This is my third Ludum Dare, but the other two were complete failures. I attacked the jam this time with a friend of mine. We divided the design and the programming. I did the art as well. I was really sad that we didn’t have time to add sound or additional levels. But overall I am really proud of us and happy to have submitted my first game.

Check it out here: http://bit.ly/1pIqZiV

What actually happened::

Day 1: Little progress. Idea scrapped. Played DotA.
Day 2: Same as above.
Day 3: Came up with a simple idea and finished it on the last minute.

Here it is!

Next time, I won’t procrastinate again!

Jason of Etherframe Games here,

A true miracle occurred nearly a half-hour ago. I was able to submit our game with mere seconds to spare. The file was taking forever to upload to Dropbox and it wasn’t being uploaded on my computer so I couldn’t get the link. Somehow it finished uploading with something like 5 seconds left on submissions, so I quickly copied and pasted the link and hit submit. I’d like to say I prayed a little too there, but I don’t think there was time.

Many errors cropped up in the last two-hours before submission.

Post-mortem to come, but for now it is playable, but lacks some polish.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35100

This was my first Ludum Dare (my first competition ever, really) and I must say that I had more fun during those 48 hours than I have in a long time! I can’t wait for the next Ludum Dare. With that in mind, I’ve learned a lot of things in general about making a game during a time crunch…

Prioritize Prioritize Prioritize!
I am a ScrumMaster at work, so naturally I brought some of my training into the real world! During the competition I maintained a prioritized backlog of items (written on post-it-notes). This turned out to be an exceptional tool that allowed me to easily make big decisions during those precious last hours. Moving forward, I plan to start my backlog much earlier than I did during this “sprint”.

Polish is good!
I believe my entry turned out quite well, all things considered. But I realized that with every bit of polish I added, things became exponentially more entertaining. Knowing when to start working on polish versus functionality is a very tricky thing to master, but never underestimate its value. Of course my game would not even be playable without a framework, but dedicating those last few hours purely to polish was the best thing I could do.

For web-based games, test on slow connections.
During the upload period, I started allowing my friends to demo what I had made and offer last-minute bug reports. The result was terrifying. More than half of everyone who tried my game couldn’t even load it properly. I quickly realized that it was an image downloading problem due to the scripts “initializing” faster than the content was able to load. The result was a few tragic comments and a very poor initial reveal. Luckily, I was able to quickly fix the catastrophic bug that was causing all my heartache. My advice for fellow web developers – make sure to test your game on slower-than-instant connections! One trick is to pop open fiddler and set the simulation-mode to “dial-up”. Since fiddler automatically hijacks your network traffic, it does wonders for testing this sort of thing.

Testing in general.
I have since found that my entry doesn’t appear compatible with all versions of firefox. Oops! Make sure to test your stuff thoroughly, especially if you’re cooking with home-brew frameworks. I have no doubt my compatibility issues will affect my overall score. Live and learn, I suppose.

Keep a log of progress.
Unfortunately, I did not keep screenshots of my game during the earlier stages of development. I would very much like to see how it compares to even 12 hours prior to release. During the next Ludum Dare, I will definitely be keeping a larger collection of shots and animated gifs that represent my game during various stages of development… On the bright side, I did maintain a microblog of development decisions and random updates during crunch time which was a pretty neat experience. I think it’s good to be able to look back on all the decisions one made over the 48 hours of development.

In Conclusion:
I had a lot of fun during this event and learned a lot about the process. I’m not new to game development, however, working under a 2 day deadline was a whole other ball game. I am very glad that I participated in this Ludum Dare and look forward to many years of consecutive entries!

Ludum Dare 29
Moon Harvest – Embark on a journey to harvest celestial cores throughout the galaxy!
SharpCoder

WOOO! Congrats fellow Ludum Darees! Mermurder is our first LD entry ever, and we’re stoked! The amount of adrenaline produced in the last 5 mins of submitting was enough to take down a triceratops with brute force. Anyway, please try and rate our game, and congrats again!

– ROOT BEER BARREL BOYS
www.facebook.com/rootbeerbarrelboys

Hey!

This is my first LD48, it was fun :D. I did an educational videogame about chemistry, because beneath every surface there’s nothing more than atoms and molecules. I’d be great if you could check it out and write a comment, I’d love to read your opinion about it and if you think you learned something from it.

You can play it  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=31472

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34428

Presenting out first game as Slumber Studios, come check in out!

Like many other people, Ludum Dare 29 was my first.

This weekend was so exciting but so stressful. There was so much I wanted to do with my game, but it may have felt short. Irregardless, I am thrilled that I ended the weekend with anything.

I tried to keep my design super simple. A hero, a Monster, and their combat. And for this game I decided to try using Unity for the first time. I fell in love with Unity  within the first hour of starting. I’ve never had such an easy time organizing a project. I loved how easy Unity makes animations. And I love how everything i could need was available to me.

To play my game, click the screen, drag back add force, and release. The arrow will fire in the angle of the start and end clicked positions. This is fairly boring as a gameplay mechanic, I know. But I am only encouraged to make the game feel more fun, and to try harder to create fun gameplay in my next Ludum Dare.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34408

The best part about this weekend is that I felt like a real game developer, and maybe my dreams aren’t dead yet!

I made it at last , from a game that isn’t playable to a one that can be called a game at least
it was my first jam using pure programming without engines (will, I still used Libgdx library)
I found it very fun and challenging  . It drove me to learn more about Libgdx , things that could had taken more time from me .
you may have a try here

(and read the description)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=17923

We’ve learned a lot.

We fell too in-love with the humor and flavor of the game and I kept adding planned features and depth to the game mechanics before we had anything done.

We had to change art styles halfway through, and our artist had to learn pixel art and how to develop game art assets on the fly (which he did fine, GJ Jesse).

Our programmer Alec said he got really hung up on the architecture of the code.

We had a font issue that prevented the words from rendering. This issue presented itself at the eleventh hour, forcing me to madly go back and edit all the text to use Arial.

We probably won’t be using Flash again just because it has a lot of weird interactions (like the font issue).

This is now a game about finding yourself.

All in all we were extremely fortunate to be able to submit a “playable” game in the first Ludum Dare, or even Game Jam we entered.

-Jason, Etherframe Games

Good Night Sweet Prince

My latest entry is up and ready to go (at least hopefully it is; no one sees any bugs crawling around, right?) PHEW. What a jam this has turned out to be! 😛

Sub Terraria Zero is an 8-bit exploration platformer that’s attempts to be atmospheric and mysterious. Don’t want to spoil too much, so check out the entry page instead.

Enjoy, and feedback most certainly is welcome!

After 3 days without lots of sleep. We present you our game, Breaking The Waves!

You can download it here:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/6hxi8gke56gc0xt/Ben+Eath+The+Surf+Ace.exe

To be truth, there’s still few bugs and we are struggling to fix it. I think it’s time to call the vermin controller for this!

There’ll be post-mortem for our game but not until we finish to terminate these bugs.

Tags: rmxp, rpg game, rpg maker

I wrapped up my submarine simulator into a slightly playable version and submitted it.

As a game, it’s pretty unfinished – there’s no menu screen, no sounds, and no goals beyond shooting the surrounding submarines.

But as a learning experience it was great – I got the opportunity to implement a pretty accurate underwater physics engine, a 3D object-based UI, a system simulation for vehicles, build a custom underwater shader, and really learn the ease of use of game entity systems first hand.

After all that, there was not much time to craft a game as well.

On the other hand, I can now take the lessons learned and parts of the code from this project, and expand on my arsenal of useful game utility libraries and basecode.  LudumDare was a great incentive to prototype these, and a motivation to carry on developing them.  Thanks to everyone in the community!

I really lucked out with the theme. Outside of the competition, I have been working on a strategy game on a globe. Originally in that game, tiles were layered and you dug up layers to craft into weapons/units. Unfortunately, units ended up putting holes everywhere in the map and unit movement became really confusing with tile height differentials, so I removed this feature from my game.

I was sad to let go this feature, but it was for the best. Then, Beneath the Surface is announced as the Ludum Dare theme and I get excited to revive this mechanic! The name comes from the original goal – a hunt for gems hidden beneath the surface. This would behave as sort of reverse Minesweeper. You would dig up a layer and depending on the layer beneath it, a transformation would happen. Transformations were bad because they would throw off your scent for the hidden gems. This approach didn’t seem like it would work out the more I thought about it. The gameplay would probably resemble randomly clicking on tiles. I also considered some sort of match-3 game with the addition of tile height dimension, but this didn’t seem like a fruitful path either.

At this point, I scrapped everything and making a roguelike on a globe.  Tile transformations were no more. You would hunt for resources and craft them into upgrades. The only problem was I had nine hours left. I may come back to this in the future, but I did not have time to complete this during the Jam.

So I went back to the puzzle game. I was inspired by Hexic. Maybe I could do a Match-3 game after all, just not in straight lines. I was going to do Hexic but require tiles to be at the same height for removal. Then I had a better idea – rings. The specifics came later, just in time for submission (I was a little late, actually). And hey, it didn’t turn out terribly, all things considered. Still, people are having trouble grasping the mechanics. The rules probably require a good rewrite for clarity. A tutorial would be a good idea if I decide to improve upon the game in the future. Animations would also be helpful. I experimented with popping tiles out before transformations, but my rendering system prevented this from working properly.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=31866

Hey all. Our game Virophage is submitted on Eerongal’s page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=2978

For posterity’s sake I wrote up a post mortem on my dev blog, but I’d love for the community to have access to it. We really enjoyed ourselves this time around. Congrats to all.

http://aptitudeinteractive.com/virophage-a-weekend-game-jam-post-mortem/

Tags: postmortem

Everything went well! Even though I didn’t get to implement all the things I planned, it was still a great experience, and the product is playable!

I could of finished everything, had I not take too many breaks and slept for too long. Since the reason for a imperfect finish was time management incompetence, I feel pretty good 😀

(I might be happy with the product, but the game is still not fully done)

Hope everyone is proud of their product and enjoyed their ride!

Going to play a few more games then its bed time

finally got the windows build up! enjoy!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=2879

This time I had little time to make a game so I decided to go for the jam. I used open game art since coordinating with a team would have taken more time.

When the jam started I asked myself:”What do I want to do?” I love making artsy games during jams, developing a fun arcade game was another good choice, but lately I’ve been playing great games like “Towerfall”, “Nidhogg” or “Samurai Gunn” and I wanted to create something I would play with my friends. I tried to do something similar during last jam but it was too ambitious and the multiplayer wasn’t really that fun.

I mixed capture the flag and super mario to make “Doors and Secrets”, I think that even if it’s a fast prototype it can be pretty fun when played with a friend. Without further delay … let’s start with what went right and what went wrong.

What went right:

-Camera: It may need some tweaks for specific situations but it’s great I decided to spend some time working on it instead of using a fixed one.

-Open Game Art: I love making games as part of a team, sadly I always have to work online because I can’t find local devs. Writing emails and explaining what I want takes a lot of time, even with modern technology; as I had little time I used open game art and music from newgrounds, that went pretty good.

-Polished: There may be some bugs, but it’s pretty solid and I spent a good amount of time polishing some little details, they might not seem that important but the game wouldn’t be the same without them.

What went wrong:

-Level Design: I designed the levels in almost no time, it’s a hard process of trial and error that I couldn’t afford. I know that one classic Ludum Dare advice is not to depend on level design, but I wanted to make this type of game so I knew where I was getting in from the beginning.

-Testing: I tested the game to find bugs but it would have been incredibly helpful to have more people around me for the last hours to tweak the gameplay in order to make the game more fun.

-Time and energy: Some personal stuff took a lot of time and energy. I submitted 3 hours early because, even if I could use the time left to re-design the levels, I couldn’t go on and I was starving. I ordered a lot of chinese food, ate it, fell asleep immediately and woke up 10 hours later.

After this “adventure” I think I’ll make an artsy game for my next Jam. You can try “Doors & Secrets” here, grab a friend and have fun!

Tags: postmortem

Here it is, the timelapse/documentary of my compo entry. This one was a REAL challenge, watch on to see why

This was my second Ludum Dare, and my first one as part of a jam team. I had great fun working with my good friend, Will White. It’s been ages since we collaborated on anything, so it was a blast to meld creative minds once again (fun fact, Will was one of my team members on my very first game jam ever).

We ended up making Rosa Neurosa, a weird sort of digging improv game. The idea actually started as a basic sort of digging game with the theme of rooting around someone’s mind to find the real cause of an issue, but during our walk to get dinner on Friday night, the bit about having players just make up stories relating the memories came up. It got us a both excited, as I love improv games and had been wanting to make somewhat of a “toy” at some point, and it took a lot of the heavy lifting off trying to do something like think up a bunch of content and connections between memories ahead of time.

