Phew, today was a long day, and I’ve made more progress than I expected. I have to work in the morning (aka in a few hours, considering it’s now 5am here,) so I tried to cram in as much as I could today, so that I have time to give the game some finishing touches before the end of the jam tomorrow night.

A testament to progress: on the left, doors yesterday; on the right, doors today.

Core mechanics and a couple obstacles are done. Also there the all-seeying-eye thing that was supposed to look very mystic, but ended up just looking like a nacho [Gifs below]:

Chant in the evil altars to please the Eye and reveal what’s… Beneath the Surface!

Yes, this trap was blatantly stolen from Oddworld.

Things are really starting to come together really nicely! I still have to figure out what the hell am I gonna make for the character. Also sounds and hopefully some juicyness too.

Good night everyone, and good luck to all still in the jam!

YAY, I finished my game for Ludum Dare 29 Jam!

Being my first Ludum Dare, It is quite an accomplishment

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33501

– oranebeast

So I was down with fever most of the day, couldn’t much, and hence decided to finish up whatever we had.

Here’s a screenshot from the final thing:

Play it here!

We started pretty late so this is what we’ve got so far:

There’s a rampaging robot destroying the city and nothing can stop it!

You play a dog with the power to shrink itself, only you can stop the robot by sneaking in through the vents and destroying it from within. Also you can shoot lasers from your eyes.

I completed my first Ludum Dare entry last night about 1 hour before the deadline. It was 2AM in my time zone. My original plan was to finish before midnight, because sleep is important. But in the heat of the moment, priorities shift. And completing my game to a submittable form became more important. And that’s how I went to sleep past 3AM. I wanted to do a blog post immediately, but I was too tired to do so. So what do I have to say this morning?

First, Ludum Dare is quite a ride. In only 48 hours conceiving a game idea, figuring out how to do it, and actually doing it evoked all sorts of emotion, ranging from frustration when a bug cost me valuable hours to questioning why I even signed up for this. Surely, on a weekend between two loaded weeks of work there should be more fun activities to do, right?

But in the end, the satisfaction that overcame me when something did work, and when in the end I had a little game I created out of nothing within 48 hours and can say “Yes! I did it!”, that answered all the questions and did away with the frustration.

Screenshot of my game, A Mole’s Life

Looking forward to checking out the other games and to next time

Yay I’ve implemented cutscenes!

Here’s a part right in the beginning of the story that kind of lays out the idea for the game. 😀

(Also I think I might need to make the textbox darker so that the white text is more readable)

Howdy fellow developers!

I didn’t post the Day 2 Recap yesterday, mainly becuase I was exhausted and decided to instead get a bit more sleep to help me give it my best in the final day of this Ludum Dare.

A short parenthesis here: TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY!!!! And I am really excited spending it, developing my very first video game. But enough about me, let’s talk Team Java and game stuff, right?

Yesterday was another full and thrilling day for the members of Team Java. We found a great place to work in, since my father decided to give us the offices of his Taxi Agency to work in (we really owe him a huge thank you for that generous move on his behalf, huh?). Some of us couldn’t make it there due to the great distance and due to the insanely bad weather (at some point we thought it was raining cats and dogs for real). But Team Java’s spirit didn’t wane and we found ourselves working hard and making  a deep meaningful story that exploits the theme of the competition, designing the levels and developing the game’s core and map generation, the inputs and the A.I, along with our combat system.

(Here’s the hardworking Team Java in their Base of Operations)

However, fortune decided to challenge us once more by imposing upon us a mutitude of consecutive Power Outages, which most probably have been caused by the same bad weather that obstructed our members from getting to yesterday’s HQ. But once again Team Java didn’t give up and as soon as power came back up, we continued working with great fervor (much epicness, such courage, wow)!

(The power outage gave us some artistic inspitation)

On an even brighter side we also had a lot of fun on Day 2. The storytelling time was quite enjoyable, lots of programming or professor jokes (as we are all on the same University) and some great food and snacks (burgers forever).

(I didn’t manage to take a good pic of the burgers as we literally inhaled them, but I managed to salvage a few fries and some ssauce for you to enjoy)

I guess the motto of the day could be “Work hard, play hard”. Day 3 is most certainly going to be of importance, good luck to the fellow LDers and may fortune favor you all!

I wasn’t initially planning on making a game jam game, and this hardly counts at all compared to the immense amounts of hard work and awesome talents being submitted to this event, but as a crazy spur-of-the-moment idea I decided to start on a project an hour before the initial submission deadline. Obviously this meant I wasn’t going to be able to make much from scratch assets-wise, (TurboSquid is a life saver in that respect) but it gave me an excuse to experiment in Unity and throw together something super quick for the sake of putting out something silly and dumb, and I think I achieved that goal, at least to some extent. If nothing else I figured out how to submit and share a game project publicly on the web, so I can’t say it hasn’t been a learning experience!

Either way, I hope you guys enjoy my little project for this year’s Ludum Dare! I call it, “The Search For Sting’s Desert Rose Beneath The Surface! (feat. Bananas)” You can check out video of it here or play it right here on the site!

Tags: #LD48 #LD29, Bananas, Beneath the Surface, Desert Rose, Ludum Dare 1-Hour Game Jam, Quady14

It was a great fun! And pretty challenging too XD

But i made it! So, if you are curious what i made… You can play, rate and comment

(Try it out at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=11177 !)

Last night, I was quite tired and decided to call it ‘done’. The first thing this morning, I checked the comments and saw a crash notice… Great. Well, turned out to be a really small thing in the end. Now, time for an early post-mortem!

The first thing that comes to my mind is that I should have done a lot more work during the first 24 hours. I slacked, doing about 8 hours of work, and it backfired on Sunday. I had planned for tons of features (namely, more enemies, more defenses, and a repair function for defenses), but as time went by, I had to scrap most of them and focus to get single things to work.

The second problem was that while I had laid out the basic code design in my head before I started coding, it didn’t work out as intended. In the end, I had to write exceptions and exceptions of exceptions in order to get everything to work – not something you’d like to see in your code, especially if you’re going to maintain it later on. Some things were fixed so delicately that after I saw them finally working (for example, the way workers enable turrets to be built), I was afraid to touch the code so I wouldn’t break it again.

