This evening we found our game repacked and posted to itch.io under a copy of our username. I’ve reported it and endeavored to tweet-shame them, but I don’t suspect we’re the only target here. Is there some kind of collective action we can take?
Tags: whyinternetwhy
As it is the tradition in LudumDare, here is the Timelapse of my game.
I’ve used my own script (for MacOSX) to capture the screen each 10 seconds, and then fed the images to ffmpeg to generate the video. If you are interested by the scripts: https://gist.github.com/gre/11219793
I also used Google Gangout in the whole session, as a way to put my webcam in the timelapse, but more importantly to have other LudumDare friends coming in it 
As you can see @mrspeaker appeared a few time in the timelapse showing me the advancement of his crazy Metal Meter game (well next time we may try to be on the hangout longer). 2 LudumDares ago, we experimented working our entry the whole saturday in a Paris Starbucks, this was a bit crazy with all the tourists.
I think this Hangout approach is a nice alternative to the classical Twitch stream. It is much more powerful actually because you could easily stream a Hangout back to Youtube, and Google Hangout is so easy to use from a computer or a phone!
Hi every body I start working with a 2D artist, to make
a mobile version of Ocean WildLife, with many feature,
new enemies,new obstacles,new gameplay,MANY OTHER LEVELS, and new graphic.
SubScribe my YouTube Channel and follo me on Twitter:
This is a GamePlay from my entry, stay tuned to see it finished
I posted last week about doing another LD compilation, and I’d just like to remind everyone that the deadline for submission is this Friday!
If you’d like your game to be in the compilation, please email me at [email protected] /* */ with the following things
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.
A week has passed, I’m more or less rested and it’s time for the customary wall of text some people call it postmortem.
During the week before the theme announcement I like to prepare for it by making a little brainstorming. Most of the time the final idea has absolutely nothing to do with any of the concepts, and this was no exception, but it’s still fun and you never know if THE BIG IDEA is just around the corner waiting to be found. This edition the concept of the game itself changed from the initial design to the final implementation as I was running out of time to implement the mechanic.
While discarding roots, submarines and caves as I feared everyone would use variations of this, I took a look at Trompin, my pet rabbit. Half joking with a friend it hit me that I could do a game dealing with rabbits, burrows and the likes. And mating.
You can play and rate Playbuck here
I then thought of a Metroidvania game borrowing the concept of generations from Rogue Legacy: you would get to an available partner (buck or doe, you wouldn’t be tied to a gender), mate and then pick one of your children as the new main character. It would carry around the parent’s skills plus one more, and replace it as the main character. To make this work well, I would have needed a lot longer to focus on level design, rabbit skills and craft a balanced experience.
With this in mind, at some point during Sunday the mating mechanic became a goal in itself. Since gameplay was pretty bland at the moment and the clock was ticking I thought it would add a somewhat original silly touch. It’s a bit too silly for my taste, but everybody enjoys a fart joke here and there, so hey…
Sketches for rabbit actions
…and here’s the original
Overall, this time I’m quite happy with the overall result, but as always there are lots of room for improvement.
Rojan gets his third and probably last update. There are a lot of new/changed things:
– Better level-generation
– Better block-physics
– Fixed bug in tutorial
– Added explination to “Press R” in tutorial
– New icon
– Health-regeneration no longer at spikes-kill
– Screen is no longer one frame too late
– Screen flashes red at death
– Music in menu
– Esc in menu ends game
– Sound for sword-throwing
– Everything move at 1.5 times the speed
– Different win-screens
– Differnet background for ground-level
– Own art for tutorial
– More backgrounds for menu
Download it here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33967
Also we have rated exactly 100 games by now and this are our personal Top 3:
1. Senilescape byXaychru04 http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=16472
2. Gold Miner by byExclusive http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37316
3. Final Move by Team-KwaKwa http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=32076
Ludum Dare needs more charts. That’s why I made some.
Comparison between the scores in rounds 1-4 and in the final round.
Comparison of the number of themes from rounds 1-4 involved in the final round.
Click below to see more!
Comparison between the scores in rounds 1-4 and in the final round.
Comparison of the number of themes from rounds 1-4 involved in the final round.
Comparison between the scores in rounds 1-4 and in the final round.
Comparison of the number of themes from rounds 1-4 involved in the final round.
If you find any mistakes or more interesting facts, feel free to point them out in the comments.
Thanks for being an awesome community.
Please enjoy my son’s YouTube video lets play “Ocean Explorer”. You can still play game here, but post competition version will be available on IndieDB website.
Hello guys. we added a Ranking online in our entry for the ludum dare 29
The record its 200. WHO CAN BEAT IT???
~Seth
I made some .gif screenshots of gnome fortress. MoviePy is a fantastic library for making animated gifs in python. The post-compo version of gnome fortress will create gifs if you have MoviePy installed.
Now I can show you the garden gnomes in action:
Mining
Crafting
Building / Teamwork
Harvesting
Tags: crafting system, destructible terrain, gif, gnome, screenshot
Here is some of my favorites in each category:
You can also play my entry here:
My game turned out to have super-simple controls and short rounds with an addictive quality, so I decided to port it to mobile with touch controls!
You can grab an Android .apk on the entry page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=30865
This is a feature-identical compo port – I’m making some additional tweaks that make it shine more on mobile, but I wanted something people could still vote on.
Here’s an animated GIF of the PC version to tempt you:
HI HELLO.
I am Pedro Machado Figueira, Co-founder of the Baykush Studios here in Rio and i would like to share with you my favorite games developed during this year’s Ludum Dare.
I had my mind set to play only the minimun in order to get enough exposure to my game…over a hundred games after, here am i, a wiser person and a better game developer.
First, in case you feel like blowing up submarines, boats and blimps using a military-grade dolphin in a fast-paced, water-splashing bullet hell, check out my Game - Delph Ops. People are loving it so far and it’s tons of fun!
Dolphin Loves You
Now, to my list. I’ve split the entries in two diferent categories: “I would totally buy this” and “Dude, check this out”. And there is also a “Winner Entry”. “One Entry to Pwn Them All”. Each list is a top five.
Dude, check this out!
Strange and novel stuff that would forever stay beneath the surface weren’t for game jams.
Look at this cute little guy….!
That, my friends, is the kind of stuff i love about jams. It’s a Bunny-Frog-Detective in a mission to uncover the terrible misteries of the city….i don’t remember it’s name, but it’s probably somewhere in Rhode Island. Why ? Well….play it.
Behold the Pun Throne
Now, Telling anything beforehand about this game would kill it. Grab a friend and play this puntastic game.
PS: The intro song is priceless.
Evil lurks behind this screenshot
WHAT!? Impostor! Jet Force is a N64 classic, why is this game so weird? And why is it called Jet Force Gemini? Who in the world would consciously design such a weird, pointless game?
“Who” is the wrong question, my friend.
Check out this game, read it’s description and find out why this is Asimov ghost’s stuff of nightmare, and why the developer behind it might someday take your job.
We all love some redundancy in our titles.
If you like Stanley Parable and the Antichamber this is a great and quick entry. The voice over is incredibly well done and the text is really really good.
I mean, come on, this is a game that contains a button labeled “PRESS TO ACHIEVE ERECTION”.
It suffers from a few dull moments here and there, but it’s a 5-10 minute story that deserves your attention. Who knows? The patient might be you.
Plié, Pirouette, BLOOD.
This game is scary as hell, and i besides one game you’ll see on the next list, this was the most terrifying. It’s the kind of story that would never come out without a set theme and it was, IMO, the best interpretation of the beneath the surface i’ve seen around here. Not the best gameplay, but it really made me nervous and shaky while playing it. Good Show!
Next list:
I would totally buy this!
Games that should take it to the next level….if you know what i mean.
Deathbed = FUN, aparently.
Something is clearly wrong with the developers of this action defense game. It’s noy only polished to the bone, it’s packed with content like towers and upgrades. It suffers from performance issues, but with some code-scrubing it would be a really really good web arcade game. Co-op would also be a great add!
Pictured: half a planet. The other half is DLC
This person nailed it.
Great, easy-to-learn gameplay. Great narrative, media and corporate critique. This is my kind of game.
You play as a miner, gathering the resources of our Solar System’s planets until…well, until they get unstable as hell and blow up (and you though chopping down threes was a BIG harm to nature).
It could (and should) be ported to multiple platforms.
Its like an apartment building, but it goes down and protects you from air raids.
It’s a post-apocalyptic war bunker simulator. Gather resources, stay sharp for air raids, build bunker facilities and hire employees. I’ve spent almost one hour on this one and it would do great with an embeded achievement system / narrative regarding the survival.
Oh, and the music is depressive as hell. Quite fitting.
#2 A Glorious Escape for the Lich king
Hexgasm
A Tower Defense mixed with RTS Resource gathering system shrouded in gorgeous old-school pixel art and hex-based strategic gameplay. If this is not enough to make you play this, there is nothing else i can do. For you. You’re doomed.
Rage Quit: The game
Remember what i told about the ballerina game? This is the scariest. Amnesia my buttocks, this game is suffocating.
Now, i did not beat one single level. I’ve tried over and over again in each stage and no luck. But i think perhaps this is the point, it might be as unbeatable as death.
I Think a proper name would be “Helplesness Simulator”. This is how you’ll feel by playing this. Helpless.
Try for yourself, this goddamned thing just ruined my day.
Now, my top game:
One Entry to Pwn them all
You know you are going badass as soon as you see this screenshot
You see, this is the kind of stuff i would check out the release dates every week. It is fun, gorgeous and above all, challeging, but fair.
It’s a Roguelike 2d survival shooter. In order to beat the game you’re suposed to kill spider monsters that come out of the sand for 10 minutes.
It offers you fluid and responsive controllers, pacing, action and awesomeness. I would totally pay monees for an expanded, co-op version of this game (and i trully hope it comes out).
Honorable mentions:
Not a game but god, it’s beautiful.
The developer here know hisdungeoneering. Oldschool goodness for your pleasure. If you like games like “Excelsior”, you will love this one.
Thanks for reading so far. I hope you like my list!
If you are a Ludum Dare participant, kudos for being part of this!
Ludum Dare was really inspiring for me as a developer and i will certainly take part on the next ones.
Hugs and kisses for ya’ll!
Hello, I made a little gameplay video of my entry.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=12944
Feedback for our game Water Hazard has been super positive so we decided to make an enhanced version of the game during this month. Here is a dark sneak peek of upcoming boss battle.
We are trying to add following features for enhanced version:
– 4 new rooms
– boss battle
– puzzle
– door transitions
– new dialogue
– fix visual and game breaking bugs (72h didn’t leave as much time for QA :D)
You can follow the development of the new build here:
https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=8206&sid=8506125875f947e2c251984cd381ce4f
We will release the game to Oculus share when it is ready.
Our game, StromnetZ, is a pipe-esque game with bombs, vaults and other fine things. The idea for a pipe game dawned on us almost instantly and we worked on the game for the whole 72 hours (minus the time spent sleeping and eating).
Without boring you anymore: the good, the bad and the ugly… Actually no ugly.
The good:
+ We focused on the essential stuff first -> we managed to do everything we wanted
+ We managed to include some extra features, like the leaderboard!
+ Semi balanced scoring system
+ Nice difficulty curve
+ Already had some stuff ready from LD28 so we didn’t waste time learning new technologies (highscores was new and required some effort though) or creating the basics of the game.
+ Explosion animation is brilliant
The bad:
– No dinosaur skeletons in the background images
– The cross pipe and the over-under pipe are hard to differentiate
– Still no musician (music is royalty free from incompetech.com)
– UI is like that of a real power plant: bland and dull
– Not enough juice! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
Click HERE or HERE or even HERE to play StromnetZ.
Tags: eat your vegetables, help i am stuck in a tag, post-mortem, postmortem
Made some gameplay footage of my game above. Check out my game here: Nereids’ Sea
post mortem-y thing
So overall I’m kind of happy with how the game came out. I wanted to use the Ludum Dare to do some Unity practice and create a better game than my last Unity entry and on that ground, I think I succeeded 😛 There are things I would have liked to add, I think being able to look down and see your feet would have been a nice touch, the various structures you can find could have had better textures, I considered randomizing the treasure’s location etc but everything important made it into the game I think.
Ideally the AI would be very different, but I’m not too used to Unity so I stuck with something simple that I knew I could get done in the time limit. So the monster AI is kind of like a T-Rex/Enderman fusion. If you look at them, they become alert – and at that point, if you move, they attack you, so you have to wait for them to swim away. If I had more time I would have tried to make them scout around for you, and you would have to hide from them by keeping your distance or hiding behind any of the weird structures you can find at the bottom of the sea. This would have necessitated some kind of radar system though, to ensure they couldn’t sneak up on you unaware unfairly, and I wasn’t confident about getting anything like that working in the time limit.
Based on feedback, if I was doing this again I would have added some kind of checkpoint system. I thought it was short enough I wouldn’t need to, but it is very slow paced, so I can see that was the wrong call. Having some kind of checkpoint structure/item would have also given the player something extra to look around for, so definitely would have been the right thing. Ah well 😛
Beneath the surface is where it started, Obolos is where it ended. I’m still not sure how you pronounce it (we’re dutch), but that doesn’t matter
We had a blast, again. A team of two, from hating the theme’s guts to coming up with an exploration story-like (think Dear Esther meets Journey) game with multiplayer (because we felt like it). We almost ended up ditching the multiplayer altogether after one of us was already working on it for two days with almost no result.
Gameplay video
Spoilers after the break so make sure you finish the game before reading the rest.
What went wrong?
We both wanted to do something with multiplayer, we didn’t want to use photon or unity’s drop-in solutions because we wanted to save state ourselves on our server to be able to have some kind of persistence in the world. We first tried a socket.io + unity lib approach, which seemed to be buggy. My friend then burned a lot of time on trying to get his Haxe server-client code compiled to C# to use in Unity, and just trying to get some messages across. Eventually we found another socket.io unity library which did work properly and got it working on sunday evening.
We should’ve had something working before ludumdare on the server – client part, to avoid wasting 50% of the resources which could’ve been spent on the game itself.
Want went right?
Everything else basically, I could start on the boat rowing mechanics on the first day then pulled together some assets from the asset store (since we lacked an artist). I wasn’t really motivated on the 2nd day after messing around a lot with the buoyancy not doing what I want and having no clear purpose with where the game was headed until on the 3rd day when it all came together.
You were lost, on the river Styx, trying to get across by yourself since you couldn’t pay the fare. Since we went with the story/exploration like approach I wrote a short poem of which you would find parts in these crates drifting in the river. Slowly uncovering what was going on. The first idea would be finding a word at once but we realized that would take you quite a while, so we just split it up in 8 figuring the ludum dare audience would then be patient enough getting them all to get the full poem and hopefully figuring out what was up.
Now the multiplayer had to have a purpose, I mean, it’s cool to see other boats without anyone in them just rowing around but why are they there? We solved the visual ‘lacking a person in the boat’ by adding particle effects that would represent a ghost, also hinting towards the fact that you are also one and thus dead. Thinking of how to incorporate communication which isn’t just a chat that would pull you out of the experience we came up with representing every part of the poem that you’d find with a sentence or a word that you could then also speak by pressing the corresponding numbers (which other players would hear). I think it very well adds to the experience, except for the occasional player who just keeps spamming one voice 😀
As regarding to the theme, we started with the usual ‘monster beneath the sea’ but once we swiveled into the river styx direction we figured the ‘beneath the surface’ part would be you. In the real world, being dead. Buried, beneath the surface.
See you next ludum dare, if you want, you can play and rate Obolos here.
Bonus: google Obolos or Obol 😉
New Dawn was the first Ludum Dare entry for both members of our team, and the first game jam/compo of any sort that we’ve done. We went in with little preparation and an overdose of optimism, but overall it came out pretty well! We weren’t able to do as much as we’d hoped – that probably goes for everyone here – but we finished in 72 hours and still came up with a solid little game.
We had a general idea of what we wanted to make before LD started: some kind of mini-RPG or adventure game. We couldn’t help brainstorming as we were voting on themes, and we really liked the idea of setting the game in a dystopia. A few of the themes could’ve made that setting difficult, but luckily for us,“Beneath the Surface” fit really well. It led to an interesting post-apocalyptic setting where the action takes place underground because the surface is no longer habitable. Plus, a dystopian setting was perfect for adding layers of secrets and false pretenses, which meant we could interpret the theme both literally and figuratively. We didn’t get to do as much of the latter as we originally planned, but we think it still comes through pretty well.
