I just submitted my  Flappy Jam game (For more information on the Flappy Jam, click me!) and it’s turning out to be pretty interesting! I am actually really proud of this game, as this was one of the first times I have taken more than a few days on a game. The main gameplay is just jumping over some randomly generated spikes. Really. It’s simple, but so was Flappy Bird. That was the point of this jam.

All in all, it was a lot of fun to make, I got to get better in a lot of areas and actually explored a lot of stuff.

It’s not super flashy, but I am actually pleased with the art.

Some things I learned how to do from this jam:
– High scores saved to a file, keeps scores after player closes game.
– Improved randomized spawning systems.
– More reliable and less buggy “scrolling effect”.

I reused the speaker icon asset from my last LD game! Woo! Reuse of assets!

Here is what the death screen looks like, as you can see, it has detected that my amazing score of five was greater than the score in the file (I set it to zero, for the demo.) and tells the player that they beat their score by showing the player a very fancy medal. I designed this system in about two days, without any prior experience with “long term” score capturing options. Pretty darn neat if you ask me.

Anyway, I thought I’d just share that with you guys.

I used the T-Rex C++ engine I made, with OpenGL (SDL_OpenGL) to draw everything, SDL for window and input management, MMSystems for the sound (I’ll get SDL_mixer working, someday.), glut for the text (I’ll get SDL_ttf working, someday.), and SOIL for texture loading!

(You can check out the game here, or you can get the source here. I highly recommend checking out the Flappy Jam and playing some games.)

Tags: C++, files, Flappy Jam, glut, Highscore, opengl, SDL, soil, source

I Need to polish the player sprite  but the gameplay its definetively defined in my head and everything is moving on screen.
I had to stop yesterday and today due university and work, my friends are calling me now to make my part in a assignment we have together, I’ll stop and will continue to work some hours tomorrow during the morning and night.
Hope to have some playable game.

Good Luck Janxelod

Phew. It’s as good as it will be tonight. I had to skip prettier graphics. I wanted to add legs and arms to my characters. But at least I crammed in some gamepad support at the last minute.

Time to crash. And then play all the mini LD 49  games.

Well, here it is. My first game. It sadly isn’t finished and i don’t know if i’ll ever get around to it. But, I did learn a ton from it, and plan to use that experience to make an even better game next time. Most of the art was done by my friend Jacob, but I handled all of the programming stuff.

A few bugs got squished! But I made sure not to hurt our cute little gaming cockroach <3

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=31786

This entry was posted on Monday, February 24th, 2014 at 6:22 am and is filed under MiniLD #49. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Hi to all,

I finally finished this little game I did for Mini Ludum Dare #49.

This is by far the fastest and quickest game I ever wrote. It is also the most polished game I did for this short time.

Bare in mind I only started yesterday afternoon with the game play. I was on holiday this weekend and had only +-8 hours to do it.

Please have a look and enjoy.

PS: The Score Board is not working currently but one’s high score is saved.

Download the game here and comment on it: Electron download

This was my first compo/jam ever! while I won’t have a finished prototype by the end of today I have learned quite a lot about what to and to not focus on during the jam time. I’m going to participate in several other jams between now and the next full LD (Cyberpunk Game Jam, 7DRL), so my goal now is to be able to finish my games in time during the next Ludum Dare.  This has been a lot of fun so far though, and I’ve met some cool people and am on the way to the finish line with some cool ideas and sprites to show for it!

Here is my first game prototype made for MiniLD.  I spent all weekend on it and am pretty satisfied with the results. I learned a ton working on this and can’t wait till the next LD / miniLD.

All the art is placeholder art “borrowed” from Google image search.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=33196

We have added the fish and fish animations, we still want to add a scoring system, fish textures,  additional sounds, and a menu in the next 9 hours.

We have uploaded a second (three player) gameplay video to YouTube, the link to the video is http://youtu.be/9-LOxs9i7vQ

Please try it out! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=33085

That was the first game jam I have ever participated at and although I wasn’t even near my minimum goal I had a lot of fun and learned a lot of things, the first one being that I’m still not a good artist ;). In the end I didn’t really focus on the things that I should have focused on and the result is an immense incomplete game. Fortunately one can see that it should be a game at some point. I won’t submit an entry, but those of you who are interested may check out the dev build linked at the end of this post.

