First of all thanks to all who played and rated our game. We especially enjoyed watching streamers playing our game, one of the most memorable moments, to me, was watching Leth (Wanderlust & Risk of Rain) playing it. It was extremely rewarding! I tried setting up a stream of myself playing LD games to try and give someone else that same experience, but I didn’t get it working properly

This was our first LD entry and we learned loads with it, not only technically, but regarding employing certain abilities, time management and all the other things that come with the pack.

We placed #12 in Graphics, which is unbelievable! Our average score was closer to a 5 than a 4, that leaves me speechless. I’m so glad that people appreciated the art so much, we dedicated a lot to graphics. Which also explains why other areas didn’t reach the same tier.
We placed #119 Overall, which is exciting, but showed us that we could’ve dedicated less to graphics and more to improving the overall experience, as shown with our #141 in Fun. Perhaps that is the most important category of them all, there’s nothing more rewarding than to know that people are having fun with something you made, we’ll definitely invest more in that on the next LD!

I think some buggy and poorly tuned values hindered our overall ratings, which eventually got fixed in a post-compo version. The community’s feedback helped us really focus on fixing them and we’d love to hear any feedback about our post-compo, especially if you have already played the compo version of the game.

So, once again, I’d like to thank the awesome LD community as well as leave the link to our post-compo version, should anyone like to try it out
Post-Compo Version

Hi there, Ludumdarians!

We have some news. We are working on fleshing out faif (our Ludum Dare #28 jam entry) and we decided to make a pre-release for your Android Devices!

Pre-release

You got the game before anyone else with an exclusive 50% discount. WHAAAAT?

What is Faif?

Faif is a puzzle/rpg game with a unique battle system based on gambling.
Try to defeat as many opponents as you can and unravel the secret story behind the game.

Look how gorgeous it is:

So download the game!

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beavl.faif

But hey! Listen!

if you don’t have an Android phone/tablet nor .99 cents to spend, you can still play the web version HERE!

Cheers and have fun!

* Note: Faif is still in development, we will be improving and uploading new versions of the game almost every week until final release for you to test it and help us flesh it out. You can use the “Tell Us” button in the game to send us your suggestions or comment right here! Thanks for all the support and hell yeah, just faif!

Tags: android, beavl, faif, ld48, postcompo, unity

First of all, I’m here to thank everyone who gave us some feedback to Babelita and put us on 32ª in the Ludum Dare 28 ranking!

And to celebrate this, here is the link for Babelita on Kongregate
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Kuupu/babelita/

Also you can check our other games there! =D

Since August of 2012 I have been intending to participate in the Ludum Dare. But, unmotivated and intimidated, I have yet to work up the courage to actually follow through with my promises of participation. But I’m finally doing it! First game I’ll have ever made, first Ludum Dare event, yet I’ve been programming since 4/10/12. Hopefully it won’t suck, which is the reason I chose to do the MiniLD before an actual LD. I’m jumping right into the deep end! Let’s do this! MiniLD #48!

Tags: first Game ever, miniLD #48, Tier42

I feel like I learned a lot from my experience this past LD. Or at least it’s gotten me to think about things.

One lesson I learned, or at least experienced yet again, is never to undervalue time management and planning for the unexpected. For the first 12 hours I dawdled not doing much at all, then for the next 24 hours spent too much time obsessing over details and putting off important stuff (sounds, music, level design). The last 12 hours were super intense and sloppy, and as a result the game didn’t turn out as good as it could have been, and it was unpleasant working that hard.

After I submitted the game (here and on Newgrounds), I got really discouraged by a few comments providing fair and useful criticism. I obviously knew my game would be nowhere near perfect, but I was being really negative about it. I thought that I shouldn’t have even submitted it, because it was a waste of time for people playing it. I felt ashamed and guilty. Deep down though, a part of me knew that these feelings were irrational, and that I was blowing things out of proportion, but I felt sad anyways.