On a more positive note, I surprised myself at how quickly I was able to make the graphics and sounds. In total, I probably used about three hours drawing the graphics, and about an hour making the music and sound effects. Granted, there’s not that many sound effects involved, but still.

One thing I especially liked about was the water. I’ve always struggled with animating water, or even creating nice-looking, non-animated water. This time, I used just single-colored, semi-transparent blue planes, stacked and slightly animated to move up and down and rotate a bit. I was surprised how well it worked considering how simple it was!

So, what have I learned?

• Making graphics for this kind of game is surprisingly fast.
• Code should be refactored / redesigned / repurposed multiple times during the first 24 hours. Later on, broken code causes even more broken code.
• 48 hours is both a short and a long time. Flesh out all ideas you can, but prepare to scrap most of them and focus on the core things first. If you have time, adding more stuff shouldn’t be that difficult if you’ve prepared for it.

All in all, I’m pretty satisfied about the results. The code is at awful state, and if I’m going to continue on this, I have to spend a lot of time cleaning and restructuring the code first. Most of the worker and defense code should be erased and re-written.

I’m also thinking of porting this for Android. Whaddya think?

Tags: post-mortem

Just to keep my thoughts straight, I’ll make a hasty poo-poo.

SPOILER ALERT DON’T LOOK AT THE ATTENTION-DRAWING PICTURES ABOVE

I’ll be satisfied if I can add these three locations to the game. First one’s the lookout cliff, where you can find people that grant you blue notes. The band’s official “”misc. instrument guy”” will compose a real chill song for the band if you get a bunch of black notes and blue notes. You can then jam there with the song and potentially unlock the next area.

Next up is the streets, where there’s shiny new red notes, and the bassist girl will unlock an urban funk song with enough red, blue, black notes. Note that you can’t get blue notes here, so you’ll have to backtrack for those.

Finally we get to the plaza, which looks very unhealthy at the moment. Green notes aplenty, so it’s no surprise this is the corgi drummer’s speciality. He’ll pump up the rhythm and make the fastest, most challenging jam song after some serious resource grinding.

Whoever’s in charge of composing a track for the given area will give actually helpful comments, and the other two just randomly butt in with some Jiggawatt humor.

Oh boy, that’s still a load of work. I don’t even have this full day to work on the game, subtract ~6 hours for exam stuff. I’ll definitely submit a playable thingy because the idea is cool, but if something’s missing from this plan, I’ll add it in a post-LD version. (You might remember that I haven’t yet finished my post-LD27 and post-LD28, but THIS TIME I’M FOR REAL TO THE SECOND POWER.)

Tags: keikaku

I haven’t been able to get anything done in the last couple of days. I tried to work, but for some reason my sense of creativity is just completely busted.

I tried! I really did! But all I have now is a random maze that has boulders rolling around in it. I don’t even have any proper ideas. I figured that if I just started working I’d come up with something on the fly. I didn’t. A shame, really.

I’ll be back next time, but for now I’m just going to take a break and do absolutely nothing for a while.

After an exhausting weekend we have some good news! Everything seems to work fine and after the upcoming testing we’ll submit it. Probably in a few hours. It’s exciting and frightening. Hope it turns out good!

Tags: screenshot, stealth, unity

This has been fun. Technically I was done last night, but I was too tired to post the news!

Please check out my game here, if you leave a comment I’ll be happy to check out your game and leave a comment in return. 😀

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=1508

I’ll try to get a Flash version and Android version exported ASAP, but I have real-life deadlines this week so we might be out of luck on that front.

Thanks!

Yesterday @Mlociara has been perma-banned on Twitch for streaming boob-making. This is the price we paid for making this amazing character creator:

You can try it out here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17432163/LD48-29/LD48-29.html

Follow @Mlociara on Twitter, and follow @vigrid on Twitter.

So i come back to my computer today to find my main level missing and apparently corrupted … people say its because your computer has crashed etc but no not this time , so yes .. my game Derpy : the next dungeon crawler experience is dead .. RIP 2 days of work lost.

Edit : Im back in after re making the whole game! luckily no scripts were lost so it was just level design .. still many bugs &  issues remain.

I just woke up a while ago. Now I feel ready to write this!

Theme

I don’t get prepared before hand for any theme. Sometimes a theme may give me an idea upon reading it during the voting, but I don’t intentionally try to know what I could do with any theme. So I was as prepared for this theme as I was for any other (except “It never ends”; I had a cool idea for it).

But this theme was both easier and tougher than every other from previous entries to me. I usually have an idea early and keep working on it through all the weekend. This time, though, I had only a concept early on, and this was after a lot of thinking. I first decided that I wanted to make a story driven game (and therefore a visual novel thing), so I started getting the engine ready with Flixel. Then, I posted a concept here and started to think about a story for it… Which wasn’t coming out nicely. Then, I kept going forth and back between writing the story and drawing assets.

Another thing I did was keep coming back to read the original concept. I was afraid I might get off track again (as I did with Hummy’s Hunger), so I was tried to think how I was going to fit the theme with the game.

Time handling

Seems like each passing LD I get better able at handling my time. I didn’t feel as pressured as with previous LDs. Before, I’d keep working until the last second while panicking cause there were too many things still to do/broken/etc. Since I set on a story driven game, that didn’t depend too heavily on implementing stuff, I was able to take it easy and, after writing a basic VN engine over Flixel, concentrating on assets.

I knew what I had to do and how… Also, since I had a setting in my mind, but not the story itself, I was able to think about the graphics for the world before writing anything. This really helped as I only did start writing the story at the ~23 hours left mark.

Seems like I’m out of time. If I left this as a draft, I’d probably never finish. So I’ll post this as is and, later, I’ll write the rest of the postmortem.

Thanks for reading. 😀

Tags: postmortem

Audio is the focus of the game, so sounds change depending on where you are in the level.

Used web audio to create all the synth sounds by hand! No samples baby! Hence why it sounds so… Simple.

