. I believe the final background music was just one track I found in the library cleaned up a bit to loop properly. For sound effects I still rolled with CFXR. Even though the SFX are 8-bit it still seemed to work alright with the feel of the game. The only thing I regret is the SFX I applied for when you shake a present. It sounds a bit too much like a tommy gun. The initial plan was to have a different SFX when each present is shook, to give you a better idea of what’s inside. I quickly realized that was a lot of work and I didn’t have time to handle that though.

Overall
I’m pretty happy with how the game turned out. Yes, it could have been better, but for the time spent on it I’m happy with the results. Ludum Dare is always a lot of fun to participate in and I’m glad I completed another jam!

Thanks for reading and *cough* don’t forget to comment and rate!

Tags: postmortem

Hi there!
this was my first LD and I have to say I’m pretty happy with the result so I thought I could do a little post-mortem (and tell everyone how to kill the final boss because many people seems to have troubles with that!).

The game:
In the game the player controls his ship which can only move around of a little planet, and there some other ships (and some other dangers) that want to kill you so you have to kill ’em all.
The only problem is that you only got one single bullet to survive, so you have to go and pick it up every time you shoot.
Play here! (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29092)

The early hours:
The idea of having one bullet was actually one of the first that came to mind when I read the theme, so my first idea was to make something like r-type but with one bullet.
But in r-type when you shoot your bullet goes to the infinity and beyond so there’s no way you can catch it again… so I thought, just put some walls so the bullet can bounce around and you can pick it up easily or make it like asteroids where the bullet just appears on the other side if you lose it.
That sounded fine, but I assumed many people would have had the exact same idea (and I checked the IRC and some early posts and I saw at least a couple of people doing something similar) so I wanted to give it a twist somehow.
Then I thought on the spherical movement, it’s something I had tried a couple of times before and didn’t really worked out so maybe it was time to make a spherical movement that was actually playable.

What went right:
– The spherical movement! yay, it worked quite well and the camera follows your ship while rotating in a pretty nice way. It’s interesting to say that nothing is actually “moving”, with that I mean that all in-game objects are positioned in the center of the planet and they only rotate, simulating the movement around the planet (that would have brought problems if I wanted to move to another planet, but I didn’t need that for this little game).
– The camera shake: it’s amazing how good it looks for 2 lines of code (it’s just a sine weighted with a countdown timer).
– The final boss: I’m pretty happy with the animations and the mechanics of it, didn’t have much time so the model is empty inside lol, but no one will notice.
– The one-bullet mechanic: I had to add some code to attract it at a certain distance (since it was too hard to catch some times) but at the end I think it’s pretty fun

What didn’t go so right:
– The enemy AI: I had some serious trouble with the AI, I just wanted a really simple AI that shoots to the player, but I found that I didn’t know where anything was, I had no coordinates! everything was just rotating in their local space and translating that to world coordinates was pretty hard in euler angles. So I did some awful stuff to make this translations to quaternions, which kinda works, but it’s completely wrong and inefficient.
– The final boss: I thought it was good, but that was before seeing how hard it is for some people to beat, I thought everyone knew that worms’ weak point was the mouth, especially when they are firing lazors… Also I didn’t have time for any feedback animation when you hit it, yep -_-

Happy Christmas everyone!

I’ve only done two LD’s so far, and I was happy the most with this one.  I’m sure there were improvements I could have made, but I accomplished my goal with it, and that’s really what I was aiming for.

Some notable things about the process:

• I tackled gameplay first and worried about graphics and sound later, which was the right way to do this.  Previously I tried to do all of them at once, and it ended up just confusing me and causing me to run out of time before I could get everything right.
• I made all the sounds from scratch using my microphone.  The footsteps and the gun firing were both me making sound effects into the mic and then editing them heavily in a .wav editor until I was happy with the result.  It should go without saying that I composed the music as well.
• On a technical note, this is the first time I’ve written coroutines (used during the map generation), and the first time I made a maze generator out of prefabs.  (The process I used for “Where Am I?” was clunky and barely worked.)  Regardless of how the scoring comes out, I can definitely say I came out of this with some additional experience.
• Because I had enough time left over, I implemented Oculus Rift support, and I was very pleased with the result.  In hindsight though, I should have paid more attention to the size of the objects on the map.  I had shrunk the player down to fit the prefabs, and I think it caused the camera to show everything extra tiny as a result.  The only way to fix it would have been to redo everything in a larger scale, and that didn’t seem worth it since the 3D effect was still there, just not to scale.  I’ll know next time.
• On retrospect, I should have used more colors in the textures.  While the grays do give it a dreary sense, it felt too visually similar to “Where Am I?”, which was completely monochrome as well.  (But at least the muzzle flash was in color!)

