I made it! It’s been very hard and intense this fourth LD partecipation for me..

Last time (ld #28) I had to leave it cause the first concept I’ve started to work on didn’t went very well and the time left was so little to start a new one..

This time I was afraid I was going to face a similar situation but fortunately the first concept worked well and so I could be able to take it to the end!

The idea was a sort of mix between tetris and a platformer, the aim of the game is to pass through a surface made of color blocks by placing other blocks on top of them and match the color to make them explode.

I had a lot of troubles to make the game engine work without problems that it left me a little time to design the different levels (i made only 10) but still I think it’s a quite difficult challenge to finish all of them without dying.

I hope you’ll like it and dont forget to vote and comment!

link here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=12028

A video playthrough of my entry:

And here’s the two music loops I made for it:

You can play, rate and comment the entry here.

Now back to playing some more games!

Can you play and rate my game.

I think that somebody (maybe) rate my game when it doesn’t have Windows.

One questione: can we edit our game now?

i swear if i play another game with sfxr sound effects i will rip my jaw off haha

i understand its quick and easy and really helpful and not everyone can make sfx but it seems about 98% of the games all have basically the same sfx .. creating sound is a fun part of it for me (altho i had no time to implement it this time round so i should shut up

i just will more people would be abit more creative with the sfx  

anyhoot ..im not complaining really.. just a thought

howie

The timelapse for my spaceship adventure game “Beneath the surface”

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=11818

I added notes in video for you to understand more clearly the various steps.

My entry version will be hosted here. You can rate it/comment on it here.

I will be occasionally pushing updates to the version here. I had fun during this LD, even if I didn’t get nearly as much finished as I’d like. I learned a lot and I’m REALLY looking forward to the next one.

PR0BE

Tags: Enceladus, javascript, linux, phaser, PR0BE

Explore the intriguing underbelly of PLANETNAMEPLACEHOLDER!

Now you can explore the intriguing underbelly of PLANETNAMEPLACEHOLDER on linux and osx, in theory ! What are npcs saying? And what is really going on between their ears? Plus get questions answered. Like – Can you find the teddy bear?

Lore? A planet name is born.

Yeah. So.. I forgot to name the planet before the deadline…and I don’t even have a name for it now so it’s not really a typo/fix. Opps. I want to name it after the element that’s used as fuel, Cuerlium, but then that might be confusing right? Planet Cuer? Yeah! And the battle of NAME was…. Battle of Creek Ludensen. The Master of the Order could be a Ludensen too, whenver I get to adding him in for a post ld-48 version.

Technical info for Linux/OSX

To run in either newly supported platform download and open a command prompt (apple key+space type, type terminal, press enter) then navigate to your download folder (cd Downloads –  I think) and type

./orderofthemindOSX or ./OrderOfTheMind

You may need to make it executable first by (Ubuntu: right clicking, choosing properties then clicking the executable checkbox).

or chmod +x orderofthemindOSX

Learn how I learned stuff!

To get the code compiled on ubuntu I installed virtual box, and used an ubuntu iso. I also enabled 3d mode in settings and installed the guest additions by mounting that iso found in virtual box folder to increase my screen res (640*480 makes me suicidal and homicidal – in that order).

Then I tried g++ main.cpp -o ootm on the command line, but g++ isn’t installed so it kindly tells you how to resolve that. I typed that command (sudo apt-get …)

Next was fixing compile errors yayyy! null_ptr or what I was using in MSVC isn’t defined so I just changed my if statements from if(apointer !=null_ptr) to if(apointer).

Also because I was using back() which is apparently new in c++11? So I had to add  -std=c++11 as an argument to g++. The error was something like “ error: ‘std::string‘ has no member named ‘back‘”

OSX

My memory is a little fuzzy on this honestly – g++/clang are the command lines but you need to download them as an addon for xcode. I used this link that I found from this thread, but you need a (Free) dev account . “Useless” comments solved my problem! What do you know?

This was giving me the same error about back() so I used both –std=c++11 AND -stdlib=libc++ to get it working. this time. And then it worked. Yay.

Know an easy way to make them execute when you double click?

That’s the last task. I tried googling a bit before I gave up and usually ended up with “how do I get my shell script” blah blah. No promises I’ll actually get this done though.

“now this is a puzzle game I’d spend hours with”

– BarkingCat

“I enjoyed this game a lot, and I’ll look out for more stuff by you in the future”

– Norse Games

“Nice to see a puzzle game on here with a mechanic that I haven’t seen before.”

 – Maschinen-Mensch

“I now dominate the earth. Awesome.”

– Andrew Adams

You too can dominate the earth

Holy crap!  I just realized I forgot to put a post here to tell the world about my game!   It’s quite simple.  Biolab1 is a relaxation game that allows you to play with viruses.

It can be found here!

Finally, after getting some sleep, we can say that our game was successfully submitted. It was the first time when we made a horror game with self-made sound effects. Although “Whistle” has some ugly bugs the experience was really interesting, and we are almost happy with the result. Not everything went as we wanted, that’s why we are going to fix that in Post Compo version. It would be great to get some feedback, so please check our game here

In our turn, we want to congratulate all of you who reached the finish line! It’s time to play and rate all these great games now

Tags: final, jam, progress, screenshot

The Hit

The target is never the only objective.

A game about betrayal and heists. We used the beneath the surface theme to build on the idea of concealed objectives in a cooperative game.

Rather than create another video game we decided to make a print and play game. I looked through the rules and only the term ‘game’ is used in reference to what each participant must submit. The game does not have any source code and so I submitted it as a jam game rather than a compo entry.

The game only took around 12 hours to create and a few playtests to tweak and balance. It was incredibly fun and rewarding creating something I could play and enjoy. I often find this hard to do in regards to the usual computer game jam entries I create.

We aspired to create a game that allowed freeform roleplay in a similar way as games like Fiasco but with a slightly more tangible rollin mechanic related to the heists the players are attempting to carry out. The first game we played we set in the present day. Robbing some gold hidden in the walls of a McDonalds and a TV from a bank. This game was played with only the two of us who created the game. Having the ability to play with only two players became a focus during the creation process and it works very well.

The second game we played added another player and showed us some flaws in the balance mechanics which we tweaked and hopefully solved. The game changed quickly and having the ability to erase variables and rewrite them in pencil made it so fast to playtest unlike my usual game jam pipelines.

The main thing we need to rework is the cooperation mechanic of the game. Players naturally want to betray each other at every turn but it seems strange to be backstabbed by a group member only to pull off a heist with them the next turn. We have considered allowing players to branch off and attempt heists on their own or form alliances. Hopefully we will be able to playtest this soon and update the game.

Hopefully we get some feedback on the game eventually in order to improve it. Print and Play is something we love and it would be nice to see more created for jams.

I hope every one had fun developing games for the 29th Ludum Dare, I certainly did.

Anyway here is the post-mortem on my first actual 2D game Journey through Memories.

Ludum Dare #29 – Post-mortem

Here is some videos about our game : De Profundis (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37070)

in game:

and two timelapses, from Carlos our main artist:

Avenge Them! is the result of my first Ludum Dare. Dawn the armour of the knights to sneak through their barracks and find the one who murdered your family. You will be revealed when you make your choice, so kill the right knight!

Beneath the surface: my first though was digging, the second underwater. Then I remembered the Beatles song “Yellow Submarine” and it was clear: I do a submarine treasure hunt game. You can try it here! For this Ludum Dare I wanted to put an emphasis on creating an immersive environment, so this is what I did (read: “tried”).

Fish:

Some years ago I experimented with swarm behaviour and there is even an algorithm called particle swarm optimization which I used once. A quick 3D model of a fish with Blender a uniform orange material and we have a fish GameObject. Then a second GameObject for the swarm which moves the fish in sync. Each fish is pulled towards to the common swarm goal and pushed away from other fish in the swarm – ready.

Weed:

While the ocean floor is actually extremely empty down there (did you see that ghost shark!), I figured some plants would look nice. First I tried a blender model, but quickly switched to procedural generation. Weed is created dynamically in batches of around 100 halms. Each halm is created as simple pyramid with 3 radial and height segments. At each height segment there is noise added and the halm bends a little to created the rigged effect.

Hooks:

Now how to pick up treasure from the floor. A hook for grasping and pulling the treasure in would be nice. But how to do that in Unity3D? After some failed atempts I created a spring joint on the submarine object which is attched to a hook mesh. If the “Max Distance” property of the spring joint is increased/decreased the hook is lowered or pulled in. To pick up objects I use a dynamically created “Fixed Joint” to connect the grappeld object to the hook. The rope is a dynamically created cylinder where one end is on the submarine and the other on the hook.

Tentacles:

Motivated by the hook physics I aimed for something bigger: evil tentacles which grap your submarine and drag you down. I used four cylinders connected with hinge joints, a fixed base cube and a sphere as a endeffector. But moving the endeffector in a controled way from A to B is not a trivial task. The tentacle tends to mess up and get stuck in itself. Time for some math magic (line 136) and please don’t ask… In the end the tentacle gets stuck sometimes, sometimes it moves a bit erratically, but in total I am quite satisfied with the result.

It can hoard treasure too:

You can play my entry here! Please let me know what you think in the comments!

Hi everybody, as we recived a lot of good feed back, we decided to start working on a mobile version with many awesome feature on our game

If you did’nt play the game you can do it here, hope you like it, and remember to follow me #belva12341 to stay tuned

If you feel like playing an abstrat little and short game, you can play greys 😉

Click me! 

Maybe later I write a post explaining all the secrets and the general meaning on the game. Before that I enjoy the general confusion 😉

Together, this was the RowdyGhosts’ first LD entry, although we’ve both entered alone in the past. It was a resounding success! This was the best game made in the history of the universe!

Here’s a little timelapse from the art and sound side of things:

…. and in case you missed it, you should really check out our “We’re In” video. WE think it’s awesome:

Oh yeah, you can play our game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35291

Tags: #LD48 #LD29

I’ve never written any proper postmortem posts during my LD carreer, but my LD#29 game, The Last Beacon was so successfull in my aspect that I have to do that now.

To understand, why I think so, I should start explaining, how the event have happened for me.

The titlepic, which is currently my best artwork ever. I suck at drawing, ‘uknow.

BEFORE

You must know that the days preceding LD#29 were completely empty for me. I just sat at home, played games, and sometimes visited social media, but that’s all – and I did it literally all day! If you wouldn’t know, this way of life drains creativity. Okay, of course I went to shop to buy food and fuel for the great event, but pretty much that’s all.

The fuel for my creativity was the fact that I decided sleeping some hours in the afternoon before the theme announcement. I woke up at 10 P.M. (CEST), did some Redditing, then I went back relaxing for an another, so I was kind of relaxed when I was waiting for the theme.

DURING

So, theme is “Beneath the Surface”. I didn’t know what to expect so my first (kind of reflex-like) reaction was a fist into the air with an “OH YES!!” shoutout. Then I started thinking of ideas, “just for some time before I go to sleep”. heh, well, I didn’t go sleep…

My first thought was “beneath the surface of an alien planet”, and I started thinking on that way. Only about half an hour was necessary to find out every features, excluding a proper title, a story and a protagonist. All of these were decided was later.

And the key to my success just have come…

THE STRUCTURE PLAN!!

This is it: the annoyingly precise draft of ALL tasks to do!

Around 4:00 A.M., I had an idea to build up a literally FULL to-do list to surely cover every aspects, and avoiding mistakes I did last time, when I screwed up 20 hours a completely useless map loading system – not even talking a lot of other, terribly implemented features.

It looked like this:

1. I did some basic definition (where does it take place of, what’s the genre, will there be a controllable character, etc.)
2. then I explained it (what’s the aim, how the player can reach it, will there be premade levels or procedural generation, what may happen on levels, etc.)
3. then I decided about main features (behaviour of environment, basically) and I thought over, what kind of sprites should I draw (including technical sprites such as particles – yet they weren’t implemented at last)
4. these technical features were great start for a to-do list
5. and the final step, which is the most important: I made a detailed explanation for every points of the to-do list! I could follow these statement while I did the stuff that must be done and it not only speeded things up, but also made them “bug-proof”! It was especially useful when I created the map loading and saving system.

So yeah, this was the true power of my LD. And the energy drink.

“I hid behind this bottle perfectly…I hope no one takes notice!”

The structure plan was done around 5:00 A.M., so the actual work was started around that time. Then I worked on the game without stopping for 24 hours, and I literally didn’t stop!

At the end of this period, I had a fully working engine, and a partially working editor. The rest of the second day was spent for smooth features, such as the ridiculously simple intro sequence, the HUD, the rest of the textures, an autodetailer – and of course the creation of maps and story.

End was a little bit in hurry, and had to rebuild both the .exe and the .love file twice after Comp ended (first time for a bug that makes lvl2 unbeatable, and second time for the buggy appearance of the ending text), but fortunately, I could finish the game.

It was at 32+ hours of pure working, if not more. I can not estimate it precisely, due to time spent on YT, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and so on, but I’m pretty sure it was at least 30 hours of pure work. This is my personal record, and I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to exceed it.

SUCCESSES

• Excellent structure plan. Explained above; it was the best thing I did during the whole Compo. Incredibly, how does it increase efficiency.
• The peak of my LÖVE knowledge. Eight months of programming in Lua with this amazing set has proved that I’m actually able to make a great game.
• Arcade feeling. The placement of HUD was a great choice, and that small and direct interaction with the skytexture also works well.
• Quick basic implementations. After 3 hours of work, there was a working player affected by gravity. After 4 hours of work, both the grapplink hook and the laser beam were added. In those circumstances, they were absolutely free from bugs.
• Reusable functions. “The Last Beacon” seems super easy either to port e.g. to C++ /w Allegro, or extend into a more complex game.
• Design aspects of the levels. The tileset I did was proven to be great.
• My first idea worked perfectly. Usually they aren’t as good, but now, it was great.
• And I could do the whole planning phase without sleeping.