While the first day went pretty good I think, I already made less progress on saturday, probably because I generally had less time that day (okok, making games is cool, but I can’t miss my favorite’s club football match!). Also, I spent way too much time on making some (pretty bad) graphics this day. I guess I will become better at it with some more practice, but it’s just not my favorite thing to do either. I should maybe get some helping hands for the next jam for this, so I can focus on the programming. The programming went pretty good. Ok, I used Unity, but I’ve been programming for quite some years now and I can’t remember any (for me) new technology that I had so few problems with like this weekend. The biggest issue is that weird jumping bug that you can marvel at in the dev build as well. If you have any solution for this issue, hit me on Twitter perhaps.

Sunday was the worst day because some nasty headache has knocked me out completely and it still isn’t gone yet. I tried to do some stuff but ended up doing bullshit only. Sucks. I just hope I stay healthy during the next jam and perhaps find one or two people to help me and I think the result will already be much better. Now.. I’m going to check out some of the games that have been submitted and have s0me fun with them, too, I hope. See you at next LD! Tim out.

• Check the development build here (needs Unity Web Player)

The protagonist should be a tealight.

The first planned enemy: wind. One is bursting at the tea light while the other one is starting a stormy attack!

To sum up my experiences completing my first miniLD  “me.X86“

Before Competition:

• I have wanted to try a programming competition for a long time
• miniLD #49’s theme of “non-human player” was really interesting
• I wanted to try and use the bare minimum tools to complete the competition
• I wanted to capture a Time Lapse of everything I did to  create the game

Start of Competition:

• Decided the game would only use HTML, JavaScript, & CSS
• Only use software that was freely available, shareware, or I had written
  • Bracket.io ( Code Editor )
  • svg-edit ( Browser based svg editor )
  • Chrome (google) & safari (apple) web browsers
  • Ghost TimeLapse (I wrote it)
• Write everything from scratch at time of competition

What went well:

Completed on time & Audio

• Game works and was completed in time. ( though I only managed to include the first level )
• Created all graphics from scratch during competition
• Audio created by Aart for the Menu, Level, and game outcome sounds fantastic (imp)
• Overall look of the Game
• Everything to complete the first level works
• Game engine is easy to include additional content and capabilities
• Released game can be played without having internet ( only 2 HTML files, and some media)

What went wrong:

Time Management & Expectations

• Spent too much time testing software tools during competition time
• Lost a lot of time trying “new” ways of reinventing the wheel
• Ended up using 1 JavaScript file I had created pre-competition
• Ran out of time to test final game on other web browsers
• Tried to include way to much from the beginning ( forgot the KISS principle )
• Did not include a description of how to play the game

What is next:

I like the game concept, and a lot of how the game plays, so I will be continuing on and adding more of my ideas to it. Overall I learned and enjoyed doing this competition, which should help me be better prepared in the future. Looking forward to the next competition.

Overall Experience:

Humbled. I learned a lot about myself, and my programming style. Though happy that I was able to complete as much as I have, wish I had spent more time polishing the user interface before I posted it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=33141

I would appreciate any feedback people have.

I almost made it. I was doing SO well, but I ultimately failed. I want to blame my failure on an IRL event, but I know it was all me. I shouldn’t have attended it. This means so much to me because I WANTED to get this done on time. This is my first time participating in something like this and actually getting anything substantial finished. I feel so disappointed now. Maybe I was too ambitious? Maybe I wasted too much time doing IRL things and I need to spend less time away from my work? I dunno.

Hey there! Check out my MiniLD/FlappyJam game “Fade to black”, an atmospheric endless platformer.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=24534

http://erkberg.itch.io/fade-to-black

Please check out ArkBurst, a collaborative project between my studio Dobuki and Derail’d studio for miniLD #49 jam. I worked on the code and they did the art, level design and music (Ryuno is the composer). It’s a brick breaker and the player is the ball!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=20841

Gotta say, my projects look a lot more polished when I don’t draw the art myself ;-P

Tags: ball, brick breaker, MiniLD, MiniLD49, non-human

So, this has been my first Ludum dare and I’m actually really happy with what I was able to come up with, I hope you like it!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=32981

I have polished of my game for MiniLD #49 just a little bit more.
One has the ability to pickup powers such as SlowMo power. This power will be very helpful later on
when the game is getting to difficult.

Also, I have created a video for those who don’t want to play it.
PS: You are really missing out.
Video URL: Electron – Trailer1

URL To MiniLD #49 entry: Play Game

Like many others, this was the first miniLD/game jam I’ve participated in, although I had thought about joining one before. This time though, I didn’t even know there was a miniLD going on : I just jumped in friday at about 3:00 pm when I read about it and started planning out what would be my future game. In a way, I think it was more motivating to simply jump in and do it without thinking about it too much.

The Wandering Treant is a 2D sidescroller in which you, the treant, must find the nutrients you need to survive in a polluted forest. But beware, for you will make a tasty snack for the many beavers lurking around. Rumor also has it that lumberjacks are on the lookout for firewood and that they watch for unusual animal behaviour to find your trail. I might have put a little bit of my canadian heritage in it.

In short, it is a 2D sidescrolling puzzle game. You need to get to the “win zone” and set your roots there (to absorb the nutrients) while avoiding beavers and lumberjacks (or at least prevent them from chopping you down).

If any of you are interested, you can check it out here :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=33174

If you do try it out, I would like to know what you think about the (few) levels I’ve made !

Dat axe.

The game technically only features three levels (the first one serves only to show you one of the mechanics). I’ve spent hours (basically all of Sunday) designing levels that weren’t too simple, some of which I’ve had to scrap in the end because they never worked the way I wanted them to. Silly physics ! However, I’m still pretty happy about both the result and the competition itself. It was a great learning experience. It was humbling and fun. And I still feel motivated, even after the competition. Too bad I have a weekend of homework  to catch up to 😛

Until next time !

Time to write a post mortem for Gaming Cockroach.

The theme

“Non human player” did not click with me. I grew up with the genesis and the super nes, and quite a lot of my favorite games are staring animals or at least anthropomorphic animals: non human player is not a constraint but a given in my mind. I guess I could have done a puzzle game, but the truth is, I don’t think I could pull out a working puzzle game over a weekend… So the last idea was doing a game that was not intended to be played by a human; I thought of different things, like making my cat play with my tablet or doing some video analysis from a webcam (poor man kinect) to make you play with a plush… And it was terrible till I get an idea : I was looking to add an interface outside the game (a cat, a plush, whatever), but it could easily be done inside the game. So I started doing some 3D model of a nes gamepad.

What went wrong?

Well, I got lucky with this one: the development went right and I only got a few quacks on the road:

• Tetris is harder to clone than I thought and the result is kind of cpu demanding. Of course any modern CPU will make it run smoothly, but still, its heavy for a simple tetris.
• A real 3D approach would have been better that this pre-render thingy: took me a lot of time for pretty much nothing.
• I should have taken the time to make my own graphics for Tetris instead of using the classic Nes version. It’s not hard and I might even have learned a thing or two.
• At last but not least: don’t suppose everybody thinks like you do. To my surprise, some people did not understood that the cockroach could jump or fly, but it’s true that it’s not written anywhere. I should have done a small, one page, tutorial consisting only of a few drawings.

What went right?

• Since I saw small, I could put everything I wanted in the game (or almost, cause at the very start, the idea was to play a mouse and to have a cat wandering around randomly…)
• The result: I wanted to do some playable yet unplayable game, just to see people raging. This goal was perfectly  achieved and I’ve had some fun watching my friends loosing.
• Balance. For the very first time, I’ve had time to tweaks value so they achieved some kind of balance. The fly is timed so you’ll drop on the start button, the speed is timed so you can only do 3 action time (move, rotate and then re – move)… And overall, it seems to do what I want :3
• The konami code and the flappy bird clone made people laugh ^^;

For my third game, I’m quite satisfied with the result, and I can’t wait for the next jam ^_^.

I’d also like to thanks everybody who played it!

Well, a while ago I posted about GreaseMonkey’s awesome tool. I had some spare time so I worked a bit on it trying to get it more configureable. I packaged it into a .exe for those who don’t have Python and together with it a batch file to read the instrument files I made (most are GreaseMonkey’s original instruments) to easily configure your music.

As usual this is a work in progress, any suggestions are welcome

Download it here (.rar 2.5mb)

You can also get the direct Python version if you have python 2.x installed properly

Also you can check the project on my site for no reason, but there are some samples there

If you make any awesome new instruments I’d love to see (hear) them…

Cheers!

Tags: game music, music generation, tools