Hey,Just making sure I can add some leaderboard functionality for gamejolt now right?
As it has no affect on the gameplay it should be alright,please answer.

To avoid spoil, we’ll not gonna include the end game screenshot … but now it’s in you can see the mighty balrog it you dig too deep.

As our game is called “Beware the balrog”, it was a missing key feature.

We add a post-jam version to make you see it !

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=10263

Hi everyone! Thanks for a great LD!!

My game pond tycoon will soon be released for android and iOS in cooperation with my game company Mjölnir Games.

For the upcoming version I’m now looking for a handful of testers to find potential problems and test it out on different hardware.

The app also has a plugin for the SmartWatch 2 so if you have one of these it would be beneficial as well!

How to apply:

If you have android and want to participate in the beta, send me an email to r.lindh(at)mjolnirgames.se and I will get back to you in a few days when we launch the beta.

Play Pond Tycoon

For the vast majority of games, this isn’t an issue. But some people have put downloads for desktop versions of their games down as web games. Mislabeled games make for a frustrating experience. Even worse are the people who put web games as downloads! Host it somewhere! There are TONS of free sites you can host your web games on!

It doesn’t stop me from playing the game, but it does add frustration.

So, time to evaluate our effort for Ludum Dare 29!

Play+Rate Deep Sea Joyride

Friday (Day 0)
Me and Magnus got our gear together, jumped in to the car and traveled for about 4 hours to our third member of the Ludum Dare team, located in Karlstad, Sweden. We were thrilled that it was finally time for Ludum! We got our gear rigged and went out for food and beer. A nice way to plan the upcoming 3 days.

In our everyday work we program controlsystems and game programming is nothing we normally do. For myself it’s my fourth Ludum (2 previous entries, LD26 Jam, LD27 Compo). Magnus just had his second Ludum and Jonathan had his first Ludum Dare experience. And believe me when I say he’s hooked!

We all really wanted to code most of the time, and with that in mind we decided to skip Unity this time. We ended up with XNA, which might seem strange to some people as it’s not something that will stay alive for much longer. But we wanted C# and we wanted something well documented and with a lot of answers online.

In the timezone we live in, Ludum Dare starts att 03.00 AM so we stayed up until the theme was announced and we immediately started thinking about game ideas. One of the first ideas was to make a “free runner” or a game that just goes on the longer you “run”, the higher score you get. The second idea that actually came up was it to be a diving game. And as Magnus is a spare-time diver he liked it right away. We stayed up another hour planning, probably making it to bed at about 05.00 AM, excited as ever!

Saturday (Day 1)
We went up at 10:00 AM and went out to a cafe for breakfast and to plan what we need to do, what classes are to be written, what graphics we needed to create and who’s was gonna do what. We ended up with Niklas taking care of main game flow, sprite animation classes, enemies and other entities. Magnus had background, foreground and ground objects as well as audio and music. Jonathan took care of the player object with related controls as well as a lot of graphics.

Everyone started off working with his tasks and in the evening, at about 09:00 PM we decided to take a couple of hours break and go to a Greek restaurant and celebrate my birthday with some delicious food and wine. (We even had a bottle of champagne that my girlfriend had ordered in advance to the restaurant).

After that we coded for another couple of hours and once again went to bed at about 05.00 AM.

Sunday (Day 2)
We woke up a bit late (11:00 AM) which was probably just good as we got another hour of extra sleep. Jonathan started out by rewriting the code for the player as he didn’t think it was “pretty” enough! That’s kind of serious to be in Ludum! I wrote the code for the enemy fishes and Magnus made some music. The sound effects were recorded and we even had to break some glass to get the right feeling! The following sounds were made:

• Bubble: Made with a glass of water and a straw. Blew a very small amount of bubbles to get the single “blub” sounds.
• Diver Breath with bubbles: Making a “Schhh” sound in a can. Bubble sounds by blowing hard and long in with a straw in a glass of water. Some fixing of speed and tone of the sounds in Audacity
• Airtank pickup sound: Consisting of three sounds. First the sound of a well shaken, 1,5l Pepsi bottle opening. The second part is the opening of a beer can. The third sound is a well shaken 1,5l Zingo(!) bottle.
• Hurt sounds: Just various sounds made by myself.
• Glass shatter sound: This sound is played if you reach 200m. It’s the glass on the depth meter that shatters. We put a towel on the floor. Wrapped a shot-glass in paper and smashed it with a hammer against the floor.

The music consist of two tunes. One theme that is used in menus, and one looping tune when diving. All music was done by Magnus in Garageband on an iPad.

During the evening (read early morning) we had some play testing on Jonathans projector. We felt very proud!

