Hi Everyone, our take on the theme was an action/arcade game based on a randomly generated grid that was filled with colors and mines. The player could select one color to reveal at a time, thus showing the safe cells. This game came out much harder than we expected since there was little skilled involved. We ended up creating special abilities to balance it out: such as armor, reveal, jump, etc. Also, we tied each ability/color to a positive character traits: courage, perseverance, resilience, and forgiveness. Here’s a run down of the good and the bad:

What went right:

• Polish. The game had logo, sound, artwork, and there were no bugs.
• Although difficult, the game was generally fun.
• The visual design was minimalistic, colorful, and most importantly, something we produced within our skill and time limitations.
• We experimented with a new creative process and the result was not too shabby. We plan to keep refining our approach.
• Easily published for Web, Windows, and OSX using Unity. We wanted the game available to as many people as possible.

What went wrong:

• The game was really challenging because we didn’t have enough gameplay elements to empower the player. We could have identified this sooner and planned accordingly.
• It was more based on luck than skill. It didn’t feel like you can improve skill and overcome the challenge.
• We aimed for 5 minute game session, it averaged 30-45 seconds.
• The introduction story was conceptualized after the core mechanics. It was trying to provide purpose via a “spiritual elements” concept, which was too abstract for such a literal game.
• There was no tutorial or instructions. We just tossed the player into deep waters without teaching them how to swim.

Even though our creation is essentially a “glorified minesweeper variant’, we are very happy with the game. We are continuing to work on it and making it the best it can be.

Full Article with Behind the Scenes

Play our Ludum Dare submission: Trial!

Tags: action, colors, grid, LD28, postmortem, random, unity, unity3d

Thanks to everyone who submitted their game!

Here it is my post mortem about 0RBITALIS. For this game I got inspiration looking at other themes in the final round. It’s hard to make a game that is as vague as “You Only Get One”, but when you couple it with “Gravity” and “Chaos” it’s much clearer what you can actually do. I have always been interested in games which explore how simple rules (such as Netwon’s laws) can generate beautifully complex behaviours.

Most of the “features” of the game are actually consequences of the strong time constraints Ludum Dare imposed me. For instance, mi initial idea was to have a moving camera that could zoom in and out, but I didn’t have time to code it properly. And this automatically lead to a “stay in the system” mechanic. The vector fields that you can see in the background was a debug tool I used to test and calibrate planets’ masses, but when I realised that it was fitting nicely with the style, I decided to leave it there. 

Since the very beginning of the voting period, 0RBITALIS got a lot of attention: so far, it’s both the most voted and commented entry in the 48 hours competition. I think part of its success is due to its aesthetic: it’s simple, yet effective. I spent lot of time polishing the game rather then designing more levels. This can really do the difference, especially when games are picked almost exclusively by how appealing their screenshots look like. 0RBITALIS has doing unexpectedly well. For this reason I am already working on a full-game version that will include both more levels and new mechanics. There will be probing missions, for instance, which require to scan a celestial body for a certain time. I am already working on landing missions as well, but I’d rather keep them mysterious for now!

Since I *hate* menus, 0RBITALIS won’t have one. I am working on a different system, however, that looks like a star chart. Player will be able to select levels and to change settings just touching and connecting stars. I also collected lot of statistics about levels but… I’ll keep them for another post!

If you liked the game, you’re more then welcomed to vote it or leave a comment on its LD48 entry page. If you want to follow 0RBITALIS news and further development, you can find me on Twitter as @AlanZucconi.

Tags: 0rbitalis, alan zucconi, flash, Flixel, LD28, ld48, orbitalis, postmortem, screenshot, SuccessStory

We’ve now released the post-LD version of Impressive Dog! It mostly contains extra sounds and some polish.

After spending several weeks in a pet shop, a little girl walks in and you realize she might be the one. Your new owner! However, it seems like she’s having a hard time choosing who she wants to take home, and she can only choose one!

You need to impress the girl with cool tricks and listen to her commands to show what a good dog you are. Then she’ll take you home, for sure!

Play in your browser here!

The downloads and some other stuff are at makebabi.es/dog!

Rate the original Ludum Dare version here!

See title. My first LD entry, Midnight Memories, now runs 100% of the time, and doesn’t have any known crash bugs. Previously, it only ran ~85% of the time. I’d love it if anyone would take the time to rate it: due to the crashing, I put off rating other games for the past few weeks so as not to draw attention to my own. Now, since I’ve played and rated quite a few games, I have the lowest D score of any entry. By a lot -_-. Might not have been a great decision, but hey, at least I finished. It’s been a wonderful time, and I’ll gladly participate again in the future.