Was fun to make a noise synth, I used brown noise, a lovely tone to it.

Play and rate Dr Beat

I planned to sleep. I tried to sleep. The excitement lead to adrenaline. The adrenaline got the better of my sleep unfortunately.

Wow. It is Monday morning here in SA, and I am looking through the Ludum Dare entries. Congratulations to anyone who entered, there are stellar prototypes out there!

Next up though I realised how much I achieved this weekend. Learnt plenty and feel far more confident for approaching new projects and prototyping new game ideas.

If you are reading this and you haven’t done Ludum Dare… Or you have… well, see you all at the next one! Good luck to everyone in the voting!

Hi there,

The Timelapse Video for our Jam Entry Escape Scofield Mine is avaiable now.

Please feel free to play and rate our game.

Greetings

PLAY TRUFFLES

Well i officially don’t have any more spare time to work on my game… so im gonna upload it as is.

Beneath the surface was actually just about the only theme that i wasn’t really expecting… or hoping for, in fact  i actually had my heart set out on a few of the other themes. With that being said i almost immediately decided that i wasnt gonna do this ludum dare.

About 9  hours into the comp i decided ” hell why not,  how bad could this really be?” and i began brainstorming ideas.

About The Game

Truffles is about a little piggy who accidentally falls into a abandoned mushroom mine.

Tools

I decided right off the back that i was gonna enter the jam instead of the compo, and for coding i would be using  javascript. I later on decided on using photoshop for sprites, fl studio and my ipad for music, sfxr for sound effects ,pixel Edit for making tiles, and tiled map editor. It took me a while to decided on using a html5 library or Unity3d but in the end i choose phaser.js because i iv used it  for a few other games and i also didn’t have as much time as i wanted for 3d modeling and i was working alone.

The Good

– Javascript is a language that i’m comfortable with so i didn’t really face that many coding problems

– I already had a piggy sprite laying around on my computer, which inspired because the inspiration for my game, so i decided to give him a name and a home.

– I had absolutely no problems on day one , even though i started a few hours late. I had completely finished my piggy sprite animation, made the first version of my tilset, came up with a game idea,  and  completed  my level creation goal for the day.

– I’ve completed my first ludum dare

The Bad

– I started working a few hours late

– I wasn’t really sure what i should spend most of my time working on.

– Around day 2 i started slowing down due to frustration

– Im sure i drove my family coco from how many times i asked them to test my collision.

– I didn’t get to make as many levels as i had wanted but i still met my overall set goal.

-Right after my laptop died i lost my  charger and spent 1 hour looking for it

The ugly

– Phaser.js had one hell of a time with collison. I spent about 3+ hours just trying to get my collision detection  it to at least where i could consider it some what decent.

– i didn’t get to do as much as i wanted with the game such as add various enemies, puzzles, more levels, obstacles…etc

I didn’t have any good ideas happening this weekend, and had resigned myself to bowing out of LD29, but around 7pm Sunday inspiration struck, and I decided to make a game about the New Mexico landfill where the E.T. cartridges were buried, and unearthed this weekend.

My game was made in a little over 6 hours.

Alamogordo

I’ll do a proper post-mortem after I’ve had a chance to catch up on sleep.

There’s still a lot of movement/collision bugs in it, and I hope to have a lot of them squashed by the Jam deadline tonight.  But there’s a playable version of it up right now.

Tags: Alamogordo, atari, E.T., GameMaker Studio, landfill, ld29, New Mexico

My second Ludum Dare entry!

Theme:

I enjoyed  the theme a lot more than the last one. Even if it resulted in a lot of “Surf Aces” 😀

My game:

The original idea was to stop  fishes from destroying the iceberg which in the end killed the titanic. Ultimately i went with the more peaceful option of stopping the fishes from “building” an iceberg. Balancing was a bitch: Just a few fish more and it became unbeatable, a few fish less and it was boring.

Play and rate Total Tipanic

Thanks for reading, can’t wait to play all your great games!

Cheers! ~ tiffi_gaming

Working on checking all the items on my TODO-List, this is the Post Mortem to my game Castle Engineer.

In this game, you (obviously) play a castle engineer. A castle engineer works beneath the castle and usually just stands in front of a button and presses it every time the connected trap deactivates. But on this very day, every other castle engineer is at the beach, so you have to take care of all the traps in the castle. And the heroes know.

What went right

• my TODO-List – did help (but could have been a bit more specific about the implement the game point
• Krita – used this software for the first time for the LD, and with a little setup was able to do my “pixel art”
• Pixel Art – for the first time, I have an image that could really be called pixel art, the treasure chest: It was the last image i created and it is my best looking image ever.
• The protagonist – I don’t know what he is, but that’s a good thing, I suppose
• Created my first platformer – so far, I’ve only done top-down games. Had to come up with some other way of doing collision detection because just checking with every tile in the game would have been a performance killer. And this went pretty well. It’s not perfect, but that’s something to do in a post compo version.
• My first sketch of the idea – did it before writing any code. It’s the first time I even did something like this. Worked out pretty well and the game looks pretty much as planned.
• The heroes AI – also known as artificial stupidity, but could have been worse.
• The sounds – I just love doing sounds myself, they are the most fun, or to quote one commenter “adorably hilarious”. Who needs 8bit sounds if you have a mouth and a mic?

What went wrong

• added a bug right in the beginning of coding the game. Discovered it when I had the first trap-thing that moved from left to right. The fix was easy, but I got stuck there for a while, thinking about how to fix it correctly.
• Got kinda discouraged on Saturday evening, stopped developing early in the evening and was too tired later on to start again. But was back to full strength on Sunday and coded, drew and recorded sounds for ~15 hours all day long until after midnight.
• FPS-Rate on Firefox is extremely flaky, made it impossible to work with the delta between frames. Now I’ve got a fixed delta and everything is predictable. This even fixed some weird bug I had with the heroes falling or going through walls, still not sure why.
• Used the dev version of the Dart Editor and updated on Saturday morning. The thing just didn’t stop updating taking my fans into full power mode. Also content assist broke. Switched to the stable version which worked flawlessly. Lesson: don’t update if it’s working and you need to use it at the moment.

