Here is how we wanted the fight to be, but couldn’t make this happen on monday.

We like to start with thanking the people who left a comment. We really like to have feedback on our game. And we love reading your comments (we still get a kick out of it when someone gets eaten right away). Play it here!

Here’s what went well, -bad and what didn’t make it in:

What went well

First time working together
Concepting smooth
The brainstorm session before creating any assets or code
The controls of the playable character
Music (so dynamic!)
Beacons is a combination of a radar and stones to lure the worm

What went bad

Web player version is broken and we don’t know why
Created for the resolution of the web player version
The worms are not the smartest
Not enough information about how to play in the description (or beginning) of the game
Throwing beacons of the map
Could’ve used a better ending

What did not make it in

Save zones (rocks), because fighting 1 worm is easy
Multiple worms
Player stamina bar so the player only could dodge an X amount of times
Some worm graphics were replaced with simple ones
Gamepad support
Swallowing of the beacons by the worm
Grenades (and having the worm swallow them)
Radar (you can still see the green glow of the radar on the characters wrist)
Mouse support. Just felt better with keys

What we’d like to add (if we continue with Wormhunter)

Items or upgrades
Different types of weapons
Different types of worms
Co-op
More complex worm behaviour
Leaderboards

Some stats

Total plays 347
Worm wins 218
Player wins 71
No worm here? 58

Q&A

kyyrma: “The only thing that felt inconsistent was the actual beacon. Why would a tribal looking fellow have what appear to be small radios or something?”
The original plan was to have a lot more sci-fi stuff involved, like the radar and some grenades. It was gonna be a mix of a tribal style and kind of crappy/scrappy technology. All that ended up getting cut, and the beacons remained. So yeah, they’re a bit out of place.

Reinkout: “I felt like a black Kevin Bacon in tremors! Thanks for the game!”
Kevin Bacon will be included in the upcoming Wormhunter DLC

Moebius: “Also sometimes the worm just wouldn’t show up at all – sometimes it just ate me directly after the start”
The worms are not the smartest nor the bravest. There is always a worm each game and with the help of the beacons it can be found.

v_n_j: “I’m still using WinXP Maybe you’ll make a web version?”
Maybe, not sure yet.

Davidllanos22: “I missed being able to dodge in diagonal.”
That would work with gamepads, but those are not supported. It just did not feel good with a keyboard.

Bazid: “I’d like to see the idea expanded, with more things to collect and fight.”
So do we.

What is next?

We don’t know yet. That’s why we’d love to know what you like and dislike about Wormhunter.

Play it here!

Gameplay footage of Ocean Explorer is here. Don’t forget to Play+Rate this game here.

Small bug fixes (within Ludum Dare rules) was also made. Thank you all for great feedback. Game will be rewritten, polished and uploaded to mintarcade.com after this /compo is over. Follow my social channels to keep updated.

Hi there. I’m 13 and this is my first Ludum Dare competition, so don’t be surprised if I come up with a question.

I finished my game but only compiled for Windows. Apparently I can also port to Web. The LD guide also says Web entries are best – my question is: should I even bother?

Is it really so inconvenient to just download a zip folder? Who would even be looking to rate games on some Android device, and how many people even care about my game anyway? There are so many out there better than mine, it’s hardly a loss.

So what do you think? Should I make a Web port? How many ratings is not doing one likely to lose you? Are you really sat there thinking, “If only this kid had ported to Web so I can play it”? Do you even want to?

Are you really dying to play?

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35150

Many ideas to implement for the next release.
I’d love to hear suggestions and ideas as they enjoy playing it !!

Hey all!

Apparently, last night sometime we exceeded the bandwidth on our hosting account that was backing our entry. An unforeseen but not together terrible problem to have.

Fortunately, the terrorists won’t win. It’s back up!

So anyone who tried and wasn’t able to, please give it a shot. We are getting pretty good reviews for theme, so check it out.

Tags: #LD48 #LD29, update

My entry, Magma Surfer, is done!

I finished it a bit before the deadline, but I just didn’t have time to post this :3

The menu

Dodge the rocks!

And don’t die!

My high scores!

I’ve had plenty of positive feedback!

In hindsight, I should have added music. But it’s still fun!

I’ve already seen MANY awesome entries. Good job guys!

Also check out the other entry I took part in (I did the graphics for it): Super Scrool Bros by eLLectron

Thanks

Sorry for the early testers. Now launch crash bug have been fixed!

Thanks to your comments, we have decided to make a “full game” version later (included boss fight, more environments and a gamepad support) . thanks a lot!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=3211

ALERT! The memes have taken over the under world! Its up to you to knock-em-out! Welcome to Whack-a-Meme! Hit those crazy meme’s back into their holes in this fun, and past paced game. Don’t hit the grapes! You’ll lose health. Can you get the most points?

rate my game!

I used a base code that i wrote a week ago for this LD. Its just the basic skeleton stuff that i write all the time when making my games so i decided to just save some time and have files that have these repetitive things.

i Wasted a lot time coding for the reading scripts and maps. Adding more objects to the game also was hard, next time I’ll add the complete base code to make it like a sandbox. The last hard part was drawing and getting the levels right.

About the levels: I didn’t have code for switching between maps so that was a big problem since i wanted at first to make the game to be able to generate the levels randomly and you just got to find a way out. I also added keys and doors but i couldn’t use them this time. Because i didn’t make it to generate randomly i had to make the levels myself, so that was very hard. Of course when making the map randomly you don’t make a big thing, you just create a part of a map that represents for example a 3 way hall or just an empty room.

Another thing i didn’t finished was the particle, bullets and gun system. i manage to get the Chainsaw system done but the others are now kind of bad. You have to hold “fire” (left click) to make the gun to be able to work instead of just making clicks. The particles where terrible, just plain squares like the bullets. I also was planning to add like gore to the game when killing the monsters with the chainsaw or the guns but i didn’t have time.

The final result for me is: incomplete, i wanted to add a lot of stuff to my game but there was no time .
Conclusion: Make a sandbox 2D engine. (:

Entry of my game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=7045

I hope you guys had fun because i did even tho i didn’t finished. Great work to all i love your games, i just play 20 , soon I will play a lot (: have a good/day/night. Also here is my timelapse video:

If you haven’t already rated it, make sure to check out Abstraction!

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

Background

I didn’t come up with any clever ideas so I started with creating the diving controls and let the game take shape during the development.

Stuff to improve

• The pearls were too big, making finding them too easy.
• Make some parts of the terrain much higher to make it less plain and boring
• Add underwater ruins. Making pearl diving more interesting and challenging. Some pearls could be hidden inside the ruins.
• Some people reported they couldn’t get the radar work, actually it’s a sonar. Maybe they didn’t understand how it works or there is a bug.
• The camera is in fixed position in relation to the player’s position. It’s a lazy solution and I want to add a proper camera follow that doesn’t go behind walls etc.
• The player model is mirthless and animations of it are unwieldy. I spent over 3 hours to model the player and add animations. It’s been always such time consuming process.
• I don’t have Unity Pro, so I couldn’t add any fancy post-processed water effects.  Also I made the fog bright instead of dark as it would be logical way to make an underwater scenery. I realized that just in last hours and didn’t want to change the art style anymore because it looked good nevertheless. The abstract/low poly/minimalist style allowed the artistic freedom.

Stuff that was alright

• I believe this is my best ludum dare  graphics wise.
• I’m still proud of diving controls even though I just tried to mimic super mario 64 diving controls.
• Randomized sea plants and creatures look cool!

What next

I’ll consider making a post compo version. Depends if I have enough motivation, time and if I see it valuable. I’m also making a minimalist strategy game prototype. Follow me on twitter for updates www.twitter.com/samoojam

Play and rate!

Pearl Diver

ART

Beneath the Surface, our original idea was to do something based on the adventure time episode revolving around having the best armor. It involved a David figure going up against Goliaths’ with a sling, Goliaths’ would be this ridiculously armor clad beings and David was this stripped down figure. Some cornball moral about it’s what’s underneath that counts.

Due to time constraints and judging by how I was feeling I didn’t think I’d be able to make all those graphics. We made the call to reuse the player graphics while fitting them inside a story about clones inspired by b scifi and bad japanese horror movies. Which is what the game is now.

I’m very familiar with drawing and painting nude figures so that was fun animating them and putting them in game. I liked how raw and bodily the animations were, so I wanted to do more with making things feel realistic and good or even exaggerate the realism but I think that’d be another game.

I’m usually not a fan of topdown perspective games, or never thought of making one, they just never strike me as visually interesting but this one was fun.  All in all really enjoyed this jam and the game we made, and hope to continue polishing it here and there.

keo

TECH

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt by doing numerous game jams over the years, it’s that simplicity is the game jammer’s best friend. I feel like our game was successful in this regard. We decided on a simple game mechanic, and refined/polished it until the game felt good. Having that extra time to polish your game makes all the difference between whether a game is fun or clunky.

We had one programmer, one artist, and one musician, so our development had a neat division of labor. Because our game idea was simple enough, this gave me full control over the codebase, letting me prototype extremely quickly. I could hack away without worrying about someone else having to use my code.

I’m glad we explored a new genre to make a polished title. I’d call this Ludum Dare a success. Here’s to the next one!

ekun

You can play RAW here

Hi! I just wanted to say that I’ve ported my my game “I Remember Alice” for the web, and you should now be able to play it in Chrome or firefox! Just click here to go to my entry page, or click on one of the images below.

So, my game, Beneath The Mirrors’ Surface, is going pretty well, in my opinion. it may not win, but the response I’m getting is pretty darn good. However, one of the main issues I hear is the controls. Either being “sticky”, or too close together. In this light, I am going to release a “post-compo” version, with keybinding. This is going to require quite a bit of change, such as new menus, title screen layout etc, which I think is too much of a change to get away with slipping in as a bug fix. On top of this, I am going to periodically update that version with new features and improved levels, making the earlier ones easier and adding more, with a larger story, and more difficulty towards the end, possibly with some new bosses too.
Anyway, just wanted to put that out there and, if you can, please check out my game.
And, with that, I bid you farewell!

Hello Ludum Dare contestants and aficionados!

Allow us to introduce ourselves; We are The Button Masher Bros.! We play da vidjas and make da funnies on the youtubes.

We are going to be releasing a set of videos (promo can be enjoyed here) highlighting the very best of what Ludum Dare has to offer! With 2497 (WOWZERS!) submissions, there’s no way we can play them all. We want you to help us by sending us your favorite submissions!

You can comment on the promo video linked above, comment below, or tweet your favorite submissions to us at:

@ButtonMasherBro – Show,

@MathBlasterRitz – Chris,

or @jwowBMB – Josh.

Thank all of you in advance!

******

UPDATE! (5/7/14)

After a week of shooting/editing we are proud to present the first in our series: Ludum Dare to Believe!

With 2497 submissions, there was no way we could play them all.

Luckily Reddit, twitter, and youtubers all stepped up to give us suggestions – and for that we thank you immensely!

If you like the games you see, be sure to check them out of Ludumdare.com and let the developers know what you think!

Today we will be highlighting:

Title: Surf Camp: The Legend of the Surf Ace
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: Gertjohnny
Link:http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=22774

Title: Deepeon
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Hacksaw Unit
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=17731

Title: Senilescape
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Xaychru04
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=16472

Finally, we’d love to hear what you think!
You can comment on the episode linked above, comment in this thread, or tweet your favorite submissions to us at: @ButtonMasherBro – Show, @MathBlasterRitz – Chris, or @jwowBMB – Josh.

Added Windows version for those who have trouble with Unity Web Player!

Play & Rate!

After a long time of fighting around with MinGW I managed to get my game running on Windows.

Download (Windows)

play denudation

each Ludum Dare event, I challenge myself to try something that I’ve never done before.

this time, I wanted to make a game using a physics engine, feature a multi-stage boss battle, and focus on fun gameplay.

this turned out to be far trickier than I expected and I though I ended up having to do a ton of math (and getting very little sleep!), I am incredibly satisfied with the results.