Figuring out how to let people share their stories really made it fun, and it was great to have people trying out early builds of the game in our developer stream and then share their silly stories back with us. I also was pleased that after many jams using Construct 2, I finally managed to do something that actually used some things that are specific strengths of html5.

There are some issues I’d like to address post-jam:

1. A lot of the objects don’t stand out over the drillable ground and on the ending screen in the office, I’d like to make borders for them or backgrounds that they can sit on, since they’re pretty key to the stories making sense
2. I’d like to fiddle more with my spawning rules, right now things can spawn behind rocks and sometimes there just aren’t that many items that show up
3. We’d been hoping to at least get a palette shift on the environment to convey different levels, but ran out of time, like you do
4. We only tested this in Chrome, and as such there are a lot of bugs in Firefox that I’d like to address
5. I set up the input so that it would be easy to add alternate controls and gamepad support later, but didn’t have time to get those in
6. More patients! The patients featured are me, Will, Will’s wife and streaming partner (Amanda), and a random bear. It makes it 10 times more fun to send Amanda or Will a link of my story when I happen to get them as patients. It would be really funny if we had a way of letting people incorporate their friends as patients (maybe randomly pulling from facebook photos?) but then it wouldn’t have Will’s charming character animation.
7. One of my goals for the game was to incorporate what I’ve been learning in an Information Theory class I’m taking with Mike Acton. I barely got one thing implemented from it, and figured out how a lot of things I was doing could be done in a more information-efficient way, but it turns out that sort of math is really hard under time pressure!

Lastly, this was my first experience with doing a live developer stream. I loved it! It was fun that Will and I were in the same room so our audio could be on one another’s stream. It definitely kept me focused and was great fun responding to stream visitors. Thanks to everyone who stopped by!

All in all, I call this a successful jam

Tags: postmortem

Hi everyone, this has been my second LD, and boy what fun did I have!

Please try out my game HERE, feedback is much appreciated.

Last time I focused almost all my time on gameplay and spent nearly no time on graphics. This time I worked on the graphics first once I had an idea. After the overall look started coming together I began work on the gameplay. As a result, I wasn’t able to get all the gameplay elements finished.

Picking an idea for the theme was hard for me. I decided to go with a platformer because I really like them, and my last game (a puzzle platformer) had awful controls which I wanted to redeem myself from. The controls turned out bad still because of glitches, but I was later able to fix them luckily. When I added the idea for tears, I just went off with it to see where it would go. None of the gameplay mechanics besides jumping were preplanned.

I’ve been told by nearly everyone who has played my game that it is very hard. I guess I failed on that end, because my last game was also very hard and I had wanted to make this more approachable as a result. Oh well, I enjoy the current difficulty at least =]

Things that went right:

– Graphics and animations I am very proud of for my first time doing pixel art.

– Theme interpretation

– I was able to put together a simple menu system in the last hour that worked well.

– Almost a fully working game

– Turned out better than I thought.

– Second LD completed!

Things that went wrong:

– Players let me know of a game breaking glitch. It took me a while to find a solution, but gladly it was extremely simple when I got it fixed.

– The ending of the game was bugged and no one could complete it. It turned out this was simply a typo I easily fixed later.

– The crying mechanic is buggy, sometimes the girl cries when when she shouldn’t and doesn’t cry when she should.

– I wanted to add a few more ways of interaction with the robots but ran out of time

– Forgot to add a reset to the game. Added the player reset at the last second but forgot about reseting the robots.

– No time for sound =[

I’m really glad with how my game turned out! I managed to think of a cool idea and scope it well enough to finish in time, and I’m quite proud of the result. Here’s some screenshots with explanations of game mechanics! There’s minor spoilers ahead (basically just a couple screenshots of the earlier puzzles), so be warned.

Basically, the premise is you’re sucked into your game (in a really cool cutscene), and you have to manipulate objects to get to the end and escape. To this end, you can rip the textures off objects, which modifies their properties, and reapply them to other objects. You use this to solve puzzles to make your way through your broken game (which is itself a work in progress, hence the title).

All this button is looking for is a model with the “orange” texture applied. That orange has the texture by default, but this nearby tree will work too.

This is an alternate (although not altogether exciting) solution to the first puzzle, which is primarily to introduce the player to the mechanics of putting oranges (yes, the fruit) on button. Why oranges? Well, because it’s a work in progress.

Make anvils float and hop along to the end!

This screenshot is the second puzzle. There’s actually a few different solutions; hopping along floating anvils like originally intended is incredibly hard and if you can do it, you are a god at this game.

Wireframes float and are solid; you can use them to build staircases.

The third puzzle involves a lot of objects just lying around; you have to pick them up, toss them, and remove their texture midair to create a makeshift staircase to scale a vertical wall. This is both easier and harder than it sounds; this is probably the most time-consuming puzzle.

Staircase as viewed from the top. This is a great accomplishment.

Getting to the top is a great feeling, though.

All these wireframes, in a sort of staircase. Where do they lead!?

What could this screenshot be about? Is that a door floating on its side? I guess you’ll have to play the game and find out!

All in all, the game is a light-hearted, humorous take on (what could happen beneath the surface of) game development. I’m glad I finally got to use this mechanic I thought up a while back, and I’m really happy it turned out so well. I wish we could have made more puzzles (or just more interesting ones), but unfortunately, as cool as the mechanic is, and as well as it works, it’s really hard to come up with puzzles for it. If I’ve learned one thing this weekend, it’s that I’m rubbish at puzzle design. Other features I included but never used were collision detection as a property of textures (applying certain “ghostly” textures to objects would cause them to become immaterial), and various types of event handlers I never really made full use of. And, of course, underneath all the textures, and the shaders, and the effects, it all comes down to wireframes. They’re what’re “beneath the surface” of all modern 3D video games, whether we notice it or not.

You can play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=22782 Let me know what you think!

This is The Devil’s Magnificent Return, an entry LD29:

While away in Sanctuary, a demon took over Hell. Play as the Devil, and claim hell back.

What went well

There were two things that I wanted to do primarily when preparing for Ludum Dare, testing out Free Writing, and working with the 2D tools in Unity.

For the first task, I wanted to see if I could come up with a game idea with given a topic, which is something that I think gets me sometimes; I mean, I don’t have troubles coming up with new ideas, but they usually just pop out of nowhere, unless it’s playing guitar, I don’t sit down to write or come up with ideas for games, I just do the one that randomly popped into my head some time ago… But this time I wanted to do it differently and for it I used the Free Writing technique, which on the Broken Age documentary Tim Schafer mentioned he used, and decided to give it a shot, and it worked incredibly well. If you have ever had a problem with the “blank page syndrome”, this technique is totally awesome. It’s my first time using it, and I loved it, it gets you going and writing, and before you know it, ideas start flowing. Again, loved it. And I think the idea I had for the game was pretty cool. I haven’t seen other entries taking place in hell, so I think it was creative (or terrible enough that no one else wanted to do it :P).

For the second, I wanted to do stuff in 2D using the tools provided by Unity. I mean, I’ve already worked with 2D in Unity, but it was using third party packages, not the official tools, and I wanted to learn about them, and I did. Not as much as I’d have liked to though, because of time limitations, and because of being extremely tired by the end of the event, but it was still good, and now I have the sprites to polish this in the future, so I think it was very good.

Also people seem to like the game, they are having fun with it, they love the graphics (done by Alejandro Socorro) and the music too (which was done by René Rivero), and that makes me glad, since they took time of their schedule to help me out with the game.

What went wrong

Alejandro didn’t have Internet access on Friday and he wasn’t able to work well that day.

Even though I planned a lot to have free time for the event, there are things that you have to attend to, and even though I missed a few things over the weekend, others I could not miss, so I had to sacrifice some content and polish, which is why the level is quite sort, and there is only one sound effect. Not to mention some bugs regarding the character animations. But still, overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the result.

Conclusion

I had a blast, streaming and chatting with my friends as I was working was pretty fun, I hope I can do it again, it’s tough to do though, but I will certainly try.

@davidmoron

Tags: 2d platformer, ld29, platformer, postmortem, venezuela

Hey all! I’m posting on behalf of my two-man-team to release what we’ve been working oh-so-hard on!

I wanted to post this last night, but, submitting it 1 hour or so before the closing of the competition (1am my time) I had to get some rest first!

Our game, titled along with the Theme, “Beneath The Surface”, is a 2D Platformer Puzzle game; where you hold control of two characters, but you move them both with only one input! The game is focused on getting both of the characters out of the level. Alive. There are traps such as spikes and lava, and man obstacles for you to tackle using nimble movements clever planning!

So the team who built this was only two people! There’s Alberto, the engine fuelling this creation; and then there’s me, the art & sound guy!

Here’s a link for you all to go get started!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35518

Or if you like to go direct to the download, click the below link
http://joshuaosullivan.co.uk/beneath-the-surface-game/

Screenshot of our LD29 entry.

For those of you who are keen speedrunners (or just like a challenge), I challenge you to beat my record time of 6 minutes and 7 seconds, in only 6 deaths! Post your comments below with what you thought of the game; please remember to vote, and feel free to show your time & deaths! I’d love to see how everyone does at this little puzzle game!

367 seconds; that’s 6 mins 7 seconds. :P

Thanks for your time, I hope you enjoy playing the game even half as much as we enjoyed making it!

– Josh

Here’s my Ludum Dare entry.

I didn’t want to use a boring and common idea like “Beneath the surface of the Earth or water”, so it took awhile to come up with an idea I liked, and I think the game turned out pretty well.

Play it here

Tags: flash, flashpunk

I wrote a post mortem for my game Coffin.  Instead of writing here though, I posted it on my personal blog.  Enjoy reading it!  If you’re into reading post-mortems.

Tags: game, post-mortem, postmortem, unity, unity3d

36 hours without sleep, but I feel it was worth it. Even if the final polish for the game had to be done on my lunch break today 😛 Those finishing touches were absolutely necessary, though.

I definitely learned a lesson about rapid prototyping during this jam. I have a tendency to obsess over having the “perfect” modular code. Everything has its place, everything must be clean, everything must be commented fully, highly decoupled, intuitive interfaces, etc.

Sometime around 2 am on Monday, I realized how little progress I’d made, and finally buckled down to just finish SOMETHING that was playable, coding conventions be damned. It turned into a giant knotted ball, object references scattered all willy-nilly, the bleating of sheep was deafening. Oh, the horror! The code was some of the worst I’ve ever done.

You know what? It was fun! I can definitely see the point of creating a prototype first as quickly as possible, ESPECIALLY for games; I got to get a feel for the game as I worked on it. “This isn’t as fun. This could be harder. Maybe that’s too hard.” Fail faster, as they say. Kind of like the “plug and chug” programming method, but with game design.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to implement a lot of our more lofty design ideas. There were supposed to be llamas. Random llamas, bursting out of the skin for no reason. And perhaps Grumpy Cat, because somehow that’d magically make us appeal to a larger demographic, right? Or something.

Dammit… no llamas, though. Not even a giant pink snake monster.

At least there was blood. And pus-filled ingrown hairs. And of course, random speech.

Next time I take a stab at a jam, I’ll make sure to put on my “fug’git” mantle earlier on in the game and just have fun with it rather than try to over-engineer every little thing. I got some good reusable components and code out of it, but that wasn’t really the point.

There was an obvious cost, though, to rushing it; bugs. So many bugs @_@ Not long after submission, I realized I’d used an older spritesheet for the hair wiggle/break, which I’m sure people can see, is the wrong size. I’m not sure if that falled under the “typo” category of bug or not. What do you guys think? Collision’s the same size, just a cosmetic fix. I think it probably qualifies. Curious to hear what other people think.

One thing I really wanted to get in was procedural, endless generation of the levels, but there simply wasn’t time. At the last minute, I just started throwing down hairs, blood, and pimples in ways I thought would be challenging to get to the gold.

I think it made the game a little more challenging than a random level would’ve, which is good, but I failed to realize another oversight; I wasn’t actually resetting the levels at game over. A very LARGE issue that makes the game unplayable after you’ve finally exhausted the blood pools. The level definitely needs a reset. Don’t know how I could’ve missed that.

But again, I don’t know if that qualifies as “unbeatable,” so I don’t want to mess with it until I get some feedback on whether others think it’s OK to fix. Deadline has come and passed. I probably should have thought of these things before.

Oh well. I’m tired and was pretty much useless at work today… but man, I had a blast! I can’t believe I’d never done one of these before!

Of course, shameless plug: If you’re still reading this, you should play the game! Vote! Be harsh, I can take it; the next game will be even better 😉
A big thanks to the rest of the team! You guys were amazing, I really appreciate it!