Features I did drop because of the time limit

• Would have liked to add some individuality to the heroes. Some being brave, or faster and more heroes obviously. I would have also liked to make them more intelligent. Like jumping over a trap if they see one right before them.
• My initial idea had some resource management included. A specific amount of energy available for trap activation.
• Wanted to have some way to configure trap. Like the type of each trap, or the path of a trap and with different effects on the heroes. But that would have been to much complexity on top.

And now I’m off to work on the last item of my checklist, to play and rate at least a hundred games.

And for the sake of it, a hypnotizing gif of my game:

And now that you are hypnotized, one more link to my game Castle Engineer.

After a good nights sleep I figured out what I did, in my haste to start up I forgot to try catch the game setScreen() class, and call a super.dispose(), making all those access violations!

Game should be good to go!

Nith The Surface!

Windows/Mac/Linux

Controls: A,D,SPACE,E,CLICK

Use e when near a chest to open it, chest’s give you a random chance weapon or health. Current weapon will be over ridden with the new one.

Goal of the game:

Evade and kill all the purple demons while trying to make it to the end gate, you’ll know it when you see it!

Thanks for playing,

Demetry!

Hi everyone !

We are so excited to see all the games being uploaded now. Here is a final WIP update on our own one.

Yesterday night, at 9:18pm, we were facing the very first casualty. The first death of our mate Robert that I was able to catch. RIP man. That meant we finaly had some gameplay ! Quickly we were able to kill everyone in the mansion ! Then we re-coded all the dialogues systems which is the base for trying to change the others characters behavior or kill them so we can play the game.

Slowly today, we had all the core features coming in. Lose/win detection, balancing some stuff here and there, animated sprites, some sounds, updating the look of the map, etc.

Now Maxime is making the menus and Paul is finishing the first version, the one we’ll upload in a couple of hours. Saddly we won’t probably have time to implement more levels (maybe an update post-jam if players are interested?). At least we’ll have a full playable level that we can restart as much as we want

Ahead of us is the final step : exporting and having a stable exe. Let’s see how it goes !

Enjoy the final hours !

EDIT : We are looking for someone with Game Maker Studio for Mac or/and Linux to make a build if possible ! Cheers !

Tags: Game Maker Studio, ld29, May I help you?, wip

In case you’ve missed this is our game, our tribute to the Atari game Hero.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=23927

Lessons learned (half whining half serious):

1. I suck even more than I thought.
2. Start with the code, end with the assets.
3. If you have several similarly complex ways of solving a problem, don’t take the one you think is the easiest to implement, it will backfire in the worst way possible and you will spend more time trying to fix it than you would if you chose another solution.
4. Have people to talk to, there is nothing worse than bashing your head against a wall alone.
5. Drop a post after every bigger achievement, it will vastly increase the chances of getting some feedback from community and will keep you motivated.

So now, with 13h left in the jam, and the only thing working being the terrain generation as seen below, I ask you:

Give me one reason I should stand up and ignore this little nervous breakdown and keep trying to finish the game…

Edit: oh right, forgot the “picture”

Eww.  Ticks.  Crawling everywhere.  Trying to get beneath the surface of your skin.

Please rate my first ever Ludum Dare entry, Tick Attack, when you get a chance.  Squash as many of them as you can.

8 hours of development compressed to 3 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKk9yvQfSCw

Play Miner

Tags: timelapse

Check  my game out.. It is my first Ludum Dare

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34962

What started as a underground band game ended as playing a hipster DJ messing with a keyboard, but I’m proud of the art :3

— Play the entry here —-

Finished my 6th LD entry with 30 minutes to spare, which is a first for me. Usually I’m scrambling in the last 15 minutes to add sound or buttons, but not this time. Perhaps I’m learning to manage my time better.

I will say this though: the last 6 hours of the competition pass far quicker than the rest. They feel more like one hour.

Now that I’ve had some sleep, I’ll write a post about my entry.

Arctic Antics

A game about ice-skating, paper collecting and orca avoiding!

Man the harpoons!

You play an arctic researcher who has clumsily lost their life’s work, it’s pages blowing across the frozen sea. You take to the ice in an effort to recover your research, but the orcas you study have different plans though…

My original idea was to have many different sea creatures breaking through the ice, but upon realising how time consuming drawing all those would be, I decided to limit the scope and adjust the story to fit. I also wanted to add bits of ice flying around when an orca smashes through, and lots of blood when an orca does manage to eat you.

I probably spent a third of the competition working on the ice alone, which is all procedurally drawn. The other third was drawing and animating the 8 directions of the skater, yikes…

Overall, I’m very happy with how it turned out, even if I wasn’t able to add all the nice things I wanted.

I had a whale of a time making this one, and can’t wait to try some of the other entries I’ve had my ice on. (Okay, that’s pun’s a bit of a stretch, but I’m keeping it.)

Here’s a link to the game, give it a go!

I rushed through the last few hours to get all the game states in place but phew! its done. I finished my first ludum dare. Am I proud or what?!

You’re a firefly in this game. And you’re lost in the dark in an underground labyrinth.

You only need to survive in this procedurally generated world for as long as possible and finish as many worlds as possible.

(The mazes are generated on the fly and vary in size from 15 squares to 40 squares… so you’ll need all the luck in figuring out a few of them. Of course then there are the monsters blocking important paths, so save up on  helmets!)

To go to the ludum dare entry, click HERE!

This has been my first Ludum Dare attempt, and I have to say that it has been a really exciting and productive weekend. I have successfully created a game before the deadline. It’s titled ‘Beneath the Surface’. I was trying to create a short narrative-driven game about a person being buried alive.

the idea
The game was very loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’ in where the character wakes up in a boat’s berth thinking he was buried alive. I intended the game to deliberately show the main character to have met this fate. However, a choice near the end of the game decides whether or not the character was actually buried alive.

I’ve used MSPaint, Flash, and FLStudio in creating this game.

how it went
The game was finished early, and I was happy about the result. The game was pretty short though, only lasting at least two to three minutes. The bad reception effect, the music, and the story mixed perfectly to provide a tense, riveting atmosphere.