I used the nape physics library for actionscript, and used the figure app to generate the music.

 I went with an even lower-res art style than usual this time. I felt like it would be something fun and new to try, and it fit well with the game mechanics.

I had a blast making this game, and I learned many new skills that I’m excited to use in future Ludum Dare events!

Tags: boss fights, physics, pixel

Got around to putting a timelapse together for Seamless, my LD29 48hr entry.

Things I’ve learned from putting the timelapse together:

– I pull lots of weird faces when I’m doing gamedev
– I stick my tongue out when I’m concentrating
– Apparently I don’t have the ability to sit still for five minutes!

Enjoy the vid and please check out the game!

I used Gawker to record the cam footage, InstantShot! to automate screenshots, Zeitraffer to stitch them together, and iMovie to add the titles and picture-in-picture effect. There are some nice bits early on of me working on the pixel art!

The music is Predictable Action, one of my own compositions from a few years ago.

You can play and rate Seamless here

Hi !

If you tried my jam entry “Graveyard Keeper” and found it too easy to finish, you will probably want to try the post-compo version, which is a little harder.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=7170

I wrote a* Post Mortem

It’s only in german BUT it has WIP drawings and links to timelapse vids \o/

http://henklein.com/post/84345743696

If you just want to play (and rate?) the game:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=12061

* my very first

Tags: postmortem

I’ve had quite a few wonderful comments about the game’s soundtrack (thank you!), so I decided to upload it to the game page.

Yes, I know you can get the files by downloading the game anyway, but I’ve included quite a bit extra for those who download the soundtrack. In the zip file you’ll find:

• Four audio files: the theme track, the piano variation used later, a looped version of the piano variation, and an unused piano theme that was later replaced by the piano variation.
• Scores for each track. They aren’t the most intricate scores — after all, I wrote them up quickly in Sibelius for the purposes of importing the midi into Cubase — but they are detailed enough, and may be of interest to someone.

–Snoother

Eat’em All

Play and Rate

Well after two days of intense sleeping, it’s time to do the post mortem of our first Ludum Dare.

What went right

• The concept seems good, some say “Flappy Shark” but it’s  bit different
• Funny
• Easy to understand
• Fast and frustrating

What went wrong

• Maybe to much frustrating?  (Damn jellyfish…)
• Well, the graphics are nice to me, but they can be much better
• The music… When you’re not musician it’s hard, really really hard to do a little music
• Maybe that we started one day after the beginning ?

What i did not had the time to do it

• Simple stuff like menu, pause…
• Add some fishes and humans

What I will do after

• Do what I did not have the time
• Add some gameplay elements
• Port it on other platforms

So see you next time and do better games 😀

Coquinounet (from France !)

We’ve just uploaded a gameplay video of our LD entry. Check it out if you haven’t played the game yet/haven’t got time to play.

The game can be found here:

Thanks!

Kuchalu

So… I kinda, uh… Made a game, but the game was poop, then I pressed some buttons and now it is less poop. You can put your hands on that poop right…. HERE!

VERSION 1.1!! FOR YOUUUUUU!

New

• Score based on kills rather than depth (SO YOU DON’T RUN AWAY, PUSS!)

Fixed

• You can now play with an AZERTY keyboard or with the Arrow Keys (BECAUSE FRENCHIES OR CASUALS OR BOTH!)
• Major bug that didn’t bring enemies into action (604.37% MORE MOLES, BOY!)
• Power-ups now spawn every 30 seconds (BECAUSE some WHINED ABOUT THEIR LUCK!)
• Music stacking when restarting the game (BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE GOOD TASTE IN MUSIC!)
• Music stacking when using the menu (BECAUSE YOU STILL DON’T HAVE GOOD TASTE IN MUSIC!)

Minor Changes

• Added “pts.” at the end of the score (SO YOUR LIL’ BRAIN GETS IT!)
• You can now use an AZERTY keyboard or the Arroy Keys to navigate the menus (I DON’T WANNA MAKE ANY MORE DULL JOKES….)
• You can use Enter to navigate the menus
• Pressing ESC during gameplay takes you back to the menu rather than quit
• Pressing ESC at Options screen takes you back to the menu

ALRIGHT SO GO PLAY THIS THING RIGHT NOW SO NOW I CAN GO TO SLEEP PLEASE

G’night…

Hey there, just uploaded a timelapse of the development of Sepsis

First time doing a timelapse, it’s really cool looking at all the work you did like that!
If you feel like playing and rating our entry here’s the link: Sepsis
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=15244

Play and review my submission: Dead men tell no tales. Comments & critique very welcome.

Ah, my first LD. It was awesome, I’m definitely hyped for doing it again. I’ve been meaning to do one for awhile but there was always something getting in the way. This time I had been learning Unity for 2-3 weeks and with a free weekend ahead of me and an itch to make something fun, I jumped all in.

I wanted to do a SIM / tactical game, where you didn’t have direct controls over the player. I decided to go for a defence style game, but instead of the usual defence turrets, you spawned AI controlled characters (Pirates, Yaargh!)  to fight for you.

Dead men tell no tales

The good:

• Was able to get it into a fully playable “finished” state
• Really pleased with how the visuals turned out considering the problems I ran into with animations and sprite sheets (see below)
• Has been well received in the reviews, thanks!
• Love how the boat rocks in the background, I was actually playing around with random values trying to align my camera when I noticed the cool effect rotate was having. I was able to code up a quick script to get the boat rocking in about 5 minutes.
• Put the 3 weeks of unity tutorials I had been doing into solid practice.

The bad:

As many of you can relate, I had too many ideas and ultimately had to cut many of them out to get it done in time.

• There were some critical gameplay elements missing:
  • Able to upgrade the pirates – this would have added a whole new level of gameplay
  • Different enemy types – all the code was done for 3 more different types. Some flying enemies poisoned you, others were like bosses with high hit points and damage. I didn’t have time to do the visuals though, quite gutted about that!
  • Music – Even something simple would have added much in terms of immersion
  • UI / Interface – again, ran out of time.
• Struggled with Unity’s animation system – I just didn’t have any experience with it, it slowed me down quite a bit on the Sunday
• Ran into problems with image / sprite sheet resolution – again, due to lack of experience with Unity this took up alot of Sunday’s time.
• The difficulty balance is whack. Unless you know what you’re doing, the first 7 waves are brutal. If you make it past that you pretty much have unlimited cash and barely a chance of dying. Still, it’s quite fun steam rolling everything in sight, kinda feels like you just trained the baddest ass Pirates the world has ever seen.

The future:

I’m pretty sure I’m going to continue working on it. It’s quite far from how I imagined it, so with a little luck and a big push I’ll get it there. I’ll post again if there are any updates or you can follow me @aaronjbaptiste  and i’ll keep you posted there.

See you next time

By Daniel Smith and Paul Potgieter, with music by Tim Harbour

During LD29 we produced No Hawking, a game we’re both proud of. But it didn’t go exactly to plan, and we fell far short of our initial design. We now examine the process so that we can get closer to our mark in LD30.

The making of No Hawking went like this:

WRONG

Planning:

• We forgot to name our group.
• We aimed too high, and as a result did get core gameplay in place until the last day.
• First release build was attempted after deadline (it failed… continuously)
• Dan forgot to pack a toothbrush.
• We burnt out each day instead of sleeping at regular intervals. This disrupted the flow of development.

Technical:

• We used an interpreted language with horrible garbage collection and no native threading support.
• Custom Engines take a lot of time, which we didn’t have.
• We used a graphics framework that wasn’t actually finished :’|
• We used a release tool that didn’t “just work” and consequently spent the last frantic minutes just getting a distributable build done.

RIGHT

• We had an incredible brain storming session right after the theme was announced and came up with a design really quickly.
• We built a “working” custom engine during LD!
• Despite everything that went wrong, we managed to make a playable game with objectives, obstacles, and win/end states.
• We got enough sleep. (Although it was all over the place)
• We had pizza and fizzers… a lot of fizzers!
• We didn’t give up.
• We had fun!

NEXT TIME

• Use finished engine/framework etc…
• Release early, release often
• Sleep properly.
• Have more fun!

CONCLUSION

• Ludum dare is a time for experimenting with game design but not a time to create a whole engine from scratch
• Ludum Dare is fun!

There will definitely be a more complete Post-LD version.

Tags: gosu, jam, no-hawking, post-mortem, ruby

Lets see. Ludum Dare 29! Oh yeah! It was my first (and not last) ludum dare.
I created a puzzle game known as IO, The games mechanics were to shoot the
red tank, by reflecting the bullets of of mirrors, igniting bombs, blowing up
bricks and using portals. Original I had hoped to create ALOT more content,
But for 72 hours (Of which I porbably only worked 13) I was proud of myself.
I created a basic click n’ place system for the mirrors and a very pixel style
for the game, of which Star made the graphics.

What went well :

• I finished the game!
• I created (some) challenging levels!
• Used a Portal (Valve Game) refrence/element!
• Found a good soundtrack!
• Used trusty ol’ sfxr!
• Created a readmeplzineedtoberead.txt I was proud of!
• LAMPS!

What did not go well :

• I did not create the many other puzzle elements I had designed
• Made a cruddy meny/you won screen
• Failed to create many levels
• Failed to crate more than 2 challenging levels
• Spelling errors
• My game did not relate enough to the theme
• My time lapse died out D:
• BUGS!
• Bombs not removable once placed
• Unremovable elements… removable (pre-placed portals)
• 2 entry, 1 exit portal failure (which then ruined the difficulty of level 15)

But after this journey, I gained a game, To cherish, love and polish at my will. (when im not too lazy)
Oh, and some lovely reviews!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33501 – Give it a play

Ludum Dare #29 Entry: SkyManta

Released for: Browser | Windows | Oculus Rift

Made by @snickersnax and @zite00

Idea

I have no idea where the manta ray thing came from, but it seems like a logical leap. They look like they could fly pretty fast, right? My partner and I talked through the first iteration: a reverse runner in a fixed lane moving toward the horizon, constantly speeding up as you dodge or shoot at bad things and use the water as drag for slowing yourself down (suitable for the “Beneath the Surface” theme).

Process

My personal goals were for this to be both a learning process and a test of whether Zite and I could reasonably work together. The two of us settled on a first iteration and got to work. Virtually everything game-related I’ve done has been in 2D, so this necessitated me learning how to model, rig and animate in Blender right off the bat as fast as possible.

Zite stayed up all of Friday to build out the first working prototype, I spent most of the first 24 hrs editing the manta ray model heavily and then learning how to rig from scratch. We reconvened after the prototype was done to talk about what was working and what wasn’t in terms of the camera view, where and how the laser was firing — leave all that graphics stuff for later because that stuff doesn’t matter if the game doesn’t fundamentally work.

Sleep deprivation began to set in and design decisions came down to whether it passed the “does it sound like a good idea?” test. I made a list of all the features we talked about and culled the nice-to-haves from the core functionality. Our priorities: character attacks, enemies, the Octopod boss, and whether it would port nicely to the Oculus Rift.

We playtested throughout the game jam, but bug fixes and last-minute tweaking and things breaking prevented us from working on other more important things (which were brought up over and over again by submission reviewers after we submitted).

What worked?

Iterate, iterate, iterate. Sometimes it’s hard to let a bad idea go! We talked through design features in a ruthlessly objective fashion.

The graphics turned out surprisingly nice, mostly freebies on the Unity Asset Store and elsewhere. The pre-made assets saved a ton of time in the face of me needing to learn an entirely new program from scratch. Blender’s UI is like a design nightmare out of 1998, but I was in “go big or go home” mode and figured it out with the help of countless tutorials. (Thanks internet!)

I love the logo, super fun to design, A++ would make again.

What didn’t work?