P.S. My high score in Midnight Memories is 14 waves. I’ll be adding a leaderboard post-compo, but in the meantime I’d like to see anyone top that.

It’s been a while since I looked at this game.  For the most part, I’m pretty proud of what I was able to punch out in the busy weekend I had.  At the same time, though, it obviously had its fair share of problems…

The Good

– While the game was made in Game Maker, this was my first game that was made almost completely with code.  Previous games I’ve made in GM were mostly generated with drag ‘n drop functions, so it was nice to get knee deep in the code this time (which I discovered was a lot more flexible to work with)

– I’m glad I was able to keep the art simple, while not completely bland.  A talented artist I am not, but I could at least make a decent stick figure.

– Getting the basic mechanic to work was a lot more complicated than I had originally thought.  When the player would kill a ninja by typing a specific letter, ALL of the ninjas with the same letter would die as well.  I didn’t want it to work like this, considering I was using repeated letters to try to make certain levels easier for the player to beat on the fly.  Eventually, I was able to get it to work, and I think the game benefited greatly from it.

–  I’m happy I had time to add in sound effects and music to the game.  I felt it gave it a bit of charm, and made it a lot more exciting.  I intentionally made the title music super cheesy, almost reminiscent of early Flash games you’d play online.  The punching sound effects added quite a bit of “oomph” to each hit as well, which I felt was very satisfying.

– I tried to keep the levels as basic as possible, and I think I succeeded for the most part.  Originally I intended to have random letters thrown about in one level, and the player was tasked with reading all of the letters and typing them out in one second.  I also planned on having symbols and numbers in the mix as well.  However, upon consideration, I opted to have the levels consist of simple words, like “KILL” or easy patterns, like “ASDF” in order to give the player more of a fighting chance.

– Originally I didn’t have the clock timer that counted down to the end of the round.  There was just the bar at the top of the screen that would deplete until the round was over.  A lot of people who I had playtest the game seemed to really enjoy having the clock there, though.  Knowing you finished the round with 0.01 seconds to spare is an exciting feeling, and adds to the sense of accomplishment.

The Bad

–  It’s been told to me a thousand times, and I can’t say I disagree with it, but the game is WAY too hard.  Turns out making a game where the player has to process information and snap decisions in ONE SECOND is way too much to ask.  Most players resorted to simple trial and error, as the rounds were way too quick, and the hints were a tad too vague.  This wasn’t exactly my intention.  Some players seemed to enjoy the challenge, but most just left frustrated.

– Starting the game over every time the player died was not a smart idea.  It only added to the frustration of an already super difficult game.

–  The static images also made the game a little bland.  It makes it immediately apparent that the game was made on a time budget, and in competitions like this, I try to avoid that feeling as much as possible.

–  I literally pulled the story out of my ass in the last half-hour or so.  I wanted to inject a lot more humor into it, and make it a sort of parody cheesy ninja movie, but alas, time was short.

–  The backgrounds didn’t come out like I would have wanted them to.  Like I said before, I’m no artist, but even still I probably could have come up with something better.  The warm colors of the main background kind of make the red ninjas blend in a bit, which is absolutely NOT what you want when the focus of the game is to process information and act on it as quickly as possible.

What I could have done differently:

–  The game definitely needed some checkpoints.  It would have at least eased the frustration tremendously.

–  If I instead chose to make a game that felt like it lasted one second, instead of being dead-set on making it actually last one second, I think it would have been for the better.  The player probably wouldn’t have noticed if 1 second or 2 seconds had passed as they were frantically trying to type away at all the ninjas on the screen, and I think the player would have found the game to be a lot more fair and fun if given more time to execute their actions.

–  I think it would have been neat to have the static enemy ninjas slowly close in on the player character.  Like, everything was happening in slo-mo, so things were moving, but just not very fast.  I think it would have given the game a nice little comic book effect that would have added to the excitement a little bit.

All-in-all, I definitely enjoyed making this project, and despite its issues, I’m pretty proud of it!

(cross-posted from my blog here)

(you can play it right here)

When I last submitted an Ludum Dare game, I gave myself an MS Paint trophy. I submitted another game, one I daresay is a bit better than the last, so here’s my reward.

that’s some CGI right there in case you can’t tell.