Oh, and a word of forewarning: The stuff the tick spouts when it talks can be pretty explicit and potentially offensive; this is because a large number of entries in our word bank came from Cards Against Humanity. That said, I think you’ll know what to expect >.> (Yes, we’ve read the license; as long as we’re not selling anything and give credit, we’re free to use the content. Obviously, if we decide to try and make money on a future iteration, we’ll use a completely custom word bank of original content)

Artwork/animation by Cindy Nguyen!
Music and the speech generation engine done by Patrick Ryan.
Additional game design and brainstorming, Chris Berber!
And  you have me to blame for the all the bugs.
I very much hope to work with these guys again for the next challenge!

Jam Entry Link:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35330

This post is about making of the game Losing it. You can take a look at it here.

So, the 72 hours are behind us and we can finally exhale and relax for a bit. I am currently looking into other entries and I’ve got to say, there are many talented developers around the globe.

But I would like to show you a quick overview about the creation of our little project here. It was a very exhausting weekend and many energy drinks have been drank!:D

The biggest problem at our side was the brainstorming. Once we woke up on saturday and checked the theme, we immediately jumped onto a long debate. We couldn’t agree on a basic idea and rejected a lot of potential concepts. There were ideas for a mining game, hack ‘n slash action with demons and completely simple ideas like fisning corn flakes form a bowl. After three long hours, we agreed on a stealth game with a rat and it seemed liek the perfect compromise.

I proposed to base the game in an isometric field, as I wanted to try something different from my other projects. My games are often created in pixel art and since this style is nowaday frequent, I wanted to distinguish our creation from other entries.

The graphics began like this:

Nothing too complicated, but everyone got the idea and it was easy for us to build around it. On the first day we managed to finish some easy tasks like mouse walking and positioning and I finished the graphics for the house surface.

Then within the first day this

changed into this:

What may seem like a pretty strange choice, is the black and white visual. And to be honest, we didn’t intend to leave the game in gray tones in the beginning. I usually draw my paintings in gray tones and colour them afterwards. But after we put the rat and cook into the scene, we kinda agreed, that this combination actually works pretty well.

Those, who finish the game, might also notice a strange ending or maybe a different meaning underneath the basic idea (so meta!). This idea was there from the very beginning, but we were not entirely sure whether we have the time to include this outcome of the story or not. We managed to make it in time, but the ending still leaves a lot of space for open interpretetation. However, I hope a lot of gamers actually understand the meaning behind it.

The biggest stress was of course present at the complete end of the jam. The guys were the most productive on the last day and worked till the last minute. I finished the assets pretty fast on that day and didn’t have to cut corners at all. Which is unusuall in a game jam.:)

Anyway, this is the result. It’s not perfect and you may come across minor bugs, but everyone worked hard and I am happy we did a lot of work. I might come back to my other projects now, but I hope, this is not the last Ludum Dare I take part in! I hope everyone had fun!:)

You can check our game at the jam entry page!

Tags: black and white, gray, rat, stealth

Yeah, finally i finished my first ludum dare 😀

Sadly, i got distracted by my other project so i couldn’t make it for the compo.

so this is Maze Shift

a minimalist maze puzzle game. You have to arrange several layer beneath the maze surface so the layer will show a path to connect the two squares.

here is my entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35576

Have fun!

Here’s a timelapse of my game crafting: http://youtu.be/Gfj_Z1TXj8s

They say that every time you make a timelapse, a time traveler’s heart skips a beat. Real idiom. No joke.

Hey all. Been wanting to participate in Ludum Dare for quite a while, and we had a week off from school, so I gave this one a shot. Overall, this was a great learning experience, and it is the first “thing” I am releasing to the world. It is heavily inspired by a small iOS game called Trap Adventure, a fun yet rage inducing platformer. I liked the pixelated graphics, but I kept it with a 3d/perspective camera so I could still keep the parallax effect with the background and some of the 2d cutout elements.

If I had a little more time, I would have liked to add a few more levels, and originally I wanted to add a bit of story. I also could have gotten a little more creative with the name.

You can check it out here. Go ahead and play it, or download the source and tinker with it.

This was my first Ludum Dare, and although I wasn’t sure what to expect it turned out pretty good! I’ve learned a lot about making games, not just in 48 hours but game development in general. Thank you to those who’ve commented on Planet Scan-it, I’ve gotten some good feedback on what I’ve been doing right and wrong.

There is a bit of a steep learning curve…

The language
For a long time, Dart has been my favourite language. I love it’s optional typing system, useful for both rapid prototyping and creating solid, fail-proof code. It’s syntax is very familiar and easy to understand. It’s got syntax for things like closures and class constructors that make the code simple and concise. It can very easily be compiled into Javascript that runs in any browser, and on my computer it’s faster than Flash or Unity. The main downside is the lack of libraries, but StageXL is a library that emulates ActionScript’s very good graphics library. I would definitely use it again next year, although I might have a go at Haxe.

The concept
Before the comp, I already had the idea of making a 2D Lunar lander type game, that scales in and out to allow for multiple planets. I have a big interest in orbital mechanics (I’m a big fan of Kerbal Space Program), so the idea stuck. When the theme was announced, I decided to go with what I’d already thought of, and spend more time programming the game. When I started making it, I honestly wasn’t sure I could finish it. Overall I managed my time better than I’d expected: In the first 24 hours I had a mostly playable game, and I spend the rest of the time adding better features and polishing up. Orbital mechanics is pretty tricky to program, on both the mechanics side and the usability side, but I was surprised at how quickly it came together.

The mechanics
There were a lot of challenges to making the game work. For example, as anyone who’s played Kerbal Space Program may know, the time scale is a lot different when on the ground and when orbiting a planet. It may take a few minutes to get a ship on a realistically-sized planet into space (the planets is Planet Scan-it are much smaller), but it takes hours to reach the moon. I had to make the physics speed up the farther you get into space, and adjust the gravity accordingly so the moons and planets stay in orbit.

There were also extreme rounding errors: The ship doesn’t land exactly on the edge of the planet, so I had to add a shadow to show where the ground is (and the shadow had it’s own rounding-related problems). I spend three hours trying to code in a particle system, before accepting that it wasn’t going to work. Some of the physics code (like the friction) was taking off the internet, and thank god those worked on the first try because I had no idea how they worked. In the end the game ending up working very well, and I spent way too much time playing my game instead of programming it! Overall, coding the mechanics was by far the biggest challenge, and I learnt a lot from it.

The playability
Unfortunately, while I was coding in the moon orbits and friction, I overlooked one of the most important aspects of a game: The playability. As I realised when the comments rolled in, the most important part of a game is at the very beginning, because that’s what players are going to experience first. I thought the in-game tutorial was a good idea, but instead the people who didn’t know how to play would keep crashing their ship, and have to refresh the page 10 times in order to read the whole instructions. It would have been better to the instructions pause the game, or putting the player in orbit at the beginning so they won’t crash.

If they manage to take it all in and not crash, then they have to land on a planet. Having played Kerbal Space Program a lot, I know what landing a space ship is like; how the last few seconds are when the scale suddenly increases and you realise you’re going a lot faster than you thought. But even when the player manages to land their ship, it doesn’t matter because in my game, landing makes you take damage. On top of all that, my game is mostly made of land -> press a button -> quickly take off again -> repeat about ten times. Landing the ship takes patience, and while it is one of the less fun parts of my game it’s also what you have to do most often. Because of the incredibly steep learning curve, most players haven’t played past flying around all of the planets.

What I’ve learned

• Get a good amount of sleep. I wasted several hours feeling like a zombie.
• Have some food that is easy to prepare. If you’re like me and obsess over things when under pressure, if you have to spend time cooking instead of programming you won’t eat, and that’ll drop your performance.
• Make your game interesting to play. Not just have interesting mechanics.
• Have good instructions. Either make the game intuitive enough that the instructions can be a single picture; Have a special ‘instructions’ page accessible from the menu; or, if the instructions are more complex, introduce each concept one-by-one throughout the game.
• Have a menu screen. You need a screenshot to show off your game, and everyone judges a book by it’s cover (more plays = more comments/ratings). Make a menu, and make it look good.
• Start by coding the bare essentials. Make the game barely playable as soon as possible, then add all the other stuff.
• Have a different aspect to work on each day. Here in New Zealand the compo starts at noon, so it’s spread over 3 days. I think I should make sure to have a basic prototype finished on the first day, have the game close to finished on the second day, and do finishing touches on the third day.
• Do a concept you haven’t done before. I was going to say ‘don’t choose something that’s too complicated’, but on thinking about it I think a good learning experience is better than winning the competition. I learned a lot from making a game I half-thought was too complex for me to make at all, let alone in 30 hours.
• If you want comments and/or ratings, advertise. Most of the comments I got have been from people I talked to on IRC.

Congratulations to everyone who submitted a game, I’m impressed with the games I’ve seen, and I already can’t wait until next time.

Tags: postmortem

One function I wanted to add but didn’t have time for, is highscore lists. It is now added and provided in a new improved version! The original version is still provided in the entry page.

Try the improved version if you want to see. How fast can you be?

Hey all!

We are very proud of what our little team accomplished in the 72 hours. While it isn’t required of Jam entries, all of our art and coding and most of the sound was completed within the 72 hour window.

So why don’t you give it a spin, you might like being an A.S.S.

Play Here

Tags: #LD48 #LD29

Woo! We finished our first LD! And submitted it with time to spare, too. (Hooray!).

Play here! (or click the image).

Underline is simply a platformer with a rather twisted mechanic. Hope you’ll enjoy it!

This is also actually our first game ever. We’ve learned so much from this experience:

Day One

We came up with rather ambitious concepts at first. And we decided on this one through rational deliberation… Ok, we actually just tossed a coin.

I started working on the background sprites and animation and originally thought up of a black-and-white visual style. I tried a painterly look for the style.

kevyee started working on the character controls and test level.

Day Two

We had steady progress.

kevyee and I figured the painterly style looked a little out of place, so I went for a minimalist look instead.

kevyee started coding the platforms, background, and foreground objects.

We were slowly working on the first level.

Day Three

Our initial plan was to make three levels, really. Then we realized we bit off more than we could chew. Still, we were content enough to have finished one rather difficult level, especially considering this is our first time. This day consisted of adding the music, sounds, the pretty backgrounds, and some tiny cleanup and tweaks we felt we needed to change around.

Here’s the soundtrack:

 https://soundcloud.com/kirfue/underline-ost-underline

At around 3 a.m. here, we finally finished and submitted our game… and then dropped to bed.

Hope you guys had fun too during LD! Good luck y’all!

Late post, but yay! Done with my first Ludum Dare 😀

Found out last minute that my game might have problems with Java compatibility issues between 1.6 and 1.7?

I hope I was able to fix that :S!

The game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35365

This was my fourth attempt at Ludum Dare, and my first time working in a team. How did things go? Well, play the game and you’ll see. Let’s just say that they didn’t go perfectly. While I think the concept was the game’s strong point, it was probably also a mistake. The thing about simulators is that you’re simulating one thing to a high level of detail, which in my case meant that 90% of the game was in a single file. This resulted in my teammate spending most of his time on reddit as there was only really one thing that could be worked on at a time. However, by far the biggest problem was the game’s performance. When I added a level for the worm to explore, 32×32 tiles, the game would run at 5 frames per second. This was my first time working with the Java 2D api, so I had basically no idea what to do at this point. I ended up having to use the Slick2D library for graphics, but I screwed up a bunch of stuff while adding that and I didn’t get the game back to where it was until Sunday afternoon. The end product was basically fun to screw around with, but nowhere nowhere close to being a game. However, we like the idea of this game and we think we’ll keep working on it.

I’ve compiled a table of every entry from this Ludum Dare. Click here or on the image to check it out.

This is something that so many people get wrong that I felt I had to make a semi-angry post about this.
I am reviewing games for LD at the moment, and SO MANY of them are a pain in the ass to install, or just straight up don’t work!
As I review each game, as I encounter problems I am going to post then below.

1) HOST YOUR FILES ON DROPBOX, NOT MEDIAFIRE.
WHY IS MEDIAFIRE EVEN A THING ANY MORE. MEDIAFIRE IS A PIECE OF SHIT.

2) Your game shouldn’t default to full screen.
If you do this, I hate you. Particularly if your game can’t be windowed AND you didn’t put sufficient tutorials in the game so I can’t figure out what to do without alt-tabbing.

3) No I will not compile your game from source.
If you seriously want me to do this, you better supply the compiler, compile script and libraries in your download.

4) Please tell me what to do. Roughly is fine. Just a hint …

5) For standalone players, your zip file better not have 3 or 4 nested directories just to get to your game.

More to come as I encounter them…

Hey folks,

I’d love to get some feedback on how the game runs on your iDevices for my compo entry Deep: Beneath the Surface! I’m particularily after how scaling affects those of you with iPads both big, small and retina.