Halfway through, we realized we didn’t have a story for why any of this was happening. Who are you, little Sky Manta, and where did you come from? Sleep deprivation didn’t exactly come to the rescue on this one either — keep it silly, or make it serious? In the figurative 11th hour, we decided it was more important to nail one instead of do both poorly. Which one we chose to accomplish is left as an exercise to the reader.

Probably don’t use game jams to learn how to do basic, major things like 3D modeling or rigging. Unless you’re ok with your project coming out like ours, which in that case shine on you crazy diamond.

Sleep : good work :: caffeine : this game.

User feedback

The aiming was pretty universally annoying, so we tweaked the player character positioning and the angle of fire to dead center of the screen. The “pew pew” sound effect also got annoying fast, and we really should have replaced it before we submitted, but oh well. I’m glad people are finding it as fun to play as we intended!

Thank god this post is almost over

We ended up porting it to the Rift because Zite has one. It felt really cool to be inside of the world we had just created, the ocean looks awesome and somehow it just feels more natural to navigate the game world we made in the Rift as opposed to on PC, so if you have a Rift you should definitely try it out.

I’ll definitely be doing a game jam again in the future — it’s been a great way to force myself to work and make games in ways I usually don’t. Yay learning! \o/

Fixed a ridiculous amount of bugs and it finally runs on HTML5 without trouble! This means you can play it on your browser, so no pesky downloads anymoreee! 😀

Tomorrow (today, since it’s midnight and I’m about to go to bed) is a public holiday here in South Africa, so I’ve decided to put it into adding some stuff for my LD game Super Landshark Missile Attack – not for the compo of course  I’ve had some really invaluable feedback from everyone who’s ever played and engaged with me, so thanks so much 😀

So what would YOU like to see in Landshark? What did YOU find missing/too much/don’t touch? I will try my damnedest best to get to make LANDSHARK as good as it can be, but the better the input and feedback the better I can do it in the very limited time I have… So – please help me jump this shark! 😀

Play SUPER LANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK here! Then tell me what you’d like in it! 😀

Thanks guys!

Background

This was my 6th year doing Ludum Dare and I had a really great experience. I made a game called In the Black–which ended up being very different from the kind of games I’ve made for Ludum Dare in the past.

I decided to go all out this time and setup a livestream of my development over on my Twitch TV channel. It was fun having different people stop by during the weekend and say hello and chat a bit. Plus, it helped make me more comfortable with being on camera–which I really don’t like all that much–it worked out pretty good! I also recorded a timelapse video of my development where I compressed 30+ hours of development down into minutes.

Since I have been pondering game design ideas involving stats and narrative recently, I knew I wanted to make a game that made use of something similar. These kinds of games are a new genre for me as a creator, but I’m mostly pleased with what I ended up with at the conclusion of the 48hr competition.

Once the theme Beneath the Surface was announced, I knew there would probably be a lot of games involving mining or digging. I wanted to do a game about mining as well, but take an approach that I felt would likely be fairly unique. I decided that the role the player would perform in my game would be managing a mine from afar through dialog choices, rather than have them actively going down into the mine. In fact, my game was going to display the action entirely in story.

I determined that the game would take place in a small mining town placed roughly in the old west. This would also fit well with me wanting to write a banjo tune or two for the game. I play clawhammer banjo and have wanted to feature some of my music in a game for a long while now. That worked out really well.

The premise of the game is that you have been sent out west by your boss to get the town’s failing mine operation back up and running profitably. You have 10 weeks to earn $10,000–or else! The fun of the game was designed to come from wrapping the simulation stats in narrative and choices. So, even though you are tweaking numbers to achieve a profitable balance, you’d feel more like you were making story based choices.

What Went Right

I had my game idea pretty early on. That is always a major benefit in a short competition timeframe like Ludum Dare. I was able to quickly create a design document that detailed a first pass on the stat system. Initially the game would track stats on three things, the mine, the workers, and the manager (the role of the player.)

The mine attributes were profit, danger level, and efficiency and the worker attributes were fear, happiness, and unrest. Lastly, the attributes of the manager were going to be greed, compassion, and ruthlessness. Each week of the game, the player would get to focus on a particular area to make their choices about how to manage the mine.

I was going to use either Flash or Unity or this game. They are both amazingly fast to prototype in. Largely my decision to go with Flash had to do with wanting to make everything from scratch for the competition. Old school style! The plugins I use a lot of in Unity are not free and I wanted to be able to provide the full source for my game, not a hobbled version. Using Flash solved this for me as I could create everything I needed.

Since the game was going to be mostly text, I knew I had a lot of time saved up that wouldn’t be used on art. That was going to be needed because I’m fairly slow at writing still and I labor over it.

The basic dialog system and main game flow were finished pretty quickly during the first full day. I knew how all the infrastructure would work. The tech was finished! Now I just needed to finish the design of the actual stats and how the player interacted with them.

With only 6 hours remaining in the competition, I was almost ready to admit defeat and throw in the towel. I can’t believe how close I came! I talked myself down though and compromised by taking a walk to get away from the computer. Even though I only walked for 30 minutes or so, and even though I felt I had no great epiphany during my walk, when I returned to my workspace I suddenly saw what I had to do in my mind’s eye. I came up with a brutal triage plan and changed the design by cutting almost half of the existing system out! This simplified and clarified things greatly and I was able to get the system coded and working well enough to actually play and balance it. Finally, I was on the right track!

As far as music goes, this was the easiest time I’ve ever had with the soundtrack on a Ludum Dare game. I’ve been playing banjo about eight years now or so and have never actually used any in one of my games. I play a lot though and it is almost always my own original instrumentals. I just love to compose tune after tune. All the time spent coming up with tunes on the fly made it fun to sit down near the end of the competition and create a tune I felt fit the old west town quite well. Here is a video of me playing the main soundtrack from the game just for fun!

What Went Wrong

As I mentioned above, nailing down the specifics of the actual gameplay stats proved incredibly challenging. As long as the stat design was foggy, I couldn’t effectively code what was supposed to happen. You need to understand the system you are trying to represent with cold hard logic after all! I was struggling with the scope of designing and balancing three areas (mines, workers, manager) that had three attributes each. Plus, I wasn’t certain as to how the attributes affected the other areas. I was worried that some of the stats were actually just inverses of the others rather than uniquely on their own axis.

I got held up a long time by having profit be a stat. Initially I had wanted to make the game more abstract and so instead of tracking money and expenses (which yields profit) I attempt to track just a profit type variable. The problem with that became apparent for most of the prototype’s development. It just didn’t make sense in my head. I kept wanting to think of it as a usable number. It took me too long to realize I needed to change this.

I ran out of time on wrapping as much of the system in narrative. I wanted to further obscure the number in the game beneath well written dialog. I’m happy with what I managed to wrap with words, but I could have done much more.

I ran out of time to add more random events and flavor text based on game state. I really wanted to have a chance to incorporate more random events that provided choices for the player to respond. These events–and how the player handled them–would further shape the mine.

Conclusion

I’m very happy with the game I got out of this Ludum Dare. I also know that I came so close to quitting, yet somehow held on and turned it around into a game that was still very playable–even if it wasn’t my original full realization. It seems that people have been really positive about it so far too with the majority of the players being able to successfully complete it! It is also encouraging that the players have been really enjoying the music too!

Here is my Ludum Dare game page for voting and feedback. If you leave me feedback, I will leave you feedback on your game! Thanks for reading and playing.

Tags: banjo, Dialog, mines, mining, narrative, postmortem

A let’s play video of William the Wopol

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=4192

This is version 1.1 – Post Dare (some bugs fixed, enemies added)

Tags: postmortem, SuccessStory

First of all, here is our entry: check it out

Inner War

This was our first time entering Ludum Dare. We are a team of two and we have one released game so far. One of the problems we had when we made our first game was planning. So we thought the Ludum Dare Jam was a good place to test and refine our planning abilities.

What Worked

1. As I said, our goal was to see if we are able to think of an idea and then finish it within the time limit. We succeeded at that! At this point everything else is just a bonus!
2. The idea. I think we have a good concept here. What we basically did was replace the A B C choices in dialogue trees with a minigame and we think it’s an exciting idea. (and we believe we can take to many directions in the future)
3. The production values. Admittedly, we did pull characters from Lost Echo and most of the music was from bits and pieces I had already written in the past, but it still surprised us how much we were able to produce in the 3 days. I also really like the splitscreen we did.

What Sort of Worked

1. The physics. It was the first time we worked with Unity’s physics. I realise it’s a Ludum Dare sin to use things you are completely unfamiliar with, but we managed to pull something usable out of it. But at the same time, the block and push moves are completely unreliable.

What didn’t Work

1. The level design. The 4 stages in the game are, well, very basic. That’s not exactly bad, we were going for more of a proof of concept game here, so the stages being barebones is fine. But at one point, we realised the gameplay would feel better if we allowed the player to move while he was attacking, or he had a bit of a faster walk speed, but we didn’t do any of that, because the stages were pretty basic and the game would have been way too easy.
2. The story. Well… There isn’t much of it. And what’s there is pretty basic. Which is fine, but it felt really cheesy when we tried to make somewhat “moody” endings, that had little to no build-up. In the end, it works as a proof of concept, but that’s all.

Conclusions

Regardless of what kind of ranks we get (although I have to say, the comments we are getting are generally positive and we are really happy about that!), our first Ludum Dare was a success for us. We also have a concept in our hands now that we like. There were a ton of ideas we had during development that we immediately scrapped because of lack of time. Hopefully we’ll be able to revisit the concept and make a complete game out of it.

Thank you all. This Ludum Dare has been amazing.

Tags: innerwar, kickback, ld29, postmortem, unity

Last weekend was Ludum Dare Game Jam again, and this time the theme was “Beneath the Surface”. For this game jam we deliberately tried to approach this with a very small team: Jory Schossau, Clifford Bohm, and me.

The second decision we made beforehand was to relax about the topic and focus more on making a nice game then necessarily letting the topic dictate everything. As it turns out, this years topic was very much in line with the ideas we had. Our first idea was about a Marble Madness variant. I read a developer comment quite a while ago, and one idea they discarded was to have a little bump that pushes the marbles around, rather than the mechanic they finall used. We added a couple of quirks to either make the feel of the game darker, or more surreal, we asked if we want to go with this or not. Jory had the idea to question what actually happens to all the line in Tetris and where the tiles come from? The idea was to continue that game “Beneath the Surface” and to explain those two questions.

After that getting to the fundamental game mechanic was easy, what wasn’t easy was to answer the question if the game would be fun. Cliff pulled out a couple of colored blocks from another game, and we tried that by hand, moving blocks over the table. I can not recommend doing something like this for every game you make: Prototype. This little messing around with blocks had two great effects: We all knew what the game mechanic would actually look like (something we forgot last time), and we got a very good intuition that this would really work as a game.

I have to say that from a coding point of view, our game which we quickly baptized sirtet, wouldn’t be hard to code. We knew that the hardest part would be to get the game exactly right, responsive, and also have the right difficulty. Jory also always wanted to have time to polish a game rather than throw it together in the last 30 minutes… wise decision.

While Cliff has no background in Flash AS3, we still decided on doing it in flash, because Jory and I were the ones who had to do most of the coding. We also used Starling as the graphics engine. Mostly because I use its derivative Sparrow for everything on the iPhone, but also because Jory and I did most things Flash related in Starling as well. I can not recomment Startling or Sparrow enough, and I use it as my role model for documentation and tutorials, that’s how great it is!

The next code question we had to answer was GitHub or Dropbox? Every same programmer should choose GitHub, but since Jory and I were anyways coding in the same room, and because we both wanted to understand what each others code does, we decided to use Dropbox. Once in a while we announced that we were done with a particular part, and either of us merged the components that the other one coded into the current project. This is a little less save than GitHub, and also requires a much higher level of synchronisation, but it also forces you to stay within you own class or context. If I want a behavior for one of the tiles, I ask jory to implement it on his end, and I make up the necessary interface on my end. Once the code is there, we just merge. Another advantage of this approach is that we have a quick dialog about what features we implement, and where each other is within the project.