This LD was a blast. I spent the weekend hacking with four colleagues from Braintree and we had ourselves a hootenanny.

The game is more or less as I had imagined, albeit with a few missing bells and whistles. The last big gameplay feature where villagers build huts is still in-progress, and it could really use a GUI to tell you what’s going on. Still, remarkably complete, especially when compared to how very far short I fell last time.

What Worked Well

•  Knowing Unity – this time around, I knew the tools somewhat before going in. I have yet to finish a game in Unity, but I have banged out a couple of rough prototypes prior to this. In particular, the Catlike Coding tutorials were very helpful.
• Comradery – While I remain a fan of the solo format, leaving home to gather with like-minded hackers was extremely helpful. Just as in my daily work, my colleagues inspire me to be better than I am.
•  One Fun Thing – I took Tom Francis’ advice and made a game around one fun mechanic and prototyped that mechanic immediately. I spent a lot of time making sure the fire-breathing looked and felt just so, but I think that was time extremely well spent. It’s still fun to fly around and set things on fire, even if you don’t understand what the game is really about.

What Didn’t Go Well

• 3D Modeling – I realized I needed better tooling to make the ork fortresses, which is where I started to spin my wheels. Google Sketchup is a straightforward enough tool, but I really found it hard to navigate. I have a license to Blender somewhere – I need to dig it up and rediscover that tool.
• Visuals – These aren’t my strong suit. I cheated by going for a very basic look (one kind commenter compared it to Darwinia), but even then I spent more time on them than I ought to have. I don’t know what the solution is here though.

Other Miscellaneous Thoughts
I really had fun with this. One of my 2014 New Year’s Resolutions is to try and make a game every quarter. I have a few things I’d like to experiment with – in particular, I want to see how hard it is to make an online multiplayer game. I am going to finish up Our Man Dragon first though.

As always, thanks to the organizers for making this happen. LD is a very special event for me.

SP

Tags: dragon, ld23, unity3d

Our little LD28 Jam Point & Click now has a Linux version, for those who couldn’t try it in Unity webplayer !

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=10263

It’s basically the same game that we submitted for the jam, we didn’t find time to improve and debug…We couldn’t test the version ourselves, so give us your feedback if something’s wrong !

Well, I’m doing this just to get my game a bit more out there, but I can’t really say much about development because it doesn’t even have graphics, audio, and probably it doesn’t even have gameplay (at least not a normal one).
The game is kind of a text adventure, where you enter commands on a text field and stuff happens. It’s my first Ludum Dare and jam game and my second game ever.

Okay, so here goes nothing:

What went well:

-The only command that people managed to input without looking at the source (because it was the only command that I provided in the help), apparently made people laugh.

-I made my second game ever and it was kinda cool. I gained 3 XP.

What went wrong:

-There was so little help that apparently, the players were able to enter only one of the commands without looking at the source. I wanted to add the element of discovery, but it seems it didn’t work.

-I would have liked to have more commands and outcomes, but I felt it would’ve taken too much time and I just wanted to finish the game and go play KSP or something.

I probably can’t add more help right now, so I’ll do it after the judging. I would also like some suggestions on how to add that help without ruining the feeling of discovery. Incorporating every thinkable element from real life into commands could probably help.
It would be cool if after voting, this became some kind of project where lots of people suggest/add new commands and outcomes, making it a constantly growing game.

PD: There’s an entry similar to mine, check it out!

After getting some positive feedback on My Champion, I decided to make a post-jam version. My first thought when doing the post-jam was that I shouldn’t go overboard. It’s just a  jam game after all… My next thought was: Screw it, let’s just go overboard!

So here are the additions to the post-jam of My Champion, and this time, I really went OVERBOARD!