Although we started with the idea of a “mini-RPG,” we knew we probably wouldn’t have time to add many RPG elements. As it turned out, we ended up just sticking to a point-and-click adventure game. In order to have time to code extra RPG features, like a combat system, we would’ve had to spend less time on art and the dialogue system. That would have led to a very different kind of game, not necessarily a bad one, but we felt New Dawn would be better served by focusing on the story and the atmosphere. Having a better dialogue system and more detailed art helped to strengthen the story and atmosphere, whereas RPG mechanics wouldn’t really add as much in that sense. That said, if we had more time, we would have liked to add those as well.
New Dawn — A subterranean dystopia
Individual Thoughts:
Stefan (Coding, Art, Concept/Gameplay Design): Going in I knew I was going to use Unity (and C#), along with 2D Toolkit. I had laid out a basic plan which was to try to implement all the features by the end of the first 24 hours, then all the art by the end of the second 24 hours, and leave the third day for testing, bugfixing, and polish. I did this because I know that games always take longer than you expect, so this gave us some room to work with and helped curb our ambitions and expectations. As it turned out, this was a great idea, because although I did finish all the crucial features in the first 24 hours, the art ended up taking much longer and wasn’t done until well into the third day (and I didn’t sleep at all Sunday night either!).
Ultimately I’m a programmer, not an artist, so I’m not very efficient at that stuff because I haven’t done it much. However another big reason it took so long is that while 2D Toolkit is very convenient, it has some very tedious interface problems that require manually doing repetitive actions over and over, which really should be automated. These actions can be automated by script, but at the time I wasn’t sure if the amount of time it would take to write those scripts would be less than the time it takes to do the stuff manually. In retrospect, I think for the amount of art we had it probably wouldn’t have saved us that much. However, if I could do it over again, I would have set up those automation extensions to 2D Toolkit before LD started, because that definitely would have saved a lot of time.
The art itself also took a lot of time because I chose to put a lot of detail into it, despite it being very low-res pixel art. The details are largely in the shading, which ate up a lot of time, especially for the tilesets which required many different versions of each wall tile in order for the shading to match up. This also meant more work for Olivia when placing the tiles to build out the levels. The shading, especially on the tiles, is a very subtle effect, which I don’t think most people would notice unless they’re familiar with how tilesets work and are specifically thinking about it (which you usually don’t do when you play a game even if you are familiar with how it works). However, I still think it was worth it to spend this extra time, because although most people won’t consciously recognize that the shading is there, when it isn’t there it really stands out and looks noticeably worse. In particular, I think the atmosphere of the game was really well served by the extra shading detail. After drawing the basic shape and applying the shading, I also applied a noise filter to all except the character sprites to give them a bit of extra grit which I think fits the setting well.
On the third day, once the art was finally completed, we only had a few hours left before the submission deadline. At this point I implemented a few extra features that I didn’t consider crucial, most notably the ability for NPCs to move. At this point it struck me that the ending we were planning was going to be very anticlimactic; so I decided to spend the rest of the time quickly building out an additional final level to provide a more climactic ending, while Olivia was finishing up the penultimate level. I think this was definitely a good decision in the end, however it was risky, because we ended up cutting it very close; if it wasn’t for the submission grace period we would have missed the deadline. But overall it definitely makes the game feel much more satisfying when you finish it, so I’m glad I made that choice.
Olivia (Writing, World/Level Design, Music): We knew the general kind of story we wanted to tell before LD started, so once the theme was announced I started hashing out the details. I spent most of the first day planning the overall plot, with input from Stefan, and writing descriptions/dialogue for generic NPCs and a few items. Though I didn’t implement them that day, all of those descriptions made it into the game, and really helped the world feel more inhabited. I also wrote text for an intro screen which eventually turned into our game page’s description.
Saturday and Sunday were mostly spent setting up levels: I’m pretty new to level design, and that turned into a huge, unexpected time sink. One of the original “exterior” areas I’d made was close to the size of a real city block – way more space than we had time to fill with interesting stuff! That time would’ve been much better spent populating the existing areas and doing additional writing, but…lesson learned. I said goodbye to my hopes of having all the levels finished by midday Sunday, and had to cut a plot branch and simplify the remaining ones to make sure I’d have time to finish the story.
Monday was mostly a rush to implement the last of the plot. Thankfully I’d planned it all and written some of it beforehand. The penultimate level, two crucial dialogue trees, and two optional but pretty significant NPCs didn’t exist in-game until late Monday afternoon. I also wrote the second (and shortest) part of our music that day, since I wanted at least a little variety. In our rush to submit, there wasn’t time to put the intro text on a starting screen, but that’s something I definitely plan to fix post-comp.
There were a few things I’d hoped to fit in, even with the deadline looming, that didn’t make it. The main one was a set of PA speaker announcements (in the form of text dialogue) which would’ve given more backstory and context to the world. I also wanted to implement sound effects – we’d made a bunch in bfxr – and additional music. My next priority would probably have been adding waypoints so generic NPCs can move and putting more decorations and ambient descriptions throughout the world. In spite of all those cuts, though, we still managed to tell a complete story in 72 hours, and I’m pretty happy with it.
What We Learned:
After we submitted the game, we got a lot of great feedback from commenters. Several people had problems with the click-to-move interface, and since we didn’t anticipate that we hadn’t put in any alternate control schemes (though our post-LD update lets you click and hold, which should alleviate much of the problem). We also made the main quest a little easier to figure out in some post-LD tweaks, since several people were getting stuck. Additionally, given the amount of content we had to cut due to the time limit, some of the areas ended up feeling a little empty. They probably should’ve been shrunk down. On the whole, though, the story and art that we had came together really well, and we ended up with a short but atmospheric adventure game.
LD was a great experience, and it really motivated us to make a game of our own from start to finish. We might do something totally different next time around, but we’ll definitely be there!
Tags: 2D, adventure, jam, ld29, ludum dare 29, new dawn, post-mortem, postmortem, RPG, SuccessStory, unity, unity3d
When the theme was first announced, First thing that came into mind was caves. I was gonna make a normal platformer that happens to be in a cave, but then had the idea of falling rocks causing cave-in’s. It was going to have a waterfall that you climb (to fit in with the 1GAM April theme) but was soon changed due to multiple reasons.
Things that gone wrong / were supposed to be implented :
1- A proper use for the pickaxe (mine rocks for score, or use it to climb up)
2- difficulty ramping (The game is too easy)
3- Rocks’ speed, I accidentally made it slower to spawn than what i wanted, only noticed after publishing
4- Player’s jumps, raycast doesn’t work properly due to Polygon Colliders.
That’s it.. Did my best for the game and i am proud of the outcome!
links to Goat Guzzler
This was my second Ludum Dare and I approached it differently to last time.With the last game I was very bogged down in programing and I made things difficult for myself and I ended up with something that wasn’t great , I only spent a few hours on art and that’s the only part people really liked.
So this time I focused on art and my aim was to make something that looked different and was funny. After the theme was announced I only had one idea which was to have a monster peering out of the water surface.
The fist thing I did was scribble some drawings down on paper, they are terrible but they go me started.
I started with the art as it was really important to me that it looked good and I didn’t want to spend half my weekend coding with boxes and lines if the game was going to look terrible in the end.
I created the environment and character graphics in photoshop by doing some more crappy drawings which I used as a guide to cut the craft paper texture out. I went for this craft look because you can produce something that looks quite good relatively quickly and also get away with simply animating it.
All the animation and programing was all done directly in flash. The design of the level was purposely made flat to avoid my having to do any even slightly difficult programing. I wanted the controls to be very straight forward so I went with just using the mouse.
I know nothing about sound so all the music and sound effects were all made in the last hour I had. I used sfxr for the effects which I thought suited the game alright. I used wario ware DIY on the Nintendo DS to make the music because its pretty much the only thing close to an instrument that I know how to use, I think it sounds quite funny for about 30 seconds but you would probably drive yourself insane if you listened to it for much longer.
Overall I’ve very pleased with how goat guzzler turned out and I’m intending to work on it a bit more and release it with a high score table, which will be fun.
As promised, I’ve been working on writing out a tutorial on my personal workflow, and the same process I used in Sail! It’s aimed towards people who work with Unity3D but don’t know the first thing about modeling (it’s a lot easier than you’d think!), but it can also be useful to people who get frustrated with importing Blender models into Unity properly. This is just the intro, but I’m shooting for one article a day for the next week or so!
—–
Free modeling and image editing software exists, and the free game engine Unity exists. However, I haven’t been able to find a good start to finish guide on a workflow between these things, so I figured why not contribute something to the indie game making community for once! In this series of posts, I’m going to outline my personal workflow between Blender 2.70, GIMP 2.8, and Unity3D 4.
Our game “Ants at War” has been updated! The overall gameplay has been greatly improved by fixing some bugs, and difficulty has been increased on the map “Crystal Canyon”.
POST-JAM UPDATE (version 1.2.4):
– Several bug fixes (path-finding, ants sometimes freezing, enemy queens were not spawning soldier units, queens were not checking spawning area and consequently stacked units…).
– Path-finding weights has been changed on each map.
– Multiple enemy queens on the third map.
– Buttons “play”/”stop” added in the pause screen.
– Units production can be queued.
– Costs of turrets/units has been balanced a bit.
– When clicking on an unit, a description has been added to the tooltip.
– Several code changes to ensure that the game runs fine on Wine (Linux).
– Rocks and spider-webs have now four different visuals.
– Destruction of rocks is now visually progressive.
– Multiple buildings can now be created by a single click (as if you were painting with the building).
You can download the post-jam version on the page of our jam entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36462
I am currently working on a more polished version of my game (If you haven’t played it yet: Play now. Thanks!). I recommend the same to everybody since there will be no motivation to work on your old ludum dare hack in a half year 😉
Boom! Make bigger, better explosions!
I need ideas for a game now that the ludum dare is over.
Join the chat and watch the broadcast http://twitch.tv/robodylan
We will be throwing together “something” based off of user submitted ideas.
Hopefully we will get some sort of thing.
Open to all ideas.
Goal is randomness.
See you there
Hi guys!
I created several months ago an application used to follow the Twinoid community on Ludum Dare (games, devblogs, etc.)
I’m currently adding features, and I’d like to give some love to “non-author” JAM participants. I’m working on allowing users to link to their LD account (and confirm by adding a word to their description for a few seconds) so that the application can start following future blog posts and games.
This last thing (future games) needs the user id to be effective. But I can’t get it automatically at the moment if the user did not post any game yet =/
I can confirm it being a particular user’s id (with /compo/?author=666), I can manually find it with media/blog post search in the dashboard, etc.
But I did not find any way of actually getting a user id from the author name automatically (or let the user find it to give it to me).
Do you guys know any way to do that?
Thanks!
It’s hard to belive, but it’s not even a week after we finished our work on Losing it and moved on with our lives. Bud even after the three days of development, Ludum Dare didn’t end for me. Quite the opposite. I started checking different games from other creators and damn… There are really many great game developers.
I saddens me, that I will never be able to try all of the 2497 entries, but I can just hope, that the community really chooses the best among the bests.
So till now, I tried and played more than 50 entries. I know that’s nothing compared to other users, but taking in account my busy life, it’s more than I expected. And I thought it would be nice to choose few of the games I enjoyed the most and let other people know about these little masterpieces. It’s easy for a really well made game to get lost in the sea of other entries, so I took my time and decided to introduce you to a handful of creations I enjoyed: (Not in particular order)
1. A happy place
link
– More of an atmospheric experience than a classic form of a game, but if you don’t mind these kind of projects, you can’t go wrong with A happy place. This, again, is something I would describe as illustration of interactive art, but I let you decide on this matter.
2. NOT THE ELEPHANT
link
– Short, fun and impressively polished. This 3D experince puts you in the role of a sculptor, who tries to carve an alephant from a stone cube. The truth is, you are not really carving into the stone, but rather trying to get rid of the stone parts covering the elephant. But watch out. You can’t hit the sculpture itself, so your destruction can become a bit tricky. Extremely fun!
3. Planet Corp
link
– I have no idea how the guys managed to finish a game so polished, but Planet Corp is fun, pretty and even well designed. It doesn’t come with any amazingly innovative ideas, but enhances old concepts and makes them fresh. Definitely a nice entry.
4. Ridiculous Glitchez
link
– It’s hard to get into the gameplay at the beginning, but once you get used to it, you are rewarded with fun and catchy mechanics. I admit, I am very fond of shiny and chaotic effects, but if they don’t hurt your eyes, you will enjoy a very appealing experience. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely worth a try!
5. Yojimbrawl!
link
Grab a friend and try this crazy 2-player fighter. A combination of classic fighter genre and a little bit of Nidhogg makes this game a unique title. Multiplayer entries get easily lost in the heap, but this one is worth your time.
So, thanks for checking this list and give those cool games a try! They totally deserve it!
Tags: 2-player, a happy place, elephant, happy, not the elephant, planet corp, ridiculous glitchez, space, yojimbrawl
I’m hoping to have this released soon. It’s a lot of work!
Some tasks include:
– Adding Chartboost ad support.
– Adding IAP to donate/remove ads.
– Support for different screen sizes.
Shameless plug!
Be sure to check out my other iOS game, Spectre: Cybertank Wars
It’s a single/multiplayer retro-styled tank action game, and supports the iPhone and iPad!
I seem to have a thing for the color blue.
These are five games I’ve rated fun with 5, I didn’t rated all with 5(because some have bad theme or something else):
Very good game. I rated it with best ratings (of games I played).
Please play and rate this game. It doesn’t have enough ratings, but it’s fun.
This game have enough rating and it’s fun (but theme isn’t good).
Play and rate this game because it’s fun and it have web version.
It’s cool game(and really hard).
Had some time to kill, so I decide to make a wallpaper for our game! (Check it out here if you haven’t already)
Enjoy.
(Click the image for full size)
This was my first Ludum Dare and the first time I had done a solo jam. It was far more tiring than I had expected, but also incredibly fun! I just wanted to quickly break down the results of last weekend in the hopes that next time I can learn from my mistakes.
What Went Right
What Went Wrong
The balance is all wrong, there isn’t enough to do, and the player has no agency over the various seeds they get during each round. I kind of knew the 3rd one would be a problem, but I guess my tired brain gave me hope that it wouldn’t be that bad… my brain was wrong.All in all, I’m happy I got to participate. I will definitely join in on the next one and (hopefully) I’ll be able to fix some of my previous blunders. Until then, I’m going to put a little more effort into making Sprout fun and see what happens
Sprout iPhone wallpaper
The music box is a hexagonal voxel horror
The good:
The atmosphere was set really well with the music and dynamic sounds such as breathing and footsteps. The voxels turned out really well being hexagon shaped rather than the boring old cube shape and some times when I was play testing i completely forgot that this was voxel.
The bad:
This is gonna be a bit longer than the good. Even though the voxels looked nice I didn’t have enough time to vary the textures so most of the map is all one texture. The engine I set up for the voxels for this LD wasn’t finished. I still didn’t have an efficient way to place blocks. So I had to do all of that during the jam. That and the sound took up too much time, as a result the scares were pretty poor due to time. I rushed one type of scare and reused it. The first scare is probably the most effective but the problem is the player can easily be looking the other way and not understand why there is a screaming sound. The gameplay also was pretty bland, you will understand why if you play it, I don’t want to spoil it.
Also some people end up dying near the end of the game because they got hurt too much in first scare and didn’t notice their hp dropping. I should have had a sound effect and an effect visually in the fps camera. I found a glitch late into development which I never got time to fix. Some of the doors would go out of control at times when they were open due to collision with a wall beside it. If the player got hit by the door it would either get time stuck in the ceiling or be shot though the roof and out of the map. Pretty funny at first until you figure out you have to start over. This glitch could have easily been avoided if I made a better way of placing the voxels and other objects. The theme of hexagonal voxel world should have stayed consistent throughout rather than having some smooth models and then some low poly ones.
Click image to go to page
what I learned:
-How to create triangles, uv map a primitive from scratch in unity
-How to make 3D models in blender that are uv mapped
-I need to focus more on the result of the project before I start
-I must stick to graphical themes
Tags: ld29, postmortem, postmortem ld29
My timelapse finally finished uploading so here it is. (Jello will probably hate me though because it includes a look at the ending)
~AlucardX60
Ummm… yeah. I don’t know what dat is. But here I’m trying to write one. Because EVERYONE ELSE does. I blatantly copy the structure from other’s posts. I’m such a jerk… But that’s what YOU love about me, right?
About: Gravedigger 20XX is a game about a moleman, his sad story, being transformed into something he can’t describe, but also about his strong will, looking to defeat what was underground. Beyond the surface of the ground. (?).
The Good: It workz!!!!1. That’s all I see as good, I don’t know.
The Bad: Difficulty sucks, the spike at the end is insufferable. Water physics, which I added at the end, annoys a little. And the digging mechanic has a lot of flaws at how it selects the block to dig in.