All in all, coding was quite relaxed on my end, and a bit more intense on Jory’s end. But I think Jory just pays more attention to what he does than I do… so at least someone is on top of everything. Because we wanted to release the game on Kongregate, we also included the Kongregate API that keeps track of stats and highscores.

Cliff was mostly responsible for art, aestetics, and support. I will talk about the nice discussions about computational evolution, Avida, the nature of science, and pyhton scripting another time.

Check out the Screenshot, very 8 bit pixel art like:

Please check out the game and enjoy!

Thanks to all participants, I think we can be proud, Cheers Arend

“Beneath the surface” was really one of my favorite themes of all LDs that I took part.

“Hammerhead in the sea of monsters” puts you in control of a research submarine in a sea full of gigantic hostile creatures.
The initial idea was to gain resources from killed creatures to upgrade the sub. The final objective would be the oceans bottom where player fights a kraken-like screen sized monster. Time allowed me to reach at near 65% of this.

Too much effort was wasted with code in features that I never used: lots of AI on creatures attacking each other; devices that could get damaged and start to malfunction; many other devices (sonar, spot lights).

Result is that by sunday 12:00pm I barely had a playable gameplay with lot of code missing and no graphics – entire game was on placeholders. Lot of things had to be cut and graphics rushed. Well some placeholders stayed – Yes, if you find a giant cylinder swimming at depths that was suposed to be the hardest creature of the game =D

I have to say that I really liked the end result. The game got its atmosphere and have a clear path to be further developed. I’m planning more creatures, more devices and the final kraken.

Well, true is that this is the 3rd time that I promise a post compo version from my entries but at least one of them, the last one from LD 28, Hard Point, finally is ready in its full form:

www.arcadiumplayware.com/Hard.Point.html

Thank you all for another high class compo, I’m on my way to rate at least 200 of the games.

See you ate LD 30!

I created a brief gameplay video of one of the levels in my LD29 entry Tiny Haunt.  Take a peek below.  Or better yet, play it now!

Tags: gameplay, jam, ld29, tiny haunt, video

I wrote up a postpartum (aka postmortem) on my personal blog. I’m not sure what the rules/opinions are about cross-posting, so I’ll just link to it from here.

Ludum Dare 29 Postpartum

Tags: #LD48 #LD29, ld29, postmortem, postpartum, timelapse

Hi!

> play Get Beneath The Surface <

have you managed to finish all the 10 levels in the game??

if you keep getting stuck like this:

I’m here to tell you I’ve left a hidden “cheat” inside to help you not get mad and finish the game.

Go find it out!

> play Get Beneath The Surface <

Hello, everyone! This is my first time to join Ludum Dare and this is my game for the Jam – Fishing On The Ice. I made this game on my own and intended to finish it within 48 hours and submit to the Compo, but unfortunately failed the challenge, which is sort of a pity, but I do like and enjoyed Ludum Dare because it is a good experience, especially for someone like me who’s super new to game making. Although the event only last for 72 hours, it actually pushed me to learn some new stuff, which is crazy… but feels amazing, too. And, of course, I’ve still got a lot of things to learn.

Here’s some screenshots of my game:

The language I used is ActionScript 3, which I have some experience with. And the text editor I use is FlashDevelop, which is quite handy. And I also used the flixel library because it has some pretty nice features, though the art style of the game is not the pixelated kind.

As for the past two days, I got busy preparing for my midterm exams, so I didn’t worry about the game too much once I finished it. And I should admit that this game kind of lacks potential for further development. After all, in the first place, I designed it to aim to be finished in a short time and provide a short gaming experience to players. However, last night, I unintentionally came back and checked my game, and I found that there were comments, which was a little bit out of my expectation because I do think I really rushed to finish it. The suggestions in the comments are very good. I appreciate very much and really got inspired by them! So, many thanks to people who kindly give their suggestions! Perhaps I will make some minor updates to the game soon or later.

I think that there’s some feature in the game that is a bit hard to discover. I guess my game’s introduction is not very well done… Some important things are left to players to discover. For example, the fishing pole is actually a torpedo defense weapon! You can just fish torpedo with it! After fishing a torpedo, just hold it in water for a while, and it will explode. You can pull it up if you want, and let it blow up right in front of your face. There is very little penalty for doing that.

If you read this post through till here, thank you very much for bearing me for being nagging. Hope you enjoy my game and enjoy making games, too!

Finally, many thanks to UW’s GameDev Club people. I’ve learned a lot from you guys and you’re all super awesome!

Hello everyone! We submitted a small little game yesterday for the LD 29 Jam and I wanted to write a post about the process that we took, how things were planned and what went right and wrong! Click here to play it!

Initial Game Design: (French google doc stating our ideas)

The first thing to do was trying to find an idea for the game. We knew we wanted 3d-ish graphics because the strength of our engine was mostly the rendering part. We had a lot of ideas but the best one was a Canabalt style game with an “under the surface” level.

We had a lot of ideas for the theme of the runner. The “above ground” would be a kind of desert/canyon where there would be sandstorms that would push you faster or slow you down. It would also have quicksand that would bring you to the underworld when you step into it. We also planned on adding traps like falling bridges or fireball falling on your head!

For the underworld, we wanted to have something really dark, that would be painful to experiment to represent a bit the other meaning of “beneath the surface” which is more psychologic (the inner self of the character). The platforms would crumble behind the character and there would be tons of traps like falling rocks or spikes, maybe have some ghosts or wisps that would kill you if you couldn’t dodge them.

What happened:

As we mentionned when posting the game, we created the game content and code from scratch but reused our old game engine/editor we did for a school project. We decided to go with that since neither of us knew how to use a commercial engine like Unity or Unreal and we already knew most of the code from our engine. The project was more oriented towards the 3D rendering part and less towards the low level stuff like memory management, object systems, game states, etc. We did a couple of fixes before the competition like adding a sound library and remove the UI of the editor that was in place but that was about it.

Because of the engine, everything we wanted to implement took a lot longer than we thought it would at first. There were a lot of issues we ran into while doing our game that we didn’t plan when we original did the engine (for example, the ownership of objects within the code, who creates what and who gets deleted by whom and when wasn’t properly determined). We knew, about 15 hours into the competition that we had to cut a lot of features and come up with a simpler game.

We didn’t have any gameplay before the 36 hours mark. After that, we got some of the graphics done, fixed a couple of issues with the platforms, added a foreground and a background and it began to take shape really fast. By the end of the second day, we had a playable version with sound, arts and even a nice particle effect. We just had a couple of issues related to the physics and the level generation to fix before submitting.

Either of us could work on the game on Monday because of work so we ended up doing some quick fixes 2 hours before the deadline. The final result is a pretty, fun and cool game which we are proud of, knowing the tools we used weren’t fitted for the task.

What could have gone better:

• Preparation: We could also have prepared some librairies for the LD but we decided to join a day before it so it’s kind of hard to setup everything in less than 5-6 hours.
• Better estimates and priorizing: We thought we could do a lot more in the time and tools we had. We should have prioritize on things more important and set up better estimates, taking into account the down times and the possible problems with the tools we use.
• Clean code: We should have fixed the engine and wrote some proper game states, fix the memory leaks and clean the code to remove everything not useful before doing any gameplay related code. That way, a lot of our stuff would have been easier to implement and debug and it would have prevented a lot of hacks inside the code.
• Better communication / location: Me and Vincent don’t live in the same city so we had to communicate through skype. It kind of works but there isn’t the same energy as if the team was in the same room where you can motivate one another.
• Get feedback from others: We could have sent the game, screenshots or even just some ideas you have to some friends and try to get their feedbacks on what seems good or bad. You don’t always have a clear vision of what you are doing when you have been into the code for 30 hours.

What went right:

• We did a game in about 60 hours and it’s fun to play! \o/.
• Arts: The arts we’re awesome and the music also! Once we put them in place, it felt like the game was begining to take form and become alive!
• Bug fixes: We were responsive to crashes and bugs. As soon as we saw them, we would fix them to prevent any further issues.
• Code sharing: we used GitHub for sharing the code and assets and it went pretty smooth. It took us 30 minutes each to figure out what to do with conflicts but once you know how to merge, you’re good to go!

Final Thoughts:

I really enjoyed doing the Ludum Dare. I didn’t learn as much as I would have want to (I’m not really proud of the code I wrote) but it feels great to do a complete game in less than a couple of days. I’m really proud of the team and of what Vincent, Gabrielle and I accomplished.

I’ll take some time over the next few weeks or months to create some better adapted tools for 2D game creation and probably try to join the next LD.

In the immortal words of Strong Bad, ‘it’s over!’

Depending on how you count things, this was either my second or third Ludum Dare attempt (I made a game for LD24 but never submitted it). I took a relatively laid-back approach this time, opting to go the jam route rather than the compo and utilize some existing voxel code  that I had on hand.  Overall, I’m happy with how things turned out!  That’s not to say that everything went 100% smoothly, though…

Some things that worked well for me:

• Writing a game brief (check it out).  Before starting, I wrote up a one-page brief.  The intro (which I wrote to figure out the tone of the game) wound up getting pasted pretty much verbatim into the actual game.  I enumerated a couple of gameplay concepts that I worked into the final game, as well as some that didn’t ultimately make the cut (but might be good for future updates).  Referring back to the brief kept me mostly on track over the weekend.
• Using a familiar engine / framework (Love2D, in my case).  I didn’t spend much time fighting the engine or digging through documentation.
• Making configurable parameters for *everything*.  Good programming practice generally, but this helped me test and tweak different variations quickly.  It was also something of a downside, though (see below).
• Using freesound.org for sound effects.  These ultimately precluded me from including the game in the 48-hour competition, but I would have gone over the time limit trying to make the right sound effects in-house (and probably come up with worse results – I am no sound engineer, my apartment is no studio.)

Some things that didn’t go so well:

•  Increasing the difficulty right before launch.  While testing, I mostly played with a 1000×2000 voxel space (for sake of time).  I bumped that up to 1500×3000 for the initial release.  Though I only boosted the dimensions by 50%, that increased the area of the game by a whopping 225% – a huge difficulty spike given that mechanically the game is all about searching a big space efficiently.  In the subsequent Mac release, I reduced the play area to 1200×2400 – still a challenge, but somewhat more in line with what I intended it to be.
• Unclear mechanics.  Some of the feedback I’m seeing suggests that I didn’t provide immediate enough examples of how to use sniffing and barking in practice.
• Focusing on cosmetics rather than gameplay.  You can see in this screenshot from Sunday morning that I hadn’t even implemented survivors to rescue yet, leaving me with a lot less time to test and refine the gameplay before release:

Though I’m calling this a post-mortem, I think I’ll continue development on this game.  I don’t think I’ll really be satisfied until the hibernating bears are in, and I’d really like to give the character of the ‘master’ a proper game presence.  I also feel like it could work well on other platforms… going to take a stab at at Android port with the love-android-sdl2 project.

I’ll leave you with a quick video of the game, for those who haven’t played it yet – this should give a feel for how it looks and sounds, if not plays:

One Cold Night – Digging demo

Hello, my name is Alberto de la Mora, I’m a computer science engineer and indie game developer from Mexico.

I’d like to share with you some of the game design lessons I’ve learnt from participating in game jams.

My game design triforce: simplicity, fun, originality.

When designing a jam game I try to keep in mind the next qualities:

1. Simplicity

Having limited time and workforce for your game makes simplicity a must. You know your own strengths and weaknesses and you should know what you can finish and what not so be realistic when designing features. Once you have an idea you like, it will grow and you’ll want to add more and more stuff but try to stick to the core of the game and make it playable before adding “extra” features. Polishing is important but if you make a very complex game I’m pretty sure you won’t have time for it.

2. Fun

I want people to enjoy my game so this factor is very important. At the end you can have a very raw game with a black background and squares of a single color but if the mechanic is fun, the game will be (my attempt at LD 26). Also it’s always better to polish a fun raw game than a bad one. You can polish a diamond to make it shine but you can’t do the same with coal.