I spent a week or two pouting and thinking about the situation. Idly browsing tumblr I came across this blog post by Edmund McMillen about growing as an artist. Reading this post kind of brought me back to reality. It’s normal to make mistakes and learn from them, and that’s one of the main reasons that game jams like Ludum Dare exist. I learned a bunch about myself emotionally, which I’m not eloquent enough to write about, but they’re in this general domain. Lots of self-reflection, etc. Hopefully I’ll become a more mature person after this whole ordeal.

I don’t know if any of you guys reading this have had similar experiences, not just in Ludum Dare but anywhere in life, but I guess I’m just documenting my experience. I hope this post might be relevant to someone. Sorry for rambling and awkward wordings (it’s late, and I don’t write very well anyways), and thanks for reading. I might participate in the Mini-LD if I have time, but either way, I’ll definitely be back! Thanks to the staff and the community for creating such a great event.

TL;DR: Ludum Dare taught me that life is a learning experience. The blog post I linked above puts it nicely.

Tags: postmortem

Thoughts on this Ludum Dare –

• I’m kinda disappointed, but the results seem fair.
• Best ranking: 50th for humor.
• I didn’t focus on a concept and the theme enough.
  • My concept was you  have 1 arm but multiple tools, you have to find ways to carry tools without your arm.
  • Didn’t have enough time to do that!
• Instead I spent time on other things:
  • I wanted to include palette swapping and NPCs.
  • I’m happy I included them, but I should’ve focused more on a concept.
• I coded everything from scratch, which made things take longer. I’m happy I did that though.
• I received a lot of nice comments
• Thanks to the 71 people who rated my game!
• If you haven’t played it, check out The Visitor.

Thoughts on previous Ludum Dares –

• My best Entry is Mondrianism, doing well in everything except humor.
• Second best would be my first entry, The Good Ship Higgs Boson.
• Super Space Goat Thief Standoff!! is definitely my worst entry, but I only spent a few hours on that.
• My best category has been different every time, interestingly.
• As you can see, there’s a clear trend of… um… well…

Wiggly lines everywhere!

Ooh, animated!

See you next Ludum Dare!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Instead of a typical postportem, my hindsightly wisdom will be portrayed with more generalised advice, in the hope that others can learn from this too. So, here are the cumulative lessons I have learnt from the past few Ludum Dares to push your overall ranking up (disclaimer: I have yet to test these):

#1 Get yourself or make yourself a library or framework that gives you basic, smooth mechanics of a game.

#2 Make your graphics feel polished, even if they aren’t.

#3 Cool features are often easy to implement.

#4 Keep your game as intuitive as possible.

#5 AUDIO!!

#6 Get some practice with your development tools and framework.

So, now I’ve preached, I can start following these myself as well. I hope this is helpful to more than none of you. See you next Ludum Dare!

After failure on Ludum Dare #28 I’m going to take part in MiniLD#48.

LD28 was my first try on Ludum Dare and it was not an epic fail, but it was a failure anyway))

Results were following:

Coolness 57%

#301 – Humor – 2.75       #396 – Theme – 3.09

#684 – Fun – 2.59            #740 – Audio – 1.63

#756 – Mood – 2.38          #779 – Overall – 2.65

#789 – Graphics – 2.30    #948 – Innovation – 2.00

In this MiniLD I want to get  a little bit better results =)

Engine: Unity (C#)
Graphics: Blender, GIMP, Inkscape
Audio: BFXR, Musagi, Audacity, Reaper
Other:  maybe some other useful stuff

And as always,

May the Force be with us !!!

I was looking at the ratings for my game.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not disappointed with these numbers at all, considering how simple my game is. However, I’m surprised by a few of these numbers, especially Humor.

Given I am 776th place in Humor, that makes my game “more humorous” than over half of the entries in Ludum Dare 28 (assuming over 2000+ entries). But my game has no humor in it at all; it was not an intended focus.

So one of my questions is: how did my game rate so high in Humor when it didn’t have any? My other question is: would it be possible in the future for Ludum Dare to have certain categories, like Humor, be optional? Like for example, I want to be able to disable Humor for any game I make that doesn’t have any humor in it. Same with audio, etc.