FAILS

• Ratio issues. After Hackfield, I wanted to use 16×16 tiles instead of the usual 32×32 system, but my 8×8 tile pixelstyle seemed way too small; I couldn’t even notice the player. Though the playfield would have been too small with 32×32 tiles, so I decided to stay in the middle: 24×24. Which looks perfectly well, but screwed up all the HUD and placement ratios I did, since 32 is a power of 2, while 24 isn’t, so I couldn’t stay at the 512×512 size of playfield. It was 504×504 (a.k.a 21tilesx21tiles at the end, and it made some crazy situations at smooths placements. Also, after all, the sie of window is 792×592 instead of proper 800×600…it’s not a big problem though, I think.
• Lack of smooth movement. I wanted to implement it, but when I realized that it’s impossible (because player is moved by tiles, not by coordinates), it was so deeply rooted into the code, that I simply wasn’t able to recover without serious relapses. The disadvantage of quick implementation.
• The other features I skipped. Force field, that block laser, but lets player go on; portals’ ability to teleport player & grappling hook; keys for doors; explosions…I could not implement them. I had to simplify as I could, and these more complex ideas were not good ideas to add, especially after 10 hours of work. I especially agonized a lot with explosions, because I simply wasn’t able to add explosion effects.
• The rest of the bugs. I hate that I had to rebuild project files twice, because of last-time-recognised bugs, and I also hate that laser can’t burst through breakable blocks properly.
• The lack of music and sound effects. I didn’t have time for doing them. Also, Abudant Music didn’t do music that was fitting to the style of the game.
• Not challanging levels. Even though levels look beautiful in my view, I suck at making puzzles, and I even didn’t have much time, so in the aspect of gameplay, “The Last Beacon” is possibly a boring game.
• Not enough levels. Number of levels is also too small – I planned 21 at the beginning, but I was also bored and running out of time, so 3 hours before Compo ending, I had 15 levels. I made the right decision though.
• Hurry at the end. It made a lot of unpleasant “featues”, including a ridiculously small story and a kind of short ending.

OVERALL

Even with every unpleasant events and bugs, LD#29 an outstanding success for me, and this thirs time was the most entertaining for me among all of them. I still can not believe I actually created this…

I hope I’m gonna have a good ranking at the end. Also, I’d like to extend this game in the future, like Alan Zucconi did that with 0RBITALIS.

I hope I can do that. But until that, good luck for every competitors, and thanks for reading!

– Katamori

Tags: postmortem, the last beacon

I got my timelapse edited and pieced together! :3 It’s really funny to go through and see my battery power dipping up and down. XD But I hope you guys enjoy it! There are big chunks where I cut off the timelapse, mostly because I forgot to record it. 😛 But there were significantly less art assets than usual.

We had a ton of fun this time around, and I hope it shows!

Be sure to rate our game here!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=10976

Tags: ld29, timelapse

Hello everyone,

After some rest, we, @damrem, @ynck_33, @sentsu_actu and I are pretty happy to present to you “From the under”.

You can find tue jam entry here :
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=28466

And i made a quick gameplay video, because, why not ?

The game Smoldering Star. Infinite scroller with nice graphics.

My entry is here

Video:

Screenshots:

So Hot Diggity was my first attempt at Ludum Dare.  Been meaning to actually enter this for years but always forget when it’s on.

For anyone interested, here’s a brief overview of the development process of Hot Diggity, followed by a little postmortem, some fun bugs I encountered while making it, and a few hints ‘n tips I’ve learned doin’ various 48hr jams!

Wanna see what this looked like 2 hours in? Read on!

So without further ado, here’s how it was made!

Day 1:

First batch of sprites and already you might notice stuff that didn’t make it in

When the last themes were selected for the final round I had a quick run-through to try figure out what kind of thing I would make for each one.  “Beneath the Surface” came immediately: There’s been so many mining/digging games of late (Terraria, Miner Dig Deep, Steamworld Dig and of course the big MC to name but a tiny selection) that I thought of trying to mix up the genre a bit.  Namely, instead of a careful, gradual and careful expansion, you instead piloting some crazy drilling machine, tearing through the earth and furiously devouring ore at a highly unstable pace.  The idea of expanding the craft was vague at this point, but I was keen on some kind of upgrade system.

With this in mind, I fired up Unity, added some basic controls, some tiles, added all the elements of Unity’s 2D physics engine (Itself based on the popular Box2D Framework) and here’s where we begin:

Fun fact. The drill’s actually completely stuck here and can’t move.

For most of the development time, the drill component of the driller was actually solid, meaning you sort’ve “poked” blocks awkwardly to damage them.  It made the entire driller impossible to keep straight because it was effectively triangular.  Removing this so the drills have no ‘solid’ collision was one of two things that eventually made this game bearable to play.  The other was giving the driller a fixed turn speed – Previously it applied torque which made it even worse to steer!

So just digging down was fairly dull.  We need something else.  And when you’re out of ideas and want to add something to a game to make it cool, there’s only one place to go!

No, not zombies.

LASERS!

The laser logic was fairly simple: The turret turns towards the mouse cursor, and firing shoots a little ray out that sees what it hits, then stretches the laser graphic and positions it to represent the ray itself.  Then whatever your ray intersects with (And Unity of course has all this built in) you see if it’s a tile, and if it is? Damage the tile! Huzzah! Instead tile-destroying laser!

You’l notice the terrain also is a bit more varied at this point.  I plugged in Unity’s Perlin Noise class into a basic terrain generation system.  The game generates 16 x 16 tile “cells” which get created as you move around and hidden when they’re off screen.  The perlin noise helps create a basic, psuedo-cave system that’s good enough for a basic underground game.

Fun fact: Unity’s Perlin Noise isn’t seeded, and I couldn’t get random offset working properly, so EVERY game of Hot Diggity has exactly the same physical layout (It’s why you always begin in a large crater).  The only things that’re randomized is ore layout, exploding block positions and some cells have a chance to be one of 3 biomes (“Normal”, “Ice” and “Temple” – More on these later!).

Honestly at this stage I still had no idea what the game would be.  You had a laser, you could shoot things but there wasn’t much point.  THEN I plugged a few of the lasers together and…

I think I’m on to something now…

More engines = more thrust, more drills = more digging, more lazers = more lazers… Suddenly the idea that you could gradually add stuff to the Driller made sense and the main game feedback loop was born: Get ore, level up, add a bit, repeat!  You’ll notice in the picture above some things didn’t make it: For one the above ship’s impossible because later on heat generation became a mechanic, and also I didn’t get time to have Drills that go in multiple directions (The idea of building a big box covered in drills did appear though…)

So! Quick change to the Terrain Generation to add little ore prefabs! And so introduce one of the sneakiest techniques to making a 2D game look awesome:

Give me sparkly!

Additive blending! You can never have enough glowing stuff!

So – Destroy the ore blocks, drop some little ore pickups that are pulled towards your Driller and add to your Ore Count when they hit.  Now we just need the level up screen!

Camera was considerably more zoomed in initially, which made it impossible to upgrade past a certain point

Also, I hate doing UI.  Hence why everything is big yellow boxes.

The Level Up screen and handling the state between pausing the game -> Selecting a slot -> selecting a component -> Unpausing and continuing was the biggest faff in the game, namely because when you’ve only got 48 hours, writing a proper game-state system isn’t a high priority, so there’s a lot of dodgy flags here and there and things with references to stuff they shouldn’t just to make sure everything’s fair.  It also had a tonne of bugs -> Laser getting stuck on and causing you to overheat while you level up, money still being collected which would make you level up while levelling up and break everything, etc.

Still, with this one, the basics of the game were more or less in.  Though you still couldn’t actually lose. And there wasn’t any reason not to just stay near the top of the world and dig EVERYTHING up.  I needed some incentive to get the player actually digging down.

Now logically you’d maybe have things like an oxygen meter and maybe tanks you had to reach further down each time, but no. I went with…

Who’s that crazy kook destroying the world?

Of course! A giant, planet-devouring Lovecraftian horror! That’ll do!  Also I must’ve misspelled the word “Devourer” about 50 times (“Devourerer” was a common one).  He’s basically two big sprites animated in a looping, munching motion.  Before he was done I upgraded his eyes so they actually follow your ship.

Now this chap served two purposes: One is to force the player to keep digging, the other is a more technical reason.  See, the deeper you go, the more terrain cells get generated, and these eventually start grinding Unity to a halt because they don’t get cleared up.  Enter the Devourer: Any cells above him are destroyed and removed from play, keeping the amount of stuff needed to process in game relatively low.  It’s a bit of a hacky fix, but hey! 48 hours isn’t enough time to be tidy!

As this more or less marked the end of day one, I needed a backlog of stuff to get this game fully done, along with any polish I’d like to do.  My backlog consisted entirely of a hastily scribbled notes on an envelope:

Alas, additional components and upgrades to existing ones didn’t make it…

The game still looked kinda naff too.  Then I realized what was needed:

Tile variation. Even a really basic bit of variation can make tile based games just look so much better

Plugged in a simple system to select from a random set of sprites for each tile prefab, and suddenly the game looked so much more varied and interesting.  This gave me a bit of a morale boost to actually see this thing through!

Day 2

Starting to look like a game. Heat systems in, added a few more additive glows to the lasers, and the Chase Meter on the left

Chase meter, heat systems, exploding and losing.  Polishing as I go.  Tweaking controls, laser power, laser heat amount, coolant heat amount, various bugs. Adding a basic (And I mean, some text and press a button to start basic) title screen and game over scene.  Before long the main game mechanics were all in place: Now I needed some music and sound.

FLStudio! And a lot of hastily assembled loops

I’ve been making music long enough now to be able to very quickly fire something quick and dirty out.  The music for Hot Diggity was entirely made up on the spot – I think looking back I’d’ve made the bassline less annoying, but it’s annoying in a fairly catchy way.  Other FLSTudio users will note I haven’t named or organised anything, no proper automation or anything :p No time!

Also through together a few sounds, although sound design isn’t my strongest suit so most’ve ’em are various instrument libraries I have wrangled into various explosions, dings, rumbles and clunks.

Approaching the final set of things I wanted done, I figured I needed a new obstacle, so an exploding magma-rock of some sort that’d increase in frequency the deeper you got.  Everyone loves explosions, so it didn’t take much to add some in:

The ability to push back the Devourer with lasers also made them more strategically viable

The exploding rocks had more than a few fun bugs though: They initially could chain react and detonate each other, which later on wipes out pretty much all the level, constantly.  I removed that and also made them destroy any floating ore around because it could trigger the explosions too.

Actually ore has one of the funniest bugs in the game – While it’s being pulled towards the digger, it can actually Dig through the terrain to get to you, which in turn could trigger explosions.  This can cause massive reactions below you as ore falls down, blows stuff up, spawning more ore that falls down and so on and so forth.  Untiy crashed several times trying to wrangle this whole system into something actually playable, but I still like the fact ore large clusters of ore tearing through the level to reach you.  The magnetic pull-ore-towards-me systems was also considered as an optional component.

Also at this point I stuck a big textured quad over everything to simulate lighting.  Clever use of layers mean you still see the glow of ore through it.

What a seamless transition into another environment that isn’t.

The last thing to go in was the biomes.  Because everything in Hot Diggity has various prefabs to configure what it does, it was pretty easy to create some variations of the cell generation.  I had bigger plans for this, but in the end only managed to create an Ice Biome and a Temple Biome.  The Ice Biome is tougher than regular, and I originally planned that it would naturally cool you down while you were in it, but this didn’t make it in.  The Temple Biome is just a big empty box, and the walls are the toughest tile in the game.  Originally I’d hoped to include a massive cache of ore in here that was tough to get to, but again time restraints meant it’s basically just a big shortcut.

Post Mortem

Overall I’m quite proud of Hot Diggity and glad to see other people have enjoyed it! It’s funny to think how utterly directionless I was during most of day 1 and then have everything come together late Day 1/early Day 2.  It isn’t a particularly ground-breaking, innovative game, but it’s an interesting spin on a popular concept, and in the end, Game Design evolves at its best when it takes current gaming mechanics and mutates them slightly to see what works and what doesn’t.

Good:

• Getting much more used to Unity’s 2D Framework, which is useful for my current main game project.
• Not too difficult to understand despite quite a few mechanics in play.
• Actually quite pleased with the visuals, namely because while I’m an vaguely decent pixel artist, I can’t draw people for the life of me!
• Level-up instead of Shopping for upgrades mechanic worked better than expected
• Lasers!

Bad

• Gets kindof absurdly difficult because of the lava blocks.  Think I may have overdone them a bit.
• Big monster chasing you seems like a bit of a cop-out. And also looks weird and out-of-place.
• Quite a few bugs with the extension mechanic – Possible to screw yourself over quite easily and make something that just doesn’t work.
• Wanted more of everything, but some more strategic  components would’ve been good, and some more varied obstacles/terrain.

Tips for Jamming

• Make sure you’re confident in the tools your using.  I barely know anything about using Game Maker, but I’ve been using C# for years and used Unity many times before, so I know what it can do, and I know what *I* can do.  This helps mitigate risks so you can just concentrate on getting the game done.  It’s worth learning code and such outside of jams so when you enter one you don’t have a constant barrier to overcome.
• Keep an idea, or an actual written version of a prioritized backlog.  Important things first, bonus cool things later.  Make sure you always have a target and a thing to be working on.  Often helps to have parallel ones so if you get stuck with A you can hop on to B for a while.
• Get some sleep! The brain can’t think properly when it’s starved of food and sleep.  Things that seem impossible to figure out at 11:30PM on day 1 may be a cakewalk at 9:AM Day 2.
• Polish as you go! Spending a few more minutes just tidying something up, adding some detail to visuals, nice flourish animations, some particle effects here and there all helps the thing look better, and when your game looks better you’re more inclined to keep working.
• Above all, have fun! Enjoy the spirit of competition, don’t take it too hard if it doesn’t turn out like you wanted. Learn, and try again another day! Just, keep making games!

Right. I’m off to play som’ore games. See ya’ll! 😀

It’s done. Well, not done done, but it’s as done as it was going to get this weekend. SIBS that is.

We usually gravitate heavily towards high-octane action platformers, and have a lot of base code and resources for such games. However, just like the last Ludum Dare we entered, we decided to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones, and make something different. SIBS was to be a fairly slow-paced arcade game, with some light strategy elements, but due to time constraints and lack of planning, a lot of what we wanted to get into the game never quite got there.
The biggest bummer was the guard AI. I simply did not have time to write robust enough path finding to allow them to follow the player into the tunnels, and didn’t want to rush a half-assed version. Another was player controls. We only wanted the digging movement to be the choppy kind of stagger that is currently in the game, but, again, I didn’t have time to write something that would’ve allowed the player to move more unimpeded through air, while constraining the character to the grid, needed for my digging implementation. So far, these two points have been raised by most commenters as areas of improvement as well. Both of these are clearly due to me focusing too much on the wrong things early on (optimization, visual effects).
That being said, those things that focus was shifted to, clearly worked very well. Most of the praise we’ve received is for the awesome music Ville wrote, and for the look of the game.