3. Originality

It’s a game jam, you are free to make whatever you want so experiment a lot. Try new mechanics, new art styles and anything you have never seen before, get creative.

See the theme as an inspiration or a focus to narrow your ideas, not a limitation.

If you fail at the end You can never fail in a game jam because every idea that came to your mind at the game design stage and every line of code you wrote for your game is experience gained, which eventually level you up, preparing you for the next challenge.

Take all of this as a personal opinion and I hope I didn’t make too many grammatical and orthographic mistakes

Thanks for reading

I was part of a team that made this entry in the 29th Ludum Dare: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=25241

Check it out!

We had a great time and learned a bunch.

This was my fifth Ludum Dare., and I decided to keep up with my goal of doing something different each time. For LD 29, I decided I wanted to make a 3D game with Unity.  I had never done any 3D games before, so this was maybe too ambitious, but I think the result turned out well.

Play my game here: Through Shadow

Idea: Since I dislike doing themes based on settings, I choose to consider the secondary meaning of the phrase Beneath the Surface: that there is something hidden that must be revealed. This quickly turned to the idea of illusions that must be exposed. I admit I have been playing alot of Dark Souls II recently, so naturally I decided to make a game involving fighting a boss where illusions were a big part of the fight.  You would have an ability to reveal these illusions (seeing “beneath the surface”). My biggest worry with this idea was that the illusion mechanic might just seem gimmicky and not well integrated into the fight, but I think it turned out well.

Art: I had very little experience (i.e. 2 days of practice) in 3D Modelling, so that took up a large portion of the project time, which is unfortunate since I’m definitely more of a coder. Fortunately, I explicitly practiced making human models so I was prepared for the models I made. Definitely it was a big learning experience (the nice way of saying I made alot of mistakes). The silliest mistake is that I forgot to turn on smoothed surfaces for many of my models, and somehow never noticed until after I was done. Sadly, I also never got to add the desired atmosphere to the game, which is really supposed to be dark and somewhat mysterious.

Sound: As usual, I used sfxr for my sound effects. Unlike usual, I actually had music in my game.  This is thanks to finding a link to cgMusic on the front page shortly before the competition started. This is an amazing program that creates nice randomized music. The quality of the music is probably better than I could do over a whole weekend since I have no musical ability. Basically, I would just periodically generate a new song while working on the other parts of the game and choose the best ones I heard. Definitely I am very happy about no effort, good music.

Programming: This was a relatively programming-lite game. I just used a simple AI system where the boss would just choose an ability from a weighted list whenever it was ready to do a new attack. The boss phases were mainly just different weights on the abilities. This worked well, and there is really no reason to do anything more complex. The biggest problem came in the camera. Sadly my first version tended to get stuck in places when it tried to avoid going through objects. I refined it a few times, adding in various lerps in different situations, but the code was very hacky and the result not great. It has some odd problems with walls and going above the player. I will definitely need to figure this out before next Ludum Dare.

Time: Time is always a huge obstacle. There is so much I didn’t get time to do. Foremost, it would obviously be good to have at least a token Victory screen. The beginning of the game is setup for a tutorial, including a mysterious hooded figure that was supposed to instruct you, but I didn’t have time for the dialog itself. I also wanted to balance the game better, especially making the stationary reveal effect stronger. There is just only so much you can do.

Ultimately, I am pleased the outcome. The boss is interesting to fight, and friends I’ve shown it to seem to enjoy it. There is the right amount of challenge for me (and tricks to reduce this challenge), though some may find it too difficult at a certain part. More importantly for me, I learned alot about 3d games, and especially where the vulnerable parts are, so I will better prepared in the future.

As always, the morning after LD48 I feel a little dazed.  Not because of lack of sleep, but because there is this new game sitting there, that wasn’t there 48 hours ago.  This time the time span was even shorter, as I started on Saturday night, and the actual coding was done within a 16 hour span on Sunday.  I spent most of the time on the waves and player mechanics, and had only 4 hours or so to add the enemies and finalise the game.  The result is something quite playable, though I discovered a number of bugs/quirks afterwards that luckily did not detract from gameplay.

>>>PLAY THE GAME ON WINDOWS, LINUX, OSX, OR ANDROID<<<

This time round, I think the result may be worth making a bigger postcompo of.

Today I’ve been playing with Shadertoy to create a new wave effect (check it out here, the link didn’t work earlier, but works now!). It’s something like below (my gif grabber does not allow subtle gradients, so use the link to get the more subtle coloring).  I wonder if this is the right graphical style, because I am going to have to adapt the other graphics too.  Note that I do want to keep the bubbles.  Time for some experimentation!

Web means the game can be played through the web browser. It’s annoying when I click  on the Web link, I get a download page (I was expecting a web game). So please label your links appropriately.

Here are some cases:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34696

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33937

It’s also nice if you include the tech you used for the web game. Ex: Web(Flash), Web(Unity), Web(WebGL) so those without required plugins won’t waste time staring at a blank page wondering if the game is loading.

It’s funny, I wouldn’t have thought that with a tool like game maker and it’s long list of available platforms, at the end making ports will be the hardest thing.

But now we had our Compo version available for Mac OsX… except for Mavericks (10.9)

So far, we have a windows version (except windows 8) and mac version (except os 10.9). The html 5 version has issues with the dialogues and it will be our first fix as soon as we can spend some time on it. And making a windows 8 version looks very annoying, so we’ll see. The mavericks version is a known bug, but I didn’t find the fix or it’s not released yet (hey guys, maverick is out since 6 months).

At the end exporting, testing and releasing your game is very stressfull but it’s a good lesson.

So here is our adventure reverse-cluedo game : May I Help You ?

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

Hey there!

I want to show you my game for LD#29.
It’s a little crazy but maybe you like it, I hope.
I could say my game is a parody, why no? ;]

You can play/rate it here!  

There are droids what you’re looking for.
Have a good day :]

Tags: moles

This was my first Ludum Dare, and it was a success in the sense I most care about: I finished a game. The first real game I’ve made in a long time. So that’s awesome.

Give Dowser a spin!

“Beneath the Surface”

I think the theme was great. It left room for interpretation, both literal and not-so-literal, and ideas were ripe for the taking. I ended up settling on a dowsing game. I sketched out a few gameplay ideas on paper and drew the character designs on Friday, and left everything else for the remaining two days.

What Went Right

The Sound: This was the easiest part for me — it’s what I’m most used to. I just fired up my DAW, loaded in some synths and drum machines and banged away on my keyboard. It took a little under 3 hours to finish all of the music and sfx. I made sure to carve some time for this early on, I really wanted my game to have the sound I heard in my head.

The Graphics: While making art’s not exactly a breeze for me, getting to know Aseprite a few months before Ludum Dare helped tons. Instead of wrestling with shortcuts or tucked-away options in menus, I could focus on wrestling with my own art skills .

The Engine: Flashpunk ended up being a snap to use. I practiced with it for a month or two before Ludum Dare, getting the hang of the basics and finding out how it does things, and that ended up making all the difference. I didn’t have to look up a single reference or tutorial on it to get it to work and do what I wanted. I will keep using Flashpunk for sure, I love using it.

What went wrong

Organization woes: I ended up with files piling up in folders across my hard drive, breaking the pace when I had to stop and look for something or make sure I was moving/accessing the right file. Next time I want to have a more straightforward scheme set in place to keep things flowing.

Import woes: Even though composing the music went well, when it came to importing it Flash kept spitting out arcane error messages. This took me completely by surprise. I eventually got it working by tweaking export settings in Audacity, but I’m still not sure what I did! Next time I definitely want to get this sorted out and make sure I know exactly what Flash can and can’t accept.

Export woes: I have no idea how to write a preloader, nor how to embed an swf in a html file. I ended up running out of time so I opted to ditch the preloader and just linking straight to the swf. Not exactly ideal. Definitely need to fill in this knowledge gap.

Conclusion

In the end, I had a lot of fun and learned a great deal about making a game. There’s a lot I don’t know and there were more than a few missteps but I am extremely happy with what I made. And the LD community is awesome! I am one-hundred percent going to do Ludum Dare again.

Tags: ld29, post-mortem, postmortem

Inspired by Will’s mosaic images, I knocked together a super quick prototype of a thumbnail browser, allowing you to filter thumbnails by platform (even went so far as to try and parse out unity entries separately) and click through to the entry page.  It’s a bit hacky atm, but I might expand upon it and make it more stable and maybe work with future jams.

http://ld29.jamgam.es/

Travel this maze to explore the collection of Ludum Dare games, play LD games, and look for yours! You start at a random location, so you could end up inside a wall. If that happens, just type in the location on the top left. (like 100,100) to go somewhere else. This is a good way to visualize games, because it gives you can see the high def screen shot and the link type (Web, PC, OS/X ect…) automatically and even figure out on which website it is hosted (Gamejolt, Newgrounds, itch.op, Dropbox…).

Try the Ludum Maze

Note: This is NOT my LD29 entry. This is a project I did on the side by running some script to extract the list of LD29 games and reusing code for a game I never finished. Please also play and rate my LD29 entry Princess Fart!

[Play Drill18: The Mars Project]

This was my 8th Ludum Dare but only my second time doing a strategy/simulation game — which is weird, because those are the kinds of games I live for. I think the barrier is typically that coming up with game mechanics and balance is so much trickier for strategy/simulation games than a more arcade-y one. Additionally, most strategy/simulation games take a while to learn, master, and fully experience — and for Ludum Dare I always aim for something that is playable in 5-10 minutes.

What Went Right:

1. Streaming. Nothing else keeps me more motivated, interested, on-track, and just plain-old entertained as much as streaming the creation process does.
2. Low-FPS Pixel Art. I’m actually pretty quick at making simple 3d models so I’m not sure that it saved me any man-hours, but given the amount of stuff that would be visible, pixel art made more sense from a visual and technical point of view. The overhead on the CPU/GPU would be reduced, but also most of the animations in the game are set to run at 2 FPS…and they look good doing so. They only have 2 or 3 frames of animation, and that turned out to be ideal to show “work” happening without being too busy.
3. My schedule. I always do the same thing, and it always works well. Friday is 1 hour thinking about the game I want to make, then 2 hours prototyping. Saturday morning I’m allowed to throw everything out and start over — but otherwise is all feature development. Sunday is meant to be all polish (though a few last minute features usually get developed here too). I always plan on submitting the game an hour before the deadline (that way I can deal with any last minute disasters). I get lots of sleep, and I try to go for a walk around the block every hour or two.
4. Knowing my tools. I’ve worked with Unity and C# for three years now, including six previous Ludum Dares. While the 2d toolkit is still relatively novel for me, most of the fundamentals are solidly rooted in my brain now, which means less time checking documentation or figuring out the best way to implement various mechanics.
5. Working within a genre I know well. While almost none of the mechanics work in any way like SimTower’s (there’s no elevators or day-night cycle), the fact that I was able to visualize the look and feel of the game before I started made it easier to stay focused.