What really interested me is the shock value of the game. Admittedly, it isn’t one of the happier games I’ve made. But it’s interesting to note how a few lines of dialogue, a scene, and a few cuts to static could leave an impression to the player.

This game development experience has been one of the best so far.

play, rate
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34553

Here is the development timelapse of our game ‘The Crypts of fire’

Try the game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35470

I don’t know why, but this 29th LD48 compo felt quite different from the previous one. Last time I was psyched and went on a game making rampage. I was full of joy and remember it to be my best two days of 2013. This time I felt somehow depressed half way in the 48 hours. I had difficulties to conceive a concept that fits the theme, I found myself procrastinating and I was very close to scraping the whole project and starting from scratch with 15 hours left (glad, I didn’t). It got better towards the end and I’m really glad I finished.

Maybe I was overconfident at the start which led to some disappointment when I found myself struggling. I also started working before I had a clear vision of what kind of game I wanted to make. I had to interrupt my work several times in order to come to the point at which the precise mechanics of the game were clear to me. I think these are the things I can learn from this competition.

This is my finished game, Water Temple, which I’m less proud of then I hoped I could be:

[play and rate here]

Water Temple

However, I really enjoyed it towards the end when I realized I would finish something in time.

Have Fun!

-P

Tags: Beneath the Surface, Water Temple

Well, after I recovered from last night’s rush to deliver the game (seriously, last minute build issues are though), here’s my entry to LD29: Fish Goes Fishing. You control a very hungry fish, who needs to constantly eat to stay alive. Eat other fishes, keep track of your life and don’t let the dangerous Red Fish get you. Maybe last minute build are not so hard as this fish’s life, so go on and check it out at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=3728.

My entry for LD29 is called Giant Pumpkin. While thinking of the theme, I was watering my plants, figuring beneath the “surface” could imply soil. Roots get really chaotic. Meanwhile I remembered a trip I took to the York, Pennsylvania fair, featuring enormous pumpkins. You get the idea, I latched onto the design idea and proceeded from there.

The Good:

Using Flash, I got a lot of bang for the buck using Tween objects for small animations. For example, the plus symbols on roots and stems grow spontaneously in a fraction of a second. That bit of polish does make a difference as it makes the game feel more interactive. The sound effects came together well using a cheap microphone that came with Rock Band.

The little popup that comes up when the cursor hovers over something became really useful. I hope it helps to explain features to the player.

The Bad:

Balancing basically six resource types in a game is very difficult! I would have liked it to be more educational, but overall is so far from being biologically accurate.

The Ugly:

Implementing the preloader in the final hour broke a lot of features. The bug was a simple oversight, but the adrenaline kicks in as the clock ticks down the final minutes.

Tags: flash

aka “Mole Invaders” aka “Moles From Outer Space” aka
“Surface Scratchers” aka “Terrorforming” aka “Spacedrills”

Tags: 72h, jam, LD #29, Make A Game

This has been our first Ludum Dare attempt, we are very happy with this experience. Thanks to all Ludum Dare Community. 

Space Surface LD29 Jam Entry

Wow! I reeeeeeeeally enjoy the experience of receiving feedback and comments and reviewing other’s games! After a weekend of tremendous work and effort, I feel accomplished and proud of my game!

I definitely am going to participate in future Ludum Dare competitions. Its FUN! (although a tad bit stressful near the end of the deadline) 😀

Here, check out my game or watch the video:

Youtube Video

Game Post

Oh gosh, the rush is coming. Only 12 more hours to go! Gotta stay up late and make everything awesome :D!

Good luck everyone!

Welp, guys, sadly due to non-Ludum-Dare issues that I feel are more important to focus on, I’m having to stop. :(. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to finish the game though! I’m just not going to be able to make it in the time limit.

But hey, I gave this LD a shot, and you know as they say…
Failure Before Success…

Here are a few screenshots of the game: http://imgur.com/a/giKyF#0

And here’s a big fat one for those of you who don’t like clicking links.

Anyway, I am going to continue the development of this because it was insanely fun to make, and I do want to finish it, but I’d rather wait until the weather gets better and when my power doesn’t go out every 10 minutes. >_<

GG Though. Was a nice competition.

- Jev
http://jeviny.pw/

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2014 at 11:09 am and is filed under LD #29, LD - Misc. 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.

Just doing a quick post showing a new gif of my ld29 entry 😀

It can be found: HERE

I didn’t write this second-day roundup “yesterday” (actually today 4 AM) right after I finished the game, since I had school at 9 AM. I managed to sleep about 4 hours, and I probably don’t even need to mention, I wasn’t very awake in class.

To the game. I finished the game (mostly), and I’m very surprised I managed to finish the game. It has 5 tutorial levels, the last of which is almost like a regular level, and 5 regular levels, the last of which is very hard to get all the points from.

I ended up making the music with beepbox.co, instead of Reaper like I intended at the start of the compo, since I’m not as good at making music in 2 hours as I thought.

Check out Engineer here!

Story of Treasure Hunter:

King Edward the Wasteful, King of the Golden Hills is bankrupt.
He comes to you the treasurer of his empire  and ask for help.
Now it’s your job to file his treasury, so the king can pay the salaries.

Mine gold and mint as much money as you can and save it in the treasury before the time runs out.

Play it here! (and have fun)

A quick video playthrough of Stickleback for anyone finding the destroyers a bit brutal.

Ok, this time I managed to finish some kind of interactive story/Action RPG.

It all started when I was going to sleep.. and then I checked my twitter. “Oh my! It is Ludum Dare time!” but, by this time, I was already 24 hours late! After some thinking I decided “Lets do this anyway!” and the marathon began!

In the first minutes, I downloaded the Sublime Text editor (one which I love) and then wrote some kind of 30-line “GDD” for the game.

Then, started the character design, and after three tries got one that looked good.

After this, started coding and doing graphics at the same time, and even mixing this with story design. To be short: started doing a mess.

But, after getting three hours of sleep and starting again, the result started to look good!

And now, I present you with the game: Beneath

Go and rate it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=14248

Have fun!