* Tweaks to the gameplay: I tweaked the gameplay to make it more playable. Notably, you no longer go faster when running diagonally. The hit box against the gorillas are a bit smaller.
* Half-time: To respect the rules of soccer (or at least some of them), you get a half time at 45 min and get to switch sides.
* Translation to French and Korean: Yep, the game is entirely localized in French and Korean. I translated every words to French, and a friend help me translate to Korea. You can change the language dynamically during the game by pressing ‘L’. This took a lot of work!
* Extra options: You can mute the game. You also have the option to toggle auto-kick. I just added auto-kick to be able to play the game with one hand while holding a beer, but you do play much better by using the space bar.
* Dobuki Logo: The game now looks more professional with my logo ;-D
* Animations: I added the Kick animation for the cat. I also added the gorilla’s walk and kick animation.
* Head-turning: Oliver now sometimes turns his head slightly towards the ball. It’s a bit useful when you need to find the ball offscreen.
* Sound effects: You can hear the ball getting kicked!
* Illustrations: The text is now paired with a nice illustration that describes the story. You can now see how I originally designed coach Tapo (he’s a rabbit!). Also the cat has a name: Oliver!
* Practice mode: You can practice at controlling the ball on an empty field before the real match.
* Referee: Yes! There is now an in-game referee. Though it might just look like a smaller cat, it’s actually a hamster. He doesn’t affect the gameplay, but you can push him around to calm your nerves.
* Goal-keeper: I love this addition, because it’s a big reference to an anime I used to watch in France. I hope those of you who also watched it will recognize who I’m referring to. Note that in theory, this makes the game much harder, but hopefully the adjustment to gameplay compensated for that.
* Multi-player coop mode: That’s right! Multiplayer! I implemented a mode that lets you play with a friend on the same screen. Ok, it’s no longer “You only get one”, but it’s ok. We’re in post-jam ;-P. The second player use the keys ASDW or QSDZ for AZERTY keyboard 😉 and SHIFT. Both players have to remain on screen, so if one player falls behind, he’ll get dragged on by the stage’s boundaries. Note that the 2 player mode is unlocked only once you win a match, so I hope you guys can actually beat the game.
* Vicky: Not only you get a second player, but it’s a feline chick! Here name’s Vicky. She’s pink, she’s faster than Oliver, she can push him around, but she’s weaker at kicking the ball.
* 2 additional endings: Since there’s a new coop mode, I had to add two more endings. One for team victory, and one for draw/defeat. There’s also a nice little storyline to explain the inclusion of Vicky.
* Medals and score table: There are now 8 medals and a highscore table. Some medals are a bit tricky (can you find Waldhino?)

What I didn’t add:
* Crowd: I was going to add the crowd, but to get to it you would have to go pretty far past the game’s boundaries. Meh… I think I’ll go without it.
* Music for title screen: That’s actually the last thing I want to add before releasing the game on Newgrounds. I’m contacting some composer to help me come up with a nice theme song.

Meanwhile, enjoy the post-jam version, and if you haven’t yet, feel free to try and rate the Jam entry. Have a happy new year!

Thomas Prince

Tags: LD28, post-jam

UPDATE: Now actually has all the games.

Oh hey I used to do these pretty regularly for Ludum Dare, but I’ve been forgetting.

Here is a different way to browse games: a giant, clickable grid of thumbnails!

And a bunch of wallpapers if you like that kind of thing:

• 1024 x 768
• 1152 x 864
• 1280 x 768
• 1280 x 800
• 1280 x 960
• 1280 x 1024
• 1366 x 768
• 1440 x 900
• 1600 x 900
• 1600 x 1200
• 1620 x 1200
• 1680 x 1050
• 1920 x 1080
• 2560 x 1600
• 2880 x 1800

Here‘s an enormous version where you can actually make them all out.

Here are the scripts used to generate this stuff. (PIL required): gridmaker.py,makemosaic.py

Firstly, i wanted to find an innovative idea with the theme. I didn’t want to make a classic game in which you only get one life or one ammunition.. or something that simple. However, I didn’t achieve to get something better than a poor joke that nobody laugh about ^^

But i had so much fun developping my game that i decided to make a post compo version. To call your curiosity and show you what i planned to do, take a look to some special effects screenshots ;=)

Play it : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=19058 and tell me what you think.

Next step : implement a better difficulty progression. Stay tuned 😉

ps : Minko API for actionscript 3 is really a pure gem for 3D stuff, i recommand you to try it !

Tags: 3D, as3, flash, lotusgame, mahjong, Minko

After the LD 28 I was very busy with my educational projects, so I’m gonna use some free time to share some thoughts about this compo with you. (compo version of the game lives here) For those who won’t read the post – android mobile version is here

It was my first Ludum Dare to participate in and I was very excited to be a part of this event. I’d like to start with what went wrong.