I think what this LD has taught us most of all, is that our weak points as a team are clearly time management and planning and pacing tasks. It’s awesome to figure these things out, because that helps us improve both as a team and as individuals. None of us had the time to work on the game throughout the whole jam, but blaming the games shortcomings on that would be a huge cop-out, as there are tons of very polished entries in the compo category by people who had barely a fifth of the man hours that we had at our disposal.
But alas, it was really fun and educational. We learned a lot, got a bunch of new tools in our bag of tricks, and have a game prototype to polish and turn into something finished.

I would personally like to thank my two teammates for their patience and resolve, I could never do this (game development as a whole, let alone something like Ludum Dare) without the two of you, and thanks to your hard work and our mutual support, I’m working every day towards realizing my dreams! Also thanks to everyone that took part in LD29, it was awesome, as usual!

/Aapo

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36114

1,000 miles below the surface of the ocean, the Angler fish hunts it’s prey.

Swim around as the Angler fish, using your bulb to deceive sharks, dodge jellyfish and eat un-willing fishy victims. 
The game has 3 difficulties; progressively getting harder and harder. 
How far will you go to survive in nature’s harshest environment? 

Hope you enjoy the game, please vote and give us feedback!

Hello friends,

We are a team of 4 members, we made our entry ” Beyond the Dark” for Ludum Dare 29.

I am posting this late because I was up all night with my programmer and was pretty tired.
So we submitted at 7.30 am and when I woke up, I see some players facing trouble with the right click in the browser, so we made a small update today.

So this is our game,

” You play as a miner trapped beneath the surface, inside a mine full of dangerous creatures.
Use your limited resources carefully and find your way out”

Click to play the game and rate the game

Some Screenshots !

My name is Brian Ash and I made a game for the Ludum Dare #29 Jam portion. I know it’s not post-mortem yet but I still want to talk about my experiences with Ludum Dare and what I feel like I could do for next time.

If you haven’t played The Ice Pond yet, go check it out here

Looks pretty dreary, right?

So first things first, I am never making a text-based adventure game ever again.

What I mean by this is never, I had so many difficulties with the command base that in the end I had to narrow it down to the point where you couldn’t experiment. I also used functions to refer to areas and get it inside one larger function, making it more stressful when I wanted to call something outside of the function.

It could be that I decided to code it in Python, a language I have had little experience in, although my only options past Python were Visual Basic 2010 which I am not fond of or just not doing Ludum Dare.

Due to my choice of Python, and my limited knowledge, I had about 70% of my code be ‘print’ on a single line to leave spaces between sentences. I also had to spend the last hour I had aligning the text with the console, just so you could read it.

Secondly, that writing a cohesive story and coming up with humour is difficult.

Most of the humour in the game was written in a sleepy haze during the second day and I had no sleep by that point so I wasn’t 100% there when I wrote it. Most of it gave a short-lived chuckle but past that it didn’t really help. In addition, most of it was only funny to me and the people I’m friends with as we all have similar tastes in humour so yeah.

Finally, what to do next time.

Hopefully by then I will have gotten a lot better at Python, enough that I can at least use pygame and a better editor than Sublime Text, something as advanced as Eclipse.

Next time I might try to focus more on the story and have a simple gameplay system, one that’s easy to understand and master, whilst also adding a bit of a challenge. I feel like with a text-based game, you need to focus on both whereas I not great with gameplay, if given the time to plan, I could get a good story done.

Hopefully by Ludum Dare 30 I might have convinced some friends to help me, as one of them writes and another is learning Python as well.

I hope that everyone has a great 3 weeks worrying about rankings and see you all at Ludum Dare 30 😀

Finished my game and I’m pretty happy with my first attempt at a 3d game. Its a voxel horror game, i ran out of time near the end to do more and different types or scares. I think I spent too much time on the voxel part and it made it more complicated being hexagon voxels rather than cube voxels.

Example of the hexagon Voxels

When I was play testing it, I kept forgetting the game is even voxels because I spent so much time setting up the atmosphere of dynamic sound effect and music which are constantly changing, such as breathing and footsteps. The game turned out pretty creepy at the end but the scares are a bit too basic and not too effective, which is a result of them being rushed at the end.

Click this image to go to the game

link: http://goo.gl/cHtgJL

If so, you might like my LD29 entry: Project Tethys. Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

I reckon this game is one I’d like to take further, so I’ll probably be doing a post-compo version and any feedback I can get would be great!

My ludum dare jam entry Under The Shade was about building a shade and getting a signal fire built. Like perhaps every participant…, I too had huge plans on what I wanted to have in the mini game.

This wasn’t working so well…

With big plans in my todo list… I saw I couldn’t get everything done. I chose certain key things (like shelter building, fire building, hacking wood and so on) and get them done (well enough for playing). The end result is an actual mini-game: you can get a higher score by building a nice shelter (that provides shade)… and the game ends when you build a big enough signal fire. It’s nowhere near where I wanted to be, but it’s OK.

The turning point was when on Sunday I was so exhausted that I just slept between 21-24… and woke up in the middle of the night. I thought.. “man, I’m so tired, I just want to sleep…” but then decided to work “one more hour”. At 2:30 am (Finnish time) I was ready, couple of hours before the final deadline.

The crucial last couple of hours helped me to get the thing done, release the game. I feel that was a hugely important achievement for me: to finish & submit the entry. Without that last hour push, my work would have not been here to rate.

I survived the contest, and it was fun time so I consider this one a successful survival scenario.

Those interested: I posted a youtube video moment ago just in case you have a minute to check out bits of gameplay.

Title screen.

You can PLAY and RATE our game HERE!

I couldn’t be more happy for making this game. It was 72 hours of almost no sleep and lots of debugging, but it was also very fun!

We managed to create our game with everything we had planned in the beginning. Of course, during the development a lot of new ideas came up and we could fit some of them in the game.

As I said in a previous post, this was our second idea. We started the first game and discarded it after feeling it was not what we were expecting. The responsible for this was this little guy:

Our first idea was a game where the protagonist would drown in the sea and enter a coma. The player would play as the protagonist’s conscience and would have to learn everything again (how to walk, how to run…). In each of the levels the player would learn a new ability. The idea behind it was that each stage would remind of a certain memory from the protagonist where he had learned that ability previously. That said, since he entered a coma after drowning in the beach, we decided to make the first level resemble a beach! Now, don’t ask me how this crab came up, but when we first saw him in the game all we could do was laugh. Hard. It made use realize that some elements we have set would not work very well for that game and then we decide to move on to another idea.

We wanted to make something simpler but also challenging, which would make the player want to play more and more. We wanted the game to be a platformer. The idea of the screen moving behind the player was one of the first things to come to mind, we mixed some platform elements into that and used the bats (one of the greatest elements from the discarded game) to create a challenging environment. Initially we though of a more fast-paced game where the player could pick up power ups which would enable a dash ability, double jump and so on. We ended up deciding to only add double jump to the game and take an approach on precision.

When building “Escape from the depths!” we needed to create an extra level to praise all the gloriousness of that crab. Unfortunately it didn’t fit in the game. We even had a special music just for that stage. Below is a video showing a small timelapse of the development. It shows early stages and how they evolved to what they are now. You may also see some elements who are not in the final version, all thanks to the event limitations of the free version of Construct 2.

Now about the bugs, when applying the tileset in the stages I managed to, unintentionally, put some invisible tiles in some places (I though I was erasing the tiles but I was putting an invisible one over them instead). This led us to very funny situations where the invisible tiles would save us from certain death and sometimes block us from winning a stage. It was a pain to find and erase them all.

Another funny bug was when implementing character’s movements. If you were jumping and hit the ground while holding left or right the character would get stuck in the default animation, without moving. Only after you press a new direction it would start to move. When we fixed the bug one of us found out that pressing left while holding right would make the character turn left but keep walking right! And he was like: “Guys, there is a bug where the character is doing a moonwalk.”

“Doing what??”

Strangely, the ‘bug’ only worked in that specific direction, even the code for the other being very similar. The moonwalk was just too awesome to be vanished as a bug, it then became a ‘feature’.

Hi all, I had a great time this LD so far, I hope you had, too.

Last time, a friend of mine (Fenmar) made let’s play videos of some of the games he played. I think this is awesome, because you can actually see how good your game works. So I decided to do the same thing this LD. I will try to do it with everyone who comments on my game (with feedback, of course), but depending on the number of comments, my time might get short. I will continue even after voting closes, if necessary, but I can not make any promises.

I will give a link to my youtube channel as soon as I really uploaded some of them.

Have fun playing and rating!

Great news everyone!

The bucket bug is GONE. I found the cause of it and fixed it.

(one line of code)

For our game jam entry, since we had some spare time, we implemented some achievements. And now i have just got all of them.

Game and achievement hints can be found here

P.S The Become the magnet achievement requires that you get a large number of points, and i suggest playing the desk level to get it, as it is smaller than the other level.

Behold! A successful run of our game Dig Hard *is* possible (don’t watch all the way to the end if you hate *spoilers*): [YouTube]

We’ve also now linked our Source Code if you’re interested.  Everything is Creative-Commons Licensed.  Some useful general classes which anyone using Unity might find Helpful:

CustomBehaviour – A no-cost, drop-in replacement for MonoBehaviour with lots of helper functions to let you type less!

CustomExtensions – General helpful extension methods for vector swizzling, time-independent easing, component-lookup, etc.

PooledObject – A super-lightweight GameObject-pool for explosions, bullets, etc (just a linked-list using the source prefab as the head)

Sprite-Lerp Shader – for doing color-fades like flash does, rather than Unity’s default multiply.

Also, a shoutout to Gallant Games’ InControl Library for GamePads.  It Just Works.  Amazing.

Hope this helps!  Power to the people!

Game length: Under 5min

Genre: Clownscape

Ludum Dare link: Click here!

Rating: 2 and a half hugs.

Being awkwardly busy during LD seems to be standard for my team and I. We’re still proud of Murder Clown regardless. Hopefully, we’ll be less occupied during the weekend of the next LD. I’d love to make a longer game using grossly contrasting visuals like these.

Good job everyone! See you next time!

That’s supposed to be water. Perhaps I should have simply called it a ball pit.

I forgot to post about this before. >_> <_<

SWAN QWOP is complete! It’s been a while since I’ve actually completed an LD game, so I’m pretty pleased. 😀 I’ve written a little more on my site, if you’re interested.

Tags: game complete, screenshot, surfing frogs

How can I find out if putting more efforts into my game would be useful later? Because I feel that my entry was so successfull that I can work more on it, but I’m not sure if it’s worth.

“Heavy Metal Detector” is a game about an old rocker who’s looking for his metal beneath the surface of the beach.

Total Dev Time: 12 Hours 35 Minutes

Successes

• Got to do pixel art for my game for the first time
• Recorded my own “music” and sound effects
• Learned about Audacity and used it
• Learned about animating sprites in Unity

Challenges

• Tripping on some simple script in Unity. ie having a gameobject be able to play multiple audio sources.
• Sprites look very rough, environment could have used more action in it.
• Gameplay is really simple (I aimed to do a simple game, but maybe this is too simple?)

I really enjoyed doing the pixel art between the coding. I’m currently refining my skills in that. I think this community is really awesome and I did enjoy playing other developers’ games. I look forward to Augusts’ LD!

Thank you for reading!

http://gamejolt.com/profile/ninjabit/116627/

That was my third Ludum Dare and it’s probably my better game I had make in this competition. To start, sorry for my English, it’s not my first language. Here is a little screenshot.

I was supposed to use C# and monogame but I decided at last minute to try GameMaker. I’m very happy with that choice because I was able to do the core gameplay mechanic very fast so I was able to made all my little sprites and a second level.

The good

– My arts. It’s incredible how it was simple to make some pixel arts with tilestudio.
– I was able to make a second level
– Nothings wrong happen when I published my game
– I didn’t have a monster bug to fix

The bad

– My UI. I hate my UI (I will work on it later)
– It take a long time to have my idea. In fact, I found my Idea when I was taking my shower Saturday morning.
– It take some times to balance the towers vs enemies

Conclusion

That was my best Ludum Dare. I will continue to work on this game. The first things I will do is the re-factoring of my UI. After that, I will add some levels, new enemies, new tower,new tower upgrades and maybe a little story.

If you want to try my game, you can go here : Body Defence

Don’t hesitate to give me your comments.

Web, Linux and Mac builds now available.

Linux and Mac versions haven’t been tested. Give them a try if you can and let me know how it works out.

The only thing that might go wrong is the data loading, this being Unity and all.

Hopefully not.

Play games and have fun.

So, I have recovered from my first LD, during which I slept a total of 4 hours.  I am very proud to say that I finished my game, and although it needs some work on the player controls system, it is a relatively complete game.

My submission:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35774

This contest was pretty important to me, as I’ve spent the last two years bouncing from project to project trying to find what fits best for me and my dev style.  Because of this, I had not completed a game yet.  Now I can finally say that I have, and one with story, audio, custom characters, a custom game-mechanic, and a lot more.  I’m still debating on whether I will persue releasing a finalized version of the game in the future, but for now I’m returning to my previous project with a lot more confidence.

I would have preferred a 24 hour recovery period before being expected to vote on games, but other than that it was a completely positive experience.  The community is friendly, the deadline provides a great challenge, and the reward at the finish line really cannot be compared to.  If life permits the time to commit, you can count me in for the next LD; whether I’ll fly solo again is still undecided.  I’ve met some great people in the indie dev community these last few days, and I may step outside my comfort zone for LD once again and team up with another dev or two.