Monday (Day 3)
We wanted three types of fishes (each type with it’s own swimming pattern) so all of us made one fish graphics each. We put those graphics in, and some code to save the high score. Then we submitted, packed our stuff and went for a 4 hour drive home. Totally exhausted, yet very proud.

What went right:

• Planning. We did actually manage to implement most of the things we discussed and we still had a good time without being stressed out.
• Graphics. None of us actually do graphics. Even if that’s the case, we really like the final look and feel of the game!
• Audio. We did manage to create all sounds and music that we wanted. A little more time for the “diving-music” wouldn’t have hurt, but still we feel that it’s giving you the correct mood.
• XNA. The choice to do this in XNA feels very good. None of us had tried XNA before, still we didn’t run in to any big programming issues. Excellent framework to start coding games in!
• Probably a ton of other things. Most things did actually go very well!

What went wrong:

• We didn’t have a proper setup for a team. Instead of Git or SVN we used dropbox… I say no more…
• Too late I realized that the C# random() method isn’t that random without a good seed…
• The balancing of the game is quite bad. At first it’s dead simple and suddenly it gets way too hard. It’s actually based on the random problem above…
• Did not add an ingame help or tutorial.

Thank you very much for reading! Hoping to see you around next Ludum Dare!

I made a trailer for my entry 😀

You can play it here:

I finally found the time to write my entries post mortem. My entry is a platform game called Go Below with a pretty nice game mechanic. If you can’t proceed since your path is blocked, you can continue beneath the surface.

Go Below – Play and rate now

Before we start, my favourites

Senilescape is an awesome platformer, where you need to escape from a prison and flee from the guards. I didn’t get very far but I tried over and over and over and over so it seems to be very good.

Beneath the Surface is a disturbing, creepy text-based experience where you get send into a bunker and need to kill the big red. During the game play you have some options to chose from, but I don’t think you can finish the game without feeling bad.

Gun Bat This game requires headphones. You need to resist against enemies that you don’t see. It uses audio to give you an idea where you have to shoot.

What went right

• Nothing
  Just kidding.
• Create an ingame level editor
  This time I started coding the game with the ingame level editor. This saved me a lot of time, especially since I could test jumps and alike directly after editing. The levels tiles were then saved in the browser (using localStorage), so I could reload for changes without losing the level. When I was done I used a little console stunt to export the level. The editor can be enabled in the source (class World, property editing).
• Using Coffeescript
  Coffeescript is awesome. It allowed me to focus on the game logic without setting up the prototype chain and stuff on my own. The syntax is so much nicer than pure JavaScript.
• Handdrawn style graphics
  This time, I’ve gone a different route than usual with my graphics. Instead of pixel art, I used the brush tool of gimp to create graphics that are looking like drawn by hand. The process to create those was really simple so I consider the style for the next Ludum Dare.

What went wrong

• No music
  I tried to create a soundtrack with LMMS, but I have not learned usage yet so I skipped it. A little background melody would’ve helped atmosphere so much.
• Not using a framework
  Like at all the other LDs before, yet again I had not prepared a framework. The basic setup always costs worthy time so I will use a framework next time (hopefully).
• Level design
  The level is with a playtime of avg. 3 minutes quite short. On the one hand this is nice, since it allows the people who rate my game to beat it before rating. But too many seconds get wasted for simple walking and less puzzle solving. Especially in the middle of the game there is a pretty long walking part.

Finally, thank you to all those who commented, who created all the awesome games and to Jupiter_Hadley and shubshub for their videos of Go Below.

Tags: post-mortem

For those who cant play my game, here is a youtube video:

Here is my entry: CLICK HERE

I love all the games I’ve played so far, i think this Ludum Dare was the best, idk what happend but i had a lot of fun and all the games were awesome :’) great work to all

Soo the fourth stage is done and there won’t be anymore. At least all four stages are unique and represent a completely different way of gameplay.

Time for some fancy menu graphics

I’ve uploaded the list of all the LD29 games submitted in JSON format, also including the first screenshot and all provided links for each game. I hope by sharing it, someone can find a good use and make something fun out of it. I used that list to produce my Ludum Maze.

LD29.json

This is the code to produce the list: https://github.com/jacklehamster/ludumdare/tree/master/LD29 (it’s in ActionScript 3).

Lets see what weekends there are Game Industry/Demo Scene/Indie related things going on in August.

• August 2-3 – Assembly 2014 (Finland)
• August 9-10 – Full Indie Summit (Vancouver), SIGGRAPH (Vancouver), GDC Europe (11th)
• August 16-17 – Gamescom (Germany)
• August 23-24 – ?? ** This SMELLS Like a good weekend for LD30 **
• August 30-31 – PAX Prime (Seattle), PAX Dev (27-28)

– Evo is in July (11th-13th), so no conflict.

Jacob Rathjen over on YouTube has made a gameplay video of my Ludum Dare 29 entry Shovel Quest.