What Went Wrong:

1. OMG WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU. Every competition you say “I’ll just make something simple like a themed Pong,” but nooooooo…you have to go and make a game that requires a ton of animations, relatively complex AI, interactions between different types of units and different types of buildings, resource management, etc… The number and complexity of the bugs you had to squash was ludicrous. You are not a good example of what people should attempt during Ludum Dare. At least you didn’t do multiplayer again (LD 23 & 26).
2. It’s an established fact that Unity really doesn’t perform well when you have many, many active GameObjects in a scene. They are just too “heavy”. Despite this, I went with a game where each tile is implemented via its own GameObject…with several components. This made development much quicker and easier, but I was taking a massive risk that the game wouldn’t be performant enough. I had to adjust the scope of the game (camera zoom level, victory condition) to help keep the number of tiles modest. Anyone who continues the play past the victory condition will start to experience poor framerates.
3. God damn freaking gaps between god damn freaking tiles. Lots of people have experienced this issue with Unity 2d’s system, and no amount of Point filter modes or camera orthographic nonsense could get true pixel-perfect placement in Unity without using custom shaders. I will NOT be using the built-in 2d sprite system for background tiles ever again. It’s slow and doesn’t work right. I wasted far too much time trying to resolve this, and the issue can still sneak up in the final build at certain resolutions.
4. No ability to do spritesheet/palette swaps using Unity’s built-in 2d animation system. Unity’s 2d sprite splicing and animation system is excellent for a lot of things, but because it does all the heavy lifting in the editor there’s no way to do a spritesheet substitution at runtime (to make it easy to have the different worker careers have different outfits). This is something that would have been possible if I’d written my own sprite handler (which wouldn’t have been difficult).
5. Improper nutrition. I always prepare good, high-quality food before Ludum Dare…but this time I more or less forgot to eat it. I spent Sunday afternoon completely burned out until I had a proper meal and my energy levels shot up. I should have forced myself to eat more consistently.

What’s Going to Happen:

I was already working on a Unity Tile Engine. I’ve now added support for multi-tile, animated “rooms” and run tests to see if the performance problem was resolvable.

The Ludum Dare version needs about 30 tiles wide and maybe 30 tiles deep (about 900 tiles). I want to support an area that is at least 100×100 (10,000 tiles). So…I tested a map that was 1,000 x 1,000 (One million tiles). To make things even more difficult, I tested on a 3-year-old MacBook Air, the weakest computer I could get my hands on.

Visual FPS – Minimum Required: 60. I got 350 with ~100 tiles visible and 150 with ~500 tiles visible (which is so far zoomed out that you won’t be able to make out tile details).

Simulation Thread FPS – Minimum Required: 2. I got 30. On a 100×100 map, I get 3,800 fps. If I want to tempt ever more complex multithreading issues, I should be able to improve the performance even further for multi-core systems since I can easily chop up the map into chunks for simulation.

So I’ve definitely got an engine that can support an extended version of Drill18. It’s also immune to any weird “gap” issues in the background.  People also seem to like the game. Will this finally be my time to release a polished version of a Ludum Dare entry?

This was our second LD Jam, and Ill have to be honest, I really didn’t dig the theme.

Life doesn’t always give you the lemons that you want, but that’s half the fun, trying to think of an idea that would be fun to create.

So we made Somalia, a very relaxed ship sailing/combat game, where you have to get from A-B, whilst not getting destroyed by the enemy ships and monsters that lurk beneath the surface.  There is no end to the game, so you can play it for eternity as levels are generated on the fly.  I quite like just having the world open and watching the day/night cycle, I promise its not me being narcissistic!

Macs seem to have a problem running this, I think the framerate is getting locked to something strange, which messes with the physics, but I don’t have one myself, so I cant see whats going on to fix, so please check out the video if you cant play it as it should be played!

Video

Thanks LD for another fun weekend!

Hello. Here’s a short gameplay video of my 48hr comp entry. It’s a frantic puzzle game based on the underlying relationship between human and nature.

and you can play it here!

any comments would be appreciated….Thanks!

Philip

New:

– changed movement

– removed Surface-Screenshots from Menu

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

Our team had a load of fun with this Ludum Dare. The entire weekend was one rolling shank pun and it was glorious! We have updated our entry with a patch to the game and a link to the awesome trailer on Youtube, which I have embedded below.

Check it out and leave a review. We hope you will enjoy the game as much as we enjoyed creating it!

Demon Shanker 2

Tags: LD #29

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2014 at 8:45 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.

Hi, i really enjoyed making Beneath your feet (click, rate and comment please XD ) And… If i got 1000 plays on gamejolt, i make another game with similar style! But this time, i use a creepy pasta of YOUR choice! 😀

So, if you like my game, play and rate on gamejolt too 😉
(and sorry for my horrible english, i learned english just from famiclone games so.. You know, All your base are belongs to us and similar things XD )

Since it was unanimous from the comments that the lack of sound was a bummer, I’m pleased to announce:

The post compo version of The Longest Way Down!

What’s new:

1. Sound! The game now has a few sound effects, recorded by me personally.
2. Music! And it fits the mood perfectly.
3. Better layout! The presentation is now a little cleaner and easier on the eyes.
4. Assets preloading! To improve gameplay immersion.
5. Title Screen! Ok this isn’t very exciting.
6. Bug Fixes! Neither is this…

I wanted to add more content but I decided against it to keep the game bite sized and focus on the mood.

Think of it as a Myst equivalent of a comic strip. Short, but atmospheric.

Hope you will enjoy my game. Check out my compo page if you want to try it out.

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

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

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

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

The starting concept. Sitting women are hard to draw.

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

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

This guy was supposedly holding on a pole originally.

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

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

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

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

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

Hope you people like my game, thanks! 😉

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

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

What went right?

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

What went wrong?

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

Final words

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

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

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

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

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

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

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2014 at 10:43 am and is filed under LD #29. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

“First superaddictive game on this compo” — TeamInCharge

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

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

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

“Fantastically fun” — zkenshin

“Impressive is the word.” — javifugitivo

“Oh my god the addiction” — tomvert

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

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

[Play Drill 18: The Mars Project]

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

Hi there!,

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

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

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

 What went right

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

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

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

What didn’t go that well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks a lot everybody and good luck!

Post Mortem of “Louis and the Louse”

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

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

Saturday

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

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

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

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

Sunday

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

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

What I would change if I could

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

My last word

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

Play “Louis and the Louse” !

Any criticism is welcome !

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot

First professionnal finest critics : 

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

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

“Very awesome! I love it!”
Hermes

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

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

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

Join the party : May I help you ?

Tags: ld29, May I help you?

What floated nicely:

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

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

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

What sank: 

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

You can play it here.

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

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

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

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

Check out our game here

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #LD48 #LD29, postmortem

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did you think of the theme?

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

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

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

Did it really go sooo wrong…?

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

What was the best bit?

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

What were your tools of choice?

GFX: Tiled, Gimp.

SFX: Audacity.

Coding: Javascript + Canvas.

Tags: worm

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

Current Greenwar Highscore

Tags: Greenwar

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

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2014 at 12:51 pm and is filed under LD #29. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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

Story behind the production of Treasure Hunter:

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

What Went Right:

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

What Went Wrong:

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

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

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

Have fun!

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

Have fun!

Tags: java, libgdx, timelapse, youtube

We just discovered a hidden feature in Greenwar!

The pictures below says it all.

Greenwar Hidden Feature

Some more hidden feature

And in case you missed the hidden feature…

Tags: Greenwar

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

The bad

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

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

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

The good

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

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

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

Improvement Areas

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

Tools

Language/Engine: JavaScript/Phaser

Version control: Git

Text Editor: Sublime 2

Pixeling: Pixen

Debugging web browser: Firefox

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

This was a very special game jam for us.

Not only was it the first jam we ever participated in, but it was also going to be to first game we would release under our just recently founded company, Manschinen-Mensch.

I don’t want this post to grow into a post mortem about our entry just yet, so I’ll (try to) focus on what I wanted to put out first; some of the scribbles that we did while creating Planet Corp.

This is the first thing I dew when coming up with the basic idea of Planet Corp., which was called back then “Planet Cracker”.

The rest of the first page detailed out some of the rather complex mechanics I had initially envisioned for shooting the Torpedo-Drills. Luckily, both the necessity to reduce complexity from the tight time-frame as well as the ever so fruitful discussions between the two of us led to a much more focused and simple player interaction. One of the most memorable moments for me was when Riad said we could basically strip the whole shooting mechanic down to a one-button interaction (instead of the extensive menu-type of settings I had in mind initially).

Here you can see a couple of thoughts for how we would combine the different material types to create different challenges for the player. Back then the resource was still called oil, which we dropped some various reasons.

Maybe one of the best decisions was to take the games setting from a rather generic space sci-fi thing to our own solar system. This immediatelly spawned the idea of the newscast, which allowed us to add a lot of humor, narrative grounding and an actual message to the game. In hindsight, I’m still blown away by how much that seemingly little decision has influenced the game overall.

One last pic which shows the initial idea for a level progression screen. The intention was to have this inbetween planets. However, we never really saw it fitting into the really nice structure we found for the game (newscast followed by planet) so we ditched the idea alltogether, even after I had already prepared the graphics for it. However, as Riad struggled a bit with the Game Over a.k.a. Mining Failed screen he still found a good use for the graphics and used them there. Again, this was a really good decision compared to what we had imagined initially, and it again came out of sheer necessity and limited time.

Those were the most interesting design notes I wanted to share with you. I hope you enjoyed the little insight.

greetings! alright here’s a little PS. for the Sewer Rat Racer.

This is my first real Ludum Dare and my first ‘working’ game in Unity.
I really wanted to focus this LD on programming and game-mechanics to learn
a lot about Unity, but surprise, it went totally different once i got started.

I already had a cool idea for a racing game in mind, but it didn’t quite fit the Beneath the surface theme, still I really liked this idea so i wanted to go for a racing game either way so i could learn about racing game mechanics and perhaps reuse my code for this other game…Then I quickly came up with the Rats on Jetski’s idea and was totally psyched..so much that i spend about a whole day modeling the rats, rigging bones, animating (originally i had a kind of triathlon in mind which also involved running, where the jetski’s were introduced later.)

Anyway you get the idea, 2 days went by (with lots of import problems), but i had an animated rat on a jetski, some sewers with water, particles and stuff but not a line of code yet. I was set out for the 48hour compo but now i strong doubts i was even gonna make the Jam. Still I wanted to offer the experience to be able to cruise around the sewers on a jetski and get generally getting an idea if this sewer race idea was cool enought to pursuit further after the compo..I spend most of the last day working on simple pathfinding for the other rats, and in the last two hours i managed to slap in a finishline with timer, suddenly realising i had the chance of actually releasing something that could be classified as a playable game.

what went wrong :
Yeah..so in no way I managed to do what i had intended as a learning experience, and spend most of my time on things i already knew how to do (modeling/animating) i have been a working as a modeler and animator professionally. I guess you can call it bad planning, but I still believe the graphics and mood as it is now comes close to how I envisioned the experience also it is hard to downscale your ambitious idea into something that can be made in 2 or 3 days

what went right :
everything else, i had an awesome time making this, right now playing and commenting other games..already looking forward to the next LD

What now:
I really want to thank everybody who has took the time to play the game and supply me with their comments so far, i understand the gameplay could be a lot better, and there is a big list of features i had to cut in the process. But comment are so very inspiring and  i’ve already started working on the first updates: better water, better AI..so yeah i will release a post updated sewer rat racer at some point!

thanx!

play Sewer Rat Racer

Hello, I can see a lot of other people doing  a “Post Mortem” so i thought i would give it a try.

I saw that ld 29 was starting about a week before and originally wasn’t going to do it.

It wasn’t until 10 hours in that i decided to do it, and that was a good decision.

After about half an hour i made my mind up about the game and got started.

Fast foward 1 day and i had made a character, basic tunnel and some mechanics but the  characters

movement was messing up so i had to change him to a cube to get the jump working.

My original concept was: the player must make it out of a huge tunnel to the surface while avoiding enemys

such as zombies and skeletons.

After a couple of hours i had thought of the multiple choice story thing and got started on it but there was a

bug that i spent lots of time trying to figure out but couldn’t ,

the bug was that a trigger was activating when i was nowhere near it(I couldn’t have enemys and multiple choice questions in the same level).

So i just made into a multiple choice game and fix a few things and had to make a shorter level due to time shortage,

I missed the compo but got in the jam so far i have received some good reviews

The good:

Got a nice level

good idea for challenge

gain lots of experience

cool music

great game to continue working on

The Bad:

Had to change concept due to bug

no randomly generated levels

cube for character(Although i think it works a bit with the graphical style of the level)

To check my game out: Click the image

One of the options in the game

Some were surprised I got so much done in 48 hours, luckily I recorded a timelapse for you guys to watch.  Here it is with really goofy narration:

First LD done! I’m very happy about the turn out. Well, I really wanted to get more levels in before the submit deadline, but I was running out of time.