In-so-far as advice to any newcomers to the challenge: get a good night’s sleep before the contest starts.  I pull all-nighters about once a week, so the lack of sleep (although still more than I am used to) wasn’t a huge factor for me… except at the end.  The thing that I did not prepare for was that I was working harder and faster the closer the deadline came.  I can honestly say that although I work crazy shifts constantly, I have never produced this amount of work in such a short period of time.   So, if this is your first battle with the unrelenting timer that sits atop the LD website, then I would suggest you show it respect.  When you’re planning what you’ll be working on the last 6 hours, if you’ve been cranking away with little sleep, you will not be in charge of all your faculties.  Save the simple stuff for the end.. the kind of stuff that you can do “in your sleep”; ‘cuz that’s exactly what you’ll be doing.

Thank you to staff at LD for the opportunity to compete, and to the the community here for being so awesome.  If you participated, whether you finished or not, I think we can all say that we walked away better game devs.  And all we had to do was give the community our time.  I can’t speak for everyone, but I got back what I put in ten-times over.

This is my first entry here in Ludum Dare. I made this one for the 48 hours Compo 29. It’s a simple 1st person survival game. Just eat the smaller fishes and avoid sharks.. yeah, you’re a fish.

Unfortunatly I haven’t time to put sound.. but I’ll be working on it, there’s a lot to improve.

Hope you like it! 😀

Play it !!

I’ve fixed the most annoying bugs in my entry, mostly crashes. Windows and OS/X versions have been updated.

Also, as it was a constant request in the comments, I added support for wasd keys. Now you don’t have any excuse to not play the game and try to post the best score !

You can play it here

THIS
DARK
MTTR

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=18014

– Explore the fundamental particles and mysteries of the entire known universe – 
– atmospheric solar system exploration – 

An interactive toy? Or relaxation aid? What are those…images?

My 3rd Jam entry!

Unity3D, Photoshop. AbletonLive.

ThisDarkMattr

I made Geofront for practice, to see if I could find it within myself to design on my own. I never intended to make a good game. It was just setting myself a challenge.

What went wrong :
– The game was supposed to be more obviously tied to the theme. Basically you live inside a sphere, and that sphere is inside another surface, and then a third one. Each level should have been the player-character shooting their way out of one sphere, only to encounter the next one after. I didn’t want water and I didn’t want caves. I wanted sky.
– I ran out of time. The game should have been triple its current length, it should have had three levels in total, more enemies and more gorgeous, detailed, furnished backgrounds. Taught me to check my ambitions.
– Not enough playtesting. That’s a lesson I will keep in mind. If someone else hasn’t tried your game before release, it probably isn’t as fun as you think. This is probably basic for many of you. I did have a couple friends, the guys at H-bomb playtest though, they really helped. You can have a go at their current game, Clodo Crush Saga, originally made for this year’s Global Game Jam. It’s loads of fun.
– Enemies randomly become extremely resistant. They practically stop registering damage. There might be something wrong with how the Flash/Stencyl combo seems to handle collisions. Or, more likely, I just looked for the bug in the wrong places.
– The boss design wasn’t really well thought out, visually. I can and will do better.

What went right :
– GUYS I MADE A GAME
– Had loads of fun, tested my abilities and limits, saw lots of beautiful projects being made following #LD48 on Twitter.
– Pixel art is a blast.
– Learned a lot about logic. Stencyl doesn’t require programming skills, however I’m pretty sure what I’ve learned developing this will be useful soon.
– Great music from Lucien. His work really added a playful, happy vibe. Check out his soundcloud page!
– I MADE A GAME

If you’ve played Geofront, thank you. Know that just thinking about you playing it makes me happy.

This last weekend I participated in Ludum Dare 29. I teamed up with one of my good friends. The goal for me for the weekend was to learn on the fly how to use Unity 3D, and get a better understanding of C#.

The weekend was a phenomenal success. Click here to go to the submission page.

After the theme for the weekend (Beneath the Surface) was announced, we took about an hour brainstorming possible ideas that matched the theme. We initially wanted to make the game about Hell, since Drew has been playing a lot of Dark Souls lately, but since I like Greek Mythology, we ended up making it about the underworld. Drew is a 2D animator by trade, and we both enjoy old school platformers, so a 2D platformer seemed like the logical choice.

Having settled on a theme, we quickly went ahead making our lists of what needed to get done. Drew on his paper, me on my computer. Preparation was key to us getting it completed. I made a brainstorming web of everything I could think of that would be needed to get the game done and Drew had lots of post-its with several things written on them, and little check boxes next to each item. As he said, filling in the check boxes gives you a little dopamine rush each time.

Each of us, armed with our own organizational tools and sitting at a kitchen counter, set forth to check off every item on our lists.

We made good progress on friday. We got a workflow set so that we could get Drew’s assets into the game pretty much as soon as he could finish them, and got the first level pretty much done.

Saturday we polished up the first level. We made the second level. There was lots of coding. There was lots of tracing down where bugs were. There was lots of staring at C# and then saying “hey Nick, why isn’t this doing what I think it should? … thank you Nick!” and even some “hey Nick, why isn’t this doing what I think it should? … wait, nevermind, I got it.” I got the coding set up for the animations for the 2nd and third obelisks and was very happy that I figured it out on my own.

Sunday was when crunch set in. getting a decent nights rest saturday, I knew I had my work cut out for me to get all the animations working correctly. Unity has a tool called Animator. It allows you to connect one animation to another by creating a transition. Animator is a very new feature in Unity and can be a little buggy. What I didn’t know until I got the animations from Drew for the 2nd and 3rd obelisks, was that if you make a transition without having art assets in the animation yet, Animator will create a buggy transition by default and you have to delete each transition that is bugged and remake it.

Put bluntly, there were a lot of transitions made saturday night, that I deleted and remade Sunday morning, and then deleted and remade again Sunday afternoon. We continued to plug away though. We laid temp music and sound effects in so the programming could get finished. Drew got the animations for all of the transformations finished. We completed the third level.

At 9pm we had all of our items completed aside from fine tuning music and making sound effects. We knew those would be the easiest items, and required us to move from our friend who was hosting the game jam at her place, back to mine where my recording equipment was set up. We moved our equipment back to my place. Drew went home to take a shower and have a small break. When Drew came back, he had a 4th level planned out. Immediately, we knew we could do it, it would just take some time. We knew we needed to have it, otherwise the game would be boring. We had all the mechanics and programming required, it was just time. It would take us a while to sweeten the music and get the sound effects in, but we didn’t really need to sleep.

At 8am Monday morning, we had a finished 4th level. The game was now finished for submission, with music, sound effects, and what we felt was a short but entertaining game.

I successfully made a game. The feeling of completing the Ludum Dare 72 hour Game Jam was the most accomplished I have felt in a long game. It was challenging. We learned a lot.

Next up, The Public Domain Jam.

Who’s in?

We’re rather proud of our entry for our first Ludum Dare, “Dozer’s Gem Jam”.

PoQA(Power of Quality Assurance) Games has previously participated in three Bacon Game Jams, which are 48-hour team-oriented game jams coordinated through reddit.com/r/bacongamejam. We wanted to try Ludum Dare, but still work as a team. And so we decided to voluntarily observe the 48-hour time limit of the Compo.

This is what we came up with.

Watch some gameplay on Youtube!

Tags: ld29

Auger, our LD Jam entry, was created with an alpha version of Vixle.  Vixle is a voxel-based game development engine that we are also building.  Here’s an excerpt of the full post-mortem:

Vixle’s First LD
When Kit and I discussed whether to compete in the most recent LD, we saw various pros and cons. When Vixle is finished, the ease of use and collaboration aspects will make it an ideal platform for both solo and team participants in game jams. Since it’s still far from finished, it wasn’t clear whether we’d really be learning anything from an attempt to use Vixle. The tools in Vixle are either incomplete (voxel and code editors) or non-existent (animation, texture, and particle editors), so we’d have to use external tools to create most of the assets. We also knew that a lot of our time would be invested in improving the Vixle engine, instead of working on the actual game. Despite all this, we knew our Kickstarter push could only benefit from having a working game. We also hoped that building a game end-to-end would be a trial-by-fire that would tell us a lot about the viability of Vixle in general.  [more]

We all now it’s difficult to come up with an idea knowing you just have 48h to come up with a good one AND implement it. But sometimes it’s difficult choosing which one you should stick to!

These was my brainstorming session. I gave myself just two hours to get the idea, so I started with a mind map. It’s in Spanish and dirty, but you get the idea:

From ‘beneath the surface’  I explored ideas related to the Sea (first person shark; a Lovecraft-like story about something luring you from the depths of the sea, a la Innsmout) to Earth (control a volcanic eruption – being the volcano; growing plants; procedural caves or sewers; dune-like worms; BEING BURIED ALIVE – I liked this one a lot!) and also some figurative interpretation, like being a nice person to friends and colleagues, but beating the shit out of your wife when you get home. Too dark, this one.

I stuck to those ideas that seemed easier to implement and sketched them:

First one consisted on controlling a growing plant. We would tell roots where to go to find water, nutrients and avoid poisonous substances. I wanted them to travel up the root to the stem, so that you could cut poisoned roots or something.

Then I though I wanted to do some pixel art. Probably because of my job I though of  jellies. Came up with two games. The first one consisted on matting same-color jellies. Something similar to an old game called eMotion.

The second idea was inspired by Finding Nemo. You would jump on jellies, controlling your fish as in Lunar Lander. They would produce nice sounds when hit.

I ended up choosing the first one with jellies. It was fun animating them and recording their sounds. Control is a bit awkward with a mouse, but great on touch screens. The biggest issue is, however, that it soon becomes quite difficult to control what is happening on screen. Fun to watch, but difficult to control.  In any case, I certainly wonder how those other ideas would look…

I would love reading a bit about where your ideas came from!

Tags: brainstorm, draft

If you’re bored of trying every single game – here’s my proof that it’s worth a try!!

I still can’t really believe I pulled it off. Although more could be done with it. I managed to get most of the core systems in.

The Good

Mental Preparation: I had long planned entering this ludum dare. I decided that i was going to give it a go no matter what the theme. Once this was decided and i was prepared, everything seemed to go a lot smoother than previous dares.

Theme: I felt the theme was a great theme this time. It allowed all different sorts of games to be made and I have really enjoyed playing through a fair few of them.

Construct 2: I intended (even in my I’m in post) to use unity, c# and 3D for my game this time. While reading other’s I’m in posts, I kept checking out the engines people were using. I saw someone mention Construct 2 and I hadn’t heard of it so i checked it out. It looked powerful for a game creator. I know you’re really not supposed to use ludum dare to try new tools but I thought i’d give it a go. I felt a little bad using a creator and not coding it myself, however what it allowed me to do so quickly far outweighed my inner desire to prove that I am a programmer (I code in c# everyday for my job). It’s in built systems such as path-finding saved hours of manual coding.

Art: I felt I got on top of the artwork quite quickly. I was dreading creating a tileset but it turned out quite nicely.

Systems: I managed to create a leveling system which increased the XP required to level each time. It also increased the monster difficulty each level while also making the leveling feel as if the hero was getting more powerful each time.

My Wife: My wife totally supported me during the dare, looking after my 3 young girls completely and freeing me up to work the entire weekend on it.

The Bad

Limiting myself: From the outset when i decided that i was going to attempt a top down action rpg, I decided i was going to have levels, 2 or more enemies that increase in difficulty and some form of scoring. I wanted to add an inventory system with loot, but decided that I wouldn’t attempt in due to the time restrictions. As it happened i had some spare time at the end but wasn’t prepared enough to add it in. Also I mentally limited the different types of enemies to 2 and could of added more.

Too much caffiene: I had too much caffiene that when i eventually went to bed the first night, I couldn’t sleep and only ended up having 2 hours. This meant I needed more caffiene the next day which kind of continued the cycle.

General

I enjoyed this ludum dare and was surprised with the amount that ended up in the game by the end of the weekend.

Feel free to give it a go if you haven’t yet:

Beneath The Mountain

Time-lapse of development for my first Ludum Dare attempt, 29 Leagues:

Hey guys, I’ve compiled a little behind the scenes video of our (rather frenetic) LD#29 experience. Enjoy

You can play Infection HERE

Tags: jam, LD #29

I’m really happy with how this Ludum Dare went, as it was my first. Mostly everything was good for me and I didn’t really have much bad stuff which was very cool. I guess that I was lucky nothing else went wrong because I didn’t really do any planning at all.

The Good
– I was able to complete my game .
– I didn’t really have any bugs that caused me to get stuck for very long. – I had the whole weekend to work and my sisters didn’t bother me too much
-My mom got me icecream when LD started, yum!

The Bad
– I didn’t really get too much gameplay in, I was hoping to add a little more potato shooting and jumping around
-Music, I didn’t really have any tools I knew how to use to make some so I resorted to an online, simple creator thing
-I could get the HTML export to work unfortunately so no HTML

That’s all. I’m really glad that I did this because it’s really motivated me to code more games and it was a ton of fun. I learned that I shouldn’t try and code large games, but instead build a bunch of little prototypes and if I find something I really like, expand on it. Thank you all for making it awesome!

Another game jam, another set of firsts!

PATRIOT is my first “jam” category submission. Although I did work on games in teams, my Ludum Dare’s where always in the solo comp format. This time around, I had very limited time, so instead i decided to ask a couple of people for help, use some external assets and still be able to submit something. And I’m very happy with the results. (Although the game did came out a bit too hard/not engaging enough so most people don’t see the plot-twist ending)

So, comparing JAM to my previous COMPO experiences:

[+] It takes less time to make something interesting (~20h total among 4 people for PATRIOT)
[+] It’s more relaxed! I didn’t stress out a bit, even thou other people counted on me.
[+] Working together is fun, even if only via skype
[+] You may get to know new people / new techniques
[-] You DON’T get to learn things the hard way – so you don’t learn that much as in comp
[-] Voting only works on the account that submitted the game! :/

That’s a lot of [+]’es! I’m going to do this again! Who’s with me 😉 ?

This is my first entry and my first contact with the ludum dare community, and I have to say I’m very surprised (and pleased) with the positive atmosphere of this community. I didn’t really expect all the positive feedbacks, considering that I myself felt like I should’ve done better (more level, yes). But it is an honor and a pleasure to receive such comments.

As for what next, I guess the entry as it is won’t change. I fixed the very minor bug and no other bugs were found (yet). For the game itself, I really want to create more levels, get someone to work on the art, balance it, and publish it somewhere, maybe on this summer break or maybe later. Bottomline is, entering LD 29 really motivated me to go into more serious game development, and for that, I thank you bunch a lot. 😀

This is my most complete game for a Ludum Dare yet! It’s too easy to just sprint through, but I still have fun swimming around, bein’ all krakeny, and hunting the few different enemy types I managed to make.