My game can be found here

Tags: gameplay, Let's Play, LP, video

As someone who uses Linux it’s annoying to see links to “Web” which are actually Unity. Unity doesn’t have a web player for Linux so I end up clicking on a lot of links to games I can’t play.

Suggestion: have a “Unity” link and use that instead of “Web”.

Thanks

We have ported our Ludum Dare 29 game to Mac OS X (32 and 64 bit) and Linux (32 and 64 bit). Please rate our game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33517

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35257

What went right:

1. I fixed my state machine and now it works perfectly
2. I realized that even i could make pixel game “art” with piskelapp
3. I got a lot of great feedback about my game
4. Game got a surprisingly good rating
5. I had some really fun experience with Dart and StageXL

What went wrong:

1. I didn’t expect the fixing that the state machine required
2. I could only make one really short level for my game.  I had ideas for 3+ levels
3. I had a name collision issue, so i could not change my background during play, although in the Dart version it works
4. I used bounding box for collisions

Conclusion:

This was really fun and I hope I can participate in the next ludum dare. This was a great experience for me.

Thanks to ludum dare, I started making my own game engine in Dart, so I hope next time, I will have a better weapon to fight against you guys.

SO, I made that game, Beneath The Mirros’ Surface, and since then, I’ve been continuing some work on it. This is an announcement to say that the (beta?) early versions of a full version are now on the internet. There are the same levels etc, but a bunch of new features have been added, and more gameplay mechanics are coming soon.

So far, I’ve added a full main menu, with key-config, a short “How to Play” page, which will be made better soon, and an autosave feature, so you don’t have to run through the game in one go. On top of this, I’ve done some optimizations, so, with any luck, the game should run faster on some machines, but it is still slow on some lower end machines. Despite this, the Windows Executable still runs fine on these systems.

This version will be updated frequently. I’m going to fix the “through the floor” bug, improve “shadow” casting, and then pack a whole bunch of extra features into the games, to enable me to make some quite interesting levels. I’ll also be working on the easy-to-hardness rate, so the game doesn’t get too hard too fast.

If you want to check out the post compo version, check it here.

If you want to vote, I would encourage you to play the original version first, vote, then check out the new version, for fairness’ sake.

What is this, a postmortem for ANTS?

Play Magnum Here!

So it’s time for my postmortem of Magnum. It’s been a crazy ride, and it’s produced a crazy game. Here’s what I did right, what I did wrong, and what I have no idea if I did right or wrong.

Stuff I might have done right?:

• I did something unique and weird. I went with what would be crazy instead of what would be safe. Because anything’s safer than doing a Zoolander Sim.
• I “interpreted”  the theme uniquely. Kind of the same as the last point. I expect to either get a really high Theme score for interpreting it uniquely, or a really low one for barely incorporating it. Time will tell. But either way, it’s not another game about fish, oceans, surfers, or caves, and I’m happy about that. Although nothing’s wrong with those, no offense if you made a game about one of those things.
• I switched up my language. Going into this I was pretty sure I was going to use Unity, but instead I used Processing. Literally my only reason for this was because I could use Bezier curves for the eyebrows and cheeks. It kind of sucks that I couldn’t get a working web version, but whatever.
• Made a typing game. I used this as the game mechanic because I couldn’t think of any other one to use, but I think people in the comments seemed to like it!

Stuff I did wrong:

• Check your code and test your game! After submitting my game, I started getting reports of it running super slowly and the keystrokes not registering. All this was because I forgot to remove one line of code that I meant to take out. If I had looked over my code, or sent it to a friend, I could have avoided all of the stress that this bug caused me!
• Too short. If you win on the first try, the game is ten seconds long (should’ve made this two Ludum Dare’s ago!), and it has no replay value.

So this week my plan is to hugely update Gubble Quest. I’ve got some music in the works, I’m gonna fix up the code, and I plan to add some new features.

So far on the agenda I plan to:

1. Fix up dialogue boxes (like above)
2. Add more steps to game completion
3. Add more incidental objects to interact with
4. Add more interaction with the current objects
5. Add some more secrets

However I would love to hear some feedback! If you’ve played the game, what improvements would you like to see? The sky’s the limit, suggest away! If you haven’t played it but are interested, give it a shot, and then come back and tell me what to add or change. It will be greatly appreciated!

If it’s jam game have I rate it harder than compo, easier than compo or it doesn’t matter?

Tags: rating

Under Maintenance – LD29 Jam Entry. Select the image to go to the entry page.

So for this Ludum Dare, with the theme of “Beneath The Surface”, I decided to make a game where you work as a maintenance engineer who works between the streets and an underground train tunnel, this is Under Maintenance.