What went wrong

The day this compo began I had to spend almost all day at the university as there was an exam for me to pass. At first I even thought that I won’t be able to create a game in time. But at the same time I had a lot of time to think the theme over. There was a swarm of thoughts but I didn’t really liked any of it until I thought of this one – a music puzzle with one-touch-to-pass-the-level. At that time I was dead sure that it totally covers the theme so I rushed to implement it once I got home. But there was a small problem – as people started to play this game, it turned out that some of them thought it didn’t really correspond the theme. So I thought it all over and understood that those people were right. Partially. I don’t really think that it’s a witty interpretation of the theme, but it doesn’t fall out of it either.

The second problem – I had an overall image of the game in my head, but I didn’t really know how it should be done until I actually started to work on it. I had no idea how the game should look and sound overall, so it was a bit confusing like “what to do next? Maybe this? Or maybe this?”

The third (and the most serious) problem – there was no ready-to-use scale sounds of the piano (ridiculous). I spent several hours looking for it on all possible free sound resources but didn’t manage to find any. I found a Cello scale instead (which is good, but I really wanted the piano). I had no music making software so I couldn’t make these sound by myself.

The fourth problem – GUI. Unity3D OnGUI system is a hell. You have to calculate all the rectangles, scale, align, move and animate all of it programmatically. I decided to drop it and created my own GUI system based on sprites. It’s pretty straightforward, but it’s way more effective than the OnGUI system.

And I totally forgot to start recording a timelapse from the very beginning. I was working for several hours when I remembered of it.

What went right

New Unity3D native 2D system really rocks! I’ve made a working prototype in no time! I had some problems with animation, I’ve never really worked with it in Unity, but overall it was pretty easy and fun to make a full 2D game in Unity3D

I really knew what I can make in 48-72 hours so I didn’t think of any impossible tasks. In fact, I was able to create even more content than I planned. On the second day I was lazy enough to play demo (and final) versions of other LD games here.

I’ve made a version that I was happy with when it was about 10 hours until the main (48h) deadline. I went for a compo because I used some creative common stuff. I submitted it and started playing others games.

It took some time to create a mobile version of the game (I was busy with my education again) but here it is – you can now play it on your android device! It’s free (and add-free)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FerretSyndicate.OneTouchOfMusic

iOS version is coming out soon.

It was pretty fun for my first Ludum Dare!

Cheers!

Hi guys and fellow devs,

Just wanted to hop in the postmortem wagon and let you learn a bit more about how I worked on “One”, my LD28 entry. English isn’t my mother tongue, so be ready to read approximate french-glish.

If you’re interested, you can first test my game here.

The Concept

When I heard about the theme, I got a little disappointed because I voted against it, for the simple reason it didn’t inspire me that much. I almost gave up on participating. My first idea was to make a game about getting only one seed in an arid world, but it was too complicated and, in my opinion, not original enough.

I was a bit depressed that saturday, the sky was dark. Thinking about the LD smoking my cigarette outside, I suddenly decided to cheer myself up by cheering other up, and I decided to make the happiest and cutest game I was able to do in 48h.

With that in mind, I thought about the theme again and remembered that one dream I used to have which filled me with happiness. In this dream I wasn’t flying but jumping so high, and falling so hard ! It was fun and magic. I decided to turn that into a small game.

For those who didn’t play the game, the game is about a little child who learn to jump up to the stars. Little light balls help you to get higher and higher.

The Scope

I’m what you could call a experienced dev, with more than 20 games released in my career, and 4-5 game jams. After several years, I’m now experienced with scoping a game. My advice is to always go for the simplest idea you can have. Because during the course of development, either for a full game or a jam, you’ll always spend twice the time you planned on small things like researching, debugging, adding signs and feedback, etc. We always tend to underestimate the details, so focusing on the simplest idea and growing from there is often the best solution.

Programming

I used Flixel, which is, in my experience, one of the best technology for game jams, for two reasons : it’s perfect to create very small projects in a very short time, and it’s meant to be distributed online, as it’s Flash based. The second is useful for LD because people tend to test games with Web version more (it’s far from being enough to get a lot of ratings, but it helps a bit).

My idea for One was so simple I managed to tackle gameplay code in a couple of hours. I love when it goes that way, because I know I can use plenty of time to make art, music and moreover add signs & feedbacks.

No Instruction

Several people have been surprised, playing One, that there isn’t any instruction. Well it’s been a choice. I love to do game jams to experiment with ergonomics. Having no instruction is a risky challenge. If it’s done right it helps immersion and focusing on the message of the game. If done wrong, it simply ruins the whole experience. So far, I don’t think anybody really got stuck in the game, so I would say I’ve done it right this time !