The post-compo version includes a few superficial changes and more levels. I really wanted to try to get some music in there, but I couldn’t come up with any tune that fits the mood of the game.

Anyway, a lot of people thought the game was really difficult, so I made a couple of easy maps. For the hardcore players, I also have rage inducing levels.

If you feel like ripping your hair out, go ahead and try the post-compo version.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37077

I already wrote a “the day after” kind of post regarding Gems of the Deep, but I noticed that people were writing proper post-mortems about their games, and I thought that sounded like a good idea to address specific things.   So let’s sum it up!

What Went Right

• Dynamic cave generation.  This was the very first thing I started doing after the initial rendering of a tile grid worked.   I didn’t want to be designing levels, and it seemed like a waste to not use some of this procedural terrain experience I’ve gotten recently (even if that was for 3D).  The tile grid wasn’t even initially as big, but it had to grow to accommodate the cave generation until I was satisfied with how easily it might be traversed by the player.
• The jetpack.  This came along pretty early in the game, even before jumping.  Tuning the gravity and thrust was one of the priorities, which I eventually thought felt pretty smooth.  But I still felt like it was kind of unnecessary to constantly be flying, especially since it meant constantly hearing thrust.  Jumping was added on Sunday, immediately after which I moved the jetpack onto the W key.  I didn’t like it; I felt like I was fumbling the controls a lot.  So while out for a break I thought of just implementing a double-jump technique to activate the jetpack instead, and that ended up working out great.
• Parallax scrolling.  It was never planned, it was just an idea to fill the empty void of the background.  I liked the look, so I kept it, tweaking it along the way.  Initially it was using the exact same render as the main map, so when you destroyed terrain in the foreground it was affecting the background too and looking a bit odd.  So I ended up doing a separate pre-render of the world, then using that one for rendering the parallax layers.   Probably would be even better if I flipped it, since at the starting area you can really tell that it’s the same cave.  But it’s fine once you start moving deeper.  It was apparently a hit with people reviewing the game!
• The artwork/graphics.  And I’m not an artist!  Sometimes I luck out though by pushing pixels around, which happened with things like the main character and the bat.  Other stuff though, like the background tiles, went through several iterations (some still in the texture atlas) before lucking out on something which wasn’t bland, and which I could use as a base to easily tile random tile types together with.  Rounded corners had already been implemented before that, which made this all even more time-consuming because I had to keep remaking those, too, for each iteration of tiles.
• Destructible environment.  This was another thing that wasn’t initially planned.  Shooting wasn’t even added until Sunday, and I added breaking blocks as a way to make the gun have a purpose in case I didn’t get enemies added in time.  A happy accident was when I realized that shooting gems made you collect them, because I had based the bullet on the main entity class.  The entity class itself had actually ended up primarily being the player class as time had gone by.  The player could of course collect gems by touching them, so bullets suddenly had the same behavior.   I left it, because I thought it was fun to collect them that way.
• It’s fun.  Somehow I made something that I personally enjoy loading up and playing every so often, even after the contest.  I surprised even myself with that one.

What Went Not-So-Great 

• Rounded edges.  Overall, this was a plus, avoiding sharp blocky corners and giving it a slightly more polished look.  But it had quirks due to the hacky way part of it was implemented, which while this saved a ton of time, it bugged me and made me worry that people would think it looked sloppy.  The combination of shortcuts manifested itself most noticeably when there was a narrow row of diagonal blocks.  I’ve fixed most of this in a post-LD version, though, using some multi-texturing techniques to apply the rounded edges instead.
• There was no web app.  I mentioned this in the other post, but I kept getting Java security permission problems, and wasted a lot of time trying to sort this out.  I eventually decided that if my default Java permissions are going to give me this much trouble then I’m not going to bother aggravating other people with it too.  I cut my losses after wasting almost two hours signing and packing JARs.
• There’s no music.  I wanted something to help set the mood, but at the same time I realized that if it had been bad or annoying/repetitive music (which could very likely have been the case, coming from me) then it might have actually worsened the overall experience.  I did try a few  music-related web things for a bit, but I never got anything I was happy with.  The other big part of it was that I honestly wasn’t even sure of the legality of using music from some of them.  Eventually I felt like I wasted enough time on it and went back to code.  Next time though I’ll be better prepared on that front; I’ll find a tool ahead of time.
• There’s no proper crosshair.  There’s a flashlight beam, which I felt turned out really well (despite spending too much time on it), but that doesn’t really help you aim.  I also didn’t grab the mouse cursor due to the lack of any kind of crosshair/aimer system, which means it’s also possible to accidentally click outside the window, which is annoying.

What Went Wrong

• There’s not enough gameplay.  Getting gems and shooting bats is fun, but it needed an end goal.  Even just a “you win” type of thing for getting all the gems (there’s exactly a hundred of them randomly placed) would have been better than nothing.  There just wasn’t time, unfortunately.
• You can’t die.  I didn’t start working on bats until about an hour remaining, then health at the half-hour mark, which meant I not only had to make the code for it but also draw the heart (and I reiterate, I’m not an artist).  I wanted there to be some knockback from the bats, and some flicker during your moment of invincibility.  I wanted you to take damage if you hit your head too hard or fell too far.  I wanted to have earthquakes and have rocks fall.  Even something like stalactites/stalagmites would have made it a bit more hazardous.  Health didn’t seem incredibly important early on, but in the end it turned out to be one of the most important things which didn’t get finished, so practically anything that revolved around the concept didn’t either.
• The wasted time.  Between all of the time spent sorting out the collision detection, dealing with the applet stuff,  redoing the map tile graphics several times, trying to come up with some music, etc, I could have probably accomplished many of the things the game needed.  I suppose most of that was just part of the development process, but the applet part at least could have been avoided if I’d worked it out before the contest.  But I didn’t even know I was going to enter until practically the same day, so there wasn’t much I could have done anyway, I suppose.

Overall it was an incredibly positive experience, one which I plan to participate in again.  Peoples’ reactions have been really enjoyable to read, and making something you’re proud of in such a short amount of time is pretty motivating.  And perhaps best of all, I learned a few things in the process!

To wrap this up, I thought I’d include one of the early screenshots:

Hey, folks. Coin Flip Games here to tell you about our entry for LD29, Bitmite Blitz. We’re incredibly proud of this game and wanted to make sure YOU got a chance to play it. If you’re not convinced, here’s some of our favorite reviews we’ve gotten so far!

“Super fun game. I have highscore! for now :P” – tehryanx (Still has the high score, btw)

“I love games that put me in a perspective I never would have thought to explore. Great game!” – greysphere

“This is definitely one of the most polished games I’ve seen in the LD. Having an achievement system is an impressive addition, given the time constraint.” – StencylTuo

“Good game, it gives me the same feeling as Flappy bird which is a good thing.” – Sparrow

So go give it a shot already!

Back? Okay. I wanted to talk a bit about how we accomplished the global leaderboard. I’d love to see more games with this feature because I think it adds a whole new dimension.  So, to start, you can implement this in any language or game engine you would already be using. Some (like Unity) will make it easy than others, however. You need 3 things, a server to host the scoreboard api and scores, you game and a communication layer between them. Ideally, you want to have something in place to prevent people from adding fake scores as well. 

Set up a database of some sort. Use whatever you would feel comfortable with and if you’re not comfortable with anything, use MySQL or sqlite. You can get away with, as a bare minimum, a single table: scores, but that’s not so much fun, is it? You can easily use this in a bunch of games if you do it right the first time.

1. Set up your database engine (mysql in our case)
2. Add a database and user. Make sure that the user permissions make sense. Don’t give them GRANT access to anything. Ever.
3. Add the tables as below:

Alright! Done with the database for now. Now we need to setup the API. I’m going to leave the actual implementation up to you (as an exercise or something), but the functionality you’ll need is…

1. To receive input from the web in some well defined format. I used PHP to get data as JSON. You could use Ruby, Python or whatever fancy language you want. You could use XML too if that’s what you’re into.
2. Check the input to ensure that it’s valid. (Did this come from a legitimate source? Does the input make sense?)
3. Sanitize the input. (Can’t stress this one enough)
4. Perform some action on the data. (Run the command ‘getScores’)
5. Return results in some well defined format. (Package up the results of the command as JSON and pass it back)

And on the client-side (game) we need to do the same thing, but in reverse. The client needs to build these requests and be able to parse the responses. Since I used JSON, I’ll show our request as an example.

{

cmd: ‘Leaderboard/getScores’,

api_key: ‘…’, (I’ll get back to these)

signature: ‘…’,

time/token: ‘…’

}

And the server would spit back

{

[‘name’: ‘Awesome Bitmite Blitz Player’, ‘score’: 100000],

[‘name’: ‘Awesome Bitmite Blitz Player 2’, ‘score’: 10000],

…

}

Easy enough. The trickiest part is ensuring that the scoreboard can’t be tricked into allowing scores that aren’t legitimate. That’s where the API key and secret come in. For every game that will use this leaderboard, generate some random string for the API key and some random, hard to guess string for the secret. The database knows what these are and your API can check them out no problem. You’ll also need to let your game know what these are and if you’re lucky enough to have a compiled language, they’ll be safe from curious eyes. (if you release the source code for your game, strip both out).

So now the server API and the game both know the API key and secret. Great. Now let’s use them to generate a signature for all the requests that the game client will make.

So the idea is that both the client and server can construct the signature independently and compare them, but prying eyes cannot. The key, secret and a time/token are needed so that requests to the same API resource (getScores) won’t always generate the same signature. It’s secure because the secret is… well… secret.

(There might be some of you that recognize this pattern. It’s basically the same model that Amazon Web Services uses.)

So that’s the basic idea. Here’s some resources to use if you want to implement it yourself:

• MySQL
• PHP (PDO)
• Unity SimpleJSON
• Unity WWW
• Unity crossdomain.xml
• Matching PHP md5() to C#

Cheers! I hope someone can get some use out of this!

Tags: ld29, postmortem, unity, unity3d

I’ve posted a development timelapse for our LD29 entry, Under Warranty.

Under Warranty was my fourth Ludum Dare, my third jam, and my team’s second entry. We had a ton of fun making it, and while it isn’t quite complete, I’m quite proud of what we managed to accomplish.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, play Under Warranty here.

Being my first ludumdare experience and second jam, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about my game, other games, and jams in general.

–Make the game easy to play

Any sort of non-intuitiveness or early difficulty turns people away immediately.  It takes a lot of time to rate games and it feels like a chore to replay anything or not know what’s going on.  Death mechanics should be quick and painless into a respawn nearby before you’ve lost the player to the next game.

I made this mistake.  I didn’t end up getting enemy spawn waves set up properly with save points, death is a little slower to get back then I’d like, and I had zero tutorial-like early game structure.

My plan was to have a big contra style boss fight be the highlight of the game and most didn’t even see it. =(

–Get mechanics/gameplay done first, polish later

A fairly polished broken game will have you tossed before anyone can experience what you have created.

I was polishing as I went – sounds, art stuff (the water visual physics was the first thing I did and really had nothing to do with the gameplay…), particles, etc.  This had me freaking out the last day trying to finish the boss fight mechanics, before I’d have to scrap it to make sure everything is working and finish the build.

Although…

–Some polish makes a world of difference so plan accordingly

Many claim that you expect to play rough games and it’s all about discovering new fun mechanics.  This just simply isn’t true .  It’s quite obvious the games that look and play the best, get the most attention.

And rightfully so.

There is more to how a player interacts with a game then what their hands and brain are doing.  The visual and audio representations of those events are a large part of why a mechanic can feel rewarding.  Without these an innovative idea can fall flat and be left to die due to a lack of peer attention, which can be a major deciding factor for anyone thinking about bringing their jam game to the next level.