What I learned: I don’t know. I think I learned something about platformers. But I can’t describe it. I just say, that the only way you can learn something is getting your hands dirty. So if there is something you want to do and haven’t, Start Doing It Right Naww.
This is all my postmortem.
Now, here comes the timelapse.
Apr25th – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZrMwHHDHss
Apr26th – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLK9GqQuKk
Apr27th – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Y6I5HF7Lg
– Watch them -he says-.
Trivia: You probably guessed it. But 20XX is a random extra at the title. Has no meaning. Or does it?
[ Original post with videos and audio, here > http://www.piritubano.com/2014/05/04/planetolution-a-postmortem/ ]
Yeey! Ludum Dare 29! Explosive Planets!
I was thinking don’t participate in this one, not because I don’t want, but because I’m with too many things to do in this weekend – girlfriend at home, have to work on sunday, an app to finish to the next week… my feeling is the game will not happen.
But in the shower on friday – aways on the shower – I have a vision. I was thinking in experimental games, telling some kind of history, but this one hits me in the face like I was his bitch. I decided to explode planet on the shower.
The idea was a simple gameplay, nice effects, a visual flat-pixel-like, a music maded with DrumPads on my tablet. KISS.
So I started the development. I also recorded eight of twelve hours of my work. You can check it here if you want.
What’s went right?
The idea: It born in my mind like I was the Choosen One. Sharbel was surprised with the game idea (this is very rare to happen), and when I release it this is the major opinion.
The graphics: I really don’t know why, but I think it’s because the game have a intro. The intro show how the graphics are like that, so I think people like it.
The time: I don’t suffer with the time, acctually I made it very relaxing. Works perfectly. Someday I’ll put some energy on a Ludum Dare to see what I can do in these days.
The music. I make my second music in gamejams. And it’s not suck. \o/
What’s went wrong?
The gameplay: I could’t evolve it very much. If you focus on one planet, you win.
The balance: I doesn’t do it. So if you try to maintain two planets, you will suffer. If you on one, you’re immortal.
The post-compo: I don’t have time to take a good care of it, make it better because I was in a very complicated week.
But I don’t thinking in give up the game. Probably I’ll take some day in next week to work on it. It’s not so hard, I was make the sound effects, some basic music, and now I was thinking in add some animations (like when the played reaches some milleniuns the planets show something in that era), put some mechanics to make the game hard, and export it to mobile (because I was thinking on mobile all the time).
Hey there! DDRKirby(ISQ) here with my post-mortem writeup for my chiptune rhythm game, Ripple Runner! Please check it out if you haven’t already done so!
The title screen for Ripple Runner – Click to play!
This is already my 7th time entering Ludum Dare…I’m really getting to be an old veteran now! Last time around I teamed up with my artist friend xellaya and made a puzzle platformer called Match Girl for LD28. You can read the post-mortem for Match Girl here, if you want to see how that turned out.
This time I ended up working by myself and entered the 48hr division. I came up with an 8-bit styled (more like 9-bit, really) musical runner game, with a lot of similarities to Bit.Trip Runner. (Imagine what Canabalt would be like if it were a rhythm game) I’m really happy with the result, and it seems like other people are too! Here’s what the game looks like in action:
A shot from stage 3, showcasing the spike mechanic
Without further ado, let’s dive right into what went well and what didn’t go so well.
What went well:
Workflow and Experience
I feel like I’ve been saying this ever since Hyper Furball, but the process of taking a game from start to finish has gotten really streamlined now, and now that I’ve got all of the basics down pat, I get to spend most of my work time on implementing the cool awesome things that are specific to the individual game, as opposed to writing lots of boilerplate code and worrying about menus, collision detection, how to recycle entities, particle emitters, screen flashes, etc. Ever since Hyper Furball, I’ve sort of had the same basic formula for the intro, title screen/menu, and jukebox as well, and I think that’s been working fantastically. Not only is it really easy to reuse the code from before and just adjust the menu slightly (as well as put in the appropriate background elements), but it also ties my works together aesthetically. Having the intro there (complete with shrot musical ditty) really gives it a sense of polish, and I’m really beginning to enjoy how I have it for each game I make.
The one downside for this is that since I’ve been copying code from my previous LD projects, all of it has a bunch of random hacks and terrible coding that I did in the 11th hour when all you care about is tweaking one thing or fixing one issue. So far this has been harmless, but if I continue to do it without cleaning any of it up, I’m bound to run into issues sooner or later. One example: I have a variable for a “blackImage” that I used for fading the screen in/out to black from Match Girl and Hyper Furball, but I decided that I wanted screenfades to white for Ripple Runner, so now my “blackImage” variable points to…a white image. Which, of course, is totally fine, because that image is only used in the title screen and it was much easier to just keep the variable name but switch the content rather than having to actually rename the variable and catch all of the places where it was used, etc etc. Anyways, sometime in the future it would be ideal if I could avoid copying over all the hacks from existing projects…
Concept and Brainstorming
This is my favorite idea that I’ve ever had for an LD game, and I was actually REALLY excited when it all started coming together and I could see that it was going to work out. Because of various factors (which I’ll talk more about later), I actually spent quite a lot of time brainstorming different ideas for the theme this time (“Beneath the Surface”) and coming up with a bunch of different ideas, including a FEZ-like game that focused on water reflections, an extreme fishing game, a rhythm-based digging game, and a sort of 2D platformer version of Minesweeper (think Mr. Driller meets Minesweeper). In the end I think I was inspired to create a rhythm game by stumbling upon Rhythm Doctor in the few days leading up to LD, as I was brainstorming what kinds of games I would want to make this time around. Seeing that someone else had successfully made a music game using flashpunk was actually really encouraging–I now knew that it was possible! If I hadn’t seen that, I probably would have shied away from the concept, as music games are notoriously hard to really get right (I know–I’ve worked on one in the past as well).
Because I had so much time to brainstorm, I actually had almost the entire gameplay visualized in my head (and on my scratch paper) before I even started working. I had it all thought out, including questions such as “do I want to make the tempo stay constant or speed up throughout a song?”, “how exactly do I want to handle syncing the gameplay to the audio?” (easy–I simply mapped the player’s x position to the current sound position and placed everything else accordingly), “what art style do i want?”, and “how exactly do I want the musical cues to be integrated?” I knew that the idea was fairly interesting, and relatively simple to implement assuming my few basic assumptions about the flashpunk audio engine would work out (they did). Here’s what an early development screenshot looked like:
An early development screenshot, complete with derpy placeholder sprite
As you can see, it’s actually not too far off from the final product! I even already knew I was going to do the watery displacement effect for the reflected half of the screen, so that was already in there at this point. I hadn’t yet thought of the spike concept, but even with just jumping and swapping it was already becoming apparent to me that the game was gonna be a success. It’s also good to note that this was probably my simplest LD idea yet in terms of execution complexity, which definitely helped out. (I finally hit my goal of not trying to bite off more than I should chew!)
I think the in-game tutorial was one of the best gameplay design decisions as well, and definitely beats all of my other games in terms of easing new players into the game mechanics.
Art Style
At some point during my concepting, I decided that I was going to try out using a 4-color palette for the game. I knew I wanted something that would look good, yet also be relatively easy for me to do, since I’m pretty far from proficient in my art and pixeling skills. This turned out to be a great decision, as all of the graphics in the game were really simple for me to draw, yet the end result looked really great! Kudos to Plant Cat: First Blossom by flashygoodness and friends for getting me inspired to try this art style out. I also decided to go with a greenish hue, as a throwback to the good old days of the original Game Boy. This also made it easy for me do the hue-shifting effect that happens at certain checkpoints.
To illustrate just how simple this made my life, here’s what the three different layers of the background look like individually:
Dirt simple! All I had to do was draw a solid shape with some variations at the top edge and make sure that it wrapped around nicely, repeat it for another shade, and then draw some super simple pixel clouds. The parallax scrolling effect is very simple to do in Flashpunk as well, by just making each image into an automatically-wrapping Backdrop that scrolls at a different rate.
Then I just had to add a layer for the water, which only shows in the bottom half:
If you’re paying close attention during the game or at the title screen, you’ll notice that the white lines and dots on the surface of the water actually move, sort of imitating the bubbles and lighting that the surface of water makes in real life. I actually used two separate layers of white lines for this and made them scroll at different rates, so that it looks dynamic, as opposed to seeming like just a single image that’s scrolling.
I implemented the wavy water reflection effect by modifying the “Glitch” filter in punk.fx to be based on a sin function instead of shifting lines at random. It’s a simple displacement effect that just shifts each horizontal line of pixels by a different amount, but it works really well!
Finally, I used a hue shift effect for the different sections of music, also provided by punk.fx. Here’s another example of the final result:
I’m really pleased with how the running animation turned out for my little guy too, despite being not confident at all that I could get that right. I had no idea what I wanted to make my character look like at first, and I actually still don’t know quite what it is (some kind of squid-like aquatic being??), but it ended up working out perfectly.
I should note that even though I said I’m using a 4-color pallete, the final visual result of the game isn’t really constrained to that, because of the reflection effects and transparency and all that. Hence, the visual style of the game is very much “9-bit”, just like my music is–in other words, it’s derived from old 8-bit games, but doesn’t emulate them perfectly, and instead allows for some extra capabilities.
Music and Audio
Well, I don’t really know what I can say about this at this point, as making soundtracks like this is standard fare for me nowadays. This game in particular was REALLY fun for me to compose for, since I got to have fun involving the player in the song as well. I really enjoyed it, and it was helpful to write it as I was coding the game, keeping in mind the spaces where I wanted to have tutorials and checkpoints and whatnot. People are really digging the music already, it seems
Be sure to check out the soundtrack at my bandcamp site, too! http://ddrkirbyisq.bandcamp.com/album/ripple-runner-original-soundtrack
The Ripple Runner OST – click to download!
What didn’t go so well:
RL Stuff Eating into LD Time
This certainly isn’t the first time that I’ve had real life issues distract me or come into conflict with Ludum Dare, so it’s not like this was any surprise to me, but sheesh…just once I’d like to just do a Ludum Dare without getting sick or being mentally exhausted or having my timeslot screwed over in some way. This time around I left my Friday dance event early so that I could have a bit more time to focus on LD (I was too distracted to really think about anything else anyways), but as luck would have it I needed to go perform for something on Saturday at around noon, so that ate up the first half of my Saturday. I brought myself a pen and paper so that I could spend my downtime brainstorming ideas and concepts for the game, which actually ended up working out pretty nicely, but in the end I didn’t get to sit down at my computer and start working until 4:30PM on Saturday, which is over 20 hours into the 48 hour timeframe. Soooo yeah, I kind of got screwed over in terms of time. On the plus side, having all my ideas planned out as well as being all anxious from having lost out on a half-day of work made me blaze through the initial dev work and I had the basic game up and running very quickly (after a few hours of work), so it wasn’t the end of the world…but I’m pretty sure I would have been able to program more content and make more songs if it wasn’t for me having lost out on all of those potential work hours.
Here is a good time to note that I actually didn’t implement the spike mechanic until preeettty late into development (At t-minus 5 hours or something like that). After making the first two stages, I was thinking to myself that it would really be nice if I had a third mechanic, as only having jumping and swapping was fun but also not quite that interesting from a gameplay perspective. Three is kind of the magic number for having different things to concentrate on, as I know from playing Puzzlejuice, so I was looking for something different to do. In the end I came up with two different ideas–one was the spike/flip upside-down mechanic that I ended up implementing, and the other was that I was going to have the Jump button do an attack or kick of some sort if you pressed it in midair, so that you’d have to press jump twice in quick succession to get past certain obstacles (breakable walls or something). I wanted to implement both, but in the end didn’t have time, so I just went with only the spikes. I knew that that was the better of the two mechanics anyways, because holding a button down is a different feeling than the button presses for jump and ripple, both mentally and from a tactile sense too. The jump-kick idea would let me introduce more eighth-note rhythms into my songs, but I already kind of had that idea going with the jump-ripple combo, so it didn’t -really- introduce anything new.
Not Enough Content
Like I mentioned above, a direct corollary of having less time was only being able to make 3 songs for the game, even though I had definitely wanted to make more. Programming in the actual stages was actually quite time-consuming, as I had to make sure all of the platforms and obstacles were mapped to the appropriate times in the music, as well as placing special events such as checkpoints, hue shifts, changes in scrolling speed, and tutorials.
A Weird FlashDevelop Issue
Thankfully this wasn’t actually -too- bad, but every once in a while (typically when I went to import a source file from Match Girl or something and was trying to rip out all of the Match Girl-specific parts), FD would have problems with the compile process–it would either fail to detect changes, or just tell you that the compile succeeded and then try to run the resulting binary, when in actuality the compile was supposed to fail (because of a missing import or something). Again, this happened only once or twice, and I had some workarounds, but it was a bit of an annoyance when it did happen. Other than that, my development was actually really smooth this time around, with no real surprises anywhere. I remember having issues trying to get the ripple particle effects working properly, but I ended up figuring that out without too much pain.
Overall, Ripple Runner was a huge success, personally, and I’m really looking forward to what you all think of it as well. Again, please play and rate if you haven’t done so already!
I’m also definitely looking into working on a post-compo version of Ripple Runner, cleaning up a few things like adding the ability to pause the game, etc. Mostly, though, I just want to add more songs, because 3 just isn’t enough! I also want to give songs that have a wider difficulty range…the 3rd song isn’t nearly hard enough to give players a *real* challenge. Stay tuned for news on the post-compo version–I’m hoping to work on it over the next couple weeks!
Tags: flash, flashpunk, ld29, post-mortem, postmortem
Just a quick update. Chris has ported Shanghai to Android, so if you’ve got an Android phone please give it a spin. Here’s the link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33962
If you’ve played the Web version of Shanghai, you probably would have noticed that the resolution is weird! Well the story behind it is that we realized early on we were making a puzzle game and we were having 2 parts to the action; The Bund and the Puzzle Grid.
It helped emphasize the jam theme, since the grid was beneath the surface of the city… like your actions. But most of all, it just worked so much better as a mobile game. The dragging gameplay is a lot like Flow, a great puzzle game on mobile devices. Shanghai has similar line drawing on a grid, so we naturally designed for the smartphone.
Now we finally have our smartphone port available, so even if you’ve played Shanghai before… try again It also doesn’t seem to experience the city-not-loading bug which has plagued random players since submission.
Here’s another link for ya: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33962
Feedback is much appreciated, thanks!
– Sam
G’day my fellow creators. So a week and an hour after LD48 compo has ended it’s time for me to reflect on my performance.
Gameplay
I’ve created a 2D adventure game with a pretty simple goal but a lot of micro management. You start off with a group of ants and your goal is to build your nest on the surface of the ground. To do this you need to collect dirt and sticks from underneath the ground. There’s also a survival factor because you need to collect food or else your ants will slowly die off. There are 4 different types of ants and each has its own task to perform.
When the game starts you have 3 of each type and 1 queen. The basic expectation is to create 3 groups of 3 and send two groups exploring to the two different sides of the world (since you start in the middle), leaving the third group and the queen closer to the surface to build once resources are collected. In the Ludum Dare version, the game ends when 50 ant-made blocks are placed on the surface in the dedicated area. There’s also a 20 minute timer but it doesn’t do anything except running down.
Mechanics/Keys
From the comments I’ve received during the past week I see that mechanics have a pretty hard learning curve. There are 5 types of actions (shown in the GUI on the left side) and you switch between them by pressing numbers [1-5]. Any kind of action requires you to select ants (pick action [1] and left click on an ant [LMB]). Then you pick your action between 2 and 5 and left click to perform. You move selected ants with [WSAD] and move the camera by holding [SHIFT] or [RMB] and pressing [WSAD]. Here are all the key strokes:
Sound/Graphics
There’s not much to it besides a couple of simple blips while picking up items and a very “soft” (and quite) digging sound. There’s also an ambient rain/thunderstorm sound and a very simple but in my opinion cool addition is that the deeper you go (with your camera) the quitter this sounds gets.
The graphics engine works off a pixel array and all art was made during those 48 hours. I’ve used Paint.NET and pretty much free handed all of it.
Download
Here’s a little website I’ve quickly made: http://anterraria.ls-rp.net/
Submission: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=29770
And direct download: http://anterraria.ls-rp.net/Anterrarium.rar
Sorry that you have to download a .jar file. Apparently I can make a game in 48 hours but I can’t get an applet to work. (PS. Make sure you unpack the files and then run the game – you need the /res/ folder)
Screenshots
Timelapse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvzufKYzuVQ
Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll take the time to rate my work
I managed to get some time to add some upgrades to the game this weekend.