I wanted to get back into Ludum Dare because of how much I enjoyed LD27, however I was travelling out to see friends on Saturday so I had very little time to do a compo entry.  However it didn’t stop me from working on a simple game, so I decided to put as much energy I can during my free time to bring you this busy micromanagement platformer. As such I appreciate giving your time to reading my post mortem, which includes a timelapse and tweets among other stuff and see how I managed to fit social events and my job into this Ludum Dare.

The Theme

So being in the UK, I was up till 2am to see what the theme was for this Ludum Dare, which is why I ended up tweeting this in the early morning:

Beneath the Surface is the #LD29 theme for Ludum Dare! Now All you in the UK GO TO SLEEP! #LD48

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) April 26, 2014

Development

Development technically began when I got on a 9:30 for my 2 hour train journey:

Today's mission: Find seat and power point on train to do #gamedev #LD48

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) April 26, 2014

Since I had two hours both on the outward and return journey I decided to start off my coding on the train, luckily the train service I was on had charging points next to every seat so I grabbed the first one and got underway, although technical issues did set me back early on, mainly to do with building for Flash with Haxe, as a result I ended up building for Windows (a slightly longer process):

And I was one hour into coding, before I got library errors #LD48 @HaxeFlixel #gamedev pic.twitter.com/LqJDE3zbpL

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) April 26, 2014

In the end I only spent about 4 1/2 hours on Saturday, majority on the train and the remainder at the bar I was at with friends. The rest of the time was when this stuff happened…

Anyways, Sunday was a lot more active. I had plenty of free time to work on assets and the more complex logic. Protip: Use rectangles or other shapes as graphics for your objects with assets not yet completed, it gets you working on the logic as soon as possible and it can help you get a good idea of how proportionally large you want everything for both appearances and collisions:

Current status, I've added people and rats. My game has you managing the undergound! #LD48

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) April 27, 2014

Please don't sue @mikeBithell #LD48 #gamedev https://t.co/mMlgBOoDO8

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) April 27, 2014

Just remember to work on graphics at some point if you don’t have someone to do graphics for you:

Only 12 hours left, and I still need to do graphics! :O #LD48 #gamedev pic.twitter.com/MedW9tFKP8

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) April 27, 2014

Speaking of graphics, most of it was done in Paint.NET, which I find is better to work with for pixel art than Photoshop. It’s less bloated and had much more simpler controls, the main thing it lacks is in it’s Text controls and transforming selections, which is why the title screen logo was done in Photoshop.

Current #LD48 Progress! Look at the little rats! #gamedev https://t.co/f7LwRm9WfW

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) April 27, 2014

Sadly by the end of the night I had work to do tomorrow, and it wasn’t finished in time for the compo. However I carried on after my job on Monday with the addition of sound, I decided against using BFXR since  I figured an outdoor environment would work better with outdoor sounds, so I used a voice recorder and just recorded at the carpark near my office, which is good because cars drive past and there are loads of different sounds to record when you are creative, but bad because there were crows constantly making sounds.

Voice Recorder – The second most easiest source for sound effects!

Well, I've got work tomorrow and I need to sleep. Looks like my game will be jam entry. #LD48 #gamedev pic.twitter.com/GY6dTlKvCX

— Gamepopper (@gamepopper) April 27, 2014

All of which lead to this.

What went right?

Well for starters, I was able to finish a game, unlike my last ludum dare entry, it was a submission that was fully implemented at it’s core. I didn’t over complicate the idea, nor did I overdo the game play to make it seem bigger than it already was. While the game wasn’t ready for the compo submission deadline on Sunday, I used whatever time I could use on the following Monday to finish off whatever was left and upload the game on time.

I also did a better job on graphics, as I had been practicing on pixel art during other projects, in comparison with my LD27 entry, I think the character artwork is a bit cleaner, and since I used smaller sizes and used the animation and sprite classes in HaxeFlixel, the overall file size was smaller.

Things I have learned.

1. Don’t use a large resolution for a Flash game: The one thing I forgot when working on Under Maintenance is that Flash game portals like Newgrounds and GameJolt aren’t designed for games with a window size 1280 x 720. If you play the game from Newgrounds, the window stretches beyond the site borders.

2. Bug Test your game: While this might sound obvious, when you only have a two/three days, you might skip it so you are able to upload the game on time. Don’t skip it! Get a friend to play through the game, or if you can’t make sure you play through the game entirely and make sure you know what the correct outcome for any actions should be. It’ll save you having to fix a bug and upload a “post-jam” version.

3. Plan around any events/activities you’re attending: If you cannot get a free weekend, but still want to make something, see what time you are free to work on the game, and see what time where you might not be free to use a computer, but still work on stuff for your game.

Thanks for reading, now I need to rate more games. 😀

Tags: Beneath the Surface, ld29, postmortem, timelapse, Under Maintenance