You can also definitely polish a turd into something people will enjoy.  To the resentment of hipster developers everywhere,  the world just simply works that way.  See half the COD series and Miley Cyrus for reference.

-My submission

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37472

I made a video! This is a trailer for Divernaut so showcase a bit of gameplay, and also to show off the music that would have been in my entry if I’d a bit more time. Should have slept less.

Here it is! (click for youtube)

If you haven’t tried Divernaut yet, give it a shot! I’d love to hear your feedback since I plan to make a full version of this.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33993

Here is the timelapse for my LD#29 entry. It’s a lot shorter than usual because I made it with double the fps as in previous ones.

I have updated my game so now you can download the linux version, I have not tested it yet but hopefully unitys build is good enough. If you don’t know what this game is, it’s called The Music Box. Its a hexagon voxel horror game

Here is a gameplay demo of Ball Club …

Hey guys!

Wow, so many reviews since the last post <3

One thing that obviously scares off many people is the difficulty in gameplay. It is very tight and unforgiving, but with practice comes perfection.

Me ripping through some boney fellas (animated GIF)

We chose the One-hit Permadeath intentionally to give you a challenge and stay longer in this little world that we have created, but we admit that a gameplay like this can be very frustrating if you are not willing to spend some time and deaths to learn the mechanics.

Anyhow, we are working on an Easymode at the moment so you can relax and enjoy the art :3

We can’t await your reaction!

NoNoBattle

This was a fun LD for me. I went in cold without a pre-disposition as to what genre game I wanted to make. I was a blank slate. In honesty this was due to bad preparation and planning, but it meant I had to pick an idea quickly and get to iterating.

Please play/rate my game and I’ll do the same.

How long can you last?

What went right…

• Streaming. I got the kinks worked out from last time’s attempt and this time it all went smoothly with voice/picture and everything from a technical standpoint.
• Settled on an idea quickly. Like a lot of people I took the top 3-5 themes and sort of wrote some test ideas for each. For Beneath the Surface I was going to do a game about drowning, or a game about being a gopher under a golf course, hiding from groundskeeper attacks, ala Caddy Shack.
• Super small scope. I wanted an idea that was simple. One-button, one mechanic, one idea. I was thinking about mobile games and zero training. A pick up and play and instantly understandable game.

What went wrong…

• I struggled with a major physics bug for several hours. I switched from 2D to 3D physics and back and forth a couple of times. I’d used physics for every game I’d ever made and knew it cold. Why weren’t gravity and impulses working properly? Turns out if you have an Animator component attached to your object, uncheck the “Apply Root Motion” box. I had no idea. None. It was my first time using the animation system. But as soon as I unchecked that box, everything worked flawlessly in terms of physics.
• The animation system bit me in the ass and cost me 3-4 hours – again. I still do not fully understand it, but someone in the channel mentioned “don’t have any parameters on your transitions” and it worked. I wasn’t even triggering the anims via the parameters, but once defined it appears Unity *requires* you to do so, vs triggering ala “animator.Play(“Swim”)”. The animation system in 4.3 seems to be a mess but perhaps I just need more experience with it.
• I had NO idea what I was making. It wasn’t a familiar genre with expected mechanics. I’d never made a game like this nor had one for reference. So I stumbled along until I found mechanics and things that seemed fun. But I went to bed Fri night thinking “yeah, this might work”.

In the end I think the game came out well. Most people score 40-60s. But you can break 100s and reach near 200s as the game has a narrow band of skill and timing you can exploit, so more skilled players can score higher, and there’s some tricks to learn. I’m pleased with that.

Please play/rate my game and I’ll do the same.

LD came and went, and no game from me… Due to time constraints I was unable to complete my project: A 2D Raptor style surface flyer beneath the surface of Mars.

Still, I had a good time in the one day I was jammin’. For starters, it was the first time I did a Unity project in the new-fangled 2D mode. It worked out pretty well. Also, this was the first time I did any type of random/procedural terrain generation. I kept the design for this extremely simple and had quite some difficulty getting the details right, but all in all I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

One bump I hit (once again) was collision detection. Took me a night’s sleep before I realised Unity has separate functions for physincs in a 2D project. Pro-tip: Don’t use the functions for 3D collision detection when in a 2D project. Use OnTriggerEnter2D() instead of OnTriggerEnter() if you want our code to work properly…

I knew time was the enemy, kept my design relativly small, decided to learn some new things and in general had tons of fun. I refuse to see not having a game as a failure.

I finally got my internet back, yehaw! Damn you internetprovider.

Jesus! Not only have I entered and end my first Ludum Dare, I also created my very first game!
This is so exciting! I never thought that I will finish such a “big” project like a game, but I actually did!.

And I’m totally in love with my unknown pixelart “skills”. :>
Hayoo, okay enough from my exhilaration.

What went right

• the sprite stuff went out better then estimated, although they took the most time
• all of my coding ideas work, most of them are totally easy to reuse
• I’ve overcome all obstacles and problems, without becoming demotivated
• I’ve earned so much experience AND motivation, that’s really gold!

What went wrong

• I started coding without any idea of the actual gameplay, that’s why this is a tamagotchi (engine, game, somewhat)
• I should prepare myself a little bit more, especially the thing with soundeffects
• the HUD. Seriously, that’s more kind of a command line then a HUD

Thanks for all the interesting posts about your games, LD community. It such a nice competition.
Now my task ist to play and rate aaaaaaall the gaaaaames!

Dr.Stahlbart

 
First Ludum Dare check and check!
 

Here it is!
 

I’m so proud and happy with this game and it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite games that I’ve made. But for a while there in the middle of the compo, I started to worry that I was failing at the number one rule everyone said I should follow: “Have fun.”
 
About 75% into development I had to make the character animation. I had drawn up this awesome female archeologist with a top hat on and I loved it! But I couldn’t make it look good on the computer for the life of me, let alone animate it! I became very frustrated and wasted half the day trying to make it work and just became a general grumpypuss.
 
But then I took a walk. On the walk I contemplated dropping out, I like to hold myself to a certain standard in everything I do, and releasing crappy graphics wasn’t in that standard. (I realize now of course that my game was fine, especially for the second game I’ve ever released officially. But remember, I was a grumpypuss at the moment.)
 
I also am really bad about quitting things when I think they arent right, and I wanted to fight as hard as I could to not give up, as I greatly wanted to be a part of this community, The LD community and the Indie Dev community. So on my walk I pondered and pondered on what I could possibly change about this game.
 
So far it was a game about an archeologist who would jump underwater and blow up rocks and dirt to find treasure before the lava rose to the top or you ran out of breath. It wasn’t very elegant yet, it felt like something was off and I simply couldn’t animate swimming as quickly as I needed to yet. So suddenly I realized it didn’t have to be a human character! What about a submarine? I can animate the hell out of a fan!
 
So I rushed home, made a submarine sprite, and realized it’s odd to have the submarine dive down and come up… Why not make him start at the bottom? Suddenly the whole design fell into place! The sand and rocks falling added much more challenge, the tension from the lava was way better! The game didnt feel as clunky and it had a great flow all throughout! Suddenly, I was having fun again, grumpypuss no more for the rest of development.
 
Check out what I’m up to at anytime at:
http://www.gamechildstudios.com
 
And email me for whatever reason at:
dreiiwinder@gmail.com
 

As everyone knows, the most grueling and most onerous part of Ludum Dare is… the postmortem. (Well, it can feel that way sometimes.)

If you haven’t played my game yet, you can do so here. With that out the way, let’s get down to the nitty gritty.

The Good

• Graphics – people seem to like how the game looks. I’m not an artist, so it was a wise choice to keep things simple. I made one spritesheet for the player, two backgrounds, then two frame animations for the npcs. It’s not perfect (the background colour is too close to that of the player in places, and the two backgrounds aren’t consistent) but it did the job and allowed me to focus my time on other areas.
• Theme – I hadn’t given it much thought before the start, but after seeing what other people were doing, I discarded the first ideas that came out of my head and decided to base the game around being an undercover cop. The game is set in a criminal underworld which hides beneath the surface of civil, law-abiding society. The player is also pretending to be someone different beneath the surface. To go one step further, the identities of the criminals are also not what they appear to be on first inspection.

The Bad

• Slow Text – the one variable most responsible for negatively affecting people’s response to my game. And to make matters worse, there was no button to skip the slow-as-molasses* text. In a game about reading text. Even making it half a second quicker might have made it a lot more tolerable. Fine margins, eh?
• Design – my game may suffer from a condition known as ‘not-being-game’. All you do is talk to people, inspect items, and then try to work out who the boss is based on some nebulous puzzle logic. I’m not sure what would have improved it, except some adventure game puzzly-ness, but that may have been too much to do. Also, since people could just accidentally brute-force the puzzles through trial and error, I made the dubious decision to prevent people from accusing the boss until they had found the five items in that level (sorry!).
• Animation – I wasted a few hours in Unity, first not going down the Mecanim route before learning that didn’t work for sprites, and then wrangling with the Mecanim animation system which I wasn’t used to. This is why, when your mother tells you to do the Ludum Dare warm up to get familiar with all your tools, you do it.**
• Audio – there’s only one sound effect, and some very basic music that I would have been cruel to include without a mute button.
• Juiciness: it’s something I still find hard to do – and maybe the game isn’t best suited to it – but it lacks all that satisfying shiny, bouncy, camera-gyrating goodness.

* That’s molasses, not mole asses, people. I know we’ve all been playing a lot of subterranean games lately, but it’s no excuse.

** This may not have actually happened.

Overall

All in all, it may look like there’s more bad than good, but I’m pretty happy with this entry, and I had a lot of fun making it. I even did a post-compo version, fixing the most glaring problems with the game, just in case there was anyone who wanted to see how the game ends without enduring the tediousness of the compo version. The post-compo has the following changes:

• The default text speed is quicker.
• Pressing either X or C will skip text.
• Instead of having to find all the items before making an accusation, you only get a warning before hand.
• The player animation system has been redone (and is no longer an absolute mess).
• The hint screen has been polished.

You can also find that here.

Thanks everyone!

Hi there,

We (@Laguna_999 and @Thunraz) took part in the LD29 and managed to finish Escaping Scofield Mine.

Now it is time for a postmortem.

What went bad:

• Pathfinding: We started working on Saturday morning and completed the first stages of core gameplay mechanics. I used a C# Pathfinding library which worked fine in my testruns, but always broke in the second level for unknown reasons at random situations. I spent 3 hours debugging but couldn’t fix it. So we kind of patched that bug by only using one level (but only after having implemented portals between levels
• We started out with a very simple tileset but decided to create some edge tiles via AutoTileGen Pro (which is a great tool and we are really happy we could get it in the Ludum Deals). Which kind of was a nice idea because it helped the look of the game, but was a real mess implementing it because we had to change a lot of lines of code and manually replacing all the tiles.
• As we did a kind of adventure game i must say i am quite discontented with the puzzles i put in there. It is just simple “go there and there” and nothing sophisticated. But there was no time for some really cool logic puzzles.  Probably next time
• I could imagine, that some more world-player interactions could have helped the game a lot. In the game you meet some miners and it would have been nice to seethem follow you out of the mine. We kind of started this with putting lights on after repairing the generator but did not continue it to the end.
• Some of the Sound Effects are quite crappy and would need to be fixed.

What went right

• We had a well established codebase and i am quite familiar with my helper classes since i use them regularly for my onegameamonth projects.
• We had some clear labor division and everyone knew at any time what he should be doing. So this is great and i hope to continue this on further projects.
• I am presonally really pleased with all the small details (flickering lights, smoke out of a chimney, to sum it up: the juice) in the game. I dont know if anybody noticed, but the player sprite changes when you pick up your helm and go down in the mine (he then gets a helm *so proud*).  These are the kind of details i really like on other games and i think we did a great job.

So “thank you” Ludum Dare for this great weekend!