From Below’s Ludum Dare entry page

Day 0:

I was really pulling for Deep Space as a topic, and I should be working on Cloudbase Prime, so I almost sat out for LD29. My wife sounded disappointed, though. I told her I was thinking of a kraken game once the topic came up and she was all for it. So I cracked open Unity and Blender and got to it. I pretty much just made some bitchin’ tentacles on the first night. They’re a line renderer that I made render some bezier curves from bone to bone, using every second bone as a middle curve target for its neighbors. Seemed like a sweet idea! But then every other joint ended up having an ugly non-smooth edge. I tried averaging out the positions after switching which bones I used as the curve target. That just undid my curve work, which was sadly obvious in retrospect :P. So I just rendered those “overlap” corners twice instead of averaging them and got the cool stripy/jointed look in the game today!

Game jams get wonderful when something goes wrong and I can just say “fuck it, I’m featuring it!” This was one of those times.

Day 1:

The main image I had in my head when imagining a kraken game was descending into the depths, dark where nothing else could see you, and coming out to strike. I never did get those stealth elements into the game (most of your enemies are submarines; it wouldn’t have made much sense for them to care about light any way), but I got the darkness and that feeling of depth it added to the game.

I did this by changing the camera’s fog color as your character’s depth changed, and also attaching a shton of colored, mostly transparent planes to the top/bottom of the player, so that looking up and down always looked brighter/darker, regardless of the current background/fog color. I then added a water ceiling to the game and spent enough time staring at the screen afterward to go and make four separate idle animations that each tentacle independently cycles through at random, at different intervals for each so that they don’t synchronize with each other incidentally too often. That made me feel much, much more like a kraken. That’s when I realized I needed separate controls for each tentacle. It’d be silly and just feel wrong to have these nice writhing tentacles and only use one or two of them! A huge goal for me in this LD was to “finish” my game before going to sleep at the end of day 1 (Saturday). I totally failed at that goal, but aiming for it made a huge difference in terms of focus and drive. I at least had my central game mechanic done before going to bed: being able to attack, grab, and throw enemies and hapless whales. I rewarded my grand progress with an early morning shower, made the music while poking at GarageBand on my couch until 4:40am, and passed out on the couch.

Day 2:

I was happy with my progress the night before, but waking up at 6:20am guaranteed I felt like total shit. Food, coffee, sunlight, and showing my wife what I’d worked on the night before got me going again. A big feature of the game is that you can hold down a key to look toward the nearest enemy. This helps the goal of eliminating every enemy in a given wave be less frustrating, and also makes you feel more like you’re a hunter that can actually sense its prey. Moving the camera while the player is also mouse-looking it is a problem I got stumped on last week for Cloudbase Prime. The game jam approach of “nope, screw that idea, that’ll take more than half an hour to try,” applied a few times solved the issue in a jiffy. Homing missiles (uh, torpedoes, I guess…) were straightforward enough, and after that, subs were up and running shortly, reusing the wandering logic I added for the whale with some extra “never ever fly off the map pretty please because then the player will be stuck forever and hate me,” logic added in.

The best bug ever:

too many missiles: animated gfycat here.

I did leave in a bug where enemies can keep firing missiles at you after they’re defeated, and while they’re grabbed by your tentacles. I tried to fix it, but fortunately decided it wasn’t worth the time since it feels pretty badass to have the enemy firing at you in desperation before you chuck it at the dirt or a whale or its sub-bro-in-arms and watch it all explode. UI, health, copy/pasting a bigger submarine, throwing it on top of the water so it’s suddenly a boat, and making it shoot half a dozen slow, fat, super damaging missiles, and I was done! Barely, at the last possible moment. The rushed, clumsy, fantastic wrapping of the project is my favorite part of every Ludum Dare.

Family, breaks:

This weekend was really, really nice in Arizona. We’re the land of 100 degree Easters and it was firmly in the 70s. The weather was amazing. I went out in the yard whenever I needed a break and watered plants/stared into space with my wife and the dog while the wind howled. My wife’s support was great. When trying to work a ridiculously long amount of time in a row, simple stupid things like not eating food or drinking coffee at the right time can make a huge difference. The meals! Salmon crepe, bleu cheese and steak sandwich, beef udon… I was downright taken care of and I’d feel silly if I didn’t feel so damn lucky.

I met my folks for dinner in the middle of LD and showed them a Vine of the game’s tentacles. They told me the clouds looked great. There… are not clouds in this game. Perspective helps.

Wow, I wrote way too much. You can check out From Below here.

Great work, everyone! I’ve been judging games for the last two nights and have been genuinely enjoying it. Ludum Dare’s an inspiring thing.

oscar (9 years old) and i participated in our second ludum dare and it was awesome once again! this is a great activity for young game makers and we can’t wait for the next one! we’ll be posting time lapse videos and post mortems, but in the mean time, here’s us deep in coding thought…

Oscar’s game: pixel bat attack

My game: the vole beneath

So after days of sleep, i want to post my resume.

This was my first LD and i’m still exited, i have done a lot of stuff, but also wasted hours with some aspects of the game.

Good part:

I created a shader tilemap system, that allow me to show up to 4096×4096 tiles in real-time, so a zoom to the whole map don’t effect the performance. (The map in the game has only 256² tiles, but you can change this in the source code, if you want to try it out)

Afterwards i extended the engine with a 2d raytracer for light and shadow calculations (this was the risky part). And voila it looks very interesting.

Because the map data is saved as image and i don’t have many experiences with map generation, i added a map editor and integrated it into the game, too. This was easier as i thought, the only “time-eater” was the “tile-connection” algorithm, it produced many hard code.

It is also possible to create/modify content (enemies, items) via “.ini”-files. So everybody can easily expand the game, without watching in the code.

Bad part:

For the first time i created some music and i wasted to much time on finding a good/simple music program (yes i searched during the game jam ^^’). After all i came to the realization, that i don’t have any composing skills, so i tried out many generators and surprisingly i created some interesting loops, i combined them and changed the instruments via midi tool and in the end i created 3 titles, which do not sound so bad. But next time, i will be more experienced in this part.

I integrated to many game play elements (like items, enemies, stats) to late, so i lost much potential for the game. I integrated for example the item’s, 0.5h before LD ended. >.<

I love pixel art, but i’m not this talented yet, so i spend a lot of time in just a few sprites. For the future, i think i must find a simpler style to create more content.

Bad or Good part?!

I was sleeping about 6h the whole jam, this was interesting, but next time i think i will just better plan my game schedule.

Finally the Game:

The screenshots are “post game jam”, because i added a few new features afterwards, but you can play both versions :):

The in-game editor:

Game Jam entry:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35550

Latest Version (0.2.0):

Win(32bit)

Have fun, and sorry for my bad English.

This was my first LD entry, and it was a really awesome experience! Even with all the bugs lack of polish that went in the submitted version, I really liked how it turned out and I do intend on keep working on it and see where that goes (so I guess this would be only an LD post-mortem.)

Darkvision is a horror platformer, inspired by classic cinematic platformers such as Oddworld and Heart of Darkness. Peer into an evil parallel dimension to reveal the way as well as hidden perils!

I’d say the biggest issue I faced was one of scope, which I’d assume is something fairly common in game jams, specially for the unexperienced (this was second time participating in a game jam.) Doing a cinematic platformer in itself was already a not-so-prudent decision, since the mechanics are fairly complex for a jam entry. And sure enough, it took me the whole saturday just to get it all working, even if lacking a lot of polish. Still, I had been meaning to do a cinematic platformer for a long time, so there’s that.

Halfway through saturday and the character could grab ledges… but not climb them.

After the platforming mechanics were fairly stable, I went on to making a couple of traps (falling boulders and a deadly blood geiser) which opened up some possibilities for the level design. I was a bit worried about the visuals though, since I’m a programmer and I only draw a bit, but I definetly can’t paint (as in colors, depth, shadows, all that.) But I did find that working with textures had a very interesting result, specially after drawing a bit on top of them to simulate depth to the objects. Also using Unity’s lighting system, the game was even more prettified.

By the end of day 2 the scenery was looking very spiffy. But the eye thing did look like a Dorito.

On monday I had to work during the day, so I only had about three hours to work on the game before submission. In those three hours I change the eye’s color, textured the character, fixed a bunch of little problems (like the fact that each body part of the character was too far apart from each other in the z axis, which screwed up with the lighting) and did 5 out of the 8 levels in the game. It was intense!

A quick rundown of everything that went on:

The good:

• The whole thing was way too much fun!
• Learned a lot from the feedback I got here.
• It was also a very cool experience to work alone in this, as you have to juggle around with what needs to be done.
• Learning about using textures this way was very good, and it might come in very handy for me in the future.
• I got a good notion of how the lighting works in Unity (even if I still have a lot to learn)

The bad:

• I really wish I’d managed to put in a few more levels.
• It also kinda sucked that it didn’t have a menu screen or a tutorial (something simple, just the key images popping up in some places in the beginning.)
• There were tons of little bugs and improvements, but there just wasn’t any time left!

A few lessons learned:

• Using textures is an easy way for a non artist to make things look pretty!
• Feedback, feedback, feedback! A lot of people who played the game didn’t realize what chanting to the orb did, the eye thing definetly wasn’t enough feedback. (To be fair I did plan to have some blood splatters and stuff that you’d only see in the evil dimension, but still.)
• Before making an animation in Unity that changes the position of something, but very very sure you won’t have to change anything afterwards. I had to change the z value of all the body parts to fix the lighting problem, which meant I had to manually change all the values in all keyframes of all animations (you can’t tell Unity to ignore one axis of the transform, even if you’re not using it in the animation.)

All in all, it was freaking awesome, I can’t wait to participate in the next LD! Congrats to everyone who participated, even if you didn’t manage to finish.

If you haven’t played Darkvision yet, please give it a try and tell me what you think!

Tags: postmortem

What Went Well

This time around, there was a very quick committal to a game concept after the game was announced. This may have been due to having others around as a sounding board when the theme was announced. This allowed actual work to commence a lot faster than in LD26, when over an hour elapsed before committing to a concept.

This theme was too easy. There was no lack of ideas: a city builder where you had to move humanity into an underground city, an anthill adventure, playing as a fish or octopus, a game based on fracking, an adventure beneath the surface of the skin. Any one of these could have been viable. Indeed, I am starting to see that many of these concepts have been done by others.

The procedurally generated buildings turned out great. By taking a few base components, and giving the basic instructions for building up one floor at a time and randomizing, I was able to have the game generate some complex building layouts. Sure, the architect of these buildings must have been crazy, but isn’t that the same for most games?

One area of player feedback from LD26 was that Dehoarder lacked some kind of finality for a full clear of the room. There was one goal end at 10,000 points, but that was just an artificial goal and was only celebrated by a single popup that was easily dismissed. For City Beneath the Surface, I set aside time to create two different endings that are definitely final. I even had time to make them cinematic. They were the second largest identifiable time cost in the game, at 7 hours, with much of that spent watching the submarine escape scene in 10x slow-mo to get the timings and measurements good.

All in all, I managed my scope well. I had intended to put a means of moving from floor-to-floor inside the building, but as Sunday afternoon loomed, I re-evaluated that feature and decided that it would not add much value to the gameplay that was there, so I axed it. (If anyone asks, the Atlanteans moved between floors on unpictured elevators built into the corner blocks on each building.)

Similarly, the original scope for the building generator had the engine building interior walls as well, sometimes making for multiple rooms per floor. This never got implemented, never even made the prioritized backlog, and honestly would detract from gameplay and make the game unnecessarily harder.

Blender and I have been getting along even better since our bromance started in LD26. The shark is my crowning 3D modeling achievement for this Ludum Dare. Maybe someday I’ll actually get better at rigging stuff, too, so that he doesn’t just move stiffly through the water, but stiff is fine for a 48-hour compo, especially since your back is to him while you’re running from him anyway =D.

Making sound effects for this was fun. Some basic stuff, like alerts, inventory feedback, etc., were done with sfxr, but other in-world sounds were recorded on a cheap mic on my laptop. I think the scream for the shark death turned out especially well. I got a kick out of using the bathtub to make the water sound effects. Luckily with the way my house is set up, the laptop could be kept safe behind a wall while the dispensable mic did all of the dangerous wet work.

The music just happened for the second time, it was like a gift from above. I fired up cgMusic like I did last year, and fiddled a bit with it. I wasn’t sure it was up to the task of creating the deep, warm, droning music I was looking for. Then I took a piece it had generated, deleted everything after the second part, and turned the tempo way down to 15 bpm. Voila! The perfect sound – slow arpeggio guitar melody over a glacial harmony by string instruments with bows that must be 5 feet long.

There was something just wrong about the input for much of the project. I was using a fairly standard move-mouse-to-turn model, but it just wasn’t working out well. There seemed to be a weird acceleration curve, and that movement control always confounds me once the mouse moves outside the game window. So I switched out the controls at the last minute, and fixed another latent bug in the user input code. I was very glad I took some extra effort to correct this, it made the controls much, much better.

At a few points this weekend, I took a step back, and wrote out a list of what remained to be done. Then I would quickly prioritize all items on that list 1-4, and then knock out the 1’s and 2’s from that list. I repeated this until I was done. This micro-agile approach seems to work great for compos, because it keeps the highest-risk, biggest impact work at the forefront.

Having some common code libraries harvested from prior projects was a big plus. Some basic calculations were just there without having to go to Google to look up algorithms. And being able to fit a bunch of re-usable polish trim right in place, like streaming loading, volume controls, scene transitions, and the like, helps me present my entry in the best way that I can.

It was good that I had blocked off the entire weekend for this compo, otherwise it would have been fail. I even took a day off on Friday to relax before the compo to make sure I was going in fresh and rested. That was a very good idea. It allowed me to put in 6 full hours the first evening of the compo. For the rest of the weekend, I had my support network in place, meals arranged, and everything planned out so that I could focus on Ludum Dare to the maximum, and I am very glad that I did. With 34 of 48 hours utilized for the compo, 3 hours spent preparing meals or doing chores could have made the difference between success and failure this time around.