Tags: categories, ratings

So, another LD has come gone and as usual there are trails of interesting feedback on the road. Let’s see how Synesthesia went.

Woah, that’s something I would have never expected: top 25 for Innovation? I knew the idea was very interesting but I would have never expected to go so high! Thanks to everyone!

Ok so let’s see in detail. It looks like what other fellow Ludum Darers appreciated the most was the basic idea. That’s encouraging, since I’m planning to expand further on the game. It really got butchered out of time caresty so it bugs me that the original idea hasn’t come out as much as I expected. It shows on the Overall and Fun category since it should have felt more of a demo than a complete game (even though a 3 star average is still amazing in my eyes).

This fact, combined with the lot of enthusiastic comments about a post compo version really geared me up towards making a longer and better version (and over everything, portable). I couldn’t work on it in these weeks because I had to finish another game based on a game I made in LD27 (it’s out gladly, so you can get it for free here if you are curious), but I’m definately going to work on it after the MiniLD this weekend, so stay tuned for some update.

I’m especially glad that people liked the mood of the game, since it was my main focus besides gameplay.

On the bottom we have, not surpisingly, graphics and… Humor? Two stars in humor? For some reason people think Synesthesia is more humorous than half of the games in the jam! I’m flattered but I can’t seem to see any humor in this small demo. Oh well.

Okay, so let’s talk about this miniLD that is about to start. I’ve never partecipated in a miniLD but since the rules are much more relaxed I’m pretty confident of creating something worthwile. Let’s see the tools I’m going to use:

• Language: JavaScript (HTML5 canvas)
  This is the first time I have ever dabbled into developing something for the web. I’m starting to get used to the language in this period and I really like it, it feels like a web oriented version of Lua which is always a good (and the C like syntax is something I feel more comfortable with). Also, portability and simplicity of use is never a bad thing. I’ve done a few simple projects and besides dome problems with asynchronous loading it looks like it’s working great, so I’m really excited to create a game in it.
• Graphics: Gimp, Inkscape
• Audio: REAPER with the amazing sounding Synth1, as usual, bfxr
• Editor: Emacs

Ok, this looks like everything for now. Looking foward to this weekend!

Tags: gamemaker, LD28, synesthesia

My first LD has come and gone, how’d I do?

Coolness 51%
#254 Theme 3.32
#423 Humor 2.40
#497 Audio 2.52
#660 Innovation 2.65
#728 Fun 2.52
#762 Overall 2.68
#881 Mood 2.10
#903 Graphics 2.04

Not too good, but not too shabby. At any rate, I hope to make a great little game for this Mini-LD!

2013 is over and I figured it was time to look at how all four of my games did. Overall, I think the scores are a good reflection of each game’s strengths and weaknesses.
For more charts and analysis, check out my tumblr post … For all the raw numbers, you can view my google spreadsheet.

Two additional insights that may be useful to everyone else:

• Audio and Mood seem to go hand-in-hand
• If you’re not careful with controlling your scope, high Innovation may come at a price at lowering other scores

I’m looking forward to the next mini-LD!

NOTE: I wont be here for most of tomorrow, so I decided that I will use half of today, and half of tomorrow, and that will still end up as 48 hours. I hope that is allowed.

NOTE2: I will post the post explaining the game tomorrow, I just wanted to log my progress for today before I forget.

Alternate title for this post: “I FINALLY SQUASHED THE BUG!!!!!111!”, or “I am so bad I have to resort to unconventional means”.