I have an open Test Flight invitation you can join the team with. Provisioning is a bit slow as I have to manually add your device ID and push out a new build for each group of testers I add.

Thanks!

i know you like gameplay gifs ;P

65 games in, I decided to list the top five games I’ve come across so far, to give extra credit where extra credit is due!

Without further ado… Here’s the list!

1. Nether – This is a simple platformer, but my heavens… It’s awesome! I can’t stop playing it!
2. Hot Diggity – Retro-feely digging game with modular drill building mechanism which results in hilarity at times!
3. Cave Survival – This genre… I love this kind of games. This was done really smoothly and worked really well. Props!
4. Yumbugs – Reminded me of Rayman games. Really awesome graphics and sounds, and an interesting concept!
5. Deep Blue Home – One of the few games I actually played all the way through. Really well-designed puzzles. Wow.

And… a special mention…

• Balancitos – The concept of this game was just so original, it had to be mentioned here! Go give it a try!

There! These are my favorites so far. There have been many awesome games besides these, with great concepts and cool twists. I hope you appreciate these games and their creators, they have really put their effort in these games!

And now, time to play some more games! (…right after I beat Nether. Damnit.)

Tags: favorites, top-five

So after two (and a half) days of bashing our heads against our keyboards we finally have something to present to you. Our creation is named Sewer-Quest. We are planing on releasing a Game Over screen as a $15 DLC in the feature. Test it, rate it and comment. We might actually keep working on this a bit after the compo

Oh.. and Mac version is comming…

Thank you all! We had a wonderful time!

Reflection is a minimalistic platformer with a twis. Check it out by clicking HERE

Here’s a little peak of the game:

Hello everybody, some hours ago, we could finish our game in time. We are very satisfied of the result this LD, Tentacle Rails is finally live without important bugs or glitches.

The game is hard to complete but easy to control, you only has to worry about kill everything. It’s a funny game perfect for a five minutes session. I will try to write a long post-mortem about the development with some concept-arts and interesting stuff. Tentacle Rails has been developed with Game Maker Studio.

Now is the moment to rest a bit  and soon we will begin to test and rate other games. You can try my game in this link, and if you want to post a comment, please link your game to test it too 😉

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=25708

Tags: Game Maker Studio, MechanicMoonStudio

I was unable to put in an actual highscore logging mechanism in my game, which was unfortunate, but I really wanna see what people can do with the game – so here’s a comp!

Send me a screenshot of your SUPER LANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK highscore, and the toppest scorer this week will get to design a level (well I’ll build it of course) for the game! 😀

Find me on Twitter, on Facebook or just comment here

Hi all,

Please checkout my game: Lost Beneath Adventure

My game is about a little miner that got stuck in the mines and he needs to get out before his little torch flame goes out.
He can collect oil in these mines but beware the DARK CREATURES.

Someone posted their favorite Ludum Dare #29 entries after playing 65 of them.  I like being exposed to what other people like, so I thought I’d blatantly copy that post idea and shout-out my top five compo entries so far after playing about 50 games.

1. Water Golf

2. Balancitos

3. Scratch

4. Jetpack Caverns

5. Temple of RA

and then this game has made me laugh the most.

This doesn’t necessarily reflect what my five favorite games will be by the end of the three-week judgment period, but hey, I think these are good entries and I wanted to share them with anyone who hasn’t seen them yet.  I haven’t gotten around to playing many of the Jam games but I intend to play a lot more soon enough.

This has been your friendly neighborhood blog post.

WEB VERSION

I should tell you that the Downloadable Version will provide you a better experience than the WEB version.

On the downloadable version you can choose the graphics quality and the resolution.

If you play the WEB version NEVER Right/Left-click with the mouse or it will do something wrong and you will have to restart.

You don’t need to click with the mouse buttons in that game. Clicking can be a survival reflex sometimes. So I warn you!

About the controls you will feel that it’s slow when on the ground but that’s the experience I wanted to have. When you jump it makes the difference.

The first level is a piece of cake, I hope every body likes food, because if platforms were food, I could say that you will eat platforms, but they are tasty!

Good Luck! Don’t Give up!

With music! And a special surprise at the end!

You can check out the game here.

Last LD we made scripts to show all the screenshots in a mosaic of the Mona Lisa.

Our Art was in Good Company.

I’ve updated the script, and run it again.  Your game is in this picture, somewhere!  Happy hunting

This time, I looked through the Google Image Search results for “Beneath the Surface” to find a nice picture of a green turtle:

A discussion about how to improve the script, or alternative images that better fit our screenshots, welcome

Whoo! Found a Bobomb!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=18340

Hi everyone! 
I’m very happy to announce that we’ve got at least a working game concept done on this LD! 
Me and my wife were working very hard on other things this weekend, so we just came up with the idea at Sunday, 10 pm! =/ But we’ve done some rapid prototyping so we can check that the game mechanic is solid and fun. Now we will finish the game, balance and so on. Please ignore the TOTALLY placeholder art (and the crazy helicopter orientation as well) =P 

But here are the basic prototype: 
You control a submarine, hidden beneath the ocean surface You must destroy all the enemy helicopters by moving your sub left/right (with the arrows) and firing your missles (space). 
The catch is: you don’t know where your sub is until you fire! But when you do, the enemies see you too, and they attack. So you have to carefully balance your shots in order to destroy your enemies, find where you are and dodge the enemy missiles! 

BTW: The sub wraps on the screen edges, so no one can use them as exploits for locating the sub 😀 

Hope you guys have fun! 

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=2312

Tags: Construct2, first prototype, Game Concept, shooting

So I spent a few hours yesterday porting my LD29 game to android. It’s also the first game I’ve put out on the play store so I’m pretty excited!

Play it HERE

It was a fun weekend, stressful but a lot of fun. We finally finished our game yesterday and it’s up for you guys to try :).  The artist has done a great job on the visuals if I may say so myself, so it’s not only fun to play but also nice to look at!

This is the 5th Ludum Dare I’ve participated and my first 48hr compo. Before I used to go on for the Jam, sometimes solo and others with a cool team. I experience this compo, for me, was really “extreme”. Not like the jam, were I had a bit more freedom and time, but this is good. I like to work with limits. I had a really hard time trying to figure out what I could do for the game. I decided to discard all obvious ideas I had with the theme. So I was looking into ideas and I stumble upon this really cool game called “Glitchspace“. I thought it was genius and it gave me the base idea for creating my game. I couldn’t have  created a new programming language and interface in just 48 hours, so I just decided “why not just expose properties”. Exposing the properties would be like seeing under the hood of the game, seeing beneath the surface.

The First Day

I didn’t do much really. I had a vague idea for a game I started prototyping, but it didn’t feel right. It was to dull. I stayed up until 4 am working on this prototype and I just decided to discard it and go to sleep. I was just about to quit this jam.

The Second Day

I woke up at 12 pm not feeling inspired at all. Very unmotivated about not being able to find a good idea for my game, so I just continued my day as if I was not going to participate anymore. After having some dinner and watching a movie I started checking out what new games had come out and that’s when I found Glitchspace. I immediately felt inspired and motivated and started programming the base object, which I called Hackable, that could allow me to modify any property I wanted in real time. So I just started pushing the idea. This was my first result:

It was very simple, but it showed the power of what I had created. That was good for me. From now on was mostly thinking on how could I implement this into a real game.

This was a very difficult task, but finally I decide to go with a simple platformer puzzle type of game. This was my first result with it:

Then I started creating some levels. I had real hopes about making about 20 levels, but after I started drawing the tiles on my tile editor I began to feel that was far to what I could accomplish. So I just decided to go with ten. This is how the first 4 levels looked like.

After this I felt I couldn’t really get to 10 levels, specially if I didn’t have any art, sounds, or even a main screen. I just left the game with only 8 levels. Now it was time to focus on the art. I had the make a couple of iterations about this because I wanted the game to look nice, my first approach was  to make something really detailed, of course this didn’t work out because of time issues. At the end I just went with a more simple style with bright colors. I thought it look good.

For me the game was done after this, at least I thought it was, until I showed it to a couple of friends and the first reaction was “the controls suck”. This was a huge problem! I had to figure out this asap! I had almost no time for fixes. I tested a lot of controls. I went from mouse wheel to on screen buttons to finally just using hotkeys for changing values. I didn’t want the player to feel frustrated about changing values, like gravity, that were huge values. At the end, I think, the controls aren’t perfect but are useable and don’t interfere much with the game flow.

The Bad

– Designing the controls was a very hard task, I think I didn’t accomplish this perfectly.

– Working solo is hard. It’s always good to have a team who can support and give instant feedback.

– I couldn’t take complete advantage of the core mechanic because of time reasons.

– No music. I was working on a track but the exporting to wav got messed up and only one track was playing so I discarded it.

– Bugs. There were some bugs I couldn’t fix because of time problems.

The Good

– I believe it’s a nice concept. I like the approach on the theme.

– I really enjoyed creating the game.

– I got some really good feedback and I feel this is a game mechanic I can explore more in depth for a future idea.

Thanks a lot!

You can play my game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=13148

Cheers,
Felipe.

I think, given the good feedback I’ve got so far, I’m going to work on a full version of the game to release separately. This will feature new mechanics such as pushable blocks, broken mirrors, water which reverses gravity, maybe an attacking system, more Demons and a longer, fuller storyline.

In the meantime, Give this a play and vote for it on Ludum Dare!

Edit: Oh, and of course, I’ll fix any bugs. that you find. Eheheh.

This is my 4th Ludum Dare and no less fun than the first! This time around I paired up with Greg Lee, a good friend and wizard artist, although unfortunately we only had half the time due to other commitments Still, very happy with what we managed to achieve!

We decided to avoid the elephant in the room in regards to the theme (digging) and settled on ‘infection’ or ‘beneath the skin’ instead.

Beneath the Boom Boom Boom is a game where you have the ability to influence the poor souls who host your disease by making them sneeze and pass it to others. But be careful, when a host sneezes their infection decreases. So carefully time them for maximum effect!

Vote and play here!

And please let us know what you think, good and bad, in the comments section 😀

So, Ludum Dare just ended, and as always, I made a Rude Bear game.

The big change here is that I had an artist, and I got a couple of musicians on Reddit to help out with the soundtrack.

Now, when the theme was announced, I really couldn’t think of any mechanic based on the theme itself, it seemed like more of a setting than a mechanicy theme, and I was wasting time, so I just settled for an idea I’ve wanted to make for ages now: Rude Bear Revengeance.

Every Rude Bear Ludum Dare game has a suffix beginning with R (Rising, Radio, Resurrection) so I’ve always wanted to make Revengeance, Revelations, Red, Requiem and Revelations. This time I picked Revengeance. I’ve never played Metal Gear Rising, but from the trailers I gleamed you go around cutting things up with a sword, so I decided to do that, but attach it to a grapple hook whip.

You can fire it out and retract yourself to it like a hookshot. Likewise, you can retract it to you, which allows you to kill enemies with weak points. This meant I could make a more diverse set of enemies, with different weakpoints with minimal effort just by adding colliders on the backside of them etc, so really the only time restrictions there were on art, and also keeping things fresh:

Next I wanted more ways to make you feel like a badass, and my friend SonnyBone and I were doing an optional theme we randomly decided on the day, “Do Flips”, so I added some wall running. I didn’t really have time to make it feel nice to hop from one wall to another, which was a feature I really wanted. I used to play a lot of GunZ: The Duel, and I guess this was partially inspired by that – I always loved the wall running.

And, of course, what cyborg warrior is complete without a divekick? Here you can see the screenshake quite clearly. I wrote a class called Vlambeer.cs that allows static screenshake functions from anywhere after seeing the absolutely fantastic Art of Screenshake talk by Jan of Vlambeer. Screenshake’s something I’ve used slightly before for Claire’s Voyage, but never so gratuitously.

Then I found something inadvertantly lovely I call “chandeliering”. If you grapple to the ceiling and dive kick at the same time,you become a pendulum of death. I was really keen not to use a GUI so I made a health decal round the side of the screen that glows red when you’re close to death, basically Call of Duty. In Rude Bear Resurrection I had a similar view on GUI and it worked really well. Not only is making a rescalable GUI a bit of a pain, but it means more graphics, and in such a short space of time it’d be hard to get it to look right. Likewise, on the endboss’s third form, I added an aura to indicate HP. That’s something I did in Resurrection too, but this time the HP was more discrete, so it’s more obvious.

Then, of course, what would a Rude Bear game be without a gratuitous endboss? Here you can also see at the beginning, the hopping in midair. There’s actually infinite jumps in this game. The game’s designed around restricting your path by difficult combat, not blocking off your exits like traditional platformers. You can go anywhere you can see – there are no restrictions. I really wanted to give ultimate control of your character so you could feel like a god in combat.