What Did Not Go Well

A procedurally-generated level was the best choice for this type of game, and manual level design of this scope would have taken longer and required a lot more pre-planning. Still, the map generation code took much longer (about 9 hours, over 25% of the project) than was hoped. This put the project behind schedule early, and I had to work like the dickens to make up the shortfall.

I would have liked the game to be more playable in the early stages. While basic player input and physics were done early, map creation was a large obstacle to testing any actual gameplay. Thus, it was not until halfway through the compo that the game felt more like a game and less like a physics simulation and world generator. It was not until Sunday morning that the game was actually winnable. It was hard to know early whether the gameplay would actually work out or not, which is vital with a compo.

34 Hours was a little more time than I wanted to spend on my compo entry this weekend – that leaves only 14 hours for sleep, eating, hygiene, and not totally falling off of the world around me and into my own reality where it is only me and The Game. I am well aware that I picked a project that was almost too big to handle in 48 hours. Still, this means I pushed my abilities to their limits, so this could be considered a very good thing as well.

It seems that despite my best efforts, a lot of people are finding the controls for the game difficult and frustrating. One source of contention is the lack of an option to invert the camera pitch tracking. It seems the old fighter-pilot convention of up pitching downward and down pitching upward that I am used to is no longer the norm, so in the future I will be sure to provide this inversion only as an option. People also complained specifically about turning being too slow – the slowed movement was an intentional design choice to boost the mood of the game by making the player feel through the controls like they were moving through water. This does not appear to have been received well. These two points are the only specific feedback provided so far about the input issues. I retested, and could find no further issues myself.

What to Change

In future events, I will try to focus more on gameplay mechanics before world building. In the case of City Beneath the Surface, I would instead have created the mechanics of the prisons and keys and sub parts before creating the first building, making sure the game was winnable early on. I had done this with Dehoarder in LD26, and did not realize until I was deep in the rabbit hole that I was doing differently this time around.

I wish I could say I won’t try anything this ambitious in the future, but part of the good of these events is that they push me to my absolute limits. So I will likely take on ever more ambitious projects anyway no matter what I say here to the contrary.

Conclusion

This was another awesome event. Even though I was intensely heads-down during a large part of it due to early missteps, I managed to create something really cool that probably would have taken a couple weeks to a month without the pressure on. It was great to see exactly what I am capable of, and how much I’ve improved since my last Ludum Dare. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone else’s submissions in the coming weeks.

Originally the game was designed to run on Android only, however we thought it would be nice to get a web port as well. To play Sky Shepherd on web (with the Unity web plugin), you can use the Left and Right arrows (or A and D  keys) to tilt the platform and use the mouse to click on power-ups and enemies.

In retrospect:

Things we could have added or changed, more graphics and animations, additional items / powerups we didnt have time to impelemnt, backgrounds (representing different zones: candy world, under-water, cave/underground, space). And ofcourse better sounds.

If you have an android phone, come test it out and let us know if there are any problems. If we continue to polish it, we’ll release an iOS version as well. For those who don’t have a smartphone, check out our web build!

Game page CLICK HERE

Hey guys!

Thought we’d dodge the deadline rush and post about our first ever Ludum Dare entry today.

Introducing… Shanghai
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33962

How to Play 
1. Drag colored tickets into a spy slot at the top of the Grid 
2. Match the colors to Foreign Agents by drawing a path 
3. Making matches earns cash and pleases the embassies 
4. Don’t let the embassy flags hit the bottom or it’s game over 

Our take on Beneath the Surface
Honestly we were not thrilled with the theme at first, but after some brainstorming we got excited. Our primary goal was to avoid Underground and Underwater since that’s what we assumed most people would be doing… and we didn’t like the aesthetic of either for our own game ideas.

So we looked at ideas for things Beneath the Surface, and society/psychology came up quite a lot. The Wizard of Oz style of a mysterious man behind the scenes pulling the strings of a city was something we really liked the idea of, so we went further with that.

Living in China, we see and hear a lot about corruption. Both Chris and myself have both wanted to make a ‘China game’, going a little bit political in a place where political views are generally ignored or frowned upon. The theme of city corruption and China just felt perfect for that.

Chris reminded me of the Ang Lee movie ‘Lust, Caution‘ which showed a glamorous Shanghai aesthetic set in the 1940s. We felt this was exciting and the idea of undermining your city for monetary gain fit with the history of foreign powers in Shanghai taking advantage of weak local government. Read about the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the Boxer’s Rebellion for an exciting look at China’s past.

So that’s the backstory. Over the judging period we’ll do some post mortem and making-of style stuff to share our experience. For now, please let us know what you think of the game!

-Sam

I’ve made a quick Android port of my jam game. The apk is available from the same location as my standalone builds from my entry.

This is likely the version of the game I’m going to focus working on after the jam given that the market for these types of games is primarily mobile based.

Though now I need to spend some time playing and rating other games

Tags: android

Taking part in LD29 was really amazing. There was an astounding amount of community support fueled by a fervent passion to create. Following various events as they unfolded on Twitter was almost as fun as making my game. At one point someone posted a link to this Youtube video. It got retweeted various times but when I saw it I was inspired, not so much by the video, but by the various designers, coders, artists, and creators that were taking time out of their busy lives to not only make something over a weekend but to support each other as a collective. Some people did not even submit a game or design anything over the weekend but continued to post comments cheering everyone on. When I made a few comments about some of the problems I was running into some people even messaged me directly with their support. The support that everyone spurned out over the last few days has been heart-achingly beautiful.

While I did not finish my game I learned a lot of things that I am sure will help me, not only in future jams, but in my own personal design. One of the most important things I took away from this was to be prepared. While I had made sure to have a clean work space, food, and time, I had not tested the tools I was going to be using for this jam. That was not done out of a lack of foresight but it happened because I could not decide what tools I wanted to use for this jam. I flitted between Twine, sfxr, Dart, Game Maker Studio, and many more because I was unfamiliar with any of those development environments. The last time I designed a video game was years ago when I was studying C++ in college. Despite ardent desires to make more games for years I have always managed to put those wants on hold to chase after what I considered more pressing matters. Finally, more recently, I am making an effort to get into what appears to be an amazing culture.

This leads me to the next thing I am taking away from the past few days. Knowing my tools is important. Deciding what I want to do and what tools I will use for the job is not only a matter of choosing a tool to fit what I am doing but it is choosing something I am familiar with that will really help me get work done. Unfortunately, I was not familiar with any of the tools I wanted to use to make my game. Outside of working on designing my website recently with a heavy focus on HTML I have not managed to get into any game design. As great as leaping in to this challenge was, worrying that I was in over my head was a constant concern of mine. Regardless, I kept trying to remain focused on coming up with something that would be interesting.

I did not figure out what tool I wanted to use and what my game would actually be till several hours had passed from Ludum Dare’s start. I had interpreted “Beneath the Surface” as an allegory for the different personas a human invariably has and the desires that sometimes remain hidden beneath the surface of the masks humans wear. Trying to figure that into game design was very difficult, considering my skills and, again, familiarity with the tools I had available. At one point, while taking a break from fiddling about with Game Maker Studio and a few other tools, I saw Notch’s game that was posted significantly early and it spurned me into thinking that Dart would be an amazing choice to design my game with. Unfortunately, this foolishly led to more study and careful reading.

I began to panic as I realized that time was quickly running out and I had effectively wasted a full days worth of design through full-heartedly chasing after a tool that would assist me to make the best game I could in the amount of time I was allotted. I had no intention of entering the compo to begin with, but had thought it would be nice if I could manage it. At this point there was no way I was going to get my game done in time for the compo, much less the jam. Dejected, I started to lose focus.

What kept me going was various posts I had seen in the tips section of this website. When I first chose to get involved with Ludum Dare I read a few posts that mentioned that even if you do not finish your game to turn it in. To do something. To keep at it till the end but most importantly, I read, was to have fun. Fretting over time constraints and the way my lack of progress could be interpreted was not fun and realizing that not turning in anything would make me feel even worse I resolved to get back to work.

I completely changed my idea for the game and decided to focus on making something that reflected the theme through gameplay. I decided that my game would focus on looking at things beyond their form. Beneath the surface, a chair is not just an item used to suit its purpose. Chairs are used to sleep in, as a means to reach higher heights, as weapons, as a table, and much more. What really made me want to focus on this as the theme of my game was the idea of using the mere thought of light as a means to explore a dark cave. By having the player focus on objects more closely they would be able to discern great detail from those items, leading to more choices, options, or objects to examine even more closely. By examining even the faintest glimmer of light and gleaning knowledge from their surroundings the player could light up the darkness even without a torch, flashlight, bonfire, or light emitting entity. I wanted to represent this by having each death the player experiences give them more and more abilities in relation to their environment.

From here I chose to use Twine since it outputs a HTML file. Something I am familiar with! I could do this! Things started looking up. I started to use Twine and realized that it could use variables. I was elated at this point.

Then I realized I needed something to drive the player along. Simply having an interesting game mechanic is not going to make a game. Time was starting to get even shorter. I had almost a days worth of time left for the jam. Piecing together what I could and learning how to use Twine (sometimes fighting it as it overrode stylesheets I created) I started to build something I imagined I would be able to get done within the remaining time allotted me. Obviously, this did not work out. The need for sleep after jamming so much knowledge into my head throughout the day was overwhelming.

I awoke and realized I had six hours left in the jam. Six! After all this time I still did not have a game. Sure, there were choices to be made and consequences for the choices, but it was not going anywhere. There was no meaning. It was not what I wanted to make. With these thoughts in mind I began to polish what I had in time to get it turned in.

After everything I am not proud of what I designed, but I am happy that I kept at it. I think I will continue to work on this game more outside the jam and focus more on using elements in the environment at a more base level to advance the plot in what I consider to be an interesting way. “Don’t have a key to get into this room? Examine that keyhole more closely, know its form, become the keyhole, and get in there.” Something about playing with the metaphysical expectations of the player seems fun to me.

Whatever happens, I want to thank you, all of you, for continuing to be awesome, and making my first Ludum Dare jam a wonderful one. Without the amazing continued support of everyone I am unsure I would be able to smile like am right now, even after having submitted an incomplete game for my entry.

Captain President and everyone’s favorite shark can now swim around on your Android phone.

That’s right, you now have a cooler way to see that I ran out of time.

See Captain P in the Play Store

I’d never entered a Game Jam until now, and I”m happy to say it was great! I’ve never had so much fun developing, and never, ever been so productive either! I was slow to start, but towards the end I was rushing due to the time constraint; 529 lines of Javascript, 72 lines of HTML, 151 of CSS for a total of 752 lines of code in 72 hours. May not be too much to some, but for me, that’s a huge record!

Despite only hearing of the jam 9 hours before it began, I got a pretty good start! I got stuck for an idea for a while, just barely managing to get one before Saturday, and prepare a basic template with which to build the game on.

After that, the rest of the next day was spent preparing the first few features. Getting the actual text input done was actually one of the easiest parts, since I was re-using code I’d developed recently in another unreleased game of mine with the same thing. After that, I ran into another design halt as I tried to figure out what I’d do for the left side of the screen, such as whether I’d use buttons or pure text input. Once I got over that (took about an hour alone) I added the first four resources, the day system and the first few commands.

Results of Saturday

Sunday started off pretty good – I had a decent plan going; finish off the game’s features, then work on story and polish tomorrow. As for finishing the features, I didn’t end up managing that, though I did get most of it.

Throughout Sunday, I managed to add village professions to help automatically generate resources and take some of the difficulty off, added a little ‘exhaustion’ mechanic to prevent gather-spamming, add the ‘time’ command and put in the resource stats, all the while attempting to tackle a strange bug thought I fixed that I still don’t understand.

Sunday’s outcome.

Monday was definitely hectic. I spent the better portion of the day implementing upgrades – something I hadn’t originally planned on adding at all – and then another half hour to slowly find out why this suddenly didn’t work, to find variables I forgot to change when I refactored some code earlier.

After finishing upgrades, and spending even more time on adding more info for the professions, I finally got to work on the story and add a win condition with 3 hours left til’ the Jam ended. After some quick designing, I ended up deciding to change the story from it’s original direction. I first had decided the end would involve you finding the villagers to actually be cultists, and to run away after discovering one of the terrible rituals they held, but instead settled on something subtler, although the ending ended up no less sudden.

Three hours remaining.

After rushing to fix a few bugs that were discovered with the ending and add a Favicon, the game was submitted and complete.

I’m actually really surprised with the outcome of the game, and very happy I managed to complete so much of the original idea – and then a little more! Better yet was seeing the first few comments on the game, which were surprisingly positive! I ran into a bump with hosting, but this was easily resolved by putting a mirror up on Google Drive.

Things that went well

• Keeping the idea to something I could handle – This was stretched a little bit, with me barely finished before time was up, but I nonetheless managed to keep the plans to just the right size for me to get everything done and still put out something good.
• The chosen language – I picked HTML5 because I’ve got some pretty good and recent experience with it, having worked on two incremental games before this, so I was able to get to the game quickly and easily.
• The outcome – I am very pleased with what I managed. I never thought I’d be able to pull this off in 72 hours.
• Getting sleep, eating well and going outside – I actually took more walks outside than I usually did, and took regular breaks to get away from it, kept fed and got plenty of sleep each night, which I think played a good part in making the end result what it is.

Things that didn’t go so good

• Planning – I didn’t really get too much of a chance to do it very much, what with having only 9 hours of awareness that the Ludum Dare was even going on – a lot of which was spent wondering if I’d even join.
• The story – What with it being more last-minute, I wasn’t able to flesh it out as much as I would’ve liked.

Suffice to say I’ve had a whale of a time doing this, and am ecstatic I decided to join. I’ll most definitely be here in August to do it all again!

Villager can also be found here, if you’d like to play it:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36267

Tags: first, jam, Mortem, Post, post-mortem, postmortem

Hello everyone!

I’ve updated my game:

New features:

– A reload button when is playing some level;

– Other way to show how to play;

– At the end of the game (after 10 levels) there is a steam key!