The difficulty was slightly balanced by adding a drill, to which the pipes need to be connected.
A level map was added.
Also after level 10 you unlock the police station which reduces the unrest by 25% with every policeman you buy.
Future updates will include
* Politician support which freezes all unrest for 30 seconds (unlockable from level 20).
* Small Bonus levels in between the planets that unlock equipment upgrades, better drills, less poluting pipes, wildcard pipes.
* Sound
* Small graphic changes.
Please be sure to rate and also any feedback is greatly appreciated.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34443
Thank you,
Adrian.
Tags: environmentalist, fracking, Ludumdare, phaser.js, web
Mind the Gap was our jam entry into Ludum Dare 26. The theme for LD26 was minimalism, so we decided to create a game inspired by the London tube map. The player builds the tube map as the city grows around them. Stations fill up, and if the player’s network isn’t up to scratch they’ll quickly overcrowd. The entry is still playable.
Mind the Gap, our Ludum Dare 26 jam entry and prototype for Mini Metro.
We were pleased with how the concept came out and floored by the response we received, so we decided to continue development into a full game.
So was born Mini Metro! There was plenty of room to improve over the prototype, so while the basic gameplay remains almost everything has been improved upon. The art style is much closer to the inspiration, rivers and tunnels present a new challenge, line editing is more powerful and intuitive, pathfinding is much smarter, and the player’s capabilities are increased throughout an upgrade system. We’ve attempted to stick closely to the minimalist theme throughout development.
Despite our initial estimates (of course it’ll be done by 2014!), a year later and we’re not quite out but almost there. Mini Metro’s been in open alpha since September 2013. In March 2014 we submitted the game to Steam Greenlight and received some amazing press—weirdly, mainly from non-gaming press. Mini Metro popped up on mainstream sites such as The Verge, Huffington Post UK, Wired UK, Brokelyn, The Atlantic Cities, Popular Mechanics, and Fast Company. The alpha has since been played well over a million times, and we’re furiously working at getting Mini Metro finished and out the door!
We hope to release Q2 2014 on desktop (through Steam and DRM-free through the Humble Store), iOS, Android, and PS Vita. The alpha is playable at http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/.
A huge thanks to everyone behind Ludum Dare! It’s impossible to overestimate the motivation you receive by competing, both from finishing your entry and receiving feedback from the great community.
I threw my hat into the ring for the second time as a solo entrant in the 48-hour competition, and here is a breakdown of how it all went developing my entry Darkness Shines Through. I realize this is a bit late, but it’s been a hectic week for me, and I didn’t have the time or the drive to do this until today. Ludum Dare takes a lot out of me, and trying to rate a large number of games to get widespread exposure is almost more work than making the game in the first place. Almost.
If you’ve followed this blog at all, you know I’ve been making games for a long, long time, as a hobby. I was content to put my prototypes out to my friends and family and leave it at that. A while back that all changed, and I decided to try and go public with my work. After making a moderately popular Minecraft mod that took almost two years to write, I decided to go much smaller scale to save my sanity and have a better chance at finishing something cohesive. I tried to make an RPG, but I bit off a bit more than I could chew at the time, and when Ludum Dare 27 came around, I decided I would give it a go. I’ve always thought it was a fun idea, and that seemed as good a time as any to give it a try. It went pretty well, I turned that game into my first commercial product and earned my first dollars through making games. The feeling was incredible, though the project was a bit underwhelming as it didn’t exactly target the broadest of audiences. I finished up the final touches on the last patch for that game a mere week before this round started; the timing couldn’t have been better.
About a week before the contest started, I decided I was going to try and use Unity this time around. Despite the few hiccups I ran into, I largely enjoyed my experience with LibGDX, but I would like to branch out into the console market, and Unity provides me an easy way to do that while still making small PC games in the interim. I only had a few days to try and learn how to use Unity, and that simply wasn’t enough time. I’m a programmer, I write code, it’s what I like to do, it’s how my brain works. I was not able to easily adapt to the much-more-visual style of development that Unity presents, so at the last minute I scrapped the idea and went back to LibGDX.
LibGDX is like my fried chicken. It’s not what I wanted to be eating, but it’s so tasty. Photo by beketchai via Flickr
I also thought this would be the perfect time to give this whole game development streaming thing a go. I’ve seen it around quite a bit, and while it really didn’t sound like a good time to me, I’ve been working on breaking out of my comfort zone to get my name out there. After a few snags with that, I finally got things up and running. Sort of. For whatever reason, Twitch would not update my status from offline, no matter how online I got. Others could view my stream, it was up and running, but I was listed as offline which meant nobody could find me; I didn’t show up in the Ludum Dare list of streams. In getting set up I had to switch my account from being a Justin.tv account to a Twitch.tv account, so I assumed it was because of that, and declared myself ready.
As soon as I knew I would have the time to enter, I started looking at the theme voting. There were some great themes, some that were mediocre, and some that I could do naught but roll my eyes at. As the list narrowed down to the final twenty, my brain went into overdrive. Every theme I read, my mind would flood with ideas of how I could possibly interpret that theme in a way that wouldn’t be overdone, and wouldn’t be out of the reach of my capability. I jotted down the best ideas that came to mind; nothing more than an elevator pitch and maybe a title, but it helped me not go crazy in the days leading up to the event. In the end I think I wrote down about 15 different ideas, each able to be tweaked to fit one of a couple of themes depending on what the actual theme was. I even tried to give myself a leg up by looking at the voting stats for the first four rounds to get a best guess at what it would be. Don’t do this, kids, it doesn’t work and it’s not a good use of time. When the theme was announced, I looked at what I had for that theme and realized I hated it.
I took parts from what I had written down; it was a platformer, the surface I was delving beneath was the facade of a small town of cult members, and there would be no combat. Outside of that it was back to the drawing board. In the first hour after the theme was announced, I started up my Twitch stream and started brainstorming. I decided to go with stealth as the conflict mechanic to replace combat, and to go with a horror-game feel. Making a stealth game in 48 hours that feels satisfying is no easy feat, so I decided to downplay that aspect in favor of a metroidvania-style of exploration. The stealth would still be there, but instead of being an epic struggle like Mark of the Ninja, it would be something more along the lines of blasting away Skree bats in Super Metroid. Something to get in the way and maybe slow you down a bit, but not really the focus. I came up with a list of must-have features, should-have features, and nice extras to add if I had time to spare. I felt good about it.
Stealth was to be my broken escalator. Sorry for the convenience. Photo by Kevin Simpson via Flickr.
By the end of the first night I had a simple platformer up and running. No graphics, no sound, just boxes jumping around and going through doors. The last time I did this, I had a horrible method for getting level content into the game, it took forever, and I nearly didn’t finish as a result, so one of the first things I set up was a streamlined process for getting levels from Tiled into my game. That turned out to be a crucial feature later on, so I’m glad I nailed that down early. My other biggest shortcomings last time were a lack of good audio, and the fact that the game was insanely hard. Audio was easy, I just had to prioritize it higher, and to address the second issue I pulled a page from the Bioshock playbook and made death a non-issue. I simply teleported the player back to the start of the map if they got caught. No loss of upgrades or progress, just a small inconvenience, and one that was easily avoided by entering a door. Going into day two I had a plan and felt on track.
I had convinced a friend of mine, the one with whom I am currently building a ping pong table, to try his hand at the solo competition for the first time. On Saturday he came over and set his laptop up across from me, with the idea that we could bounce ideas off of each other, and when the time came we would have easy and quick access to a playtester. This also gave us the opportunity to try and finish painting our table. None of those things ended up happening, but it was nice to not be locked in solitude for the entire event. I am seriously considering trying to find a local gathering for the next one, the extra human interaction was a bit distracting at times, but it helped stave off panic in a big way. What didn’t help was the fact that trying to stream was causing performance issues and eventually crashed my computer. Being behind didn’t help either.
By the end of day two, the panic had set in. I felt like I had over scoped, I felt like there was no way I could finish, and my mind was going at full speed when I tried to go to sleep the first time. I had fully animated, randomly assembled characters, tiled graphics loading from the map, and all of the music complete, but the gameplay was still missing a fair bit of what I had originally listed in the mandatory category, and I hadn’t even started on the level design. I tried to think back to where I was the last time, but my memory was hazy, I was tired, and I felt mentally drained. After kicking around in bed for about thirty minutes with no sleep in sight, against my better judgement I went back to my office and sat down for some more programming. I managed to get a buggy version of one of the planned platforming moves up and running in about twenty minutes, and while it wasn’t a huge milestone, it set my mind at ease that all of my architecture up to this point had put me in a good place. It seemed like a lot, but it would go quickly.
My mind was calm. Well, as calm as it could be, given the circumstances. Photo by Robert Grant, via Flickr.
On the final day, I was all drive. I became hyper focused and started chewing through features like a programming wizard. Within the first few hours I had all of the movement upgrades I had on my mandatory list implemented with only a few bugs that I waved away as being a casualty of speed. Stealth was working, the enemies would spot and react to the player. I wanted the whole town to react to the player being spotted, like invasion of the body snatchers, they would point and scream, and some flying cultist would come in and knock you out. Instead I went with a simple screen fade and called it a day. With about four hours left, I had all of my must-haves but two put in, and after deciding that I had time for neither of them, looked at the list of cool extras. I really wanted to add windows to the buildings, have them react to the sound of the player and open with a short delay. They would spot you just like the cultists, and the result would be the same, it just added an extra dimension to the game. I started drawing, got the graphics for them ready, got the code for how they would react written up, and with about three hours left, realized I didn’t have time to tweak the level editor and loading code to put them into the game.
I got pretty upset with myself for wasting that time. It was time I should have been using to finish the level map. Then it hit me. I hadn’t even started the level map. I panicked hard. I wanted backtracking and exploration, how could I design all of that in just a couple of hours? Fortunately, the pipeline I had set up for myself at the start saved me. The process was so streamlined I didn’t even have to close the game to load in the new map. With the editor on one screen and the game running on another, I was throwing down tiles like a fiend. After the first hour I was probably a quarter done with what I had initially envisioned. Instead of trying to finish that goal, I started throwing upgrades into existing places on the map. I added a few ledges to make the tops of building accessible with the right upgrades and stashed things all over. It changed the feel from what I wanted, no more sprawling exploration, instead a densely packed town with a collectible around every corner. The town was done, all I had left was to design the final area of the map, the church, and slap it into the game. Then I looked at the clock.
I had minutes left. Less than ten of them. I had lost track of time completely, but at least the town was done enough to play. After taking a deep breath, I made a giant empty room and put it into the game. I coded up the triggers for that map, which didn’t end up working anyway, threw in the entrance and exit, and then checked the time again. Five minutes. In a frenzy I played through the game one last time to make sure it could be beaten. With just two minutes to spare I saw the ending screen, threw my hands up and called it done.
Close enough. Photo by Mr.TinDC via Flickr.
After I finished, worked through a stupid compatibility issue with the web version and got both versions uploaded, I took a break. I watched a movie with my oh-so-patient wife who was crucial to me not breaking down and quitting, ate some food, and just let the experience wash over me. I had done it again. Sure I didn’t get everything I wanted, or even felt I needed, in the game, but it was a product you could play from start to finish. I felt accomplished. After talking with my wife about it, she reminded me that it was just as last-minute and hectic the previous time, so at least I didn’t get worse. The game was done, but now the real challenge began. Trying to get people to care about my game.
Ludum Dare is nice in that you can steer a lot of people to your game just by voting on the entries of others. So I did that. I did that a lot. To date I have rated almost a hundred and fifty entries, which has consumed almost all of my spare time for the past week. The feedback this time around is much more positive than last time. The only glaring issues seem to be the occasional glitch in collision that results from how I handled the crouching, and the lack of a coherent introductory period in the game. Nobody seems to think it’s too hard or not fun, so I’m feeling pretty good this time around. In particular, the audio seems to be getting high praises, and since that was my worst score last time, I can’t wait to see how it turns out this time.
There are a lot of good entries this time around. Some make me feel inadequate and awful, some show a lot of promise but have a few design flaws, and some make me feel like other people don’t take this event quite as seriously as I do. It’s hard to be fair and impartial when judging, and often times the description can alter that in drastic ways. Some people didn’t get started right away, so I can understand why their game feel incomplete even for a dare entry. Should that mean they get a better score for a less complete game? I’m awful at dealing with people, so rating entries is a taxing process for me. I try to leave constructive feedback on every entry I rate, and while it makes me feel more like I’m part of the community, I think my blunt nature has left a sour taste in more than a few mouths. I try to state both the positive and the negative, but when there’s not a lot of positive, it can be hard to seem sincere with coming off as being negative.
I’m about 99% confident he’s talking to me. Photo by Surian Soosay via Flickr.
Initially I was going to list my favorite entries I had played so far, but since this article is already way longer than I wanted it to be, it will have to wait for another day.
Tags: post-mortem
I took a few photos during the competition I would like to share.
My intestines were left a barren wasteland, but four cups of this ramen kept me from falling asleep.
I adorned my couch with members of the major snack groups: cookies, chips and jellies. At some point in my daze, I went back to the store and added sour candies. I ate fruit and vegetables, too. Plus, I drank a lot of coffee.
From Friday morning to Monday night, I slept once for 6 hours. I started early, prototyping all night before the competition and finished when I left for work. I hallucinated a few times. I saw a cartoon dog’s face in a tree and generally felt unusual.
Before the competition, I thought this mat could be my inspiration. I ended up using triangles for the sprites, so maybe it happened. I think this mat could also be a board game.
This post was originally posted on my Tumblr.
The 29th installment of Ludum Dare ended over a week ago now, but I’d like to write a post now, reflecting on how the weekend went.
The game I made, SUPER ROBO GARDEN ADVENTURE, can be found here.
It’s a top-down action game, with pixel-tastic graphics. To start: here’s a broad outline of things that went well and things that didn’t go quite so well.
GOOD STUFF:
– I made something almost finished, by myself, in forty-eight hours.
– The thing I made looked pretty decent, IMO
– I managed my time pretty well, all things considered.
– I wrote my first proper game in Haxe / HaxeFlixel.
– I learnt a whole lot about lots of different things.
– The most important good thing that happened over the weekend, however, was the Skype Call I was part of. More on that in a sec.
– I had an absolute blast!
NOT – SO – GOOD STUFF
– The game I made had no clear direction because I sat around scratching my head with no viable ideas.
– The game is mechanically weak. I totally made up all the mechanics in the last few hours.
– The game doesn’t have any music, because I’m a lousy musician and I’m not comfortable with any music software.
– The game is buggy. Obvious stuff that should have been fixed easily was left too late, and stuff was forgotten in the final rush.
– The game hasn’t got any tutorialization – this isn’t so important, but it makes it harder for people.
– The game’s controls are sluggish and animation is slow to change because of unoptimized code.
The best part of the whole weekend was the Skype conversation I was a part of. Folmer Kelly, a gamedude I admire a lot, tweeted out his Skype name inviting people to be a part of theme discussion. I quickly responded and added Folmer, just because I could, and joined a group of people who I think all assumed that I knew some other person. The chat quickly evolved into a place to share ideas, get feedback and show WIP. This was really useful, because it inspired me to keep going (I guess because I wanted to prove myself) and produce something good. The chat, post-LD, has evolved into a general developer chat, which is really cool, and I’ve met a bunch of really cool and talented people.
My goal for the next Ludum Dare is to produce something more thematically and stylistically interesting; I want to innovate a little more. I trapped myself into going for one specific genre this LD, and I think that was because I was unconfident about my programming ability.
Anyway, I can’t wait for the next one!
So, this could have been finished sooner, but I got stuck on a few things:
– Performance issues. Decided to give up. 30fps is acceptable for now, and likely only affects older devices.
– IAP code. Decided to leave this feature out and just have ads only.
– Chartboost crashes on iOS 5. Turns out it’s not supported.
– Added Flurry Analytics. Ah, feature creep.
We’ve heard a lot of positive feedback on the soundtrack to our game Magma (check it out here) and decided to post it here.
Tags: dminsky, game, grlmc, grlmc13, ld, LD #29, LD 48, Ludum Dare, magma
Firstly, sorry for neglecting to write a post mortem last time I entered in LD24, after the first couple of days of voting I kind of disappeared and didn’t come back till recently.
Secondly, if you haven’t played Descent, have a look over here
Here are some screenshots:
A little bit about the game:
Descent is a sort of odd game. I didn’t really know what I was going for, I just sort of went along with what I was doing to see what came out of it. I ended up with a sort of paper plane/flappy birds cross that was much moodier than either, and centered around exploring underground caverns.
You play as a sort of droid, and you’re meant to pick up various treasures. At one point I planned to do a short cutscene at the start whereby a couple of archaeologists launched you down into the cave, but I decided against that idea and instead to focus on the mechanic itself.