If you’re familiar with the Rude Bear series you’ll notice there’s a new art style, that’s thanks to my new artist Dan. One change with this as well is.. in the first four games, I’d just give a vague description, “Please can I have a flying enemy?”, whereas the dynamic with Dan is sometimes more like.. I provide crude MS paint drawings to him and he comes up with something based off that.The whip physics don’t work as nicely as I’d like them to. Once you’re skilled with them they’re quite nice, but at the beginning they feel a bit difficult, at least to me. That’s because it’s actually made up of lots of little objects which are quite massive, so you can’t really swing much (or if I made them so light that you could swing, they wouldn’t hold you up). Really, I should’ve done the spring physics better, or hand coded it instead of using Unity’s stuff. I also sat and did a bit of maths and derived a few new formulae that I now use for slerping, so things feel a lot nicer.

This time as well, I made my own tile placing system after I discovered you could code things to run in the editor, so building the world was RIDICULOUSLY quick, and nicer. I wrote a script as well that applies all the colliders at runtime and groups platforms together. Here’s something I took at the end of the second day of the world, although in Day 3 the world multiplied by about 1.5x in size, and the boss got implemented, plus easter eggs:

Also, this time we used normal mapping too, auto generated by CrazyBump, which made it ridiculously quick to make lovely normal maps.

I spent most of the first day an the elevator scene too, scripted events take me too long because they’re less mathsy. There’s a tonne of randomised dialogue though, so it makes it a unique experience at least. One of the musicians made me some elevator music that’s reminiscent of Spacestation Silicon Valley, and I loved the idea of horrible atrocities going on off screen while it plays funky upbeat elevator tunes and you have a mundane conversation.

Anyway, things I learnt:

• I need an SFX guy next time so I don’t spend half the jam making sounds.
• Use Quads, don’t use Unity’s built in sprites. That draw call count is awful.
• Spend maybe more time on the core game mechanic next time and less time making levels. Just better time management.
• And don’t waste half your time. I really wasted tonnes of time this jam just doing nothing.
• This.. drinking 10 litres of Diet Coke routine you’ve got going on actually looks like it isn’t so good for your health anymore, if you’re going to do this every 4 months, you probably just.. shouldn’t.
• See if you can get controller controls in in time next time.
• Also, the tutorial section could be a bit better, and a better ending.

But overall, I’m rather happy with how this one went. I achieved what I set out to make, and implemented everything I wanted.

LD48 page | Windows | Web | Stream

@Vorpal_Games

Also posted at my blog.

Submersion is a two-player local co-op platformer, where you traverse your submarine, maintaining it. The sub has become trapped within the middle of a naval minefield, it is your tasks to keep it intact for as long as you can.

Here’s where you can find our entry:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=30192

Take a look at the controls before you begin:

The ship is composed of four various terminal devices. The far left, controls the balist, the up and downward movement of the sub. The engine, which controls the thrust of the engine. The missile terminal, activating missiles which move towards the mouse, and the rotational lever which allows you to rotate your sub. All of which are activated by either the Q, E, < or >, depending on which player you are. You also fix leaks by being in range of them and pressing either E or >.

Thank you for your interest! This was our second Ludum Dare, definitely the most challenging one so far. It was lots of fun to make though.

Can’t stop playing and rating all these games!

Check out ours: ALIEN LOBOTOMY, give us some feed back and we’ll check out yours!

The Mac build was not working for some people. I’ve uploaded a new version which should fix it.

Give it a test and let me know?

http://www.ashleygwinnell.co.uk/_misc/games/sinking-feeling-mac-b2.zip

Hello everybody! This was my first try for LD & I must say: It was great!

Please play my game:

LINK to Game (new tab)

It’s about exploration with many funny elements. Whole game can be won in 10 minutes. It features a simple story about saving humanity, light puzzles, voice-overs and interesting mind-swapping concept.

Thanks & have fun!

LINK to Game (new tab)

It can sometimes surprise even its creator. Just found a room that’s too beautiful to hide from you guys.

The legendary Megagem (brightest one) and some bats

Play the game HERE if you’re interested.

My first LD Entry.

Please Give it a try my friends!

(It’s not supposed to be easy

Click the image.

Did some updates for this Mystic Castle to make it more playable. (New links added. Not in 48 hours)

Entry

Bug fixes:

– can not switch sight in the wall now.

Updates:

– less slip

– keys modified, Move: A/D/←/→     Attack: J/Z/LB     Jump: K/X/Space     See: L/C/RB 

– longer arm

They Launched a Probe!

It’s not a great experience playing my game for the first time. First thing you need to do? Read a few pages of documentation, learn javascript and remember your vector maths from school…

They Launched A Probe is a game where you need to program the 3 CPUs on a deep space probe that is trying to scan planets FOR SCIENCE!

I’m fairly certain that no-one is going to jump through the hoops required to have a go at this game. It’s niche and complicated, but if you do get into it, imagine the sense of achievement of successfully filling up that Science bar, and then sharing your code with other players? (No idea how sharing will work? Maybe a Gist and a twitter hashtag? #probelaunched?)

I had a great time making it. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to do some more work on it. So I’m not too worried about getting ratings, but still it would be nice to get enough ratings to place so if you do know javascript and vector maths

have a go. 

Most games end in an explosion.

P.S. wondering about the name? It’s from a song by The Winter Olympics: The Winter Olympics – They Launched a Probe

Tags: playcanvas

It’s a puzzle game – it’s quite hard apparently!

click here to play!

While we are overall pleased with how the game came out there are a few things that didn’t make it into the final build. Hopefully down the line when we have some more free time we’ll pick the game back up and finish it but for now it still a good result for our first Game Jam.

1: The ability to select which family members you can feed – We wanted to have something similar to the family from Papers Please where you have to make the tough decision of who lives and who dies.

2: A more clear Day/night cycle – The day does change as you play through the game but we still could have made it more clear on how much time you had left, also have it be more clear that a new day starts if you go home in the evening.

3: More testing – There are still several things we would have tweaked if we had the time, one being the time the berries respawn as it was meant to be an in game day rather than 60 secs.

4: Having the Monster affect the world – We were also planning on having the monster cause certain scenery pieces to shake as it moved under them, unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to do this, though the particle effects did come out nice in the end.

In the end we think our first Game Jam was a great success and were all much more confident in our abilities as programmers.

Hope everyone had as good a time as we did and we cant wait to play all the games ^^

I was too tired to do a blog post last night after submitting, so here we are!

They Lurk Beneath is a cross between Defender and “That Game Where You Drop Depth Charges On Submarines That I Can’t Remember The Name Of”. You must protect non-hostile ships from being dragged down to the depths by the Grabbers, while avoiding the onslaught of other sea creatures attacking your own vessel. Occassionally a lost city will start to rise and spawn some nastier creatures, and you must destroy the city before it surfaces, or it will spell doom for the whole world, or something.

Now onto the development bit.

Pros:

• We implemented everything we set out to do. Everything works. Hurrah!
• I’m pretty happy with the graphic style (even if I say so myself) and the soundtrack turned out well.
• Using Unity worked out well and made things easier.

Cons:

• We didn’t have enough time to balance the gameplay properly. As a result, it’s too easy. Until the city appears, and then it’s kind of too hard. It’s pretty difficult to actually lose all the ships before your own ship gets destroyed.
• I think the BFXR sounds do the game a disservice and don’t gel with the soundtrack. That’s the nature of time limits though, and good quality sound effects aren’t really the highest priority.
• We didn’t get chance to give the lost cities ridiculous HP Lovecraft style names. “The Lost City of G’sathothogh Is Rising!”

Overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, although after judging I’d like to do a version 2 with better gameplay.  We’ll see!

Clicky here to play and vote.  Go on.  Play and vote.  DO IT NOW.

This was my first Ludum Dare ever, and my 3rd real game jam in total ever (did one Indie Speed Run and one Global Game Jam, and by far my best jam ever – each jam builds on the previous one, and the LEVEL UP that one gets at game jams are just TOO MASSIVE TO PASS UP. I hugely encourage everyone to do game jams as often as they’re able to!

My LD48 game SUPER LANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK turned out way beyond all my own expectations. I was never good with Unity! Please give it a look

One thing my experience has told me is that I always write postmortem part 1 of my jams and then never get to part 2. So screw that, I’m going to do this one quick and in reverse chronological order like Memento

Score attack!

Another thing I was sad to not have had time to put in was score tracking, so I’m making a competition! Send me screenshots of your high score and the highest scorer this week (ending Monday 5th May) will get to design a level for SUPER LANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK with me 😀

Adding sound

I didn’t have time to add in sound and music, which disappointed me greatly, so I played the game over some rocking track and made a video of it

Finishing

Eventually I detailed things a bit more, added more levels (there are three in total right now) and colour and juice and stuff and rushed it out the door in the final 6 hours:

Fleshing it out

I dropped in a bunch of objects, found some homing missile code, and went to town in a gameplay test. AND IT WAS AWESOME. So I pretty much didn’t change the gameplay from this kind of stuff:

And then amped it up in magnitude, and added score tracking and a timer, which made EVEN MORE AWESOME

Physics

Then I spent more than half of day one trying to get the physics for landshark working. One of the things I really wanted was for him to swim up walls… And generally defy gravity. Eventually after a lot of maths and help from other people’s maths:

Planning

I actually don’t remember where the idea came from. All I remember was that initially I wanted LAZERS. But that was hard so I went missiles This was my “project manager” over the weekend:

What went wrong:

• Very little actually, I was REALLY surprised.
• Lack understanding of Unity physics (or indeed any maths physics), of Quaternions, of Vectors, etc, made it really really tricky.
• Didn’t budget time for sound and interface.
• I wasn’t sure what the scope was from the beginning and built as I went
• Spent a ton of time on swimming up the wall mechanic… But didn’t end up using it a lot. It was one of those REALLY out of the way mechanics that had all sorts of mad implications that I couldn’t have considered when I was making it. Like falling into the infinite sky 😛 But it’s not really so much “wrong” as “something I can explore more”

What went right:

• Being surrounded by other jammers, we could all ask each other about things. It REALLY helped everyone 😀 Jam in a herd! If it works for zebras it works for jammers!
• I let myself go – picked a theme, basic idea, and just explored how it played. The lack of a solid, defined, “dead” goal from the get-goal for me allowed for a refreshing exploratory approach to this jam.
• Not having to justify every decision, thing to try, etc in a team made it really easy to rapidly try and discard ideas. Not that I don’t appreciate being in a team. I really missed being able to specialise and do what I do best and let everyone do what they did best. Good for time, less good for focus and attention to detail.
• Google Sketchup. Seriously, it’s the only 3D program I know and without it I wouldn’t be able to make ANY 3D. Well, besides the cubes and spheres. Thanks for the fish shark!
• Unity. I give it lots of hell, and it gives me lots of hell, but without it I would never ever have made something that looks so big in such a short of time. And this applies to EVERYONE. It’s a great big sandbox, all you have to do is to find how other people did what you want it to do… And remember syntax XD

It was truly fantastic! I’ll never ever miss another Ludum Dare EVER! 😀

Tags: chaos, LANDSHARK, madness, mayhem, missiles, shark, Steven Tu, tuism, Twoplus Games

We will be playing and rating lots of games today (we are making lists with the ones we find more interesting and we’ll post’em here). Our intention is to melt down our brains with LD’s entries. So yes, something like this…

Shameless Plug: You can play and rate Patient 283 HERE! 

Tags: beavl, games, patient 283, playing, rating

It’s been a few days and since then I’ve seen how people actually play my game. Time for a Post-mortem!

The game has you playing a virus inside a blood vessel. The idea is that people avoid the small grey taggers because the more tags you have, the faster the big white blood cells can catch you. To help you out, any tags you have can be passed on to passing green bacteria, if you can catch them. The gameplay is inspired by how the immune system actually works (although if you had bacteria floating around in your blood you’d be in a lot of trouble).

The game is playable at its entry page, here!

What Went… Badly

Well, turns out this ultra-simple game mechanic is pretty confusing for people. I spent ages implementing the tagging mechanic, where free-floating taggers would attach themselves to the player character rather than showing how many tags people have picked up in a UI element. The result is that it seems to make collecting the tags basically irresistible, which results in the white blood cells getting incredibly angry very quickly and people have short, frustrating attempts.

I was also disappointed that I didn’t do more prep work. I’d already declared the various open source components I would be using for the game, but I’d not open sourced any entity management code, or basic game boilerplate of which there’s an awful lot. This meant that it took me a day and a half just to get to the point where I could actually begin adding actual gameplay. Next time more prep is required so that I’ll be on some sort of equal footing with people using full on game engines like Unity.