I finally fixed the bug I was having with SpriteBatches, on my Mini Ludum Dare 48 game: Death Plot. See, I had a convoluted set up with a Sprite Class for general sprites doing the drawing for my player class. I then had the Player class call that drawing function, and then the Gameplay screen class, which is my main class, call the player one.
Much to my chagrin however, I was getting null exception errors, due to me supposedly not initializing the SpriteBatch using new. However, I was actually doing that.
Long story short, after trying multiple things to fix it, like initializing the SpriteBatch in the Game class, in LoadContent, in Draw, and pretty much everywhere, it didn’t work. I then scoured the internet for help to no avail.
So, what did I do to fix this? I moved the player drawing to the Gamplay screen class. From there it called Player.Position as a parameter to the drawing. Everything related to the player is in Player, except the drawing. It seems to be working perfectly fine now.
Anyway, I am tired, and due to school, I haven’t had much time. I got a movement system implemented, title screen art, game menus, and one of my two player controlled objects. I’ll finish the rest, as well as a design post explaining this game, tomorrow.

Follow my Twitter (Kerinova_xeon) for more about my development process.

Tags: ASCII, mini ld

I like to start hours before, playing classic SNES.
I play several of them and some submissions from Ludum Dare previous events too.
Today I intend to test various mechanisms within the themes covered for the event.
I have been studying for some time, issues such as ‘body mass, volumes and environments’ for 2D games, state simulations understand me.
Simulations for the player feel that is in the water .. a place that has a light that affects the character, winds that affect the speed.
I’ll try to use different types of environments and simulations of this kind today.
I’ll wait to start the proposed schedule … Which is same? heheheheh … I will be playing while I wait hehehe.

Tags: audition, mini ld, proposal

I just played the game Lumen and it’s a very nice Idea and very great game! Nevertheless after reading the description i realized that the author didn’t make the music and sounds himself. He said that he just took some free assets.

So why people give a
“#42 Audio(Jam) 3.77”
rating?

Sorry for but i don’t understand this! I putted a lot of work in the music of my entry and get only a
“#323 Audio(Jam) 2.67”
?

I think the Audio category is the most wrong voted category!

I’ve never done a Ludum Dare before so I hope I am doing this right!

I still cant decide on what im going to create that will fit with any of the themes. I have started work on getting a running game working already by using XNA and importing things I think I will need (Gamestate enum, spritefonts, etc..)

In this screenshot I have set up variables for textures and fonts.

All I have just now is the standard “XNA cornflower blue” screen so I wont show a screenshot of that :/

Anyways I hope im doing this right and I hope to have something better for my next update…

LD#28 is over, ratings are public! Let’s see the difference between a 27-hour and a 6-hour game!

#213    Mood    3.23
+14 in ranking
0 in rating -> exactly the same value as it was in Hackfield!

#317    Innovation    3.17
-26 in ranking
-0,1 in rating

#618    Theme    2.65
+159 in ranking
-0,61 in rating

#625    Humor    1.96
+159 in ranking
-0,44 in rating

#720    Audio    1.78
-54 in ranking
-0,55 in rating

#787    Graphics    2.31
-161 in ranking
-0,46 in rating

#835    Overall    2.56
-266 in ranking
-0,48 in rating

#882    Fun    2.24
-3 in ranking
-0,28 in rating

So, as of 00:00UTC+11, I am entering a game in MiniLD#48. I previously worked on MediQuest as part of the LolsHouse Dev team in the most recent Jam, but this’ll be my first time soloing anything in terms of game development. So far, I’ve decided to only use the word “facade” from the list provided, as I want to keep things nice and simple for myself. I plan to make a top-down game with a very minimalist aesthetic, as I don’t want to get bogged down in designing graphics and so forth.

I don’t know how up to date I’ll keep things here, but I should make at least some posts, I’d imagine. See you guys soon.

I’m in for the Mini, though technically I did start yesterday because I won’t have a lot of time on the weekend.

So, facade, scheme, deceit, conspiracy… I’m making a game where you play a scheming dark wizard who has to cover up his/her conspiracy. It’s taking place in a wizarding school (hmm…). The player’s enemy are the students who are going about their day. As they see evidence they get more suspicious, until the dark wizard is uncovered. The player has to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Here’s the first screenshot, not a lot to see yet:

This is an HTML5/JavaScript game.

Hello im making a game for android so is there any free royalty free sound effects packs or music email me at monatancaleb@gmail.com thanks

{Caleb}