I finished my first Ludum Dare and it was a blast! Check out my game here!

I hope you enjoy!

So… no entry.

But this was an event I would not miss and I learned a lot. I did my first steps in the flash world. I learned a lot about AS3, Flixel and Dame. So I will be in a lot better condition for the next LD.

So… what went wrong? I think the biggest mistake was to put the theme fully in the graphics/”story”. Without good graphics there was no story which was to incorporate the theme. I tried to make simplifications like changing from 16×16 to 8×8 graphics and still kind of lost focus and motivation to the project.

I was also perhaps a bit too greedy on the stuff that I wanted to implement. Even after selecting the most easy of my ideas as the game and after couple of simplifications I did while doing the project. Getting overwhelmed after reading a longer version of the list below I kind of gave up and didn’t even try enough. :'(

Below is a list of stuff that was left undone or unfinished. Purely as a reminder for myself for the next LD.

Graphics

1. Level tiles (Very important for theme)
2. Enemies (Currently only one Bunny)
3. Menu stuff and generic graphics

Coding stuff

1. Enemy manager
2. Map manager
3. Attacks for enemies

Other

1. Sounds
2. Music

PS. I’m waiting for the LD30. And I’m gonna practice a lot before that 😉

Here is our progress so far. We came up with the idea of a small horror adventure. We’ve never done something like this before, but we love the genre itself. So wish us good luck and check out our creepy soundtrack:)

Visit dev diary

Tags: music, progress, screenshot

If you like music-based experimental games, give my entry a try. It’s quite calm and has an air of mystery to it.

Play Totems

New target render !

Play “Under ytan”!

I woke up a couple of hours ago, it’s now almost 10pm. This Ludum Dare was amazing for me, though it was a very different experience.

I live in Shanghai until July, Twitter, Youtube and many more sites are blocked here, Twitch doesn’t work like it should.. I wish I could have livestreamed development, I also wish I could have tweeted with people, I also wish I could watch all the trailers for games that people create, but I can’t.

The game I made is called “Under ytan” which means “Beneath the surface” in Swedish. It’s a platformer where you can dive under the surface of the ground, making it looks like water, there you can walk upsidedown, making it a weird mix of platforming and using momentum from diving up and down to reach higher jumps or deeper depths.

Good things:
I am very pleased with how the game looks. When you dive there is a splash and bubbles following you, making it actually look like you’re diving.
The controls feel natural, something I usually have a hard time achieving. about halfway through the competition some friends tried playing the game, I noticed how all of them tried pressing ‘up’ to go up faster from the water, so I added that control. Small touches like that give a lot to the feeling of the game.
The sounds are pretty nice I think, I recorded most of them doing sounds with my mouth!
Since making “blomster” I’ve learnt to create levels as you make the game, since it ramps the difficulty along with your own skill in the game, I think this worked out pretty good in “Under ytan”.

Bad things:
Doing the competition in a dorm made me take a lot more breaks than I usually do, had friends visiting me throughout. Not really a bad thing, but I sure missed a few hours where I could have worked on the game!
With 3 hours left, I tried making music, and it was a mess, I ended up using a super simple string of notes playing softly in the background, I had a hard time fitting music with the game..
With 1 hour left I realized I didn’t have an ending, and quickly made what is now the last level, I had a cool scenario in my head which I kindof succeeded in creating, but the end of the game feels somewhat like an anticlimax!

Hope you like the game, I will try to rate as many games as I can, but my internet connection is sooo slow it usually takes a very long time to download something, so I may not have time to rate as much as I would like to! Sorry!

Hello! I’ve updated the game browser for Ludum Dare 29. If you want a fast way to view, filter, and sort games then check it out! Thanks.

http://ludumdare.itch.io

Hover over each game to access the game’s downloads and see the number of ratings (the star) and the game’s coolness (the smiley face).

The page is updated every 5 minutes.

ps. it’s opensource, you can find the code here: https://github.com/leafo/ludum-dare-browser

I got let’splay !!!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klUt-aVLzb8 😀 I am so funking happy 😀

If you don’t know my game, play it before video!

BENEATH YOUR FEET

I made a game called In The Cave. Well, it’s not really a game. It’s more like a half of a game.

Suffice to say, I didn’t completely complete it. I think my biggest problem was that I started late. Way too late to finish a game. The game is not ready and will not be ready in time. I’m not a good game designer and I won’t be in a while. That is the second problem. There is no fun factor.

And I get that a game isn’t always supposed to be fun, but I meant fun as in enjoyment. It was going to be poetic and moody. A NotGame™.

But poetic games need to still pose even the slightest puzzle. Mine was pretty much a walk, as in really just pressing the arrow keys until the game suddenly ends. I had thought to add jumping puzzles with water that kills, but I was running out of time and I couldn’t easily find a way to do this with regions in my middleware (Stencyl).

The one thing where I think I succeeded was the music. I flipped out a midi file of moonlight sonata and added autofilters and synths. That was good.

But you know, this was my third LD, and the first one I failed. And I think I could’ve done this if I had started earlier.

Hah. It always comes down to time, doesn’t it? Well, my current non-compo game calls, and I must follow…

-jontturi

Tags: FailureStory

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37025

Abstraction: a game about its own code.

The game Smoldering Star. Infinite scroller with nice graphics.

My entry is here

Screenshots:

I just finished my jam entry. It’s probably one of the best games I have ever made. And it took only three days! Click the following link to play: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=26965

Though I’ve never completed a game before on my own in such a short time, I have quite a bit of development experience, so I have a pretty accurate idea of how fast I can get things done. But I also play things really safe, and I did something I’ve never heard of anyone doing for one of these: I under-scoped.

I wanted to get a very simple idea across. I figured most people would be doing digging or underwater games, and I wanted to present the idea of going beneath the surface of an object, which became the player. Thus ERUTCARF was born:

Check it out here, or click the image.

I’m a sound designer, programmer, and even have some 3D modeling skills. But the one thing I surely am not is a designer, so the most difficult thing for me is to figure out how to bring my ideas out, so please leave any feedback. It is a really short experience, but there are multiple outcomes.