Here are a non-exhaustive list of simple things I implemented to make sure players learn how to play by themselves :

– Control scheme : as intuitive as possible, only three buttons (left, right and up). Duplicated on ZQD and QWD

– At least one bonus is visible on screen at start, encouraging to reach it and learn to jump and move.

– Audio feedback when touching bonus and also when reaching the current max altitude, hinting a bit on what to do.

– Midgame, my texts help a bit, by notifying that there’s more to discover upward.

Art

I’ve worked with Photoshop. I’ve made backgrounds mainly using a brush to get this cloudy aspect. I didn’t want to spend too much time on animation so I made only a few poses of the character, mixing pixel art and painting techniques.

Music

Surprisingly, I spent most of my time on music, with at least 4 hours spent on it. I must say I got a little carried I really enjoyed making it, so I wasn’t able to stop until I was satisfied with that small piece.

What went right

This LD went really well, for the main reason I did a game with a message and an intention in mind, I think. Working with the purpose of sharing a bit of love and poetry is wonderful. I managed to do a little something I’m proud of in far less than 48h because I didn’t get too ambitious and managed to focus on a simple idea and make the best I could of it.

What went wrong

The game was a bit oversized, and loaded from a website it discouraged some of my early testers. They complained it wasn’t working because I forgot to add a preloader : the page showed a blank page for around a minute. I hope those early testers didn’t rate the game too bad. I also stupidly forgot to proof-read my texts and let a small typo in the game (which I corrected later, as I learned it was allowed).

Conclusion

Make game with love, message and passion, focus on a simple idea but don’t forget about the little details ! Happy new year everyone, and let 2014 be filled with hope, love and plenty of wonderful games ! I think games can help the world be a better place, so keep going guys, I love you all.

–Jérôme

You can reach me at contact [at] cuvegames.com if you have any question or feedback which I would love to have. 

Tags: 2D, Flixel, Ludum Dare, post-mortem, postmortem

Why, you ask? Because my graphics used to suck! Look at the difference:

So much better! There is also now a retry button for when you are dead, and some performance fixes! Do, please, check out my game, and if you already have, please take another look, because it is so much better now!

Enjoy,

Luke

Hello, LD folks! This is a post-mortem of everything I’ve made in 2013. I just feel like I must write one. We don’t end years often, do we?

This year started with the end of Ludum Dare 25. Results weren’t high, but they were higher than anything I’ve got then. Let’s call it a beginning of a beginning.

Also, I joined One Game A Month. In the first month, however, I almost failed. I managed to make a very short game about 2 days before the month’s end.

Then, MiniLD 40 came, so I made a game. Actually, I’ve made 2 games in February. The second one was, perhaps, my first serious game. I found out that I can make games.

I didn’t participate in MiniLD 41. I think I went somewhere then. I managed to make a game for 1GAM though, so I can’t say I wasted March.

April came next. And LD 26. I participated in it, and I did better. I was making several other games, I still didn’t finish them. Well, it was a very productive time. I had been on some kind of peak then… until I fell.

Yep, I fell. It was summer, but (so?) I didn’t participate in MiniLDs. I made 2 games for 1GAM, but eventually I broke my own combo. I missed the LD 27. It wasn’t because of my lack of motivation, but who knows if it could bump me up?However, I didn’t lose fully. Since the September, I was programming. Not really making any games, just programming. So, I didn’t really do anything during the autumn.

But then, in November, MiniLD 47 came. And that was the first time I pulled a game from beginning to end since April. And results were great! I put effort into everything. Even graphics, though before I thought graphics isn’t my thing.

Now, Ludum Dare 28 passed. I’m glad with what I’m done. And it’s only the beginning.

Here is what do I want to tell. Imagine yourself playing a game, where you fight against armies of enemies. And if you get killed, you lose absolutely nothing. What will you do? You will bravely attack them, won’t you? That’s Ludum Dare. What do you lose if you do something wrong? Nothing. So why won’t you put all your efforts to it?

So far, in 2013 I:

• Participated in 2 Ludum Dares, 2 Mini Ludum Dares
• Made 8 games (out of 12) for 1GAM
• Made 10 games total.
• Left 3 games unfinished.
• Made 48 posts in LD.
• Made 14 500×500 images, 8 nice little sprites.
• Composed 3 pieces of music for games.
• Made 17072 screenshots for timelapses.