What went well:
The controls.
I managed to develop a pretty unique control system, and it’s quite an interesting thing to play with and get used to.
The graphics.
It’s a very simple style, walls and corners are smooth, and there’s a static lighting effect. The text somehow seems to add to the feel of it.
The mechanic.
The end result is not really something I’ve seen done before.
The menus.
I got these done incredibly quickly, and they don’t look half bad. There’s a considerable amount of options to explore, including enabling/disabling music, sound effects and lighting, and changing the difficulty.
The plugin API.
Would do again. This was less work than I expected, and includes a decent system for plugins to hook into. It was also a lot of fun to do.
The map editor.
This made map creation considerably less difficult, and also allowed me to release something that other people could use to create maps.
What didn’t go so well:
The controls.
Although it’s a unique system, perhaps because of this, a lot of people disliked it and how it handled. A few alternatives I’ve been thinking about have been pressing a key gradually steering you towards a point or using the mouse and clicking where you wanted to go (which I couldn’t get to work within the 48 hours). I’d like this to be a modifiable thing in the menus somewhere. Meanwhile, if someone wants to make a plugin to switch the PlayerController, feel free 😉 just might need to use reflection to do so
The map loader.
For some reason, this took longer than expected. The end result wasn’t bad, but I had to go through numerous hoops to get something that worked. Glad it’s there, not so fun to implement though
The difficulty.
A lot of people have been complaining about this – while I can clear the included level in one run on normal difficulty, collecting all of the artefacts and scoring 600+, not everyone can do this it seems. A lot of people got stuck on the initial couple of rooms. Which is a shame, as the music develops a lot as you continue on. I’ve been thinking about making easy “snap” to each direction, change normal to the existing easy, hard to the existing normal, and insane to the existing normal with one life. (Also, hard and insane are pretty much impossible currently)
The music.
Although a lot of people liked this, I wasn’t happy with it personally. It was fairly randomly bashed together, and wasn’t really something I enjoy listening to most of. There are nice sections, but I don’t enjoy the overall feel of the piece.
Anyway, look forward to joining in again some other time. I’ll try and make LD30, but no promises.
I figured since this is my first entry, a few days have passed and I’ve received some feedback, it’s time for me to do my VERY FIRST POSTMORTEM! 
About Havoc2d:
You control a metal vehicle underneath a city, it has a punching device and a magnet. I don’t have a backstory to whoever is controlling this metal machine underground, but it doesn’t matter just yet. If you like destroying things, that is the purpose of this game. I reward you not with points but with auditory and visual payoffs.
If you haven’t played it yet, the entry is HERE
What went right:
The graphics- I am very proud of the visuals in this game. I managed to maintain a uniform style between vehicles and buildings, and the positioning and rendering of these elements worked out very very nicely. If you look at the time lapse of development, you will see that most of the 36 or so hours I spent developing this went into graphics alone/visual gimmicks.
The mechanics/inner workings- Everything seems to function very nicely. I have a few bugs(drive in reverse when you start), and there are a few tweaks that need to happen, however compared to any other game I have half-finished(and trust me there are many many of them), this one functions the best as a complete game-ish arcade experience.
The brain sucking addicting feeling of playing- This caused most of the things I wanted to add go unimplemented, as the game gained play ability as I was testing it, I would keep “testing” it longer and longer just because it was so much fun to watch and interact with.
The upgrade system- It is elementary at best, however, the upgrade system I added to this game really gave it some addictive qualities. That “addictive” feeling increased ten-fold when I added the 3 minute countdown timer. It really becomes a game against the clock to see how upgraded to can get your puncher and magnet before the time is up.
What went wrong:
The code- In a post-compo environment, I have to say this is very frustrating code to work with. I rushed through a lot of the coding aspects of the engine because I needed to save time. Many things that I would have coded and implemented behind the scenes would have been “long-term time investments” because the time-savings would kick in after a few weeks of programming or so. For instance, I really should have formed a resource loading platform to go through, centralized all of the assets in some organized fashion(moreso than it currently is), and I REALLY REALLY should have not kept most of the game code in the main GameScreen.java file. I hate when I do that as it immediately makes the game hard to expand upon.
The Controls- These controls aren’t so good, I simply has WASD + Space, azerty folks are having trouble, and being right handed, I’m not so sure why I made things so dependant on my left hand while there really is zero mouse involvement in this game.
The Completion- I completed ONE aspect of this game, the cars. There was supposed to be 3 layers, Cars, sidewalk stuff(poles, stands, CARDSTANDS /b/ CARDSTANDS, fruit carts, newspaper machines), and the buildings should be more diverse, have funny company names/sayings, and be destructible. Also, there was supposed to be helicopters, planes, all sorts of stuff. I was disappointed that I didn’t get far enough to even implement some sort of scoring system, however I was happy that I was able to submit something this year.
The Sound- I love the sound effects, But I was going to produce some good fitting music to put in this game, and I wasn’t able to do that part :'( which makes me very sad as that is something I do very often. I was even possibly going to make the music interactive and respond to in-game actions. But it’s okay I’m sure we all expected to get much more finished than we did.
So, the end result? I have myself a game to work on, you guys have something to play around with for a few minutes/possibly more. I was very inspired and thrilled throughout this entire process! The theme voting, the theme unveiling, the quiet thinking moments right after, the IDEA, the explosive code/test/code/test session that follows, stressing, coding, drawing, thinking,wondering why it’s already sunday,and definitely the relief of that last hour passing and submitting the entry.
I will definitely be participating this august!
This is the start to finish of my Ludum Dare game (The Sub Marine)
My LD page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=26996
I never finished my entry for LD29, but I’ve decided to share what I managed to accomplish anyway!
I intented to make some kind of spelunky-like cave exploring platformer with some pokémon-like mechanics on the side. Lack of motivation got the best of me though.
What I ended up with is a half finished level generation system (quite buggy) and a pretty sweet physics based 2d player controller (for platforming games) with some KISS-procedural animation.
It also has collision handling and jumping.
It was developed in Unity, but the scripts are simple enough to port to similar engines, I reckon.
I hope someone might find it useful! Use it as you like.
I’ve included the project as a whole as well as a separate package with only the player- and camera controller.
Note that the full project is dependant on AutoTileSet for rendering the tiles and that I have excluded it from this package. The player controller does not have any external dependencies.
Enjoy!
Whole project (Unity, AutoTileSet needed)
As some time has passed, reviews collected and lots of bugs fixed, it seems like a good time to write a short postmortem about our experiences.
Before I start – big thanks to everyone who reviewed our game! It helped a lot for bug finding and fixing and understanding about future priorities! Now to the postmortem…
Idea about making platformer came about week before event, because we don’t like puzzle games, we wouldn’t manage to make 3D game and… we like platformers.
This event was pretty historical for us, because this was first ever experience in games for our artist and first real game programming for our coder. So we’re actually very surprised that we managed to make something like this
You can check out our game here
What went right:
– We made very nice artwork and it mostly worked as expected… if not – we now know how to get it work and even better than previously
– Almost all content what was planned was made and included in game.
– Gameplay worked as expected (that was a surprise!)
What went wrong:
– bugs… a lot… in next 24h after deadline we uploaded new bugfix each 2 hours. Some bugs required complete rewriting of specific code and it was written even better (shorter and with better functionality) than before, so we learned a lot from our mistakes – that’s a good thing
– Surprisingly we didn’t waste too much time on non-related stuff, but some features what was required we didn’t know how to develop before, so we spent some time learning )
– We managed to record sounds but didn’t have time to include them in game
– Gameplay was more or less finished in time, but we left out story – dialogues and cutscenes , which either wasn’t included or didn’t work.
– Difficulty… We even thought about increasing it, because coder could finish all game in less than minute… but then we got reviews… It was too dificult for most of people so there was some updates to make it easyer (like multiple respawn points, easyer to kill enemies, closer platforms etc).
What we’re planning to do:
Well… we’re going to keep working on this game and in future releases add all content what was planned. We will try to make it more responsive on controls, implement multiple difficulty levels and expand game on more than single level. As we got a lot of reviews, we know on which aspects of game we should concentrate more and we hope that pretty soon we will have completed little game!
So I’m glad I made a timelapse this year. The sad thing is the first day was overwritten.
Anyway here you go:
(If you haven’t played yet, you can play by clicking here!)
What went well:
– The theme. Was among my favorites during voting, and was really easy to find an idea that seemed good.
– The idea was born at 6 am on a day when I couldn’t sleep because of an annoying toothache. It doesn’t seem a good start, but that morning, ignoring the lack of sleep, I had a prototype ready.
Were left behind several things I wanted to add but could not because of time, but I still think I got to create something fun.
– Flixel. This engine is wonderful. It allows you to do everything. (My original idea was to use HaxeFlixel, but it was impossible. See section “What went wrong” for details.)
What went wrong:
–The engine. My original idea was to use HaxeFlixel. This was fine for the first two hours, until I discovered how stupidly complex it is to read objects in a TMX in Haxeflixel. What in Flixel is five lines of code, here became a hell in which I spend several hours, and it forced me to change to Flixel in the middle of the competition.
–Twitch. It no longer automatically saves your streamings unless you manually change an option that is relatively hidden, which led me to lose several hours of video when I was doing my streaming.
– The art. Again.
The future:
I think the idea has a lot of potential if I polish it and add more items to make the game something worthy. Therefore, I have begun work on a second version (Behind the … Extended Edition!), with the aim putting it in FlashGameLicense to auction as soon as it is finished.
You will have news about it …
Tags: postmortem
This is kind of like a premortem?
If you can imagine the compo was conception of an idea then this is the idea beginning to grow and take shape.
I have had an overwhelming response to Box Simulator, with many people asking for more. Unreluctantly, I have decided to give up some precious spare time to put in some elbow grease here, and a spit shine there to start polishing Box Sim. Check out the link below to see the latest post comp additions to Box Simulator and for a download link.
Internet play has been confirmed as working, you need to forward a port if you wish to host a server though. New networking backend to come in the coming days.
https://www.facebook.com/boxsimulator
I enjoyed that time a lot. What changed from the previous Ludum Dare for me is that I’m now —and happy to be— a father, and I’m enough trained to wake up at 3am so I could be there attending the beginning!
I haven’t played any Ant Simulation Game but I recently played a lot “Banished”, an awesome city-building strategy game, and I was inspired by the “assign jobs to people” gameplay of this game.
Developing a complete game in 48 hours (including sleeping) is tough, especially that it is also about making the graphics and the music!
The game resulting of these 2 days is more a prototype than a finished game: the simulation remains minimalist and fastly boring, the food is the only resource you have to care about.
Here is a 300x accelerated screencast of the developement of “Anthill”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhH7of4gAHk
Best achievement of my LD entry was –to me– making the music.
I’m not a musician, neither a pianist, but I played a lot with Audio the past year and I’ve managed to make a music for this game —and had a lot of fun making it. I’ve used my Yamaha P105 as a MIDI controller for making the game music and connecting it to SunVox, a modular tracker software.
Play the music – feedback appreciated
https://soundcloud.com/greweb/sets/ld29-1
Most of the notes you heard have beenrecorded live from my hand, and I was quite proud of that, because I’m quite a noob on a piano. Doing that way, you keep some imperfection in the music (little delay on the notes, especially in the intro music) and I think that sometimes makes the music better.
I’ve talked a few times about SunVox, also I still want to make my own web version of a modular audio tracker that anyone (first myself!) could use and also could embed live in the game (and, for instance, having game variable impacting the audio experience).
Also, I’m more a developer than a graphist so I would say this was a success^^
I’ve entirely focused on making my game rather than making the technical stack. Usually, I tend to develop my own framework with the game. It is good to learn and discover some cool ways of programming a game but this time I really wanted to get things done…
…so I’ve used Phaser which is a trendy and awesome framework. It is also built on top of thePixi.js rendering library (I used in LD27) and p2.js physics engine, which are two brillant and performant JavaScript libraries.
Hopefully I started my project with a “Phaser template” I bootstraped during the previous warmup weekend. I’ve still lost some time playing with the Phaser API but I could have relied on Phaser features and performance so I think it worth it the second day.
I used Google Hangout during the whole Ludum Dare, as a way to put my webcam in the timelapse, but more importantly to have other Ludum Dare friends coming in it!
This was a cool first experiment as an alternative to the “stream my dev” approach. It was quite fun and social to have @mrspeaker showing me his crazy Metal Meter game advancement.
My initial plan was too ambitious. It seems to always happen with me: I get the first day a lot of ideas and motivation, and I tend to underestimate the work to be done. Then at the end of the first day, I’m frustrated to find out I won’t have enough time to do all my plans. Indeed it is good to have a lot of ideas but, next Ludum Dare, I’ll try to be sure to have achievable goals.
Next time, let’s remove half the features I establish!
So, the second day morning, I’ve been replanning from scratch and reprioritize my features to basically have something finished and working as a game. Because of this decision, the result you can see is a game, but far from the one I originally wanted. This version is only about digging, collecting mushrooms and avoiding stravation.
Also I originally scheduled to work that way Day 1: developing-only, Day 2: music and graphics + new features. I’m not sure this approach can really works, especially it doesn’t scale, we better work by adding complete features one after the other. That theorically works, but it is however difficult to apply in practice with the stress of the Ludum Dare countdown!
Implementing my own path finding algorithm was fast but not optimal at all because of performances! I recently released a bugfixed version which just use an existing path finding library to fix my bad implementation and also to avoid an ant to request path finding each frame when looking for a task to be affected on.
I underestimated a bit the amount of work needed to find the good parameters of the simulation. Those are very important to make the game well-balanced (e.g. not impossible but also not super-easy), I don’t think I found the optimal parameter in the released version.
I think I need two important things to make this parameter search easier:
There is a inconvenient proximity bug in my game that you may have noticed: when a new job is created, it may happen that, even if a ant was here nearby, a very far ant is assigned to this job.
I’m using a foreach ant in noJobAnts { findAntTask(ant,availableTasks) } loop. In this first approach, even if a ant will take the closest task in findAntTask, the first assigned ant will occupy the task even if a closer ant was after in the noJobAnts list.
Another approach to solve this issue would be to do foreach task in availableTasks { findTaskAnts(task,noJobAnts) }. In this second approach, the findTaskAnts should sort the noJobAnts list for the given task proximity.
However it is not that trivial because tasks also have different priorities for a given ant, and findAntTask solved that. In my original plan, there is some basic tasks like “clean the dirt” or “clean the corpse” which can be done by any ant. However, a specialized ant (let’s say an Harvester) may have some more important tasks to be done first, so this is why we need this priority.
In other word, fixing this bug is not trivial and I need to find the optimal loop for that!
I really wish to continue this game because I enjoyed making it and I would enjoy playing the one I have in mind! Time will tell if I can accomplish that wish!
– Cave-In Jumpin’ by BasselGaming
– Doomsday Bunker by ZYXer
– Dozer’s Gem Jam by PoQA Games (not tried, sorry)
– Planet Corp. by Maschinen-Mensch
– I Contemplated the Sun of Limbo by Evilion
We just uploaded a Mac build of our game, so if you were unable to play it before, here’s another chance! In addition we also made a playthrough video for those without the hardware to run a UE4-based game.
Let us know if it has any issues, we don’t normally work on Macs and made this build on a borrowed Macbook. (Thanks Jos!)
Edit: forgot to link to the actual game page: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=27767
Play&Rate Ocean WildLife
As I said i start working with a nice 2D artist at the Mobile version of the game here it is some new assets (all are animated)
This will be the check point(it open on trigger enter)
Murena (Don’t go close to him)
Puffer Fish(you can go close to him but only if you disable the light)
More stuff are coming Follow me #belva12341
If you haven’t played these games yet, PLAY THEM. I don’t hand out 5’s for Overall very easily, but each of these games earned it and are the only ones I’ve given them to thus far.
Simply amazing! This ain’t your typical driller game people! As you dig farther and farther to escape the Devourer of planets, you can collect ore to upgrade your ship with four different parts. Learning how to balance ship structure, piece selection, and your heat levels has a subtle but deep strategy to it and was fun and engaging for me; the game has been up in my browser for about a week now.
The overall level of the presentation, polish and execution is what sold it for me. The unique underwater physics and the creative use of a small set of moves is just great. It may not be the bastion of innovation, but its spot-on atmosphere and vibe coupled with its simple gameplay makes for such a well-nailed experience.
Do NOT let the strange visual effects fool you. It may be hard to explain, but this surreal puzzle platformer forges a strangely compelling atmosphere backed by interesting puzzle mechanics that can be challenging to wrap your head around. Despite its bizarre style, I found it surprisingly hard to put down! Just play it for yourself to see what I mean.