The Money Beneath Our Ground

The Money Beneath Our Ground

LOST is about a firefly who is lost in the dark and is trying to find a way out of the mazes created by the horrors of the dark.  It took me around 13 hours of work to make the game (the rest of the 48 I spent between sleeping, reading, eating and sleeping).  The theme – Beneath the Surface – led to first to underwater ideas. Then I knew what I wanted in the game (listed below) and I only had to make the ambience feel like you’re below a surface and everything else would place into place.

MECHANICS

1. Line of Sight

I’ve always wanted to use line-of-sight mechanics in my games and these few links will give you excellent examples for the same –

Amit P’s Blog on LOS

Then i came across this – GameMechanicsExplorer’s Flickering Lights

General line-of-sight implementation produce straight line shadows and while that’s how actual shadows really are, they seemed to disrupt the suspension of disbelief in a game with straight line obstructions everywhere. So a general flickering restrictive view is what i settled for (and got the idea for a firefly from there instead of the other way round).

2. Procedural Maps

My other greatest love is procedurally generated content. Maps, enemies, levels, et al. I think its because I am too lazy to design individual levels or the inherent need to create infinite never-ending games. Most of my games only have a  ‘Lose’ screen since the only way the game ends is when you die. Coming back to procedural content, for LOST I had to chose between mazes and dungeons. Dungeons offered greater exploring fun but then with the view restricting mechanism , sitting in a room and having to stick to walls to find the doors wasn’t really appealing. So a maze it was!

Here are a few links that list amazing maze generation algorithms tutorials/algorithms and one of them has the actual pseudo-code I used –

James Buick’s Site

Dstromberg’s Javascript Maze Tutorial

Rosetta Code’s Maze Generation Algorithm Consolidation Page

James Buick’s Algorithm Recap

3.  Enemy Movement

There had to be enemies on the map because “just” maze solving is quite boring. But then they had to be moving around too. Path finding algorithms are easy but take time to implement. I had to settle to random movement wherein enemies on the map choose randomly between all the possible directions they can move towards when they hit a wall. This method is very restrictive and causes enemies to clump up together but when I played the game, I especially liked the jumpscare of 3+ horrors coming at you suddenly from the dark.

Some of these enemies tended to inhabit important nodes in the map (required to actually solve the maze) and hence I had to add another element (in the form of randomly scattered helmets) to best these enemies.

4. Movement controls

The choice was between simple up-down controls and GTA-II like controls. Simple WASD controls led to sudden flips in directions which was different from what a real insect will move around like. GTA-II like controls (forward is always UP and changing directions is achieved by left-right, kind of like driving). It also added a level of difficulty because getting used to the controls is a short (albeit annoying) learning curve.

ART

I’m very bad at art and in-spite of extended inkscape tutorials before the dare began, I ended up drawing really bad things. Choosing a black and white palette was much easier since I know very well how bad my color sense sucks.

The Firefly

I started with 8 bit fly but then it turned out to be really really bad.

For the greater part of the development cycle, I stuck with the above fly. But then, during the choosing fonts, I ran into webdings fonts with insects in them! JACKPOT! I found a beetle i liked, used it in Paint.NET, and used the basic skeleton to draw myself a nice firefly.

The Tiles and Enemies

Simple square tiles and another edited (and scary looking) letter from the webdings font helped to create the rest of the game. The on the fly font is Arial to keep cross browser compatibility.

I also used the noise generation effect in Paint.NET to create the static effect in the background.

Music

Art is something I am bad at, but then at music, I am worse. So Freesound was the obvious choice and I had no time to waste anyway. Here’s the link to the brilliant ambient music used in the game – xDimebagx Horror Theme.

Final Hours of Ludum Dare

All the basic elements were in place but the game states were still in production and there was only 2 hours left to the deadline. Its fairly obvious how little time was spent on polishing these last few screens (the end-game screen and the generating new world screen).  But what is important is realizing that you need to finish the game rather than make it look amazing. 

When the final beta testing was done in the last half hour and everything fell into place, my heart was racing as I waited for the game to upload to my site. One of the biggest relief-sighs happened when I was able to convincingly click the Submit button.

After I uploaded the game, I realized that the HTML page itself looked bland and I sat down to make it look a little better. Giving it a black background and formatting the instructions text on the page was the final adjustment and I was done.

Phew! A ludum dare completed. I am happy.

Things I’d have liked to add but did not given the time restriction.

I wanted missions and better AI movement. Maybe next time .

Minimap or some sort of indicator of how far the final stop is. It gets frustrating if there is not general direction you want to go to. It does add to the gameplay so I am on the fence about it.

Better art and animations.

The Game

Click here to go to my game’s Ludum Dare Page.

Here is a short trailer for Vertico, a 2D isometric “three degrees of freedom” shooter. Dive beneath the ice and fight creatures while moving in any direction in 3D space, navigating a vertically-oriented coral reef.

Some were surprised I got so much done in 48 hours, so I’ll be posting a timelapse of the development with narration shortly.

Some cool people made a game called The Find, which is about fishing some URLs. You should play it (and rate it)

They also made a tool to build our own The Find, with our own links.

So I used it to compile my best ludum dare 29 finds for now (and I included my own game, the one in the screenshot inside the screenshot)

Play/Discover here. (Mash UP to get the fishes)

Also, all of these games are/will be reviewed in french on my blog.

Tags: favorites, selection, top

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=15315

Drip is a game about bringing life back to the surface of a dead planet.

Underground lies a world of music and you must capture that music and bring it to the surface. Slowly the songs will grow as you bring back more and more water until finally the surface becomes habitable again.

Drip is a collaboration with the wonderful music of Paul Orton.

Our goal with Drip was to try and explore the aspect of dynamic music in games. You’ll notice that each time you touch a box the game adds a track to the song that is playing, and also that the water that is dripping interacts with the songs. Overall we tried to make everything in the caves interact somehow to add to the music that is playing.

Anyways hope you enjoy.

Also Oh the Chaos!

Play SHITSHITSHIT

I did not like the theme.
I think that this is painfully obvious to anyone who plays the game.

Also, to reiterate what I said in the post-mortem for The Last Soul, I’m generally a happy, outgoing person (almost annoyingly so). But like anyone else, there are some things that sometimes pop up, shit hits fan, down the drain, FUBAR, etc…

In an odd way, perhaps since my Ludum Dare n°22 submission Solitas Exodae, this event brings out some of the darker bits of my personality.

Maybe it’s the themes? (Alone, Minimalism, Beneath the Surface, for some reason make me want to do arty-farty depression-wanks…)

Maybe it’s that the Ludum Dare calendar has an uncanny ability to sync up with more difficult times?

Or maybe sometimes I want to express the angsty teen that is still hanging around somewhere inside, and Ludum Dare has become my release valve for this?

In any case, here is SHITSHITSHIT, and it’s not a happy game. It doesn’t even revel in sadness. It’s angry, it will make you cringe, and probably hate me a little bit.

What went well:

• I made this in 48 minutes so I didn’t have to spend more time on this than necessary
• Some people like it
• It’s actually quite funny when you take a step back

What went wrong:

• Shit theme was shit (SO MANY GAMES WITH A SIDE VIEW OF THE SEA)
• I had to spend a whole 48 minutes on this, which is longer than 0

See you around, I’ll be trying out your games, I’ve seen a few that are really good so far, and I always join a comment to my votes with a little critical feedback, so if you want the opinion of an angsty asshole who tries to be nice to people, drop me a comment with a link to your game and I’ll be right on it 😉

So basically I wanted to attend Ludum dare two competitions ago, but business trips or personal life would prevent me from doing so.

Not this time. This time I decided to participate just for the sake of it.

As soon as I started I wasted a few hours coming up with a concept. I tried to be as simple as possible, knowing this is my first attempt at Ludum Dare as well as first actual work on something that had to be done really quickly and very close to completion. But when I had decided, I went full speed on the idea.

There was another drawback, which was that I still had a few errands to run and had some other issues to resolve, which reduced the total time I could spend on the project. Even though the concept was simple, I had to reduce it even more. Inexperience and not having a basic workflow while working with Unity lost me some time and some polish I could do. But in the end, I would probably do the same thing. I had some much fun in making the game and now every day I find a lot of find just browsing through games of others before I rate them and maybe even comment them.

So…

The good

• Lot of fun. I was expecting it, but I did not think it was THAT much fun.
• Feeling of a community – I’ve been following Ludum dare even without participating, but now I truly felt like a part of the whole community
• A new work experience – it was something I never really did and I loved it
• I learned. A lot. That s always a plus
• I have grasped more understanding about how Unity works than from all of the experimental projects and proof of concept cases I did in the last few years
• Even with the limited amount of time, I managed to “almost” complete the game, run the errands I had to, spend some time with my family (went out for a walk and a picninc to the park with my wife)

The bad

• Because of the limited amount of time, at the end I started rushing things. Tiredness also had an effect and this created more problems than I could resolve.
• I could not add one of the initial and main gameplay elements. It was actually the first one that I removed.

The game

The project in implementation is really really simple. You are in a cave and there increasing amount of enemies appear which you have to hunt down.

In my initial idea, I had them shooting back projectiles and killing the enemies would score you points (which it does) with which you could buy and place obstacles. So the more the waves, the more the enemies you kill, the more obstacles you could place, but the less the final score. Well, this did not happen. Too ambitious for me. But hey, I’m sure it’s going to get better for the next Ludum dare, right? Right?

Anyway, I decided to push the mood of the game a bit. The gameplay is simple, but there is a message in the game that gives it its purpose.

“Mindwash. You are beneath the surface, but you cannot tell if it’s your own mind, beneath the earth, below the sea, under the fires or out of the midst of air. Your are the Mindwashed and they are the Mindwashed. Find a way to the endgame. It will be your salvation and become one of the Mindwashed.”

If anyone’s interested, it can be found here but again, it is really nothing special. I had a lot of fun in participating and will definitely be participating in the future.

Thank you all.

Space Diggers is a multiplayer game about exploring what’s beneath the surface of mysterious planets and fighting against other players for resources.

Play&Vote Space Diggers

Features:

• Multiplayer, persistent gameplay
• 5 different environments, 25 different levels
• Platformer-like gameplay
• World Ranking

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2014 at 6:26 am and is filed under LD #29. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

We have release our Ludum Dare #29 game – Rise to Surface – on Android. Please help us to test it.
Click here to download.

So, here’s how my first Ludum Dare went and how I feel about Scary Ugly Face.

The Good:
– My game turned out pretty much how I wanted it.
– I had a great time planning it out and throwing it together.
– The response so far has been more encouraging than I could have imagined!

The Bad:
– I made Scary Ugly Face in 24 hours and slept only 1.5 of those hours because I had no clue how to manage my time, and then I was burnt out and did nothing for the next 24 hours.
– The people who say it isn’t much of a game are right.  There aren’t many interactive elements because I’m not great at programming. To be fair, it’s a story-focused game, so all the gameplay needed to do was put you into the shoes of the characters, but if I were to change anything about Scary Ugly Face, I’d try to make it feel more like a game.

The Ugly:

I don’t know if I’ve “learned” much from this experience (aside from how Ludum Dare is pronounced), but I’ve been reminded of just how awesome, creative, talented, and inspiring the game dev community is.

Tags: postmortem

So since submitting my game “Jupiter Lander” I added a few more polish elements I had wanted to get in this weekend.  I don’t know what the rules are on putting updates onto the games page, so I figured I would put it here instead.

http://www.austinivansmith.com/Beneath2/index.html

Hi! I’m Elias Farhan, the lead designer and the only programmer in Team KwaKwa (http://team-kwakwa.com). Last year, we made a story-driven game “The Last Promise” that was well-received (the link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?uid=32076) and for this one Ludum Dare, I wanted to have a big team to make even better.

So I selected two game designers who would help me with the design, three artists in Lyon who are studying in school Emile Cohl, one musician who worked with us on Cyber Punk Jam and one VO director and recording who is based in California (I don’t know exactly where) that can work with voice actors.
We managed to finish a little point and click: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=32076

To keep:

• The music and the voice recording came pretty quickly. On sunday morning, I had all the files, and I could directly work with it.
• I could more focus on the programming with my two game designers
• The FIXME hackerspace was a good location. The people were nice and it was great to know that other people were working on their own game and could explain it to each one and other.
• The game looks pretty nice and the majority of comments are positive.

To do better:

• Bugs, bugs everywhere. A point and click is really hard to make in such a short period of time and you never know if there is a bug with a certain interaction, except if you did test it. I didn’t think about lower resolution with the mouse position so there was a bug, because the mouse was limited on the bottom-right side of the screen for resolution lower than 1080p. Still, there are unknown bug on certain computer and I have no idea how to correct them.
• Game designers who don’t know the cost of implementation. The two game designers were focusing on the story, which was great, but in such a short period of time, the original story would have been impossible to implement. So, we had to cut a lot of interactions between the characters, even several who were already recorded by the voice actors.
• The art came pretty slowly. I worked on the mechanics on saturday, but for the level design I could have worked better if I already had some sketches.

The game:
I’m proud of this game. It was hard to finish it, but it was worth it. I like comments like: “I would love to see a complete game using this concept. The best rated so far for me.” It makes me feel like those 72 hours of hard work are worth it.
After, there are always the negative comments and you tend to focus on them, but the rating is not over and I hope there are gonna be more comments soon.

Elias Farhan (http://eliasfarhan.ch)

Eiradirian Wormfare

Okay, first time I did the jam rather than the compo. I still mostly worked alone, but had some assets made by a friend and used lots of CC0 and CC-BY stuff from OpenGameArt.
It was clearly the most fun, but also the most tiring Ludum Dare for me. Due to timezone issues I only got like 4 hours of sleep the first day, second day it was 5 hours. I stayed up way too long too, my first work day was 24 hours long. The day after it was over I was pretty much dead. Didn’t do anything, had a headache and dropped down asleep very early.

But even though I worked pretty much throughout all of my awake-time (I did do 1-2 breaks of at least 30 minutes every day), it got pretty tight towards the end. Levels needed to get setup properly, dialogues needed to be implemented, and The Romanian didn’t even have his special ability yet. I implemented that in the last 10 minutes, along with the Credits screen. Was pretty awesome, coding at super-speed.

So in contrast to my last entry, this is probably my best Ludum Dare entry so far. First time I made a platformer too. In fact, I like how the game turned out so much that I’m considering a post-jam version. More levels, more Wormsweave content (that was planned initially, but time was like “nah man”). An arena mode, achievements, collectibles. Controller support…and if I’m really crazy, Multiplayer Support (this game would play nice in COOP).

What went right:

• Audio: First time I didn’t have to make music myself or using some auto-generator. Nor did I have to make shooting sounds with my voice this time!
• Idea: I wanted to make another Eiradirian game. When the theme was announced, I had no idea how to properly put Eiradirian into that context. Then I thought of worms and made them the friendly quest-givers in an invaded underground realm.
• Code: The same as with other Ludum Dare games. The first two days I produced high quality and beautiful code that allowed me to add new things easily. Then on Day 3 I lost my sanity and produced weird crazy stuff.
• Graphics: Good thing I grabbed Kenney’s Donation Pack earlier, it had just the tiles we needed for our levels. Also used his platformer player character as a base for our characters.
• Visual Effects: Lighting, lots of particle effects (my favorite is the force field) and I even used a shader for the first time (the ASCII effect when nearing a wormhole). Learned a lot of new things.

What went wrong:

• Timelapse: Oh come on, I forgot to timelapse day three. Anyways, I just downloaded all 15 hours of footage and am going to render it as a timelapse, so it’s not that bad.
• Tutorial: I always forget that the people who are gonna play my game won’t have the bonus of working on it for 3 days. What seemed obvious to me got others stuck before even getting to the first levels.

That’s it. Try my game here (it’s fun). Or check out the prequel (also fun but not looking as good) and see how much difference that extra jam day made.

My game is called Robot Invasion, you fight robots (which started civilization underground) with a metal bar in a small 3d room to save the world! Whats the maximum amount of health you will have when you kill them all, or will you kill them all? Click on my name above (Tosic), download the game and find out, the world needs you!!!!!!!!!! Gonna post some more pictures (cant find my camra, lol)!

Hey everyone, we made a new promotional poster thing for our beat ‘em up game, Grimlock’s Lair!

Beat ‘em up! Chickens! Bullet hell! Explosions! Screenshakes! More chickens!

Play and rate here!

So to prove that I really make these Let’s Plays and that I am not just fishing for comments on my game: the first three are done and uploaded:

• Flip by yetanother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CL-XeG-9ns
• Gun Digger by unpromtped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxCW8YARkuc
• Sub Terraria Zero by Photon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Q4LE6ooAE

Or use my channel: (the username is old, too old and as it is only visible in the url I have no idea how to change it)

https://www.youtube.com/user/ThePunnisher42/videos

The first GIF I posted. Click to play the game.

This was my third time around with Ludum Dare – after having watched notch create Prelude of the Chambered and minicraft, I (and likely a lot of others here) were inspired to join in on the fun. I really couldn’t have enjoyed these past LDs more.

So this time, with the added knowledge of the mistakes I made in LD24/23, I took the task head on and dedicated a full weekend to completing my game. Soon enough, ‘The Quest for Unobtanium’ was born.

I started off with a completely ambitious idea in my head – a mixture of an RTS with a mining component. I soon realised how insane I was by even contemplating that, so I scrapped the RTS and went with a fairly generic mining game.

What went well:

• Polish. After realising the importance of polish in my past LDs, I started adding particles, smooth animations, paint upgrades and all the cool little things which make a game feel complete. The comments I’ve gotten since (“Surprisingly complete”, “Really polished”) show this.
• Scope. I knew exactly what I wanted to make from early on, and I somehow managed to time it very well. I got all of the features in that I wanted, even though I cut it fine at the end with 20 mins to spare.
• Art. The art was simple enough for me to make it quickly while being attractive at the same time. Nothing too complicated, I was able to make art when I needed to implement it in the game.
• I was prepared. The day before the compo, I did a bit of a warm up as well as checking my workspace/framework and making sure everything was intact. I hadn’t actually done any major game dev for about 18 months prior to this LD (!), but I was able to pick it up very quickly.
• It’s fun! The game is reasonably satisfying to play, and the progression feels good. Once you reach each rock ‘barrier’ and you see the valuable rocks behind it, you feel motivated to continue. This managed to keep people entertained for >20mins, which I was surprised at.

Not so well:

• I waited way too long to implement the core gameplay. The compo finished at 1pm for me, and I started getting all the different rocks added only at about 11pm the night before. That meant that I only had the next morning to balance the gameplay, which was fairly difficult. This also meant that..
• The game was fairly slow paced. This is the only real complaint I’ve gotten, and I’m lucky that the core mechanic was enjoyable enough to keep people interested. Dialogs weren’t skippable, the trips took too long to go to the surface, and you had to make several trips early on to make any real progression.

I feel like I’ve done really well overall – I was actually a lot more productive this time around, writing >3000 lines of code in the 48H. Complaints were minimal, and the gameplay was attractive. Check out my creation timelapse below:

Tags: postmortem

First 10 hours or so was doing 1 frame/min, after that – 1/15 sec.

Here it is:

Shubshub  uploaded this Space Surface video in his Youtube channel Game Junk.

And in this other video we complete the game.

SPACE SURFACE

A few people seemed to enjoy it and so I thought I’d give it a shot and post my game here too.

It’s called “Keep The Gem!” 

It’s my first Ludum Dare Game, and the first game I made completely alone.

A Gameplay Gif. You should really try be quick, then you won’t get buried!

For the game, instructions and tips please follow the Link:

Play the Game!

Can you beat my Highscore of 52 seconds? Write your Highscore in the comment section

I’m quite happy with the result. Sure there are problems with the physics: Some glitches will happen and if you play for too long it will get very laggy. I added the possibility to drop bombs, so that it’s possible to destroy some bodies if you/and/or the diamond get stuck, and I think it’s fairly playable like that. Putting more work in the physics engine would have cost too much time, and I really wanted to give the game a arcade-like gamefeel, so I put a lot of effort into optical feedback and sounds.

Except for the two Gunsounds I made every sound and music on my Gameboy using LSDJ.

Most of the game was made on my Surface Pro 2 while sitting in the train and I was really surprised how well it went.

Tags: SuccessStory

It’s over and I’m late with this. Let’s do it anyways.

Our game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34500

I originally planned to participate alone, but I ended up with a couple of friends. We started 4am at Saturday (theme reveal time). You would think that’s early enough, wouldn’t you? We don’t, not anymore. We had a huge list of problems and bugs. I spent 6 hours fixing collision detection, and it still is buggy! I have no idea why it was so hard, but it was. We also found a huge memory leak in either HaxePunkTmx or Haxe’s Xml.parse, not sure which one. The loaded data just stays in the memory, unaccessable. Each piece of map takes 300MB of memory. Our graphics artist did absolutely great job, although he went solo in Day 2. That pushed us back too.

So, what was our game meant to be? A simple shoot’em’up in caves. You would have cleared the caves as your mission. Down there you would have got a flashback telling you that you’re on the wrong side. Time to stop the launch of the planet-destroying missile! None of that happened. No time.

We shot too far and we missed. But, even with all of that, we had a really great time. We’ll be joining next time too (at least I am)!

Results: I’ve had enough of Flash for forever now, so I’m targeting desktop and HTML5 from now on. I like CoffeeScript + CreateJS. Other recommendations?

Hello! My name’s Alex, I’m the guy that made 1/2 of the game “In search of an Artist” for this months Ludum Dare Jam, and I really wanted to write a little post-mortem of our first game jam experience.

So, here we go.

Let’s start with the Bad things:

• Impreparation. We really should have done more preparation before the actual Jam. I mean, we lost at least a day of a Ludum timer just setting up and brainstorming for ideas. As you can see, the latter was not very successfull.
• Prioritization and time management. We ended up spending at least 10 hours just animating and doing enemy AI, and only, like, 5 hours on actual level design, player controls, etc.
• Sleeping.  To believe our skype call timers, out of 72 hours of jam time, we only spend ~27 developing (plus ~7 hours of preparations). So, yeah. Don’t do that sleep thing. It’s really bad.

Now that we’re done with the things that killed us, let’s see what revives us (aka the Good):

• Mecanim animations. Despite of how time consuming that thing was, it ended up really awesome. I like it, people seem to like it. I just need to practice that stuff more and stop wasting too much time on it.
• Music and sounds. Thanks to our awesome Man of Code and a sound artist, also known as Andy, sound in our game ended up being on a pretty good level.

So yeah, to be honest, these two things above are the only things I’m satisfied with in our game right now. We could have done better, and we WILL do better next time.

Also, the game IS based on a true story. We really lost our graphics artist in the begining of the jam. So thats how the “art” style was born, if you’re wondering.

Anyway, thanks to everybody who left comments on our entry page, it really helps us to evaluate our work!

Best wishes, Holy Cow Studio.

Hello everybody! For start I want to say HUGE THANKS for all of your support. Guys you are THE BEST!!! So that’s why I’m going to give you this little video of me playing this absolute monstrosity of the game. Enjoy!

Tags: update

Hello everyone! We are team from Siberia, chilled heart of Mother Russia (so forgive me my english, i’ve been taught by wild bears) and It’s our first time with Ludum Dare. When ld29 stated it was morning of saturday here, so sleepy and hungry we came to an office,  where we all work (yes, we all work in one company), and started our brainstorm. At the beginning we had some really nice ideas like 3d-shooter, starcraft-like strategy and 2d-runner, but we’ve stopped on time manager, because, you know, other are too common today. So, we took time manager, spiced it with a little economics and decided that it should be planet. The plot is simple – evil professor frozen planet core, and now all humanity in danger, player should save people building rockets. To make it looks like a game we add some PvE – at first variant frozen core expanded linearly and sometimes pull out frozen chains, which killed people when reach surface. So, danger beneath surface, and you, hero, should save people and hold freeze by special warming satellites, which suddenly looks like Death Stars (any resemblance to persons living, dead, or fictional or situations past, present, or fictional is purely and completely coincidental). So with this ideas we stared.

This is red square on blank screen satellite prototype (you know, one of that russian satellites, which breaks into pieces on orbit). First of all, to make it work, we’ve made our own shine method to translate from cartesian to polar coordinate, and it made our work much more simple, really MUCH more. Satellites here already moving, but it’s hard to be seen at png. Moving by circle was resolved easily and dirty – every touch location translates to polar coordinates, than they cut to needed radius and translates back to cartesian. Nothing really interesting here, so go on.

    Planet prototype with frozen expanding core, and still invisible frozen chains (white dots expose start and end points of each chain. Expanding core was made with simple mask and to images of planet – normal and frozen. Chains (as you can see on next picture), made by overlapping images in direction from start point to end point.

Merged! Now satellites and chains hate each other. It was quite hard to made them work together and to throw heating event from satellite to chain. Here we decided that chains will not decrease smoothly, but will have HP and decrease to core after HP drops to zero (here comes 3d-shooter ideology). And here we decided that core will expand only when chain reach surface. Coz it should be game, not alarm clock.

Here comes econimics! And also our artist made background with stars, so now it looks like a planet. How it looks now you can see if you play our game

I think it’s already too much for one post, so, in conclusion, we made it with cocos2dx framework (wait for iOs build!) in a team of 5 people (artist and 4 programmers). Thank you for attention, hope you wasn’t bored. Bye!

So many brick walls this Ludum. I feared for the timelapse!

Good thing anything looks good when you speed it up and add a spiffy soundtrack.

Play The Underkeep

1) Dont get leathered with friends on Friday night.

2) Dont get leathered with friends on Saturday night.

3) Dont use Java OR dont bother trying to get past all the security hoops

involved in getting it online as an applet . (im sure they change with every little update)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=8824

cheers

how

I have done à timelapse for my LD game “The Sub Machine” !

Here is my compo page :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=26996

Sadly i didn’t participate that time with all the ‘Tower Defence parties’ war and all that, but that didn’t hold me back doing a TD this year.

Behold… Surface Defence:

Click image to play..

(Timelapse coming soon..)

I knew about Ludum Dare since 2006. But I believed that I don’t have enough relevant skills and never was even thinking about participating

But now I’m finally dare to do Ludum Dare.

So how was it? It was just amazing! I don’t even remember when did I have so much fun for the last time. I was looking at #ld48 twitter feed from time to time – it was just bloated with activity, everybody is doing something, posting screenshots, complaining about the lack of idea etc. It was very inspirational to say the least. Suddenly I was feeling connection with hundreds of people focused on the same things at the same time as me.

My Setup

So, enough of emotions, here are my conclusions:

Theme:

During the theme voting process I was skimming through the themes and trying to generate an idea for each of them. So basically when theme was revealed I already had my idea ready. Pretty simple concept – stealth gameplay involving digging tunnels to avoid enemies and reach target destination. Sounds simple enough for 48 hours. But it wasn’t. I failed, I really did.

What did go wrong:

I wasn’t able to calculate time properly and didn’t do even a half of what I really wanted. The most important – I didn’t do any audio, no sounds, no music, nothing. I consider it as the biggest flaw of my entry, I believe that the good audio in any game makes at least the half of it’s charm.

Another major flaw was the shortness of the game and lack of actual level design. I have made only one level and there is no design, just level.
Obviously without enough time I didn’t have a lot of content either, no additional objects on the map, no decorative stuff, nothing.

I also did write a lot of shitty code but I believe in this case it’s kind of a forgivable. Next time I will do better, I promise.

What did go right:

But not everything was so bad! According to the feedback so far my concept wasn’t too bad, it is pretty funny to play even though induces rage sometimes. People still find digging cool, who could think of that!

Maybe I don’t have a lot of content, but I believe the content I have is of pretty decent quality, I am in no way pixel art master so I am personally very happy with the result.

I have implemented a lot of interesting things I never did before in my whole life, made a little cutscene, animations, even simple AI. Damn I am good.

From programming side even if my code was’n in all cases beautiful I did a lot of interesting things and some of them I probably will post as open source to use as a little gists in the next LD. I have pretty much 3d game emulating 2d, nothing new, I know, but still… coool!
So that’s it. Game is done and I actually going to continue development if feedback will be positive enough. I am very happy with the results, it was great experience which I would like to repeat. See you next time!

Tools used: Monogame, Visual Studio 2013, Sublime Text, Paint.NET, Tiled, Chronolapse, SmartGIT.

Entry: Suck My Dig!

Time-lapse:

YouTube link. 

I updated Pond Tycoon (my continued version) with several GUI improvements.

To celebrate this, check out the gameplay video I released:

Check out the entry page to see more