I don’t rate a lot of games. Well, who rates games on the New Year’s Eve? Anyway, here are several good games with little rating I’ve noticed:

• Batteries Not Included by Photon
• First Hour Superpower by tayl1r
• John Power by Anoarith

And you might want to rate my game: Maverick.

Happy New Year everybody! I wish you to do everything you can and aim for the best!

Tags: postmortem

This is the first time we participate in a game jam, though we have been following ludum dare for a long time now. After a couple of weeks, it’s time to write a post-mortem about this great experience.

Play the game!

What went wrong:

Character movement
One thing that made its way into the final game, is a bug where the closest rotation angle for the people to reach an objective was incorrectly calculated. In some scenarios people would make a 358° spin just to face 2° to the left. It seemed to happen only sporadically, but it turned out to be very annoying. (we already fixed this in the post-compo version)
Other point is the player controls. Since movement controls are the only one availables in this game, we wanted to make them not the trivial “move with arrows or ASDW”. We wanted controls that could make you feel uncomfortable, sightly anxious. One movement at a time, you are not in control all the time. I think we got there, but sometimes the controls feel awkward, even frustrating.
We must rework it, and should be the most polished thing since it is central to the gameplay, but we are definitively not adding stuff such as pathfinding or any kind of ai assistance.

Level design / level editor:
In the middle of the development, we faced one of our biggest dilemmas: to build or not to build a level editor. We ended up not building the editor with the only purpose of not getting distracted by stuff that’s not essential.

We left the levels design for the last couple of hours. Time constrains + no editor =
We have one big json file per level, each one containing info about position, collisions, behaviors. Making all the pieces fit together resulted to be very tricky. Position trial and error, and after we got things as we wanted, we had to iterate trying to make it not so frustrating nor boring (no editor, trial and error again).

This is how a level config looks like. Not fun.

Result? Levels not properly balanced, and things like the chapter 3, with so many people getting stuck because there is no clue about what should be done next.

What went right:

ECS
We used our custom ECS microlibrary (no docs, it’s not finished). Having all the behavior decoupled, allowed us to make big changes really easy, and the code to feel more maintanable and robust.
For example, I can add the “contagionFocus” component to any object, and from there the object will infect near objects, whose once infected will also have the “contagionFocus” component.
The only drawback here might be that performance optimizations are a little bit harder, though for the jam we didn’t need to worry about that too much.
Tooling
We used webmake to have node-style requires, and jshint for static code analysis. Having everything orchestrated with grunt allowed us to have jshint watch any file changes, and throw an error if any issue was encountered. This reinforced best practices, but also saved us time by anticipating syntax errors or typos.
We were pretty familiar with the workflow / tools / language so it definitively made us go faster.
Rest & food
No crazy stuff. We ate healthy food mostly, and didn’t skip any lunch or dinner. We only had some beers after the first journey right before sleeping. We had a reasonable time of sleep, and that allowed us to make it through the sunday energetically.
Teamwork
We worked really well together. Our thoughts were mostly aligned, and we complemented each other very well in terms of skills.
Feedback
We are amazed with the quality and the power of the feedback received. Every negative remark was highly constructive.

Next steps:

We feel there is a big room for having fun developing this idea. And a big oportunity for learning and experiencing with some stuff we haven’t done before.

Iterate and polish what we already have: quirks and known bugs(player movement, collisions, AI), redesign and fine-tune the levels, improve the graphics, sounds, and UI in general.

New game modes. We thought about adding some game modes apart from the story mode (survival, infect others?, multiplayer?).

Procedurally generated levels

TL;DR

Happy new year everyone, see you next LD!

Tags: jam, javascript, postmortem

From team Lonebot ♥!

I’ve finally found some time to compile a linux version of Careful Now. It should work, but I’ve not got a linux machine to test on so please leave a comment if it doesn’t work (hopefully with the command line output).

You can download the linux version from the entry page here.

Thanks.

As per my submission, I made the game have 3 parts. I didnt add much instruction on parts 2 & 3, because i was having my brother & parents play those parts in person. I made part 1 a bit trickier to play, part 2 & 3 are fairly easy as my parents aren’t gamers. It’s basically a christmas card to my family.

http://projects.agmprojects.com/ld28/

Release link for the compo itself, incase you’re curious: http://projects.agmprojects.com/ld28release