On another note, anyone who knows me knows that I love to watch play through and reaction videos for my games.  If anyone has done one for Wraith (or knows of one that someone else has done), please let me know!

Well, this was my first Ludum Dare, my first game here and here’s my first post-mortem.

I didn’t start early. I saw the theme and went to bed, then let it boil for half a day after I woke up. Had a few ideas in my head, wrote a couple of them down and in the end I decided on an asteroids-based puzzle game where you only have one shot to destroy all the asteroids. Puzzles are designed with screen wrapping in mind and require you to think differently about your environment. Since I was set to hold an introductory game development class a week after Ludum Dare, I decided to try out Scirra’s Construct.

What went well

• Finished on time – I stared late, some 12 hours after the theme was announced and I also had some obligations that took half of my Sunday. Still, I kept my scope small, managed my time well and successfully submited the game on time for compo.
• Slept well – Even though I had lack of time dedicated to Ludum Dare, I decided to have my 8-hour sleep and be productive rather than crunch mindlessly. I’d say this helped me keep my mind clear and finish.
• Got friends into Ludum Dare – When theme voting began, I was pinging my game dev friends to come vote and join LD, even before the jam started. When I got to work, I kept talking about my progress for Ludum Dare and I guess I managed to motivate two of my friends to join in the fun. Knowing that they are also part of LD made this a pretty grand experience. They both managed to finish, more or less, and you can try their games here and here.

What went wrong(ish)

• Used a tool for the first time – Construct is a pretty straightforward to use, through, but it still wasn’t the smartest idea to use it during a game jam for the first time. Took me a few hours to get accustomed to the UI, the way the Event Sheet works and the limitations of the Free version. The latter got me stumped a few times and had me using workarounds (thus the pre-rendered glow, instead of a realtime effect). Construct also started causing problem an hour before the deadline when I tried to import audio. It could have ended tragically…
• I almost lost my project – I made audio with as3fxr and one of the audio files didn’t bode well with Construct, so it hung on import. I waited it out for a while, realized it’s not going anywhere and decided to “End Task”. It asks me to save, I save it to a new file just in case, then it asks me to save again, ok, I saved again. Open up the new project file and what do I see? A construct demo project that I used as a reference when starting out. Fortunately, I was considerate enough to save as a new file, otherwise dissaster would have struck.
  Later I uploaded the project, full of joy that I have done so before the submission hour, and shared the game to my friends. Some time later I’m getting feedback “Hey, mate, this is nice. Would have been great if you had a game over screen, though”. “But I do have a game over screen”, says I to myself. I check the uploaded version and it turns out it’s not the latest one. I assume Dropbox is caching files, try fiddling around, but nothing. Then I get back into Construct to export the project again, only to realize that at one point during the fiasco above it decided to change the export directory to my desktop. There’s still time, so I upload the game and go back to my joyful self.
• Would have liked more time for audio – I only had about one hour for audio, and Construct started bailing on me then. I wish I could have tried out more sounds and perhaps put in some more fitting audio. As it is, it’s a bit rushed and missing a preloader.

Altogether, I really enjoyed doing this and am very satisfied with how my game turned out. And if you still haven’t played it, please try it here

Tags: 2D, compo, LD28, postmortem, puzzle game

For LD 28 I didn’t use any base code,  mainly because I didn’t know what is considered “base code”.
So I thought I should get myself informed for the next one! 😀
I use Unity, and I was wondering what exactly is considered “base code”.
If I created a first person player controller script, or a 2D platform player controller script, are these considered base code?
Thanks in advance. 😀

Happy Christmas Ludum Dare!

Hey there! Adhesion from team RADMARS here with our tri-annual Ludum Dare battle report. This time we did a fast-paced music-based melt-face cube-smashing WebGL game called VELOCITRON which you can play here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=18627

First up we got a timelapse and the long-awaited soundtrack to VELOCITRON:

http://adhesion.mu/sic/Adhesion-VELOCITRON.mp3

First postmortem we got is Brendo‘s:

Now Adhesion‘s:

Also since we decided to do another very audio-centric game again, I had the opportunity to almost exclusively focus on the music & sound design like I did with Tessitron (LD26) which was great. Doing all the music and sound design as well as a bunch of dev feature work like I have for most LDs is certainly doable but a big challenge, and the room to breathe in that department this time around certainly helped. I had a lot of fun making the music, going for something more fast-paced and pounding which I don’t do too often, plus I had the opportunity to use my new guitar and some fancy unreleased software I’m working on at work which was awesome!

As awesome as the game is this feels like the one with the hugest potential and room for improvement. I was a bit frustrated that we collectively didn’t have as much dev/gameplay iteration time as we would’ve liked, since there was definitely some room for small extra gameplay mechanics (like speed boosts!) that could’ve really improved the game. Also I know there’s way more we can do visually with three.js/webgl (like shaders!) that we unfortunately never have time for. I had some fun (ie: misery) trying to cram in some beat-based visual effects right before submission to no avail

Regardless of any issues this is definitely one of the best games we’ve ever made, and I’m super proud of it. Go team RADMARS!

This ld I was more productive. There was enough sort of easy stuff for me to do when others weren’t there. Plus mike was around and coding a ton so we had some decent back and forth

Things that worked: threejs is fun, made more time to work this round than last, had good brainstorm that got an idea quickly.

Things we could improve: more rigor to imple for core components. More full group play test time (and earlier).

The thing that killed me the most was trying to fix the way we had implemented the tube so various things could interact with it better. You may notice deep turns don’t work so hot… Also I don’t think we could do a spiral… Basically we found a hack that looked really good to start and it was hard to fix later without making it look less awesome

Tags: postmortem, timelapse, webgl

Merry Paigemas everybody! *nom nom*

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

Hey Guys!
How are you?
I’m fine and do you know why?
BECAUSE IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!
Yeah!

You have received gifts?

I currently do not, but I do not care! Me and my family are fine, so everything is fine by me!
What has been given to you? 😀

In any case, if you want to give me a gift, try and evaluate my game.

It is not much, but I hope shortly to publish a post-jam version.

Thank you all again and best wishes!

Play!

I didn’t really set out to make a holiday game. But somehow when I got into it, with the music and mood I chose. It just made sense to wrap up the story that way.

More in the post mortem later but for now. . .

Make it to the end of the game for a surprise.

Merry Christmas everyone!

D

I kinda feel that a Ludum Dare isn’t completed until a final post about the game you created, so I wanted to take this opportunity to do this postmortem stuff at least once, (since I didn’t use IRC chat or anything else social-related while participating in the compo)

Idea:
2D fighting game, limited to one single attack, the Hadoken! (Or as someone in the comments mentioned: “Beerdouken!”, which would probably fit better)
As an Input of the “special Move” a combination of letters need to be typed in, which get more complicated over time.

Goal:
My first goal was finishing a game within the time. I find it very frustrating to not reach your goals until the deadline (at least the minimum implemented) so I tried to cut the mechanics down as much as possible, using only one screen and creating a fast paced  game.

Don’t really know how I got to the idea using beer bottles as fireballs… Probably because I was listening to The Misfits at this point and connected the whole background of the game to a punk-ish concert feeling, which fitted the goal of being “fast paced” quite good.

Cool:
Finished the game at a playable state. Thats it. No really, everything else had 1000 problems and I spend to much time on bullshit.

Shit:
– ideas come and go, but an idea worth spending the whole weekend on (with the boundaries of a given topic) is one of the hardest parts in my opinion. Spend half of the first day on it – and that sucks :/

– No difficulty settings. The word or the speed of there opponents fireballs (err… beer bottles) are handled by random numbers, which are always the same. bummer. That makes it pretty much impossible for not so fast keyboard cowboys to play.
This leads to the fact, that the game is not balanced at all or the mechanics aren’t further explored.

– Not enough sound. Especially the lack of sound effects or a visual feedback when making mistakes at typing results in confusion of the player.

– A link to an external library .txt file for the words used for input. Instead there is an hardcoded array of 20 words. Disgusting, I know.

– More content / levels / opponents . Ha, thats a good one. I spend the whole night from saturday to sunday creating one sprite sheet for a single character. Took me ages to get the Misfits skull on the shirt right:

Lesson learned: don’t do things you never did before, when having a deadline this close. And yes the role model was the original SFII Ken sprite sheet 😉

– Massive problems with implementing the (very simple) game logic. Messed up some really easy to solve coding problems (not even coding : c# within unity). With less sleep comes less concentration. This consumed the most part of the valuable time. Phew.

– Guess the list could go on, but the more I write here, the more the game looks like a piece of #*§$% 😀

If you still are interested to play, here ya go.

The good thing: In less than a minute you saw everything there is 😉 But still, I wanted it like that. So in a very strange way – did I succeed? With a lot of flaws and bugs, yes. To be honest, that feels pretty good. And even if I see the other high polished, unbelievable detailed results of people, which are so much better than my buggy entry, it’s still pretty cool to get something done within the time.

And thats all about it right 😉 ?

Wish you all happy holidays, lets see what you come up with at LD29 – See you in 4 months!

.d

PS: By the way, anyone knows why my some uploaded gifs doesn’t seem to play properly? Known wordpress problem or anything?

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it! To everyone else, happy Wednesday!

I made a Christmas-type game so I thought you might have fun playing it while the mood is right.

Click to play!

A small post-mortem: I had a ton of fun making this game. It was a little difficult since it was finals weekend but I still managed to finish on time :). I didn’t have time to add much of a story or music or sound effects but I’m proud of the pixel art and the code is pretty good. I also liked working in a really low-resolution. It makes everything just a tiny bit harder and forces you to think about very small details. I might write another post on some specific things I’m proud of code-wise like the randomly-generated bullies.

tl;dr Yes the game is short and silent but I actually worked pretty hard on it.

Have fun!

We managed to port a “sort-of” working version of the our ld28 game, one-sec, onto mobile devices (android), and decided to get a friend to play it, just for kicks. After a couple day she presented us the following image:

Impossibly High Score

It seems she has managed to attain highest rank possible, something we thought was entirely impossible to achieve (and had just inserted the rank in as a joke).

I’ve got to do a big, big restructure of my site, which is going to break a lot of old links.

Would like to un-break as many as possible, so I’m wondering if it’s possible to edit old LD entries to modify the link they point to.

Thanks in advance :^)

I got back to the 48h competition and this time I had the courage to participate using Unity3D for the first time, all my previous entries were done in Flash/AS3. The idea for the theme came from mixing the fact that  there is only one mother and an egg-and-spoon race. At the end you carry your child on the mouth and at the same time you can kill enemies throwing it, but after that it becomes vulnerable. I didn’t like the idea of using human like characters and I decided to use some cute japanese like characters.

Link to Mother Love

What went right

Unity3D

I lack 3d modelling skills and 2d gives me more freedom, at least in the art oprions. I decided to use Unity this time mainly due to the release of the 2D Tools. And they are very good indeed, importing and using sprites is very easy, also adding animations is pretty straightforward. I’m not surprised so many Ludum Dare entries are done in Unity these days.

2D.5 playfield

This comes too from the fact that Unity is a 3D engine, adding the third dimension gives the game a modern look and you don’t need to program parallax scrolls anymore. Special mention for the 3D tress, they make the oeverall quality go up :).

Checkpoint

For some people the game is too easy but others have some trouble with the water zone. A checkpoint in the middle of the stage put things easier.

The Baby

He’s cute and needs protection, cries when his mother is not with him…well…it’s a lot better than a rock or any other kind of weapon.