Was also disappointed I only managed to add 4 entity types – two taggers, the white blood cell and the bacteria. It’s relatively easy to master the existing gameplay and it doesn’t progress in difficulty so it doesn’t have much longevity.

What Went Well

This game required actual 3D models, so I turned to Blender for this. I’m not especially familiar with it and haven’t done any 3D graphics in over a decade so this was a bit intimidating. It was, however, pretty simple. I only needed to make some quick textures for particles, otherwise I was able to avoid doing any hand drawn graphics at all.

The shader I wrote for the background and the animation effects for the pulsing blood are, I think, really effective. They do however give certain people motion sickness.

Three.JS continues to be a joy to work with, abstracting away a lot of the pain of working with WebGL and making importing Blender geometry easy and then moving and rotating meshes around a breeze. The performance is pretty good too!

I had a lot of new stuff to figure out making this – how to make the waves of taggers with their subtle sine wave motion and how to do the AI on the homing taggers and white blood cells. I think I got lucky in that I didn’t have as many problems as I thought I might. I was pleased with how I resolved the problem of how to ‘beat’ these AI characters because, without being able to shoot them, wouldn’t they just chase you indefinitely? I came up with the idea that the homing taggers would give up as soon as you got in front of them, and the white blood cells would give up after a certain amount of time being behind you, but would wake up again if you let them get in front.

I was also pretty happy to actually finish. I only really got a sense of what I wanted the gameplay to be on the second day, so that it has any gameplay at all is a bonus for me!

Conclusion

It’s the obvious thing everyone says. I should have concentrated more on nailing the basic gameplay on day one instead of procrastinating by adding more and more effects. Still, I’m fairly happy with the result. Been playing and ratings loads of games since I went live and this, it turns out, is the really fun bit of Ludum Dare.

Tags: #LD48 #LD29, post-mortem

I’ve received some comments that the game can be too cpu-heavy..
i’m very sorry about this, i’ve added a smaller web version, i hope it
is at somewhat playable for everyone now, let me know..

:: Sewer Rat Racer ::

This being my first ever LD AND my first ever game, I decided to make it simple. I made a very simple platformer with very basic controls.  I would really appreciate it if you took a look at it, played it and left a comment so I can improve next time.

Many Thanks

Vogon101

Game: LavaQuest

Play Here

…just after the stroke of 10:30pm, on a chilly spring Monday (local), we closed up the game files, packaged a few files, and linked to them on Ludum Dare’s website. Sitting back in my chair, I’m thinking… I’ve learned that willpower and motivation are everything when it comes to Game Competitions. There’s not really much to say on the subject other than that…  I’m tired! This game was drawn and programmed by Jimun Batty, drawn by Luthrid and myself, with a music track feature by Gero.

William the Wopol

Our game is about a mammalian water dweller called a wopol. As he wakes up, he’s greeted by a page over a speaker, calling him. After doing some experimental tests, he’s sent back to his room, but piecing together that he’s not supposed to be here. He remembers being a human! Wanting to break out, he has to put the skills he learned in the lab to use and escape, but there are obstacles in the way, obstructing his path.

Take on the journey, encounter enemies, figure out navigation puzzles. Get home where you belong…

Modes of Transportation

Initial Lab Layout

Breaking into Grate Sketch

Breaking Grating

Getting Lost Sketch

Getting Lost in Game

One-Way Pipe Sketch

Dodging Harpoons Sketch

The Bedroom Layout

Encountering Mobs

Wide Ocean Sketch

The Illusion of Freedom

Initial Lab Sketch

Initial Lab Design

The Sorrow

Sadly, our only regret is timing. There were a few things that we couldn’t get done in time but may release postmortem so the game feels more cohesive and complete. Enemy variety is a big thing. Between drawing enemies and coding them, there was simply not enough hours to do them all, so we stuck with three. The facility had guards that would capture you for trying to escape (and return you to your room). As well as other sea-life that would slow your journey down, drawing and coding got bumped down the pipe.

As well, as a tool of exposition, there were plans to have other Wopols in game who would talk to you and hint you along as to what the story’s about and where you need to go to finish the game. Again, timing.

Custom music was a big thing during LD-28 (You Only Get One). This time around we managed to do one (Thanks, Gero!), but used Incompetech for the rest. Sound engineering felt tight overall and there wasn’t much to improve on!

Edge case collision errors were a thorn in our proverbial side, but for the most part, if stuck, you can wiggle out of it. Something that may be fixed postmortem.

The Joy

This is sort of our biggest, most polished adventure game to date. Thanks to an engine developed completely by Jimun Batty, our head programmer, making the environments, the animations and marrying them together was exceptionally breezy!

Developing a game around a story that started only as an opening line until the midway point of the dare is rewarding in its own way. You see how the game plays before you know where the character is going to end up. This gives you an idea of where to go with things from there.

The Future?

From here, I’m confident that game development will be more rewarding. This was a really fun dare; it was a heck of a weekend for me personally. Between the hard work, the fun times, the sleep deprivation and the camaraderie, something fulfilling and special really hit home. That makes me all the more proud to be part of this team, and has me looking to the future with a positive outlook.

…baggy eyes, sure, but positive outlook!

Play Here

Tags: SuccessStory

Hi,

I have just released a “post-compo” version of my game “Super Robot Miner”.

It contains small adjustments (about 2 hours of work), including a much better “Prospect Mode” and (I hope) better instructions. You can also now switch mode with [SPACE].

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=14085

Please tell me what you think !
Thanks for all your comments and advices.
Nicolas.

Here is our game, Hero Arcade Edition, a frenetic action shooting game, hope you like it 😀

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

It’s party time 😀

“Kraken Pool Party” is a game about a schizophrenic Kraken. Each player controls a different tentacle: may the most tentacle-y tentacle win 😀

As predicted the game looks nothing like my mockup 😉

A lot of the initial features didn’t meet the cut, but since we applied McFunkpants‘ rolling MVP philosophy we were able to fall back on our most recent working version about 30 minutes before the end of the jam (at 2:30AM French time) and submit with no stress

To be precise the game ends after a fixed time rather than when the Kraken is killed by the enemies. The enemies don’t even attack, and no sailors fall into the water (so there’s nothing to eat). We did manage to implements all the important features though (moving, grabbing, smashing, throwing, title, score screen, etc): it’s a complete game albeit a limited one

So this kind of agile, iterative development strategy can work extremely well, it just means spending a lot of time and energy guiding the project, and a considerable amount of discipline (because we all want to implement all the features)!

Looking forward to playing your games 😀

• Project lead / sound / music: Wilbefast (NaturalPad)
• Lead developer: Sebastian (NaturalPad)
• Additional programming: Wilbefast, Bourhane (NaturalPad), Mellany
• Graphics: Lamine, Flora,  Aurel (Aiko Creative Vision)

Tags: crawl, death worm, kraken, kraken pool party, NaturalPad, party, Pool, powerhoof, wilbefast

Well, second game ever. http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/26066

Here are some thoughts on the compo

The good:
As the compo got closer, I start to spitball ideas for game mechanics. (panels in the same scene, energy generators for object creation, rpg with fight sequences). The rpg was quickly out when I read all of your advice/tips for LD. I focused mainly on the panel jumping idea because it seemed to be the easiest. When I saw the final round of voting on Friday, I started trying to apply game ideas to all of them. That way I would be able to start coding at 9pm.

I was able to come up with 16 game ideas for 16 of the themes, all focused on the panel hopping. I would suggest to anybody trying to do this for the first time to come up with some ideas and see if you can apply those ideas to many of the themes just by tweaking the graphics.

I made a complete game in 48 hours. That is pretty amazing when you think about it

The bad:
The points mechanics are somehow getting messed up. You should only be getting 10-100 points per level, but it is printing the number you got on the levels and the total number back to back (i.e. 10 on the level on 100 total prints out as $10100) – I didn’t have time to figure out why it was doing that, but I think it was creating a text string instead of just adding numbers.

I had a safety teleport so people wouldn’t get stuck on a level. It was causing a lot of bugs where you would fall into the earth on the next panel or appear and not be able to move. I had to just scrap it and make a quick reload button.

Animations – I would have liked to have animated the guy kicking over the stalagmites, but ran out of time.

Artwork – I spent very little time on the artwork because I wanted a complete playable game. Maybe this was good, maybe bad.

The level complete scene – The level complete was supposed to have jewels and objects appearing in it based on your money. But with the total money messed up (above), I just went with higher and higher bills were coming in. This was even messed up because the amount of bugged money you collect on level 1 is enough to pay for all of the bills throughout the game. So people don’t see a point in continuing since they’ve already collected tons of money.

Chuck

Tags: journal, postmortem

I just really wanted to make a gif for the combo entry Ten Body Disco Party.

It’s been a great fun! (Participating the first time)

As promised yesterday, here are some collected thoughts on my LD29 entry Into the Abyss. This was my third time finishing Ludum Dare and first time in the 72-hour category.

What went right?

• Graphics first: Unlike before, the very first thing I made was the graphics. I’ve always thought that its best to save that for last, but this time around I learned that making graphics early on can be very beneficial when facing a time limit. Not only do you get inspired by your own art, but having something tangible to look at early on helps you nail down your central gameplay as well.

• Lay off the stress: Before I have been very stringent with my use of time over the weekend, but this time around I didn’t pay much mind to the clock and took things at a leisurely pace. I went out with my friends, slept long in the morning and cooked and ate some fantastic dinners. Guess what happened? I actually put more work in the game than I have ever before. There is no point in sitting in front of your computer with a blank stare for the whole weekend, refreshing yourself will be much more beneficial in the long run!

• Taking the shortcut: I’ve always tried to keep my code as tidy as possible in case that I would like to re-use parts of it in the future. This time I had none of that. The finished code is an uncommented mess that probably even I can’t comprehend after a few days. Every time I had a new idea I simply crammed it in the most crude way possible, and kept it as long as it worked. But it was all for the better, as this helped me have all the features that I wanted and make the game much more complete. And lets be honest – I’m never going to touch that code again.

What went wrong?

• Get on with the times: This was my third LD and I’m still doing simple, retroish throwback games to the years of old. It’s getting stale real quick. With the advent of ever simpler game development platforms the influx of games just like the ones I like to make has been massive. People aren’t simply as interested in them anymore. 3D has become commonplace and low-poly is the new pixel. People are looking for unique and quirky games that can be played quickly, most often right in their in a web browser. If I wish to get more than bored sighs out of gamers I really need to step up my game.

• Show, don’t tell: So I thought taking photos of enemies would be a cool gimmick. I got the gimmick part right, but the actual execution is somewhat lacklustre. Worse yet, the camera is not explained at all in-game but only in the info dump on the download page. Guess how many people have read that so far? Zero. The comments are filling up with people confused about the camera, and they are fully right in that. If you decide to have an uncommon gameplay element do everyone a favor and explain it properly.

And to finish this post off, here is a shout out to the best games I’ve played so far. Don’t miss them!

• Deep Diver a superbly polished arcade game that would be right at home in a cabinet
• The Westport Independent a game about censorship in the vein of Papers, please!
• The Monastery a fantastic tribute to old SSI roleplaying games
• Water Hazard a horror game in the style of PS1-era tech
• Sub Terraria Zero a tidy and hard minimalistic 2D-platformer
• console.enable(); a platformer where you can tweak in-game variables

Here is a timelapse video of my entry to LD 29 : Click here for my game

The bucket bug should be gone for good.

WASD controls added.

We made it. This was probably my favorite Ludum Dare, I enjoyed the theme and I really liked working on our idea.
We went with a third person game where you fly down into a bunker and plant a bomb, then escape before the bomb explodes. Along the way you have to fight enemy blimps and try not to lose your path. Players can drop a “breadcrumb” which is a small glowing cube so players can see where they have been. The map was quite large, it’s easy to get lost. Just to make it a bit harder we also added a feature that randomly adds and removes bars in certain tunnels. So a path that was open in one playthrough may not be there in the next.
Working with unreal was a challenge, it’s a very powerful engine. However we had a few crashes and some lost data that set us behind. We wanted something that looked great and was fun to play, this did cause us to have a large file size for a ludum dare game, and many lower end computers will have issues running it.

What went right.
Game design
Level design- Fishy did a great job setting up a large and complex tunnel system for the player to get lost in.
Quad Copter- The model looked great and I was pretty happy with the controls.
Escape- When the timer starts ticking down and you make a wrong turn it causes much panic.
Blimps- That is all
Particle effects- One of the benefits of working with an engine like unreal is the ability to have great looking particles

What went wrong
Ai- I set up a simple ai outside the level, and realized once I started adding them to the level that they would start firing at you before they could see you. Didn’t have time to correct this. And due to some mistakes on my part several blimps do a little dance instead of flying.
Animations- It just didn’t happen
Bomb dropping- In the original game I wanted to have the player be able to drop the bomb to help solve puzzles, but I couldn’t get it working like I wanted, and ran out of time to add any puzzles

In all I am happy with what we did in such a short time, and even with the larger download size I hope you will download it and enjoy.