———-
So go on. What are you waiting for? Play them.
And if you haven’t played mine yet, give Sub Terraria Zero a go-round too and let me know what you think of it as well. Thanks!
yeah; lots of thanx for all the uplifting comments on Sewer Rat Racer.
keeping up the LD vibe with my post game…already some major improvements are being made in the sewer/rat gameplay experience: physics, esp: stunt jumping, water and camera movement..next up is some better AI for the others
here are some screenshots of ‘Whiskers McBiskit’ in the playground/lab area..
posing with the the shiny ratski
doing an actual salto
the underwater experience
Hi there, Daniel Snd here!
Alright, as promised the first tutorial for my new Video Tutorial Series on 3D Game Art is up It teaches how to make the dungeon floor. (The tutorial series will cover how to create all the assets for a simple/generic dungeon crawler game. Next up is the walls!)
I have recently made a small update to my game (post-compo). This update
fixes a bug on android related to putting the game in the background, and adds a much needed tutorial!
(Never underestimate how confusing your game can be, no matter how simple you make it)
Feel free to get it from this link.
And if you haven’t rated it yet, please play it from here.
My second game available to the public, all because of Ludum Dare. Love you guys
Tags: android, java, libgdx, play store, post-compo
I was interested in attempting to categorize how the games this round related to the theme.
You can take a look at my work in progress here: https://github.com/evilseanbot/ld29cat. If people want to suggest additions submitting a pull request would be the easiest way.
Some rough statistics about the games I played:
I quite enjoyed myself making my roguelike, Beneath the Town for my first Ludum Dare. The entire energy of the coding was quite motivating, especially at 2AM running on caffeine from tons of Pepsi and Coffee. I made my game in python and used the programs notepad++, and the library libtcod.
If there was anything I could change I would:
– Get more sleep on the day before the Ludum Dare so i can stay up later.
– do a bit more research and practice before the Ludum Dare
– Buy more coffee
– Actually listen to my alarm the first time
– Add/work on more sound
– make a nicer main menu
Some of my best experiences during this Ludum Dare were:
– Meeting all of the other game developers
– playing loads of fun games
– feeling accomplished at finishing my first game jam at the age of 14
All and all I had a lot of fun working on my game, even if I did get a little flustered with bug fixes and working on getting the .EXE set up, which I actually had to add the next day, submitting a batch file at the submission hour with my source files. It was a great experience, and you can bet I’m in on the next Ludum Dare in august. See you guys then!
Hi guys!
I’ve been working on a new version for my game Within The Blue after the Ludum Dare 29.
If you’re interested you can play it here
Hope you like it!
A short list of “tricks” I used this jam to manage. I only had a couple of hours to work on something, but I still consider it my best LD (disclaimer: it’s my second).
Oh and by the way, the highscore is 58 ;).
Will you be faster than Bp and fix the oil leak on the ocean floor ?
Some comments so far :
Tricky though, that swinging motion of the bucket got frustrating in a good way XD.
Nice mechanics for the swinging, very innovative I love it ! Great work
Amazing Game! Almost a perfect score! I enjoyed it so, so very much.
It’s pretty easy to get down when you take your time, but when you try to get down faster it gets exponentially harder!
Follow us on twitter : @_jpcote_ @sfleroux
Seen a few of these posts, good for any nifty ones that people might’ve missed!
Anyway, having played over 100 now, here’s some of the best I’ve played thus far!
5. Arctic Antics
Aww look at the cute little OrcaAAAARGH
If it’s not already obvious by the rest of these choices, I’m a sucker for lovely pixel art. This simple game sees you skatin’ around collecting pages while a vicious killer whale noms away at the ice to get you. Great example of the hard-to-control-em-up and generally adorable.
4. The Loudest Ballerina
Whatever was consumed when this was made, I’d quite like some
Your father’s given you some steel ballet shoes, and there’s a slumbering monster beneath the dance hall. Can you balance the perfect performance with minimal noise? Bonkers and original concept, simple gameplay and wonderfully presented.
3. Where Is My Bone?
Wif!
Fantastic little adventure game with a dark twist. Find the right scents to dig in the right spots and uncover the greatest mystery of all: Where is your bone?
3. Deep Blue Home
Glub!
Nice little exploratory MetroidVania-esque game. Fish your way through a few puzzles ‘n obstacles, upgrading your abilities as you go. A well contained little package, just the right length and lovingly presented too!
1. Beneath the City
Admittedly “Stealth” and “Roguelike” are enough to make my ears twitch…
Fantastic little Thief-esque Roguelike. Guard movements and vision telegraphed expertly, controls simple, nice little bit of story on top. Whole thing looks gorgeous too. (AND there’s no overlong animations of a window being opened.). Would gladly play a full game of this, with a bit of the ol’ lock-pickin’ and loot-stealin’ on top of it!
I’m still digging (*ahem*) through the (absurdly huge) list of games. Loads of great work’s gone into ’em. If you haven’t already, check out my game Hot Diggity
Solution? Use a laser. And if that don’t work, use more laser.
It’s a zany dig-ore-upgrade-self game but you’re piloting a barely controllable drilling machine that you gradually build-up as you go. Lots of explosions, shiny ore and a great bit gaping death-maw thing chasing you. My current record’s 1300m odd, but I think that’s been bested by a few people!
First Ludum Dare was TERRIFIC! Although I never felt like polishing up my game and adding new levels and so on… I did enjoy this game jam and look forward to the next Ludum Dare. Here’s a walkthrough/gameplay video of my game, Under Soul:
Well, that was a fun first Ludum Dare ! I would like to thanks first everybody who gave feedbacks and advice, it really helps and motivates to do better next time.
So first, things that didn’t go as planned :
So these are the major flaws of the game/development, but some good still comes from it :
For a jam where my goal was to make a gam which is playable and a little fun, I like to think I reached, even for 5 minutes, those objectives. I will do my best to participate in the next one !
Okay, here are some more games I’m really excited about. In the last two days I seem to have come across a handful of fabulous games that deserve all the praise they can get.
So, in no particular order:
The Loudest Ballerina — Really cute and well-executed game about ballet and giant monsters. Intrigued? You should be. Go play it — this is a five-star game in nearly every category.
Enderscope’s Game — A peculiarly wonderful idea that is a joy to explore. You are performing laparoscopic surgery to cut out a cancerous tumour from a patient. First person and 3D. And quite an experience.
Magma — Mechanically-simple game in which you set out to destroy a the inhabitants of planet who are “mired in sins, mortal sins”. Some killer, earth-shaking music just completes this impressive package.
Watch Your Step — A resource-gathering, sidescrolling, semi-survival game with fantastic art design and addictive gameplay.
Doomsday Bunker — This is most definitely the entry I played for the longest — probably way over an hour. And that’s a testiment to just how bloody good it is. The premise is simple: “Build your doomsday bunker! Survive the air raids! ” But the gameplay has a lot more complexity, and stuff like UI and graphics are so well polished.
A Happy Place — Slow and surreal death in an underground shelter. A memorable mood piece; evocative and beautifully minimal.
And the Moment is Gone — An introverted, experimental conversation game. It brilliantly depicts the pains and anxiety of such situations through an innovative game mechanic. I definitely feel like I can relate to this one.
The end of the list… That means it’s time for some self promotion! You can play my game here. Some of my favourite comments include “The perverse and nearly erotic descriptions are perfect”, “That was some dark shit… Well done”, “It’s hard to fight the urge to just stop playing and close the window”, ” I don’t think I’ll sleep well tonight knowing what I’ve done” and ” I feel like crap now… ” Who says games are fun?
I’ve noticed something: it appears that the later you rate games on the site, the less it affects your “default” rating, which affects how likely it is you’ll get precedence for rating games.
This seems kind of counter-intuitive; we don’t want people to game the system (the dreaded “L”, heh) but if you want to get the most exposure it would seem that you have to rate things pretty much as fast as you can. I’m not necessarily the kind of guy who wants to cruise through 50 games in the following 24 hours of the jam, especially if I’m burnt out from making my own game. I’d rather take the time to play through 5 or 10 games a day and actually enjoy them instead of feeling like I need to conduct a ratings blitzkrieg.
I’m just not sure “how fast” you rated games should apply as strongly as it does now, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t necessarily have the time or energy immediately following LD to knuckle down and thoughtfully play through a couple dozen games before we start getting penalized for late judging.
Not trying to raise a stink, but I thought this was worth bringing up and considering.
This bot posted what seemed to be a legit post:
But then…
The bot goes by the name of 25juta.
And it shall be shot at dawn.
Thanks admins, for defending the city of Ludum day and night
LD29: Upper Crust
What went right:
What could have gone better:
What went wrong:
Tags: ld29, postmortem
Annoyingly long Time lapse:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc70oYXsIf8
What went badly
As you can see in the time lapse that my original idea for the ending was a rap battle. I thought that this would be funny and a nice climax to the game. Turns out, yep you guessed it, I am not a pro rapper. It would have been helpful as I wasted a lot of time attempting to record and write a rap ahaha. Luckily I realized before it was too late and before I had done any art for that part.
Like everyone I hadn’t planned for so much fucking real life shit to get in my way and I spent so much time running errands and getting impatient waiting for busses. It was good to get out and clear my head though and I think it helped me to work harder later on.
After the rap battle thing didn’t work I was a little lost with what to do. Luckily it was all fine and the last room (The Temple one) was actually one of my favorites. But it shouldn’t have been. It shouldn’t have been okay but I got really lucky. This leads to my next point:
I should have planned more. My advice to others before it started was to plan and my plans weren’t as detailed as they should have been.
Player testing. Not one person had touched my game before I entered it. There could have been some game breaking bugs that I hadn’t seen or that occurred on different PC’s.
I had planned to add a section about how to help someone you know/yourself and I had already written it as a little extra thing that you could choose to read or not but I didn’t have time/energy in the end to implement. I do plan on adding this to all my games in future though.
There wasn’t as much gameplay as I would have liked. My first idea (which you can see in the time lapse) was to have a hugging game where two players were made to hug and sit on each other while playing. This was lots of game play unlike how it turned out. Maybe at least a few more quiz rooms would have helped the player learn more and have more fun.
What went good:
I leant a lot about animation. I discovered a style of animation I had never tried before but really enjoy. Along with this I found that I can make games that don’t use pixel art and can still very much enjoy making them.
Making a game about something I cared about. I still had drive to make the game when I woke up on the second day and that I am pleased about. Motivation is so important and I got lucky.
Getting lots of food and sleep. I wasted a lot of time eating and sleeping but worked harder from that with better energy that I think reflects into the game.
Wrote a Post mortem for the first time:)
According to the comments on the submission I had indeed helped people learn a bit and have a fun time being a snail and that is more than I could have possibly asked for when making it.
Cheers to everyone that played and commented on the game. I love the Ludum Dare community!
-SEN0RDIABL0
Yeah, it’s THIS cryptic game
Hello everybody! Here I am with my first postmortem to my first entry ever in Ludum Dare.
First of all, sorry for my bad use of english, I’m spanish.
Let’s start
What went right:
What went wrong:
And now, let’s explain the ten secrets. If you didn’t play the game, this is the moment to go and play it, and after that, you can read this and see what in hell you’ve been playing to. You can play Greys here
The secrets:
Yeah, only nine to go!
)
Maybe this is a creepy one…
What what what?
Hi plato!
Blind love…
This is a heart, is beautiful!
White like my heart white (8)
Hide
Greys everywhere!, Good choice ;)
The end
I hope you all enjoy with my bad english, see you 😉
Tags: greys
(Originally posted to ViNull.com)
The twenty-ninth Ludum Dare was my third and the second time the Knoxville Game Design (KGD) meetup participated as a location. The last time the KGD took part there was much press coverage that still seems a little surreal. Less press this time, but five games were made by members over the course of a weekend. (Hey, now is a good time to sign up for the KGD mailing list to get meetup reminders!)
Instead of entering the solo “compo” I choose to enter the “jam” with a team (if that sounds confusing read the FAQ). The team was comprised of myself, my oldest daughter Rachel (13) and my second daughter Hannah (11). Both Hannah and Rachel have experience making games with Scratch and App Inventor as well as knowledge of Inkscape and Gimp. I offer experience in Unity, Audacity, Reaper, and Paint.Net and together our powers combined to form #TeamNeel. The hash tag is required, as is making the finger sign when said aloud.
In the early DFA backer videos, Tim Shafer explains his process for designing a game. I’ve used his process multiple times with great success (in short, spend a good chunk of time free writing and after a bit you’ll have a game design). This was the first time I went through the process with someone else (Rachel – Hannah was on a school trip Friday night). The results did not disappoint – we met the theme “beneath the surface” with a hidden object game mixed with a film noir plot in a jungle setting.
I set up a Kanban board on Trello and gave a brief explanation of the process to Hannah and Rachel. I was surprised by how efficiently this made everything. I’m a big believer in agile but I didn’t expect it to work so well with two team members that had never used any project management system before. The girls got the concept of a pull flow, breaking up tasks into small self contained units, and working on one task at a time until it’s completed so well they even told me when I hadn’t updated my own tickets. I fear the day they learn about code reviews!
I’ve always wanted to make a game with voice acting, for fun and for the experience. In the alternate reality where I make games for my indie studio full time we always include voice acting. In this reality it’s a bit harder to pull off. On Sunday we were sufficiently along in development that we could record lines for all the characters (with special guest Cicelie reading for the Sexy Toucan). We’re not going to win any awards with our voice talents, but in context of a game jam I think we did a really good job.
Having a game with this much dialog and voice acting meant a script had to be written. This was another first for me, and I used a table layout in Word that I saw Tim use in a DFA video. I transferred this data to XML and the bulk of the game’s code was reading and rendering the dialog (and playing the audio dialog at the same time). The table system I used was a simple three column layout with a column for the speaker, the dialog, and what characters should be on screen when the line is seen. I had some issues (mentioned below) but overall this was a helpful process that I’ll use again.
Rachel created all of the objects and scene art in Inkscape and Hannah created all of the character art Gimp. When it came time to create the credits screen they collaborated, but not without an argument of which tool was better. I wonder if Gimp vs Inkscape will be as big as Vi vs Emacs. Probably not – both Gimp and Inkscape are useful whereas Emacs is just taking up hard drive space.
I mentioned the script above, and the problem I had most was keeping the XML and Word file in sync. I initially assumed I wouldn’t need to keep them in sync, that once I converted all the dialog to XML I would no longer need the Word file. In reality the Word file was printed out for reading during the recording session and needed to match the game exactly. There may be a tool out there that exists to solve this problem and I plan to find it or write it before I do another game dialog script.
The plan was to create a click and point adventure game, which quickly became an hidden object game, which almost became a visual novel. We had to cut some puzzle scenes to fit in the voice acting but if I’m being honest those scenes were not worth keeping. Designing actual puzzles takes a lot of time, and I think you could only do it well in a game jam if you had a team member who did that part full time. Still, I would have liked to have more interaction in the game than what we ended with.
I don’t have anything for this section. Nothing went wildly off the rails, we never lost hours to a bug or gameplay issue, and no road blocks ever shut down progress. This will ever happen again in my lifetime.
I really enjoyed sharing my passion for game development with my daughters and look forward to doing it again. To all the parents, siblings, and friends I highly recommend making a team and entering a game jam. Game design combines so many different disciplines everyone has something to offer to the process and there is something to learn for everyone as well. Not to mention it’s a lot of fun!
I’ve noticed something from my game jam games – I tend to create “experience” games rather than “mechanic” games. Each of my Ludum Dare games have been designed to complete in a single play session of 5-10 minutes long, with no intent of replay value. Several of my game ideas are either for a similar games, or designed around key moments. I don’t think this is a good or bad thing, but I think it’s good that I can identify a design bias. Not sure if I will lean into this bias more or force myself to create a mechanics driven game next.
You can play Jungle Noir at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=19362
As I’ve done for my prior games, here is a time-lapse of the development:
Tags: jam, postmortem
Instead of doing a traditional postmortem per se, I decided to do a video playthrough of my LD29 entry with some light, befuddled commentary :
Hopefully it’s not too boring to watch (or just to flick through). Mostly just talking about the game from a design perspective instead of how I made it.
You can play the entry RIGHT NOW :
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=26427
Day 1: Morning
I woke at about 8am. I powered up my computer, got breakfast, and mulled over the theme while chatting on IRC.
I decided pretty quickly that I would make an overhead 2D game that involved strip mining the land. I had no real idea what the game would become at that time. My first task was to draw some terrain textures, and get code in place to render a terrain.
I realised straight away that to make the terrain look nice, there would have to be nice transitions between the different terrain types. And I really needed a minimum of 4 types: grass, dirt, water, and land that had been stripped.