What went wrong

Unity3D

Unity allows you to get something working very fast but you don’t have full control of the game and there are times when you are stuck trying to fix something or make something work the way you intend.

Moving platforms

This was one these occasions where I couldn’t get Unity to work the way I wanted, fixing one thing broke the other and so. At he end you don’t move along with the moving platform, but it was the least bad option.

Wrong weekend

Company dinner, family lunch, electricity cuts in the first world… a lot of circumstances that left me with half the time to develop my entry. I’m very happy with it nevertheless.

I was going to do one of these on, well, the 17th; then someone told me in private chat that my game was evidence that I was a great engineer (could pull off technical feats easily) but a horrible game designer (don’t know what non-Engineer types would find fun or how ever to make a game accessible to plain ‘gamers’). And that bothered me enough to make me think about things for days; which caused me to put this off for days; more about that in Part II. This is about -only- the first 48 and what I learned from myself.

Things that went well:

1. I got the main marching physics of a Platformer/RTS (Lemming-like) up and working.
2. I got a lot of mechanics up and working relatively well given the time limit.
3. The primary two level designs were a lot tighter than I’d have thought possible given the time I had to do them.

Overall I feel this work it’s a testament to my technical ability and coding speed.

Things I Learned during the time or reviewing the video:

1. For some reason I have the habit of making a really nice art piece before starting my work on anything; I’d only really noticed it because it cut into available time on this project though it has delayed me from even starting on things before. I feel like I -should- make a working version before worrying with prettiness in the future.
2. Avoid last minute tweaks, because without proper testing a small change that fixes one glitch can create a worse one and sometimes you can’t remember the original value/code that was working well enough.
3. I used the physics system that was fastest to set up; rather than the best. Even on a time-limit; I shouldn’t do this again; it’s too inviting to lag and glitches. Also; the fact that I was using it caused there to be a need for some algorithmic jury-rigging and complications that should have been avoided.
4. This was the first time I’d opened up and used Unity in months; I do still have it.
5. I learned the a few subclasses and commands within the Unity Physics Class that I didn’t know before.
6. I work well under pressure and hold up to lack of sleep well as long as I have something to focus on. Even attempting advanced algorithms on virtually no sleep worked well.
7. I work much better at home with parents; when they respect that I actually am working, I’ve gone days without getting anything real done before due to being asked for small tasks too frequently to keep focus.
8. In general; though I like being able to interact with people when I want to interact, being able to completely seclude myself and have the world around me either disappear or respect that I am working is very helpful
9. I like sharing my progress no matter how small; this can be a great motivation, but I shouldn’t use it as a crutch too much.

Overall, I can say on the technical side, I am pretty solid, though I like to spend too much time on a single artpiece to get the project done. Furthermore, socialization is important to me, but so is the ability to self-isolate so that I can work without interruption.

Things I need to work on for future Ludum Dares and for other projects:

1. Time management.
2. Finding a way to work with others as solid as I can alone.
3. Being able to isolate myself from distractions and others so I can work, while interfacing with others when necessary.
4. Level design and polish.
5. Planning

Overall, I spent too much time on a single piece of art; not enough planning ahead or on level design and I only worked as well as I did because using this as an excuse to isolate myself from the world worked well. I can’t work that solid in a many other environments, (too many distractions).

From least to greatest:

• Desert Robot Commandos
• Jump Chip
• Old Macdonald vs Zombies
• Starbeard: The Curse of the Space Whales
• Uno Terra
• Lestac
  For more info on Lestac’s development: lestac.net
• Jameson the Pilot
  For more info on Jameson the Pilot’s development: jameson.rezoner.net

You can play One Shot Showdown (the game I made) here.

Many of you suggested in your comments that my game The One Fork Restaurant would be nice to play on a touchscreen – so I’ve just released an Android version of the game!

You can now swap the fork in touchscreen!

The game is a self-signed APK, so you’ll need to allow “untrusted sources” on your terminal to install it. Also, it’s my first ever Android game, so any feedback is welcome! You can download the apk file directly from the game page. And if you’re seeking for challenge, the current game record is 1360 points!

P.S.: for those of you who enjoyed the game, I’ve also written a in-depth post mortem.