Can’t wait to check out everyone else’s games!

Gold Submarine – Find all of the Gold pieces to win!
Use “WSAD” to move around

This LD I could not make my entry, I was showing my games in a videogames conference, it is as important as make videogames, for sure!.

So,here is a screenshot of the prototype

Worm digging

Anyway, I got a lot of feedback from ficzone14 for my games during the jam

Tags: ficzone, jam, ld29, videogame, worm, xixgames

Take a look:

Want to know how to create this?
Simply draw your “raw” painting in any drawing program you want (I personally use Inkscape) in any color (the color will be ignored) on a transparent background – so MS Paint won’t work:(. Keep a margin around the image so the neoneffect doesn’t look cropped. Then open that image in GIMP. Go to Filter->Alpha to logo->Neon and there you go!
If you want to see something made using this effect, take a look at neon subsurface and make sure to play and rate it, too.

Bonus tip: if you don’t like the black background of the neon effect and want it to be transparent instead: there is a layer called background. Simply hide or delete it.

What users are saying…

• “Fun administration game!”
• “moving unbearably slowly”
• “simple and relaxing”
• “Amazing graphics, but painfully slow”
• “Very relaxing!”
• “Nice game!”
• “Good concept. A little too slow…”

So, if you’re not in a rush and you’d like something relaxing – maybe painfully relaxing – give Exo-Aquatic a try!

Play Exo-Aquatic – Ludum Dare Entry Page

Hi, i’m satisfied with my game, Amy’s Rescue, but that was after a long way of 48 hours.

What went wrong:

-When I started making the animations they didn’t work at all, I looked for an answer to this and i figured out that it was a bug, a bug that makes the animations not switch at all, then I figured out a way to solve it, it worked, but a bit weird. Maybe I need to find a new way to solve that.

-The physics 2D where pretty hard to understand at the beggining, I thought i couldn’t make objects not collide between them but it wasn’t like that, another thing I found in the second day!

-When I was close to the last hour of submission, I finished the level, and the game started to lag really hard, it was horrible! But somehow I could make an antilag in less than that hour and submit it in the last minute <_<

-I couldn’t make all I wanted, physics, bugs, weird problems, like a fade not working without reason, and more things slowed the project, if you look in the source, you will see a saw and a crate that I couldn’t make at the end. :/

What went right:

-This is the first time I make art like that and it worked pretty well! I’m used to make games in a team cause I’m in a big project and my mates make the music and art for me, but this time i needed to do alone and everyone enjoyed it, was surprising!

-It’s the first time I make an IA like this and it was pretty fun to code, also the art, the feel of challenge felt pretty cool.

-Ludum Dare changed my way to think about my own games, I need to learn much more, and make better games. Thanks Ludum Dare! See you next time!

And you? What went wrong and right? How do you feel now? Share your thoughts!

Amy’s Rescue Entry

If you are looking for a place to host your web build, feel free to check out our platform! We support Flash, Unity3D and HTML5. And there’s a dedicated section for LD29 games.

http://playdot.co

We’re still jamming!

I made a game! It’s called PET RUN/STOP.

I learned a lot in the past few days.

The game had the problem of the player running into just spawned enemies, dying a totally unfair death. I lost a couple of hours to this problem, thinking that I could solve it by checking the player’s position while spawning enemies, or spawning them at a minimum distance away from the player. The solution was to just display a small indicator for a few seconds where enemies would appear, giving the player a chance to react.

Super simple stuff. A neat side effect is that this also vastly improved the overall feel of the game.

You can play/rate my game here.

a Tree is a collaborative asynchronous multiplayer game.

Play as a root to find water to keep the tree healthy.

So far already 18 players have played the game 😀 (here’s a little screen of the roots :D).

You can check it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=8795

Tomorrow I’ll post a simple post-mortem

I have finished my game come check it out:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=25273

[Entry]

Hi, guys

Haven’t got time today for introducing my game, I still got to work after these two days festival

Anyway, I just want to say I’m really happy about my first ludum dare experience! I finished my game in 48 hours (first time solo) and it’s my favorite one so far.

Here it is: I’m Guilty

Hope you enjoy it !

Managed to get something done for the 48hr compo despite time limitations ;]

The goal is to get a score of 8 or higher, good luck!

Link to Sub Bomber

Its crunch time baby! My game has come a LONG way in the last 5 hours including:

• Energy Bar
• Shield for Blocking
• Boosting for avoiding Enemies
• Health Bar
• Finished Controller Support(used to have to play with both the keyboard and controller)
• WASD or UDLR both work on keyboard depending on preference.
• Score(because I don’t have time to make the story mode I wanted)

I still have a LOT of work to do before 9 tonight,  I have to finish getting the score actually displayed, add endless enemies and pickups, actually add attacks.  Here’s to maybe finishing my 2nd LD entry! 😀

http://youtu.be/l5DdI6XEbwc

wow

well that was quite an intense weekend. This theme was absolute incredible! I loved the idea of something “under the surface”.

My game is “beneath  the monsters surface” and is about you trying to recover yours sister who has been eaten by the monster. IF you could possibly play it and tell me what you think that would be great!

Game

Postmortem of The Bored Room

What went well

I kept the scope crazy small – basically just enough to deliver the gag and then end immediately. Very little loss on the personal life side: no lost sleep and very little time missed from hanging out with my kids.

Humor – It’s the pillar that this game rests on. Today a friend played it who didn’t really get the humor and didn’t see the point of the game at all

Construct 2 game engine – with each use I simply get more enamored with this awesome beast. There were no surprises which made the creation a smooth sail.

Remembered the time it takes to export/screenshot/upload – The last ½ hour is usually the most stressful part of any jam for me, simply because I tend to forget that exporting and uploading takes time. This jam I remembered to budget for it, which made the final stretch MUCH more relaxing

What went could have gone better

Wish I’d given the jam more time – I only spent about 6 or 7 hours on this game. If I had dedicated more time I could have had:

-more levels/content (more than 1.5 minutes of ‘fun’)

-better art

-elevator music

I also spent some time creating special moves that are never explained or used in the game (just hitting the ctrl button 2 or 3 time in quick succession)

Lessons learned

Over all I’m left with some mixed feelings about the way I’ve been approaching game jams.