Blending between two tile types is easy, as the transition can be part of the texture proper. But with 3+ tile types, the sheer quantity of transition tiles becomes unrealistic to draw. After some discussion about this on IRC, I decided to do layered textures (which was the solution I was leaning towards anyway).
This means that many kinds of terrain can be drawn with transparency, stacked on top of each other. I wanted to get this up and running with a scrolling camera by noon. Which I did much to my delight with literally 5 minutes to spare.
Day 1: Afternoon
Throughout the morning, I had developed a couple of different ideas for what this strip mining would be about: It could be people digging for gold and gems, birds digging for worms, or pigs foraging for truffles — either way it would be generating an income for buying stuff.
With my fondness of the strategy genre, this harvesting mechanic reminded me of Warcraft II. The idea of using income to buy fighting units to stop enemy harvesters appealed to me. So that was my goal.
I’d attempted to make an RTS once before for LD24, but that didn’t go to plan. The difficulty with it was:
– It was 3D, which needs more work for pretty much everything.
– Path-finding took too long to set up.
– Combat system was over-complicated.
My game this time was 2D. I needed to ensure I had simple path-finding and simple combat system.
So it was now time to start making some characters to populate this land. My first attempt at drawing birds was not very successful, and I feared that pigs would all look alike. So I settled on human characters with pig workers.
The basic character sprite was drawn and animated, and then copy-pasted, modified and recoloured into six other characters. All together that drawing took me about 3 hours.
The next couple of hours before dinner were spent adding units into the game, and perfecting their collision detection/reaction.
Day 1: Evening
As day one passed the half way point, my next step was to add unit group selection. And since orders can be targeted at both units or areas, I needed to be able to differentiate between clicking points on the terrain and clicking on units. I tested this initially by having units follow other units if I right-clicked on them, or simply to move to the clicked point if I right-clicked terrain.
I spent all of the evening fleshing out this order handling system, as it was the core of the game engine. This included writing an auto-attack subroutine, whereby units could assign themselves an attack order if there are hostiles nearby.
Day 1: Night
By about 10pm, I realised I needed a HUD! No good me having this fancy order handling system if I couldn’t select which order to assign!
The button images were drawn at this time, mostly by copy-pasting bits from my sprite sheet. Plus I wrote a few lines of code to detect the mouse hover/click events over the buttons. The HUD wasn’t functional at this time.
At around midnight, I started writing my game music. This took me about 2-3 hours more I think. I’m not sure when I fell asleep.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=5745
In this video:
– Game of Roots by BubuIIC
– SURF ACE by mrhill
– Under Our Feet by NicoM
– Submersion by chase
– ECM by Tamik
Because this is a thing people do, right?
The Story Behind Undermined:
I wasn’t ready for “Under The Surface” to win as a theme. I had some comparatively creative and well-fleshed out ideas for other themes in the list (Time Does Not Exist had me particularly interested), but I had never considered Under The Surface as a real potential winner. For about an hour or two after the theme announcement, I had no idea what I was doing. I wouldn’t settle for any kind of generic mining game (I ended up using mining as a setting, but not as a gameplay mechanic) and I didn’t want to go with what felt like the equally obvious “underwater submarine” type of game. I wracked my brain frantically for ideas, and even listened to Wu-Tan Clan’s “Under The Surface” in hopes that it might randomly trigger a bolt of creativity. I don’t quite think I owe it to the hardcore rap (which, by the way, was far more enjoyable to listen to than I had anticipated), but I somehow settled on the idea of comforting trapped miners by dealing with the emotions that they have buried under the surface.
When I started actually working on Undermined, I was hit with an *extremely* discouraging couple of hours. Setting up a functional UI was my biggest problem, as I had initially wanted to show information on every miner simultaneously using columns, but had to switch over to a tab based system because it was just way too much data to present at once without feeling overwhelming. I was also really uncertain on how exactly the player was going to have to handle social interactions with their crew, since not many games handle this sort of thing and I had no real sources from which to draw inspiration for my mechanics. On top of all this, I was working with generally disheartening subject matter that forced me to spend most of my time looking at frowning character sprites and words like “lonely” and “depressed” whenever I edited my code. I stuck it out, though. I brainstormed with a couple of close friends over facebook to figure out how the mechanics should work, and I eventually figured out that breaking up all of the miner’s information into tabs is a really effective way of making things easy to navigate.
So, when everything is said and done, what about Undermined works well?
When I was initially brainstorming with a friend on how to go about the mechanics of the game, I had the following really important exchange:
Friend: if one guy is throwing chairs across the room and one guy is in a ball sobbing, it’s hard to figure out who to comfort first and what to do.
Me: yeah, that’s kind of the challenge I’m trying to capture here.
I’m happy to say that I think Undermined does a spectacular job of creating that particulat tension. On any given turn, you’ll never be able to help everybody, and it actually feels really stressful to decide who needs the most help. Having to make this choice every turn gets particularly intense near the end of the game, where you have to start making the difficult decision of declaring certain characters as being beyond help.
Something else that I’m really happy with is the way that you have to actually remember which members of your party prefer which methods of comfort. I was initially a little hesitant to include a challenge in my game that was based on just pure memory, but it ended up working really well. I like that they player actually needs to pay attention to what their miners tell them and familiarize themselves with the preferences of the crew if they want to get anywhere. It’s such a simple little mechanic, but it adds an extremely personal level to the game and I feel that it gets the player actually invested a little bit more in their crew.
Of course, there are some flaws in there, as well.
Ultimately, there are only really two big things that I’m not entirely happy with in Undermined. The first big flaw is that the game feels to heavily dependent on luck. You can be doing everything right, making the most strategically viable decisions, and you can still get screwed by a bad roll of the dice. I know there are a lot of popular rogue-like type games which are actually well liked for their occasionally rough dice rolls (Binding of Isaac and FTL come to mind), but those games are more about making the most of a bad situation, whereas Undermined is set up in such a way that a bad situation often means that you kind of just have to waste a turn and do nothing, which totally sucks. I’m thinking about doing a post-compo version of the game, and if I do, the number one thing that I’ll do is add a “reroll” system that allows players a finite number of rerolls if they get a set of actions they can’t do much with (i.e. most of your miners hate hugs, but you randomly received nothing but hugging time for the current round).
The second big problem with Undermined is that it’s generally a little bit vague as to how all the numbers update. I think that most people manage to pick up on a lot of the core systems and how to comfort miners, but very few people seem to realize some of the subtleties in the system, which means that they make a lot of really poor decisions strategically. The game is still totally playable AND winnable without knowing the little tricks that I do as a developer, but it feels painful to me watching people play the game and clearly have an incorrect assumption of how the systems work precisely.
My only other “complaint” with Undermined is that I didn’t really have a lot of flexibility with which to draw special effects and add tiny visual details. Instead of giving each of the five miners their own object in Game Maker, I stored all of their relevant information in a single object and had that object draw static sprites of the miners along the top of the screen. I think things ended up looking okay, but I would’ve loved to be able to do things like give each miner subtle little animations using squash and stretch, but locking them up in an array made that a much more convoluted process than I initially intended.
What a ride.
This was my first Ludum Dare, I did the 48 hour competition, and WOW did it feel challenging. I am so glad I finally finished something from start to finish with all my own assets. I can truely call this MY game.
So it seems people are posting post mortems, so how about I throw some thoughts in.
Ludum Dare was a challenging blast and I am going to try to start to try to attend all of them. Thanks to all the people who have already commented on my game. I’m having a blast playing everyone’s entries. What a talented community!
If you want to play my game its over here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35743
Also here is a time lapse of me making (including my music);
It has been over a week since submission, so I have had time to watch people play and see where I stumbled. I certainly goofed in a lot of areas. This is my first completed game, and I believe it was successful if I consider it a prototype. I am very satisfied with the primary mechanics and goal of this game. I am going to start work on the post-compo version. I will add requested features such as a restart button, UI, and animation. But I will also make sweeping changes to the underlying game design, so it might end up feeling like a new game.
Successes:
Observed Problems
Possible Solutions:
So, for a refreshing change: this time most of the complaints are about audio
Most requested feature by commenters was music during the game!
I agree with this, it would have been better
So why didn’t I include it? Well, honestly, I don’t think my tunes are that great. I used music generated with jcgMusic and, don’t get me wrong, I think the result is fabulous considering the effort and time I needed to put into it. But I don’t think they are good enough to for backgound music during play; I feared they would get annoying quickly, so I only used them while waiting for game start, and on the congratulations screen after beating the game.
Vanishing audio!
This is really, really annoying! Some player said that audio stopped working after “Game Over”, or, at least, after some time. I also noticed some quircks while testing but, most of the time it worked just fine on Linux Firefox and Chrome.
This is a major problem. I need my games to have working sound effects. I used ImpactJS as a framework, and I was actually warned before the weekend by someone who also had audio troubles with the same framework. In the past I also had some issues with CraftyJS.
Is it possible to have decent HTML5 audio on games? Is the framework the guilty part, or am I using it wrong? If it is, what’s the least problematic solution JS/HTML5 games?
The good news
Judging by the comments, people seem to have fun playing Underground. I especially enjoyed knowing that someone hacked the JS code to get more lives and finish the game!
Anyway, here’s a video playthrough just to show it’s not that difficult (well, I do get killed two or three times 😉
Don’t forget to play and rate Underground.
Tags: html5, impactjs, playthrough, postmortem
This the 3D game we did for LD29 Jam. Find your way to the Ogre’s gold in 4 different levels.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE – Alexis
Had a blast on my first LD ever. Somehow we all agree to make a game at the last minute before the jam started. What makes me the most proud is that we are able to make a 3D game in such a short time and 100% remotely. Right now I am living in Florida, US; while the rest of the team is living in Lima, Peru (where I am from). We are conscious that this game has a lot of flaws, especially in what comes to the mechanics (we didn’t had enough time to make the illumination work as we wanted); however, this projects gives us the confidence that we can make 3d games in a short period of time.
INFINITE MODE
Have unlimited fun playing autogenerated maps.
MULTIPLATFORM
Web (Kongregate), Windows, Mac, Linux. Web version recommended.
DEVELOPMENT
-Made with Unity3D
-3Ds Max
CREDITS
Alexis Sotelo
Alvaro Barua
Alonso Caballero
Edwin Cornejo
SHOW SOME LOVE
Tags: 3D, 3dsmax, goblin, gold, jam, ld29, ogre, ogresgold, unity3d
So turns out I had a complete brain fail during the Ludum Dare weekend and totally failed to make the speed of my game’s player character independent of the FPS, which I only discovered when I accidentally destroyed Chrome a bit and suddenly it started chugging horribly, simulating playing In The Blood on a tired old computer.
I’d used the delta for computing velocity… but then multiplied it by 0.000005 for no reason I can actually remember now and the result is that the delta had virtually no effect whatsoever. So.. I fixed it. I REALLY hope this is okay, dear people in charge of such matters. It’s still the same game, no new features, but hopefully everyone playing it will have the same frustrating, tormenting and short-lived experience it was designed to provide. I wanted the game to be a difficult, challenging and hopefully addictive little action arcade game but when you’re moving ten times slower than you should? Oops.
I’ve also added a Post Compo version now! It’s the same game but I managed to add a bit of the visual Woo that I didn’t have time to do during the 48hours. It destroys the mood entirely but things are a lot clearer and hopefully a bit less motion sickness inducing. Again, sorry about that too.
You can play both frustratingly difficult versions on its compo page!
Incidentally, if you like Super Hexagon style ridiculously difficult action arcade games you might enjoy other competition entries Underneath Our Faces and Diver X … and would love to hear about any other games in the compo like this!
Tags: #LD48 #LD29, bugfix, post-compo
Alright, I think it’s a good time for writing a post-mortem for my game, Princess Fart!
The Story behind the making:
For the longest time, my friend Sophie was interested in game I was making, so she wanted to join in a bit. We decided to make a game about her, and what can I say about Sophie? She’s a princess, and she farts! There, we have our theme 😉
Then came the LD29 theme: Beneath the surface.
Erghh…. I don’t really want to send my princess underground! Ok, beneath the surface is gonna mean beneath the surface of the skin, there’s an alien! Not the best interpretation of the theme but that will do.
I started with the look of the princess. She had to look princessy, but not too beautiful. Just a bit cute. I was going for the Princess Peach look, but then I changed the hair to black, to match Sophie ;-D
Next, the first thing I worked on was the music. It might seem strange to make the music before the game, but it turns out it’s helpful to repeat your theme song over and over in a loop while you’re working. It helps you get into the mood. So I was done with practically all the songs before I wrote a single line of code.
Then I spent the next 2 days producing the intro for the game. I got a kick out of using Google Translate (yeah all the voice acting come from there!). At the end of the compo, I didn’t even have a game, but only a lovely intro. The good part though, was that I had a good scripting mechanism, which allowed me to separate code related to the game engine, and code related to the game’s scenario (like cutscenes, scripting events ect…). The last day was the third day of the Jam, and it’s when the gameplay and the rest of the graphics were finished.
I finally released the game, and BIG mistake. I really should have gone through a lot more testing before releasing it on Newgrounds. The game got tanked because everyone got stuck right after the intro: See earliest comments on http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/638437
Oh well, I need to take a deep breath and relax. When you make a game especially for ONE person, you’re already a winner if that one person enjoys it. She didn’t even play the game, but watched as I played it in front of her (so she didn’t even have to go through the frustration of playing!) and she was happy. At the end, that’s all that counts.
That said, I really hope you all enjoy it too. A game about Sophie, my Princess Fart
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=20841
So I told everyone this was my first Ludum Dare, but it turns out it was my second. I had completely forgotten my last entry. Anyway, here’s the game:
The Guy Who Fights Underground Monsters
What went well:
Tools- I used Love2D and TileStudio and it worked out great. I pulled a Lua exporter for TileStudio and the collision detection code from a previous open source project (https://github.com/rpjohnst/argo). Although it wasn’t the fastest setup I’ve ever had (Game Maker is usually faster) I was able to jump right into spriting and gameplay.
Graphics- I’ve never been all that good at pixel art, but I really liked the results I got this time, at least for the character and monsters (the tiles are pretty rough). I focused on having animations for everything the character and monsters did, so they’d look more continuous and relatable.
Combat Mechanics- This is the other thing I spent the most time on. I knew it would be essentially the only thing contributing to the fun in a game at this scale so I tried to make it feel good and respond predictably. I still have a bug where the character shoots across the level when he gets hit, but otherwise I think I succeeded.
What went not-so-well:
Story- I didn’t have the full 48 hours to work on this game (pff real life why do I want that), so I didn’t really get to tie it into the theme very well. The character was originally a detective who would solve a mystery involving the charming underground monsters (see that? two surfaces to go beneath), or at least be in that kind of 20s, film noire kind of environment. Maybe later.
Content- My usual goal in short game competitions is to get the gameplay down and then cram in as much content as possible- levels, weapons, powerups, etc. But, I spent so much time on what I have now that I literally threw together a level in the last hour or so before I submitted. I feel like better level design and some extras could have made this feel like a real game rather than just the demo that it is now.
So, now I think it’s my turn, to write a post mortem for trufflehunt.
First, I want to tell you, that this was my first ludum dare and that it was a big surprise to me, that I take part. It was just 5 hours before the final voting round was over, when I bumped into this thread on Gamejolt.com and read about the compo:
http://gamejolt.com/community/forums/topics/ludum-dare-29/3239/
There was little time to think about the pro’s and con’s of taking part and so, after talking with my better half, I decided to do it.
I have taken the right decision. Because it was really fun and a very important experience to me.
So lets talk about what went well:
– The Idea
The idea evolved very fast, just after one hour of brainstorming, the gameidea was ready.
– Prototyping
After a little nap, because LD starts 3 a.m. in the morning in germany, I started my work on Trufflehunt and all went very well. First I drawed the field and made the piles, then I added the mechanics and the prototype was done.
– Graphics
Now it was time to improve the graphics. I added the piglet and it was bedtime again. After a not so long sleep, I added the last pictures and animations from the piglet and the level start and was going to the next step.
– Sound recording and creation
The sounds and music are all created with milkytracker and edited with audacity, except from the *nufnufnuf* of the piglet which was my own voice recorded in audacity and pitched higher.
And now, what went not so well:
– Sound in Unity
Then it was time to include the sounds and music into Unity. But because it was my first time with Unity and sound, I have had some little problems, which could also be a result of not so much sleep. But all get fixed in time. But it was close.
– Score descriptions
The only thing I have forgotten is, that I have not explained how to get much points in the game. There is no feedback when you dig for truffles, that you become more points when you dig longer without releasing the mousebutton. That is because first I had a little strange idea of getting points at the beginning of a level which decrease by 100 for each eaten truffle. After I had changed the points system to what it is now, I just have forgotten to include a little animation for how much points the player gets for each truffle.
After all, I must say, ludum dare has made a lot of fun and I want to be part of it the next time, too.
I have learned that it is posible to make a game in that short time and that it is a very free kind of programming without that thoughts, that bother one when sitting weeks on a project.
Thank you for reading,
ruerob.
P.S.: Here is the link to: Trufflehunt
I’ve made a few adjustments and re-tuned the game for a mobile experience. I think it makes for an addictive little package!
This post-comp version is available on the play store here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ricefrog.SplashEuropaLD29
This is my first android game, and so far I’m pretty pleased!
The image says it all, doesn’t it?
Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!
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.
Only the voting remains, and if you haven’t had a chance too, go check out my game Curse in the Depths. It was a lot of fun to make and I’m loving all the feedback i’m getting.
The Good
Time Management – Time is always one of the hardest things to deal with. It’s the main challenge. My time management was much better then my previous LDs I was organized and knew what I was doing the moment I had an idea.
Work Habits – This LD I prepared better for the long work hours by making sure I had plenty of water and soda handy so I didn’t need to take so many breaks and it made focusing easier
Breaks – This one was HUGE because the problem is what kind of breaks I would take, this time I took slightly longer breaks then previous LDs but I also did activities that were very stress free and didn’t require thought. Video game breaks, TV, and Movies, or YouTube were replaced with Walks, Showers, and Naps, overall I felt more refreshed when I came back to working on the code.
The Bad
Library Choice – Slick2D I have used multiple times, and I am very familiar with the inner workings. My Problem was that I made the Decision early to not use JBox2D making my collision and combat much harder to program later in the development cycle. This was mostly due to not fully understanding JBox2D, but hindsight is 20/20 and I realize now that I might have been better off using it.
Sleeping – I overslept on Sunday due to overworking on saturday(Sat@4AM to Sun@3AM with an hour long nap in between) and missed around 4 or 5 hours that I had planned a lot of time for artwork. This lead me to only be able to finish the background, the sprite and the HUD in the 2 hours I had left. This meant less content then I had originally anticipated, another enemy and 2 more attacks were in the works but they were left unfinished as I realized I had more pressing features to figure out.
The Ugly
Rewriting – I have spent the last week or so going over most of the engine and figuring out how to use JBox2D. We are currently deciding exactly where to go(Continue with Java, port to C++ for better cross compatability, what libraries to use, etc.)
Overall my 3rd Experience with LD has gone pretty smooth, and I am so happy with the outcome of the game that I am going to continue work on it, and the way it is going, it will see the light of day as a fully fledged indie game!
Tags: post-mortem, postmortem
I’ve noticed that some developers don’t have pages. As in, you click the ‘view all entries’ button in their entry, and it says ‘not found’. I also noticed that Pov was talking about authors. He said that there were certain criteria to become an author. I couldn’t find anything about this in the rules. Can someone please shed some light on the subject?
Day 2: Morning
Taking stock of things the next morning: what I’d made so far didn’t do much of anything. I had about 18 hours left to change that. Day two of LD is when you feel the pressure, and where you realise you need to cut corners!
Day two began by writing the combat system, and making sure I kept it super simple: Projectiles, Attack Cooldown, Hitpoints, Damage, Death. Units could now attack, and follow their attack orders. This felt like a monumental bit of progress!
I decided against drawing projectiles. Having to make those projectile sprites, and render them, including rotating the rangers’ arrows to fly in the right direction — it just felt like it would be unnecessary work, when projectiles could be represented by particles instead. I was planning to add a particle system anyway, to represent units’ bloody deaths, smoke from the cannons, and the sorceress’ fireballs. All projectiles could be done with the particle system to keep things simpler. But that was a task for later in the day…
Day 2: Afternoon
Before doing particles I wanted to get something more urgent out of the way: to make the buildings functional. I needed to be being able to purchase units and upgrades.
Normally in RTS games, it takes time to “train” units. But if I did it this way, it would have meant attaching timers to buildings; keeping track of cost and food usage during training; being able to cancel training and recoup costs; having a progress bar in the HUD; and what happens if a building is destroyed while something is being trained? and how will units in the process of being trained be seen by the CPU AI? etc etc… Too much to implement! So to simplify things I decided that all purchases would be instant. Another corner cut.
The particle system came after this, adding blood and smoke and fire effects. Then adding sound effects to the combat.
Throughout the day I had been expanding the stats of the different character classes too. Giving them each unique values for hitpoints, damage, attack cooldown, movement speed, etc.
Day 2: Evening
Writing the CPU AI was a big task that both excited me and terrified me! For if I failed at this, then the game would not be a challenge. Having thought about RTS AIs previously, I had a fair idea how I was going to do this.
I was actually surprised how quick the AI was to code, and how effective it was! The computer played me at my own game, and it won! 😮
Day 2: Night
As it came into the last few hours, my game was coming together nicely. It had a lot of rough corners, a few bits that didn’t work right, and there were features that I knew I wouldn’t have time to add, but the basic game was there, and it had an AI that beat me once!
I knew there was no time left to add any more big features. No time to add base construction, sadly. I spent much of the remaining time making the game presentable, and fixing some annoying bugs:
I did have time to add a handful of small things however, including:
And that was my Ludum Dare 29 weekend!
[reblog] A bit more than a week ago, I participated in the Ludum Dare 29 compo. It’s a themed 48h game jam on the internet. This time around, the theme was “Beneath the surface”.
It was my second time participating in a Ludum Dare, and this time around I made a game called Baum about a bone-eating tree with hands for roots being afraid of spiders. You can check it out (and rate it) right here, if you haven’t already.
Baum
The Good:
Here’s some of the things that worked really well.
- Not working alone. I actually met up with a friend and we both worked on our LD entries in the same room at the same time (check out his game cell.erity), brainstorming together, exchanging ideas, playtesting each others games and giving each other feedback. It was an amazing experience and far more fun than going at it alone.
- Not giving up. I actually started out working on a completely different game for the first ~24h before realizing that it was far too complex a concept to be fully realized in time for the compo. I really didn’t want to submit an unfinished experience, so I stopped working on it. I was really demotivated. I slept a couple of hours and played some games. At that point, had I been alone, I would have probably given up on this LD and called it a weekend. But I was feeling some sort of responsibility towards my friend. I was the one who talked him into participating – I couldn’t be the one who wouldn’t have a game to show for it. So I just started over with something completely new.
- Not giving a shit. Really, when I started working on Baum, I was in a different state of mind than I usually am when working on games. I didn’t care if this game was going to be the best I could do. I just needed to get something playable done, and quick. So I went with the first most simple gameplay idea that came to mind, and just did it.
Playing as a tree collecting things with its roots? Sounds like a game. Let’s do it.
It was a somewhat scary, yet refreshing experience for me personally, and I while I think Baum is definitely one of my weaker works, I got great feedback so far and at least some people seem to really dig it. And in the end, that’s what making games is all about for me.
- Incorporating player feedback into the design. Now, at first I had no idea where to go aesthetically with Baum. I usually do very abstract graphics in my games, because I hate (and am very bad at) doing art. This time though, I was actually working from an idea based on setting, not on gameplay, so I didn’t want to go abstract with it. So I just did some really crappy placeholder graphics and worked with those. Then, a playtester (we had some visitors throughout the jam) remarked that those slowly moving root-hands really creeped him out. So I went with it and developed the whole style around the idea of a disturbingly bizarre mood, which fit in perfectly with the concept. I never would have come up with the game’s look as it is now, if it weren’t for that one player who was creeped out by my shabby placeholder graphics.
The Bad:
Here’s some of the things that didn’t work all that well.
- Not making sounds. Again. This has been the source of complaints in my last LD entry, and it was again this time. I totally understand it, as sound can be a very important tool to give gameplay feedback as well as creating atmosphere. Now, the problem is, I still don’t know how to do good sounds, and that’s why I never bothered to put any in my games (unless someone else had made them). I am planning, however, to finally get around to learning some audio basics at some point. If everything works as planned, my next LD entry will have at least some sort of noise in it. Promise!
- Not documenting my progress. I’d love to show some screenshots of earlier versions of the game and how it changed over time. I’d also love to show some stats on how much time I spent with what part of the development, how many hours I worked in total, ect. Problem is, I didn’t bother to keep track. In retrospect, I do regret it myself, as I’d be quite interested in analysing my workflow.
The Feedback:
Here’s some of the response I got from comments on the game, as well as talking to people who played it.
- People loved the mood. Most comments I got were not about the gameplay, but the atmosphere of the game. It was a simmilar thing with my last LD game, where people also seemed to enjoy the tense atmosphere. I find this very interesting, considering I never really start making a game with the intent of creating a certain mood. I always start with gameplay, and usually find a tone while experimenting with the mechanics. I’m wondering how a game would turn out where I actually build it around a certain tone I want to set instead. I might try that in the future.
- Confusing visual feedback. Basically, I used the same particle effects when the tree is eating a bone (positive) and when a spider is crawling up its roots (negative). In retrospect, that was a pretty stupid idea, and happened mostly due to my own laziness.
- No sense of urgency. Some people didn’t like the slow pace of the game. They missed some timer, or depleting resource to make the game more tense. Also, someone managed to exploit the fact that there is no urgency to essentially break the game and get real high scores without much effort. This one really bugs me, because I think it’s a fundamental flaw in the game’s design, and one I could have easily fixed.
- The spiders are very unpredictable. Some players didn’t like that and said they would prefer it if they would move in more of a pattern, as to enable more strategic planning. On this one, I heartily disagree. I think, most of what makes up the tension of the game, is never being quite sure, how the spiders will behave. Predictable spiders would make the game a lot less interesting in my eyes.
- Some people hate waiting. Some don’t. I got both positive and negative feedback on the ‘spiders crawling up the roots’-part before the game is over. Some people didn’t like waiting until the spider reached the tree each and every time, while others really enjoyed getting a bit of the creeps whenever it happened. Easy solution would have been to make it skippable. Oh well.
- Most people hate spiders.
The conclusion:
LD29 was a blast, I learned a lot, and I made a game about a tree with hands. Lovely!
So it’s about time I started making one of these postmortem posts and talk about what was good in my game and what wasn’t good. I’m not sure where to go with this but we’ll see how I get on.
If you haven’t played my game you can do so by clicking on the image below:
(Warning: this post-mortem goes into spoilers for the game)
The hardest part of any jam I think is coming up with an idea that fits the theme. The theme this time was “Beneath The Surface”. I’m not sure what to think of the theme to be honest. I mean I could have carried on the tradition of Ludum Dare and complained about the theme for ages but that wouldn’t have been productive at all. I decided that I needed to give a crack at this, regardless of what i thought of the theme.
The first thing that came to my mind was “Minecraft Clone”. I really didn’t like this to be honest, and I hope that when it came to the game rating round that I didn’t have to dig (ugh) through various Minecraft clones (fortunately I haven’t seen that many.. although there are over a thousand entries that I haven’t rated yet… assuming I’ll get round to rating them). I needed something else
I’m going to take a diversion right here and say if there’s one tool that is infinitely useful for any hobbyist gamedev out there, it’s to get a whiteboard. If you can’t get a whiteboard, get stacks of scrap paper that you can scribble all over. You need something that you can put down an idea on. Why? Well there’s a few reasons:
I’m no expert on thinking ideas but here’s what I did. I started by writing down the theme on the board:
This is where I got stuck. I couldn’t think of a good idea to fit the theme. I had to be clever. I started looking if there was a way I could break the theme name down to smaller words. At last I found the following:
Beneath the Surf Ace! Of course! Now from there I could think of further ideas. Are you a shark trying to eat a surfing ace? Are you a Surfing Ace but you have to do a task that’s beneath you? I thought long and hard about this…
I am not the best at art. I’m actually very bad at it. Pixel art? I can’t do it, everything I make looks rubbish. I however tried to draw the surf ace and ended up making this hunk:
I use gimp for art. Gimp is supposed to be an image editor not a tool for creating art but there I was, drawing my hunk really crudely with a trackpad. Yep I was on a laptop and didn’t use a mouse. This is the best art.
At this point I really needed an idea. I did have an idea that it would be some form of Adventure Game, but I still couldn’t think of any task that would be beneath this hunk to do.
To which point it then hit me.
Ben Eath
What if the name of the hunk was called Ben Eath? Brilliant! I’m a genius!
At this point it was nearly the end of day 1 and I needed to work fast if I was going to make something with this idea.
Puzzles are things you put in games. People solve the puzzles and they can progress in the game. Good puzzles make the player feel smart.
I’m not good at thinking of smart puzzles
At this point I needed to make a simple puzzle. One that’s not too easy to solve but doesn’t have some bad logic to it either. This is kind of hard when you’ve only got a limited amount of time to do so.
Originally the puzzle was going to work out like this. You need fake tan but you can’t seem to find any. There’s a bully squirting a bottle of brown stuff on people which you think would be useful. However they won’t give you the bottle. You’d need to distract them somehow and steal the bottle off them.
This is where the kid with a broken sandcastle fits in. They had their sandcastle smashed by the bully and they couldn’t make another one because the bully smashed their bucket as well. You needed a new bucket. If they got a new bucket the bully would get distracted and you could take their bottle
The bucket is with the guy at the restaurant. Originally this was going to be a new section which wasn’t at a beach with art for the restaurant and everything but… well you know. The bucket was meant to contain an empty bottle of wine. Naturally the man won’t let you take the bucket unless you look like a waiter.
This is where the suit hire came in. Again, this was meant to be a shop, but ended up being a stall in the middle of the beach. You need money to hire a suit. Obviously.
Now here the money is found in the middle of nowhere in a lost wallet. There was supposed to be some puzzle where you stole Hunk Hogan’s wallet. Unfortunately… blah blah not enough time. You know how this story goes.
The rest of the game worked in the same way that it did (other than I had an idea for a surfing minigame where you competed against Hunk Hogan but.. I don’t even need to say it at this point). The only thing from the description I mentioned is that there was no bully.
Well.. I left them out.
Obviously this meant that the kid with the sandcastle had the fake tan all along. The joke about “Adventure Game Logic” not only was a clever way to convey humour in the game, but it was also a way to cover up the fact that part of the puzzle got removed because I needed to finish this game on time.
At this point I realised I made a big mistake. I had no babes on the beach. Our character kept talking about babes on the beach but there were no babes to be seen! This was an awful oversight I made when making the characters. I needed some babes STAT.
Obviously I couldn’t have them doing nothing, so I gave them some dialogue. Some self-aware and cheeky dialogue that makes me look like a really awful person, but dialogue nonetheless.
Oh while I’m at it
I lost hours doing this, which wasn’t helped by the fact that I decided to do dev diaries of what I was doing rather than actually trying to code stuff. I mention some pedal thing in on of these I think. That was a huge waste of time. Never do that. I just read up on Vim Clutch and thought “Wow this is going to make me super productive. Like heck it did.
I do not play an instrument. I do not know how to use any music making software. All I have is my voice. I was going to do this live.
For my previous games I’ve done humming to songs which are vaguely recognisable. I had to do this a lot with my previous Ludum Dare game “You Only Get One Shot: Eminem Rapping Simulator“.
I have no idea how music is made, or what makes music good. However the response I’ve had back from everyone about the “He’s a hunk, he’s a- he’s a- he’s a hunk” that plays in the background have been largely positive. I have no idea why is that. The game was already ridiculous so I thought “Yeah, why not. Let’s add some ridiculous music to go with it”.
I’ve had thoughts of putting a link to the audacity project somewhere so someone could pick it up and make remixes of the song. I’m not sure if anyone is interested in that kind of thing. I’d be surprised that anyone would want to make a dubstep remix of something I cobbled together in 10 minutes.
Well I’ve had some problems with my host (I’ve since put an alternative link on itch.io) and… wow, the response I’ve had to this is overwhelming. This is probably my most popular game I’ve made for Ludum Dare so far. I don’t know if this is because I’m getting better at making games or if I just lucked this one.
I’m going to go with luck. My game can’t be that good…
ESince Ethe Etitle Ealready Econtains Emore Einformation Ethat Eyou Ecan Ehold Ein Eyour Etiny Ehead, EI’ll Ekeep Ethis Epost Eto-the-point.
Tags: e
Alright, so after the feedback on the previous post it’s clear that people enjoyed our old Fat McFatterson than the new “more humanoid” one. So I went back to it and recreated the old character with updated/better topology, and this time with fingers. I’m now painting some texture on it. So far what do you guys think? Better? Did I manage to improve upon the Jam version? Or does the Jam version still looks more charming? Maybe I should add the big silly smile back? