Hey, you!! was my first Ludum Dare entry and my first jam-like experience. I wanted to share my thoughts about it

Hey, you!! You can play my game here ;)

I always wanted to enter a Ludum Dare but never had the time. I found about this one on friday, just 9 hours shy of the theme announcement, which in my timezone was at 3:00a.m. So I used that time to mentally prepare myself, set up the workspace, learn the rules, trying to come up with ideas… I read this which was very helpful and did some tests to decide the art stlye. By the time of the theme announcement I was really tired and went to bed hoping some brilliant idea came to me in dreams or something.

That didn’t happen. I woke up in the morning and fiddled with a couple of ideas but they seemed too complex to finish. It took a couple of panicky hours to come up with the chosen idea and even then it was still complex, but it felt achievable. That idea was a game of detecting pickpockets inside an underground train.

The starting concept. Sitting women are hard to draw.

I always loved stealth games, but I didn’t feel confident on finishing nice stealth mechanics on time. So why not reverse it? From the user perspective the controls get reduced to just one click, which let me focus on making other details interesting like A.I. So with this in mind I started working.

My first intention was to make something using Unity which is the platform I’m currently learning. But then again I also wanted to finish something. My lack of confidence made me resort to Flash which I’ve plenty more experience with. This at first felt a bit bad because I thought I’d be missing out on some learning experience, but oh boy was I wrong! By the first afternoon I was cutting features like crazy and even when I was working with a familiar tool I didn’t see myself finishing it.

This guy was supposedly holding on a pole originally.

At first the idea was that the characters would be able to sit down, stand up, move around, grab the poles, even go in and out of the car by the sides. I also had in mind some kind of random events like lights going out for a brief time and things like that. But I needed to make the basics first. So I focused on making the movement of one character and the thief behaviour, for whom I used the grabbing-the-pole sprite to make him look like stealing. If you have good sight you can see it sometimes, it’s a frame that lasts for 0.3 seconds 😉
At the end of the first day I gained a lot of confidence by having those basics behaviours defined, but there was a lot left to do. I went to bed to get some energy for the second and last day.

On sunday morning I made a list of things left so I could prioritize. Instead of adding more features I tried to make the current ones more fun. I thought making some apologetic dialogue while they moved around would be silly fun and gave me the idea of making them realize they were robbed and panic. So with the main features clear I dedicated that morning to make every sound effect I needed and every UI piece. I wanted to make some music too but didn’t have the time.

This floor reflection effect wasn’t even originally intended. I thought I could take advantage of the transparency of the layers afterwards.

With that done, sunday afternoon looked promising, I finally did the animation for the illusion of the train moving which until then it was completely stationary and after finishing the main features I thought about adding some more. The first and sadly last, were the trainstation stops, where the guys could get on and off the train. This feature took a lot longer than expected due to some nasty bugs and I almost lost it there. Eventually I got around and finished it just 30 minutes before the deadline.

In conclusion, the experience was intense, hard but worth it, I learned a lot not just about technical stuff but also management and decision making. I really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward the next one already. I think it’s amazing the amount of talented people participating.

Hope you people like my game, thanks! 😉

Here’s the link to my entry page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=3382 if you want to rate it 😉

So this was my first Ludum Dare and here’s a short review of it:

What went right?

• First I managed to finish LD with a working, playable game! That’s already my first success. I wasn’t sure if I was able to create something worth uploading. I knew I had some family appointments and being a dad and a husband is always a guarantee for unexpected daily issues
• Choosing GameMaker:Studio as my weapon of choice. I’m learning and using it for some months now so I was pretty confident what I could do with it and what not. For “Holy Moly” it was a very good choice.
• Trying out a 320×240 resolution in a 640×480 window. I always wanted to give that a try – learning the basics to create a low res game on a bigger resolution window and get it scaling. Again GM:S did the job perfectly fine here.
• Try to avoid feature creep. I was constantly tempted to add more game play elements but I resisted knowing that it wouldn’t help me to deliver something playable. I will work on my game in the future and add some ideas that popped up during the development time (fine tuning of the timers for rats and water, smarter rats, drills that can kill the mole, dynamite, rocks as obstacles that can smash you if you dig below them, more different food items).
• Choosing HTML5 for deployment. I think it’s very important for play testers to ease the access to the game. And a game playable in a browser without plugins to install or even a downloadable zip is the best way. Uploading to my webspace and integrating into my website was easy.

What went wrong?

• Graphics. I do suck at graphics or I simply don’t have enough experience in creating them. I want to improve my knowledge here. So I will try to do some exercises / tutorials for pixel art and vector art. I used the builtin graphics editor of GameMaker and TileStudio for the ground tiles. I didn’t have enough time to give PyxelEdit and AutoTileGen a try.
• One more graphics related issue: graphics style. I couldn’t decide what to use: pixel style or vector graphics. Because I wanted to experiment with the low resolution approach I went for the pixel style but as you can see in the game I’m not very good at it. Neither are my vector skills but anyway 😉
• Music: it’s missing. I still haven’t found a good tool for me to create simple loops that sound “okay”. I considered Magix Music Maker Jam on my tablet but that isn’t able to create chip tune music which would have fit the game style. And for trackers I do have zero experience using them. And there are so many trackers where I don’t get the user interface…any recommendations are highly appreciated here!
• Sound effects: I used bfxr and Audacity but I’m not totally happy with the sound. Again I miss some theory here to know how to modify the generated sounds to my liking. For example I had a perfect sound that I wanted to last longer or to sound a bit darker and so on.

Final words

It was tiring, exhausting, disappointing at some moments but overall it was fun, energizing, highly motivating and a personal big success for me. I will join other Ludum Dares because I did get so much positive experience from it in such a short time span – and it didn’t cost me a single dime 😉

I am aware now that I need to have a good knowledge of all tools that I plan to use during a 48h compo – it is simply a complete waste of time trying to learn a new tool in those 48 hours and expecting satisfying results on a first go…

And finally I’m totally impressed by some other entries: unbelievable what some of you guys and girls can achieve in 2 days! You are marvelous!

Daniel from team Infection is live now streaming your LD games! Just post your game link to the twitch chat so he can add it to the list

Above you can see our main character playing Infection, click here to try it out for yourself!

Watch the stream live here: http://www.twitch.tv/danielsnd

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2014 at 10:43 am and is filed under LD #29. 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.

“First superaddictive game on this compo” — TeamInCharge

“Complete 5 stars. I’ve been playing it for god knows how long.” — CoderMusgrove

“if I wouldn’t see your stream doing it, I wouldn’t believe you made it in 48h” — dusho

“Wow! this was the first game I [kept playing] after I was done rating it” — Dreii

“Fantastically fun” — zkenshin

“Impressive is the word.” — javifugitivo

“Oh my god the addiction” — tomvert

“Those small details and animations everywhere are what makes you love games” — PapyGaragos

“This blows most of the other games out of the park.” — Bevilacqua

[Play Drill 18: The Mars Project]

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=7862

Hi there!,

As my first ever submission to Ludum Dare (Jam) I must say I’m quite satisfied with the ending result.

I started out quite late on saturday morning. I live in Europe so I was already around 8 hours behind schedule. But nothing to worry, since the proposed theme really inspired me.

At first I though about the typical kind of games: digging, submarines, mining, monsters from the depths coming to haunt the player and so on.  Problem is, I wasn’t really feeling like programming any of those kinds of games and I suddenly decided I wanted to make a story-driven game where the player knows nothing right from the start (not even the controls) and has to start moving and checking things around trying to figure out what is going on. In other words, I ended up making a point&click adventure game about an amnesic astronaut stranded on a strange orange planet with two suns (woot).

 What went right

– I ended up being quite pleased with the game’s atmosphere and graphic style. Detail is minimal and only vital objects are in plain sight. I got the graphics done in no time at all. I guess I’m getting quite used to Pixen by now.

– The story-  I know you can only get a glimpse of it given the length of the “game”, but I had a full and sound script ready on paper and I’m really looking forward to finish it up and letting you all people play it to the end.

– Even though I had little time to spend on making the game over the weekend I somehow managed to get something done, playable and without bugs. It may not be a big deal for everybody else but it is for me, since I wasn’t so sure about uploading it considering the story wasn’t finished and that in my mind the game probably was only appealing to me. By sunday night I was sure I was not going to publish it but a good friend encouraged me to submit it anyway and I must say I’m glad I did, considering the good reviews it is getting now.

What didn’t go that well

– Using enchant.js –  I’ve been working with it over the last few months and I’ve somewhat become fond of it. It’s really easy to set up, it’s clean, and you don’t have to work that much to get basic stuff up and running. This is what I thought before starting the compo, considering I’ve already finsihed a few (action) games with it.

Truth is, I had to spend more time that I would publicly admit figuring out how to get the click listeners working on objects and text labels. I also had some trouble with the character’s movement, but this is probably my fault, since it was my first ever point & click game.

Also, the scene structure worked well in action games, but with and adventure game like this one I ended up with having a big hardcoded mess which works, but I would not dare to finish up a full game this way. I totally have to set up a more clever way of doing things.

– Not being able to add more content to the game – I spent a lot of time getting everything working so in the end I only had the time to set up 8 scenes, and beacuse of that the game feels more like the a micro-demo than anything else. Good news are that I  really want to keep working on it and release it sometime.

– The TERRIBLE walking cycle of the player’s sprite (sorry about that).

– Almost no sound at all- I wanted to keep things silent at the start of the game, and that really builds up the mood I think, but being honest, adding a bit of ambient sound could have improved the experience a lot.

All in all, I’m happy of having taken part on LD29 and I’m really looking forward to the next one

By the way, if you are interested on seeing where “Leaving Home” goes please check out for news here: http://www.strandedsoft.com/ or follow this twitter profile: https://twitter.com/StrandedSoft

Thanks a lot everybody and good luck!

Post Mortem of “Louis and the Louse”

My first step in the gamedev field was last december. As I was learning how to use SFML I wasn’t experienced enough to join ld28. But then I also learned Unity and I was able to make it in miniLD50. One month later I was participating in LD29 and this is my post mortem.

First of all I would like to say that I managed to finish a game before the 48h deadline and that made me proud =D.

Saturday

I dedicated the entire Saturday morning to game design. Beneath the surface was one of my favorite theme and I already had an idea but I didn’t want to rush things out.

At 2pm the game design was done and I had a basic menu and a first level working.

I knew graphics would take me a lot of time and wouldn’t serve any purpose if the game was broken.

This is why I dedicated the Saturday to coding the game mechanics. Hopefully I knew my way around unity and was able to realise that 48h would not be enough to implement all the things I wanted. Sacrificing the less important features I managed to finish the mechanics and add some little content before going out. Because yes, when it’s your friends birthday you can hardly decline the invitation and spend the evening coding.

Sunday

Most of the Sunday was spent drawing and doing the end of the game. And 30min before the deadline mark “Louis and the Louse” was on-line, my game was ready to live its own life.

You can see down there the evolution of the graphics between Saturday and Sunday.

What I would change if I could

• Managing my time better : even if I could finish my game I think focusing more on LD would have allowed me to make a longer game.
• Music : A few days before LD I learned how to use a tracking software. Unfortunately I did not had the time to use it. A voice in my head keeps telling it’s for the best because I’m not such a talented music maker. Anyway, some sounds would have been great.
• User friendliness : I did not had time to make a really user friendly game and people were confused when they first played the game. Even though I made a “tutorial”. So that’s definitely something I’ll try to improve next time.

My last word

Finishing some thing that’s yours and getting good feed-back about it is the best feeling ! Thank you ludum dare for making this possible !

Play “Louis and the Louse” !

Any criticism is welcome !

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot

First professionnal finest critics : 

“Probably the most original idea I’ve seen so far! And I even got to kill Tim Schafer! ”
Armanky

“Really awesome art style! Great job, reminded me a bit of Hotline Miami! :)”
kbm

“Very awesome! I love it!”
Hermes

“Nice! Would love to play a full version.”
Maniulo

“Great idea! If expanded it could be a great game :D”
dsoft20

“Hah, being the murderous butler is a lot of fun.”
GrooveMan

Join the party : May I help you ?

Tags: ld29, May I help you?

What floated nicely:

– Aesthetic. I was quite pleased with the low-poly retro look I ended up with. In fact, it made me nostalgic for an old game I’d love to do a retro remake of; Hunter. Incidently, this low-poly look was a result of the issues I had in the next section.

– Music. ImageLine released a beta version of FL Studio for the Mac which I hadn’t really tested. In the end, it performed exceptionally well and I had no problem knocking a tune together very quickly. Otherwise, I’d have had to use Reaper which, whilst being an amazing app, I don’t feel very creative with. Well done ImageLine!

– Ideas. I really liked the theme! On the train I brainstormed ideas about subterranean building, aka Dungeon Keeper, etc., but switching to the oceans I felt rather nostalgic about 20,000 leagues under the sea, one of my favourite books, so I began to play with themes about ramming ships.

What sank: 

– Time constraints. I had to travel at the weekend so much of the time was spent with just the macbook. Didn’t get started until about 10 hrs after the start.

– Stealth aspect. Sadly, one of the major themes was that you would be able to stealthily avoid enemy ships, before speeding up and hitting them on their flank and sinking them. I couldn’t get a fine balance between the risk posed in breaking out of stealth and then speeding up to ramming speed. Inevitably, you end up just staying at full speed to get away from the projectile shots from the destroyers, rendering the stealth aspect somewhat pointless.

– Toolset. We are immensely blessed to have access to such an amazing tool as Blender. However, I had not anticipated how much I relied on the numeric keypad for workflow when using it on my Macbook. Whilst you can emulate it with the number keys, I’d also become used to the positions on the numeric pad. As such, I really struggled with designing objects and navigating the app. Hence the ships in the game didn’t turn out as nicely as the stickleback itself due to time constraints and difficult navigation. Also, I should have packed a mouse with mousewheel and at least 3 buttons…

– Physics. I can haz non-kinetic player? Haha, it never fails to amaze me how much time I end up wasting trying to make the player purely controlled with physics forces and torque before I just give up and accept that the word “gameplay” involves a “game” and that controlling the ship should be reasonably enjoyable.

Conclusion

Whilst I really enjoyed the 48hr compo, I think I may go for a Jam entry in future. Sometimes the extra day (and extra sleep!) makes all the difference to the final entry.

You can play it here.

“Oh My Oilrig!” is rapidly shifting gears on its post-compo journey towards becoming a full-fledged Android game. While waiting for the release, here’s a sample of the new variety of enemies: a terrifying archer who will cause aggressively mediocre damage to your precious oilrig! BWAHAHAA!!

The first release (I’m aiming for Sunday!) will have nine different enemies (three submerged, three on-the-surface and three airborne) and a variety of different defense towers (a slingshot and “ye olde cannon”, to name a few!), coupled with active and passive on-board upgrades (shields, radar, drill boost…), not to mention overhauled interface. If you’re interested, keep an eye on my Twitter feed (@dManabreak) for updates. Also, feel free to tweet and comment if you have ideas, critique or anything!

Tags: android, oh-my-oilrig, post-compo, twitter

I know it’s kinda late after the fact but I only compiled my game for Windows, and I recently found out how to compile my game for Linux and and OS X. No game code has been changed is it too late for me to recompile for those OS’s and post links to download on my submission page? Thanks

Check out our game here

We’ve tried to make a rather complicated rogue-like game with abilities, leveling and random dungeons generation at our previous LD entry, but were too late. This time we decided to make something simpler and ended up with a platformer. It happened to be not as simple as we planned, we’ve designed 22 levels, but didn’t add them all before deadline.

Code:
We’ve decided not to use Unity this time again (We thought about that, though) so we had to make everything from the start and ended up with a Windows version only. We had our own level editor, which was rather helpfull. We had to adapt it to our needs though, which consumed a lot of our time.

Gamedesign:
We’ve changed our game mechanics on the run several times. We had an idea of that oasis-city in the middle of the nowhere, but we had completely no idea how to make our game interesting to play, so we decided to left our atmospheric adventure behind and ended up with a hardcore platformer like “Super Meat Boy” or “I wanna be the guy” with double jumps.

Level Editor:
we had our own level editor, which was originally made for another game, and it worked well, we’ve made rather complicated levels with ease.

Graphics:
It was made by my younger brother. He made a lot of work, there are 116 textures in total. We had some argues about the prefered colour scheme, but then kuler.adobe.com helped us a lot.

Sound:
One of us wrote three tracks to use in this game in his spare time, and all the sounds were taken of bfxr and freesound.org

Tags: #LD48 #LD29, postmortem

Hey y’all! Last LD I volunteered to make a compilation video for the LD entries, and asked for everyone to send me a clip of their game. I’d like to do the same thing again this LD!

If you’d like your game to be in the compilation, please email me at [email protected] /* */ with the following things

• A .mp4 10 second clip of your game (preferably a dropbox link)
• Your entry’s name
• Your name
• A link to your entry’s page, so I can play it, and so I can add it to the description of the video

Please have your clips submitted by Friday, May 9th. I’ll try to get the compilation done that weekend and up on the internet my Monday, May 12th. Clips will be added to the compilation as they are submitted.

If you have any questions about video format (I really prefer we stick to .mp4 but if you can’t do that I can probably make an exception)

Here’s the compilation video from the last LD! Sorry about the compression issues, I have figured out how to fix that since the last LD.

What did you think of the theme?

For the theme ‘Beneath the surface’ giant monster worms sprung to mind (we’ve all seen tremors right?).

The idea was to get in to the mindset of our giant monster worm and try to model its environment as closely as possible.  Since it lies beneath, we decided it should only sense sound waves caused by movement above ground (which we see on the black screen as concentric waves).

Then things went a bit crazy from there as you can see… 😉

Did it really go sooo wrong…?

From the programming perspective – a bit! And there are still some annoying bugs all pretty much related to the map and scrolling (the gamespace is 64×64), plus we didn’t get all our features or graphics in so it’s not quite how we envisioned. But…

What was the best bit?

Really chuffed with the worm movement, which is kind of based on Flow, the only difference is that the player is not fixed to the middle of the screen.  This gives a better sense of movement, which would be lacking since there is no scrolling background in underground mode, so the worm would just move with its tail anchored at the middle – not quite as much fun.

What were your tools of choice?

GFX: Tiled, Gimp.

SFX: Audacity.

Coding: Javascript + Canvas.

Tags: worm

We finished our game Greenwar, and now I’m spending some time trying to beat the highscore. It’s currently 56 520 points. How high can you get?

Current Greenwar Highscore

Tags: Greenwar

The music I did for our game Kitsuni is now on Soundcloud, it’s got a nice ambience I think, although it’s a bit sinister.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2014 at 12:51 pm and is filed under LD #29. 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.

We have released the Windows version of our game jam entry called Rise to Surface today. Please visit and rate our game.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33517

Story behind the production of Treasure Hunter:

LD29 was my first real LD. I entered a miniLD before so somehow I knew what I was up to. Nevertheless I was completly surprised of the theme that for the first 2 hours I had no clue what kind of game I should make. Bisides of that I had to do otherthings that sometimes interrupted my workflow. But eventually I came up with an idea in 2D dispite the fact that I never used Unity2d before (I had to train myself while I was making the game). The idea resulted in Treasure Hunter. After a couple of hours (ca.  21), I am quite satisfied with the result. Even though I couldn’t implement the story inside my game but I was able to implement a online Highscore.

What Went Right:

1. I was able to get a quite satisfiying result at release time.
2. The 2d art, was new to me. But I am happy with the result I achieved.
3. In an early stage, I recognised that my first game idea was too ambitious for a 48 hour Compo so I changed it.
4. Usage of those tools and techniques I used before went quite smooth.

What Went Wrong:

1. I used some techniques and tools I never used before and I had to teach myself all those things. (2D, Sound etc.)
2. I didn’t used any kind of background music.
3. I didn’t polished the game. ( I had no time for that.)
4. I could have made the gamehandling a bit more intuitve and self explanatory.
5. I didn’t focused on the story I had in mind. Therfore I could only tell the sory in my description.

If you didn’t played my game and/or rated it. Please play and rate it here and have fun.

This was a fun Ludum Dare. I think I really nailed the theme with my game, “Layers”. A few people were having difficulty playing the game, so I decided to make a video to give an introduction to it. I also tacked the timelapse at the end of the video:

Have fun!

Please play and leave a comment for layers. I am planning on making a video of some of my favorite entries in a week or two, once works lets up a bit.

Have fun!

Tags: java, libgdx, timelapse, youtube

We just discovered a hidden feature in Greenwar!

The pictures below says it all.

Greenwar Hidden Feature

Some more hidden feature

And in case you missed the hidden feature…

Tags: Greenwar

Switcher is an endless running game with a twist. You are the enemy, it is not because you are the bad protagonist, it is because the protagonist is different. The world fears different. Your choices are to run/fight or die.

The bad

The 48 hours compo is extremely exhausting, at least for me. I can not sacrifice sleep hours since at the end of the compo I still have to go to my 8-5 day job. Instead of using the 48 hours I ended up using maybe just about 20.

I tried also a new engine Phaser to deliver a web game. It went smooth most of the time, except by the one time I hit a bug and waste 2 hours. If I had practiced more, those two lost hours could be used in polishing the game.

The last show stopper was when I was about to deploy the final version. Compressed my zip and upload to itch.io just to have it fail with an error of zip containing more than 500 files! I had only about 20 files and didn’t understood what happened. In the end it was a dummy error. I was using git as version control and I was zipping all the git files as well. About another wasted hour.

The good

Phaser was definitely a good choice. It allowed me to deploy fast and deliver to most of web viewers the game. Accessibility is king. For voting since I have a Mac, I can not vote on Windows games and also have some trouble with Java games. I however had no trouble running flash/hmtl/unity web games.

Designing on pixel art was also good, I have been doing pixel art for almost 2 years now and I am happy I have reached the point to finally release acceptable pixel art, at least pixel art that players can enjoy.

Version control was definitely a great asset. Other games I have delivered for LD were on game maker, which greatly difficult the versioning. This time I was working on pure code and versioning is a bliss.

Improvement Areas

• Music is missing from the game. For the next game I will try to make time for this.
• Polishing was also a missing point. I did some polishing but not as much as I wanted. I think the game should be ready, not just feature complete, by the first 24 hours. At least the code and art. Then try to get some feedback with friends, family, or someone and adjust and polish the game the next 24 hours. A really cool game can be killed if it is not polished enough.

Tools

Language/Engine: JavaScript/Phaser

Version control: Git

Text Editor: Sublime 2

Pixeling: Pixen

Debugging web browser: Firefox

You can check my Ludum Dare compo page for Switcher, vote my entry, read comments and even download the source code to see what is inside.