I managed to throw a Windows port of Dwarven Kingdoms together (Thanks Jenny). I hope it works for most of you.

Please try it out: Dwarven Kingdoms

As promised, a post-mortem for my first ever Ludum Dare. I can’t say I did really badly, but I also can’t say I am happy with the result. I think there are a few major points that could get some improvement, so I will discuss each of them briefly.

Preparation

The way I went into this Ludum Dare was pretty much unprepared. I heard that this Ludum Dare finally was not in the weekend before my finals and decided to join in if (and only if) the theme was interesting and I had a cool concept. Over the days the “Ludum Dare hype” grew a bit on me and when the theme turned out to be not what I hoped for, I still went in. However, I had not even settled with an engine yet and it took me half a day to get started. I had no idea what to do, I had to set up everything from scratch and I lost quite some time with it. Next time, I want to settle on an engine beforehand and – if necessary – make sure to have a codebase ready.

The concept

The concept I finally decided to go with was a puzzle game. I think the ambitions with the concept were spot on: the mechanics were easily implementable, the concept was extensible if there was enough time, all in all a good idea to realise in (less than) 48 hours. However, even though I did consider that level design would take time, I had underestimated the difficulty of it. Making good levels is about ten times harder as completing them and the mechanics I had weren’t always as intuitive. The problem with a concept like mine is that the game stands or falls with the level design. I didn’t design the levels very well, so I think that makes the game not very enjoyable, even though I think there is a lot of potential in the introduced mechanics.

Graphics

If there was a prize for “worst graphics skills”, I would probably get it. It’s official: I suck at graphics. That is something I knew beforehand. This was the first time I ever made my own graphics (apart from boxes, circles, triangles, lines and stickmen) and I spent a lot of time on it – probably at least half of the development time. While this is not a problem per se, after all that time my graphics still sucked. I could have gotten the graphics over with in an hour and spent more time on the mechanics and I will next time try to spend more time on my actual field of expertise: programming.

Experience

This is the most important point. I am not referring to this being my first Ludum Dare, but to my experience with jamming (or prototyping) in general. I think I am a fairly good programmer, but I started on a relatively late age and I always went on with large projects. I am working on a big project right now (consider it a job if you want), and while that is really educating, I would like to set some more time apart to do small games like the ones made in the Ludum Dare. In the end, to become better, you just need to make game. Period.

Conclusions

I loved working on something with the feeling of community. It is so motivating to have other people do awesome stuff as well. I definitely want to do more of these, but I also want to do more prototyping myself. I just need to get more experience and get a better feeling for what works and what doesn’t. I have always been a bit sceptical of Unity, but I have seen some people do amazing things with it and it would also solve all my distribution problems, so I am definitely gonna give that a try and probably use that for my next Ludum Dare. Last weekend was such a cool and educating experience and it gave me so much insights in what I am good at and what I still have to improve on.

I am looking forward to playing some of the other entries and applying everything I have learned to my daily life. For now, I say goodbye and see you all at the next Ludum Dare!

My entry

If you want to check out my entry, you can do so over here. Currently it only runs on Windows, but an OSX build should be provided soon.

Tags: post-mortem

I recommend playing the game before reading this:

Play the game

Information

• Start: 11:30 AM (5:30 AM EST)
• End: 3 AM (9 PM EST)
• Time spend sleeping: 11 hours
• Software used: Sublime Text, LÖVE, Aseprite, Pixitracker, bfxr

The idea

I had to think for a long time before finally coming up with an idea. But then it suddenly popped into my mind. I thought back to a flower parade float. You can take a look at it here on Youtube. When I was standing in the audience looking at it, I felt fear. They made the mood so strong, that I feared for them being captured. I took that as inspiration and started making my game.

The good

• Art

It was the first time I used Aseprite for Ludum Dare, and it is such a great tool. It does exactly what I want. So making the art, although it’s not the best, went alright.

• The idea

I personally think I succeeded again in coming up with an innovative, and fun concept. The idea had room for potential that I could come up with while making the game.

• Programming

I don’t think there was any bug that cost me more than 15 minutes of my time. Although the source code is one big mess, I managed to find my way through it. Luckily you only have to look at it for 2 days straight.

The bad

• Gameplay

You could hug your daughter, and feed the baby, that was it. I needed a reason for you to walk from left to right and back. But with everything I could come up with, I had this argument for myself: “Then why wouldn’t the daughter stand on the right side?”. I solved it by adding the lights coming from the floor, which you weren’t allowed to be seen by (although this is actually not in the game, people still think it’s dangerous so they sort of added that feature by themselves). The ‘getting food’ was a perfect solution. You take the risk of the guy coming while you’re taking food, you need to let your daughter hold the baby, you need to feed your daughter. It added a lot of gameplay. So even though it sounds as if that all went right, it was something I had a lot of trouble with making the game.

• Balancing

Never had I so much trouble with balancing a game. It kept being too hard, I kept lowering the speed of how fast the baby or daughter cries, and upped the time of how fast the man comes to inspect. In the end I think I made it too easy, but that might be because I made the game. Most still seem to have trouble finishing the game their first or second try. Balancing cost me quite some time, and it’s the reason why the intro and menu are so shitty.

• Audio

I can’t make music or sound effects, and I felt that 8-bit sounds wouldn’t do its justice. In the end my brother told me to do a heartbeat, which worked out pretty nicely. It reminded me Eniko’s game from previous Ludum Dare, No way out. I felt like stealing it even though I didn’t took it from there. But if a single feature of another game makes your game at its best, then why not use it? In the end I think the audio gives some nice mood.

The ugly

• The baby

If you’ve played the game, you might have seen what can happen to the baby. Now you might think: Sheepolution, what were you thinking in your sick mind while you decided to put that in your game? Well, I got it from the movie The Pianist. In the movie a woman cries. A man explain she’s crying because the police was searching their house when they baby started crying, she suffocated the baby, but it was too late, they were already caught. I thought this would fit perfectly in my game. I hoped it would make people skip a heartbeat when they suddenly see the option in the menu. The scene of the movie can be found here: At 0:45:40

I hope you enjoy(ed) playing In Hiding. I think it’s a kind of game I won’t be making again soon.

Cheers!

Hi everybody!

I have just ported my entry to linux but I don’t have any Linux environment to test it. So if someone can confirm if it’s working – it would be awesome. It is just monogame Visual Studio template for linux and I am not even sure how to run it.

Thanks!

Link to entry

Released new version of Rojan fixing a bug that sometimes broke the game and made the time the “Advertising”-Banner appeared a lot shorter.

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33967

Hi! My name’s Steve, and I’m a programmer at Dream Show Adventures. This Ludum Dare, we created Chacket Valleyparker: DRILL BUNNY, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on the experience.

Last time around, I did Ludum Dare with my kids, creating most of the content myself. However, I’ve since joined the team at Dream Show Adventures, and I wanted to get the group to contribute. Luckily, it wasn’t a tough sell!

Planning is 90% of Something

Last time around, I did almost no prep work at all, and it really bit me. This time, I resolved to have things set up well in advance. I knew I wanted to use Phaser, but I’m still learning the ins and outs of serious JavaScript development. I knew NodeJS and Grunt could help me automate, and I wanted to use Travis CI to build to a Github page automatically from our source repo. I also found a pretty good Phaser template to work from. It was a bit outdated, but that was fixed easily enough.

Initially, we had two programmers, two artists, and a musician on board. Unfortunately, one programmer couldn’t contribute, and one artist and the composer dropped out at the last minute. This left us with one artist (Andrew, who also serves as creative director) and one programmer, myself. This was unfortunate, but not unexpected. Still, it meant more work for the two of us.

Beginning of… the Beginning

When the theme was announced brainstorming began immediately. The bunny/drill concept came about pretty quickly, initially as a bit of an inverted shmup starring Chacket Valleyparker, a character that Andrew never got to use from an earlier project.

Getting started with Phaser was fairly easy, and we had a very very basic prototype quickly. However, I was dependent on Travis to build a working copy of the game, which meant that testing was painfully slow. Attempts to run the game locally failed, and I still don’t know why. Searching for solutions online made it very apparent that the current system wasn’t working, despite my attempts to plan ahead. That’s when I stumbled upon Jeremy Dowell’s fantastic Flappy Bird Phaser tutorial, but more importantly, his Phaser template building tool.

Unfortunately, this new template would require a lot of re-work. With a heavy heart, I implemented the new system, losing all of our progress in the process, with the hope that it would save time in the long run. I also stored my github credentials via winstore after another method to store username and password failed, and wrote a simple batch command to make updating the repo easier.

Gaining Traction

It wasn’t long before we had a playable prototype. Unfortunately, we had already lost about 24 hours in getting to this point, when ideally I prefer going to bed Friday night with something that works at least as a proof-of-concept.

With Andrew spriting rapid-fire, and new features going in all the time, there was great momentum until about noon Sunday. That’s when I decided to implement a procedural tilemap generator for the background dirt. Basically, each new dirt block would see what was above and to the left of it when created, and pick from a subset of dirt blocks that would look nice next to the others. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to implement this, and went through 3 complete systems (each taking several hours to code) before I found one that worked (and was severely scaled back from the original system). Early on I thought that I would have to simplify, but my hubris prevented me from accepting this early, when it would have saved the most time.

Sleep. I just want sleep.

The last day, I was very tired. However, we had some happy accidents. While our composer was still absent, Andrew had some great tunes he had made but never used, and we decided to put them in. Furthermore, my day-and-a-half of experience with Phaser, as well as digging through the docs extensively, made coding quick and painless. I was even able to add some localization (if your computer or browser’s language is set to Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, or Japanese, the title screen should load in that language) to the title screen, and I fulfilled my promise to let my kids help somehow by putting some apples they drew on the title.

At the end of the day, it was down to the wire. I scrambled to get a decent ‘game over’ screen, as we hadn’t bothered with one prior. Including the company name was important, and almost got overlooked entirely! The boost mechanic was the last thing to go in, and was only fully functional about one minute before the deadline. Even now, boost speed doesn’t scale over the course of the game (unlike the normal speed or I made sure that the variables most likely to need tweaking (turn speed, damage from different objects) were simple to find, and Andrew tweaked as needed while I focused on code. We pulled together, and we’re proud of the final product.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get to everything. Money was originally meant to be used to buy upgrades, with Chacket returning to the surface every time the drill overheated, visiting the store, and then trying again. Worms were meant to get in your way, and you would have to pay their medical bills if you touched them with your drill. Moles were also planned, but not drawn or implemented. I was also searching for a way to minimize the likelihood that rocks would overlap lava, but it’s quite common. Also, we were hoping to scale up the difficulty as you got deeper, but that never happened, and the game is fairly easy. There’s also no true win condition; originally, you were trying to get to the core.

What now?

Well, that’s where you come in. If we get a positive response, we’d love to develop DRILL BUNNY into our original vision, a sort of inverted shmup roguelike, where “death” (the destruction of your drill) forces you to upgrade and try again. Otherwise, it’s back to work on Pipeworks, a game that is near and dear to our hearts, and has been in development for quite a while.

So, please provide feedback — negative and positive — here and on the game’s page — so we can ensure that Chacket’s future lives up to everyone’s dreams. Thanks for playing, and keep digging!

Finished game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=30185

As it was our first Ludum Dare I decided to share a little post-mortem on it with you guys. I won’t go into all the details, but I’ll describe most of our work within the project.

Ok, here goes.

The three of us decided to participate in Ludum Dare 2 weeks before the start. We made this decision in an Irish Pub, quite ironic when you hear the music used in the game.
We know eachother from school and we all 3 have whopping internships, so why the hell wouldn’t we join in? The decision was made and the date was set. We were ready to roll.

The concept
After the theme reveal at 3AM, we went for a walk around the block deciding what our concept was going to be. After looking at some cliché concepts like shadows, portals and all that stuff, we decided we wanted to do something original without going INTO the surface but instead ON the surface. Our artist, Rens, stood up on a bench outside and felt it shake. That’s where our concept started; something with tremors/shakes that would affect your underlying surface. The idea of a circular landscape came very soon after that, we wanted to go into infinity with it. An arcade style game with tremors.. Hm. What happens INSIDE of the earth? Magma eruptions? Earthquakes? Mining? Oh, wait, yes, mining. From there we decided it’ll be real cool to protect miners from their demise by providing overhead.

Dwarves & Goblins was born.

Preparation
We didn’t think about game mechanics yet but we were already on the drawing board. Making a mock-up of the level you can now see in the actual game. We didn’t change much on that end. Developing and designing on-the-fly is what we did and to be honest, even though is not advised, it worked out pretty well. With a lot of motivation and being stoked about finishing this concept we started. After all, we never saw anything like this before.

What went well?
To be honest, almost everything fell into place like pieces of a puzzle instantly. There weren’t many difficulties and our framework we built on-top of PIXI JS really did its job. We had an amazing workflow, using git and proper communication because we were sitting next to eachother. Only about 2/5th in we already had a working prototype we could build further on.

What went wrong?
Close to the end we ran into some difficulties with the framework though, we had some issues with the animation manager for instance. God, we were stuck on some ugly bugs and scoping issues. However, after some hacky code and a whole chuck of music we finally got through with it. It might not be the best solution, but it worked. That’s what matters.

What have we learned?
We learned to work in a short timescale, that’s all there is to it really. I personally think we’ve done a proper job by not over-thinking our concept. If we would’ve done that we’d probably never finish it in time. We didn’t overestimate ourselves and I’m really glad with that.

All in all it was a great experience to never forget and we’ll surely be participating in a new Ludum Dare sooner or later. For now, go smash those goblins to bits and we hope all of you guys enjoyed as much as we did. Without all of you there would be no competition and thus there would be no fun in making this game. Thanks a bunch for this amazing experience!

Oh, also, we’ve made a couple of VLOGS you can check out right here;

#1 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGGtl0M_OoI
#2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSoaESVg5BM
#3 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtkgabfHBsc

Cheers. Team Jamplifier, out!

Hello there i want  to show you what maps my generator can make.

So this is a “Recursive Backtracker” algorithm found on wikipedia.  After maze is created by this algorithm i using noise to dig several random sized caves. And that way i have nice looking dungeon 😀

Also i made a gif that shows some action (quality is reduced)

Dungeon Maze Shooter

If you are interested here is link to my game :  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=16249

Understanding LD – Made with Unity3d and Voxwell

“Understanding LD” – by @DarkMeatGames

So this was my first ever Ludum Dare, and I’m really pleased I managed to submit something!

I spent the first half of day 1 on two separate ideas I ended up scrapping. I wished I had spent more time planning and brainstorming, instead of just jumping headlong into the first idea I had that was ‘on theme’. Feeling frustrated, I decided to just try to make SOMETHING to submit, and the ‘on theme’ part of it was that I was gaining a deeper understanding of both Ludum Dare and Level Design (Hence “LD” in the title)

On top of that, I decided to give out free copies of Voxwell. Ultimately, it was *extremely* rewarding to have people express an interest in using something I made. Even better was seeing the projects that people made using it. Probably one of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced. Supporting and communicating with users ate into development time, but it was so, so worth it.

Overall, I’m quite proud of what I was able to do in such a small amount of time. And I can’t wait for #LD30, where I will continue my love-affair with voxels.

I made a movie poster style promotion art for my game

>>> Play Hanoka! <<<

Here’s a little background on ceosol.

Last years my contract expired and I got laid off. I knew it was coming up so I had started looking for a new job even in 2012. The holidays rolled around, still no job. Mid-January, after about two years of looking for jobs in my field, I gave up and decided to go in a different direction. Fourteen of my science career have vanished and I’ve been developing games since then. I know 4 months does not make a career in game development, but we all have to start somewhere

Back in high school I had a couple of semesters of Basic and C++, so I do know a little about computer logic. It has been a little rough trying to learn things fresh. Stencyl has been a huge help with syntax.

I am just entering whatever competitions I can get my hands on. Every thing I try to make helps me learn even more. If anybody is interested in collaborating, I would love the opportunity to work with you and learn more. I created a work email ceosol.feedback@gmail.com

It was a fun compo. I wish everyone the bests.

Chuck

Tags: background, journal

Here is my early level designs for the game Oh My Jump, you will find that there was supposed to be keys in the game, but I had to remove them and with it the checkpoints because of the time constraints.

You can also play the game and see how the actual levels changed, specially level 3

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37184

There’s a hatch they said. They never said why, they never said who. Just an ominous hatch, perhaps a pit lies below. Bottomless? You bet. Danger? Of course. Will you survive? Probably not. Is it worth it? Only the brave can know. Enter the Depth Beneath.

Hello all, armmimic and chenstopher here. This is our first Ludumdare both together and individually. Actually, to be truthful, this is the first game armmimic ever finished. We had a lot of fun figuring out what we were going for and how the endgame will look like. We were completely unprepared (aside from snacks) and armmimic had no idea how to use Unity. Three days and a combined total of 29 hours of sleep, (chenstopher slept half the amount armmimic did), we had a game. We hope you enjoy, the guns are super fun to use and the action keeps on coming. If you can, please let us know how far deep you went in the Depth Beneath!

chenstopher: Handled a lot of the code and all of the art.

armmimic: Handled the code and most of the sound.

Tags: Beneath, Beneath the Surface, depth, depth beneath, game jam, introduction, johnny depth, ld29, unity

I’m happy to announce that 70 unique users have already playied the game :D, and with that bombshell here’s the post mortem

What went right:

– almost everything, in fact the game isn’t much complex so it have taken not so long time to program. The few bugs were found & fixed very fast.

– graphics, I’m not an artist so I made the graphics as simpliest as possible.

What went “wrong”:

– server code. I always hated database & co, so it took a lot of time to create a functional back-end for the game.

What could have been improved:

– gameplay, the gameplay can be expanded a little bit also I like the idea of customized servers and a bigger play area.

Fun fact:

At the beginning of the play stage there was a little sound that resemble the grow of a root (actually is a leather scretched)

The sound was removed after a test on my android phone because it sounded like a noisy fart.

The fun part is that if you wait a little in the root view and then  play the game you can hear the fart noise 😀

You can check the game here

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

Play it here: virophage

Summary

All in all, I’m outrageously happy with how this project turned out. The concept and mechanics actually came out really well, and the two other people I worked with knew exactly where to go with their end of the project, as well as working with enough autonomy so as not to hold us up. When the theme was first announced, I was hesitant with it, trying to make sure we steered away from anything to do with water and/or caves or mining. I had a feeling those were going to be the bulk of the things that  came to mind when you hear the theme.

Daily recollections

Friday

Initially on Friday we had some good, long discussions on what we could do. Ultimately, we came down to two different ideas, the idea we used (virus attacking the immune system), and one that sounded fun, but probably more work than we had the gumption and time for, a sort of rogue-like Fishing RPG. The details of the second one aren’t terribly important, but suffice it to say that your fishing gear was like items you could find and equip in an RPG, and to catch fish, you had to battle them with your lure. We joked about this concept for probably far longer than I care to think about, given our small time frame.

One of our team members was remote compared to the rest of us (all two), so we used a teamspeak server run by a mutual friend. Suffice to say, I’m actually really happy with how the remote communication worked out in this instance. The person who was remote, MechaToddZilla, is actually the person who I participated in my first ludum dare with, this being my 5th one to date. As an aside, I think I’m getting pretty good at gauging what is and isn’t a possibility to fit into these. As I go along, there’s less and less features that need to be cut, and in this instance, adding of new things that weren’t even planned in the first place. Where as the first LD I participated in, there was probably a good 15-20 features we had to cut out. There was still a few things I had to axe that I had wanted to do because I didn’t think it would be feasible to implement well in the timeframe we have.

After some preparations (and a snacks/drinks run)  and initial prototyping, of which, the prototype looks nothing like what we eventually ended up with, both in mechanics and design, and that’s ok, we proceeded to call it a day without any real work other than getting prepared.

Saturday

This is where the bulk of the work happened. I spent most of the day head-down in the code working to bring our creation to life. We ran into several snafu’s with BoxSync working between the three of us, and i don’t know if it was a weird interaction with the newer version of unity, or something up with the latest BoxSync software, but for the entire weekend we couldn’t get it to sync terribly properly. This is both odd and annoying, since I’ve used BoxSync on my last 2 or 3 LD’s I’ve worked on without any issue at all.

Other than the issues we ran into with the other two not being able to really playtest anything most of the day, everything else went quite smoothly. MechaTodd kept adding more and more graphics into the project, and for a while there I thought I wasn’t going to have enough need for most of them in the game at the rate it was progressing vs how quickly I was getting the game implemented. TinariKao added a number of sound effects to the project that he actually made on his own with a microphone and some ingenuity, which, sadly, I wasn’t able to get around to using too terribly many of them. Both from a lack of any real need and due to getting a large portion of the mechanics down.

About halfway through the day, MechaTodd turned his attention to the musical aspect of the game, which I have to say, I think turned out pretty well. I think the small tune on it’s own is fairly evocative of a heartbeat, and complements the game very well. I’ll admit, at this point, I didn’t have the mechanics anywhere near done, and MechaTodd and TinariKao had created a ton of content that I was afraid I wasn’t going to have a chance to use much of. That said, shortly afterwards, things really started coming together within the game. I eventually called it a day with the base mechanics fully intact, but not much actual content to the game other than the white blood cells being a thing.

Sunday

This is where things really started to pull together.

I started this day unsure of the particular direction I needed to go with the game. The mechanics were all intact, but there wasn’t much to DO in the game. So i started designing a handful of bosses. At this point, the game was relatively unbalanced, and became super easy REALLY fast, so i decided to implement some scaling. To this effect, I made every boss and power up grant you 10 “level” and every normal enemy kill 1 “level”, and I started scaling boss health and damage, as well as normal enemy health and spawn rate. I also decided to up the spawn rate of power ups to make level gaining increase exponentially as you go along, thus making the game start off slowly, and ramp up in how hectic it is. It actually worked out fairly well.

With all this in place, I decided to try to give players a bit more direct influence on their attacks. To this ends, i set about trying to give the player the ability to shoot projectiles, that was earned from defeating bosses. At first, I had planned to simply have you fire at the mouse cursor. I had done this in the past in unity, but I remember it being somewhat wonky and difficult to actually implement. After googling it for a bit, and trying out some stuff with getting relative positions to the camera, i realized it wasn’t going too well, and I was spending way to much time on it. That was when I had what I think was a fairly brilliant idea.

I decided to make the firing pattern fire in a predictable 8-directional pattern. This, i felt, actually works out MUCH better than the original plan of simply firing at the cursor, and was significantly easier to implement. It also gave me some extra tweaks to give to the boss rewards.

At this point, I was once again entirely unsure of where to go with the game, but i felt it needed more challenge to it. It was then i decided to add in the super boss, which was a giant combination of every enemy currently in the game. It was actually quite easy to implement, as the mechanics for the game had really fallen into place at this time. I also talked MechaTodd into coming up with boss music for these fights. From here, things really started winding down, and we moved in to balance mode, trying to make the game get tough later on, but not too tough early.

I went through several balancing iterations, some way too easy, some way too hard. I ended the day unsure if it was going to be balanced well enough for the release on monday.

Monday

Going back to my usual day job left me with little time to do much on this project. However, what scant few hours i did have after I got home went straight into playtesting and balance tweaking. I think the results we ended with worked out very well, the game starts simple and ramps up to harder difficulty really starting around level 1000. With that in place, we pulled the trigger, locked in the code, and submitted our entry.

What went right

Overall, the gameplay mechanics really started to fall into place at an early point in the games development, which i was very happy with. Unity, as usual, strikes a good balance between ease of use, portability, and design freedom to allow us to get a good game up and running in a very short window. Teamspeak was also invaluable to our communication, and held up admirably. After our initial design sessions, everyone knew their part, and we set about our tasks, idly chatting between head-down working sessions. This can only be accredited to working with people you really trust to get their part done, and is absolutely essential in such a short timeframe.

What went wrong

Box. Box single-handedly encompassed every single issue we had with this project. We spent at least a total of 3 or 4 hours among each of us just working around issues with box, waiting for syncing, resolving conflicts, wiping out and redownloading the project, etc. We were able to limp along in this aspect and get everything done, but had the process worked seemlessly, we might have had considerably more time to pump into adding things to the game.

Had the rest of the project not been going so well, this very much so could have ended up being a show-stopper when it came to getting our project finished on time. Luckily, everything else ran so spectacularly well.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, I’m very happy with how the project turned out. Despite its simplicity, the game is actually pretty fun, and based on the reviews I’m currently seeing in the comments, people seem to agree. The mechanics, graphics, and sound all mesh so well to create a pretty solid overall experience. As usual, there was more I wished I could have gotten finished, but there’s only so many hours in a Ludum Dare weekend. At least this time i was very good at recognizing my limits, and what would really put us on a time crunch, and was able to effectively mitigate any problems that would have caused. There was still obviously a few concessions made in the sake of time, but not nearly so many as I have done in the past.

Tags: jam, ld29, post-mortem, postmortem