I’ve always sort of gone about game jams somewhat independently (so ludum dare is right up my alley), but for some reason this past weekend felt a bit lonely – and I kind of wonder if working in teams might be more fun.

I’m also coming off of the weekend wondering whether my time would have been better spent working towards the bigger project that I’m working on. I’m pleased with the little game that I built, but ultimately it’s more of a gag than a portfolio piece.

Give it a whirl if you get a chance: The Bored Room

Tags: ld29, post-mortem, postmortem

So that was quite an experience! Now that I had recover my stamina after the two day marathon, I have to say I’m really happy to be a part of Ludum Dare this year. It was my first one and I learned a lot.

Really happy with how the game came out and how people are responding to it.

Just wanted to show you some screenshot and invite you to try it out. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=32989

The game is now beatable.

Link.

My game, finished yesterday! I might do a Post Mortem later if it does any well, we’ll see.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34541

Hopefully it won’t take long…

I’m having a problem with my game.  After the user is prompted to allow the web player to run, and accepts, it doesn’t take any mouse input.

Switching tabs then switching back allows input to be received.

Has anyone experienced this?  Is there a solution?  I’m worried that I’m losing votes/getting bad votes because of it, but I’m not sure if it’s something I did wrong or a bug in the web player itself.

We have full mechanics, a couple of levels, sounds, music, colors. Doing more play testing now.

At last, I have recovered from yesterday’s long night, as well as the sheer volume of stress that comes from trying to take on such a genuinely serious topic as my game did.

More on that in the postmortem, whenever I write that. Probably when I have some good feedback to work with.

In the meantime, I finally figured out how to make game gifs!

…I say that, it’s not doing much of the whole “animated” half of “animated gif”.

That, and I just uploaded the OST onto Soundcloud. Have a listen! Let me know what you think!

You can find Esc over here, if you want to give me some feedback.

Happy jamming, everyone!

Tags: gif, music, soundtrack

Thought I’d post a screenshot of our progress. There is basic platforming, one enemy type with basic AI and two abilities for the player character (to stun enemies and then devour them to absorb their abilities).

Now, back to work!

Added download versions for Windows and Mac of my comp entry. These run a lot smoother than the Flash version. Get them here

I won’t get any more time to work on it later so here is my solo entry for the Jam. It would be great to know what you all think and let me know if you get to the end

DEEPER:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36034

Deeper takes you on a journey into darkness to uncover the truth. Will you find the truth?

Dark, CHECK! Moody, CHECK! Pretentious, CHECK!

Made using:
Unity 4.3
Playmaker

Sounds are from –
http://www.freesound.org/
http://www.nosoapradio.us/

(I did this solo but Submitted to the Jam instead of the Compo due to using Playmaker and sound clips.)

Tags: final, ld29, ld48, Ludum Dare, unity

I’m one of those game designers who never finishes a game. I always tend to lose interest once it’s 50-70% complete. When the idea came to me to participate in LD29, I thought it would be a great opportunity to finally get something out there. Considering I had to go out on the Sunday evening, I had an inkling that I couldn’t enter the 48 hour one, so I decided to call in my brother to help develop HIS first finished game as well.

(Click to go to the game)

We wanted to do “beneath the surface” without doing “underground”, which is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear it. We wanted to be unexpected. So, naturally, we made a puzzle platformer. What can I say, it’s among the easiest genres to develop and we didn’t have any experience bringing a game from nothing to completion.

The original plan was going to be that we split programming and level design duties, while I deal with sound and 3D modelling and my brother deals with story, textures, and 2D graphics. That’s not how it ended up! My brother lacked C# knowledge, so I ended up doing all of the coding (he wrote one method, but with me giving him instructions the whole way). While this was going on, he made all 30 levels, which blew my mind considering he did 23 of them in one morning (about 3 hours).

I did 3D modelling (for the player, anyway; the levels are entirely made of primitives), animation, and searching for fonts, and he did the 2D sprites of the ducks and the duck icons, as well as the background sky texture. Once we had the gameplay solidified, I got to work on the music track. It took me a couple of hours from “right, let’s do a track” to the final export. I also recorded myself doing a “quack” sound (high tech, I know), and made a couple of sound effects using VSTs.

Given more time, we would have probably included an options screen, a level selection screen, saving, leaderboards, and many other features, but we are happy with how it turned out.

All in all, I think we both learned a lot about game development, and I look forward to the next Ludum Dare!

There was a man from Knole

Who fell down a hole

He hurt his knee

Fee Fiddly Dee

Next he’ll try a tree

MUM

If you used LÖVE (Love2D game engine) this time around, are you distributing the .love file, or are you making Windows, MacOS, and Ubuntu executables/apps/distros (or both)?  How many people used LÖVE?

What do people who are judging games prefer?

Thanks!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=30075

So I made this game for the 48 hour Game Jam. 

After about 35 hours of straight work I fell asleep and missed the deadline by I think around 30 minutes  

Woe is me… but that’s behind me now! Cause I found out I could submit to the Jam! 

So here is my game the deep! 

It’s a Rogue like set underwater. If you make it to the bottom then you will be in for a surprise! But it is hard… 

Thankyou for taking the time to play. 

Arrow keys to move. 

Regards 
Danny Gallagher 
@DannyG1888

(I also just submitted it with no deaths turned on, hopefully you didn’t see that though!)

Final version of MechSpider.

Now you can play it because I didm´t know how to put applications on DropBox.

Video here.

Thanks for your time.

Cheers

Added a Linux version, let me know if it’s free from mouse troubles.

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182517150/Blueberry%20Soft/Beneath%20the%20Surface%20LIN.rar

Tags: Beneath the Surface, Blueberry Soft, linux, unity3d, update

First time entering LD, and I learned a lot from this.  It’s tougher than I originally thought, and I had to cut out a lot of what I planned. Still, I’m quite happy with the result.  It feels great when you’re finally done. You can check out the game here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jK-NcRmVcw&feature=kp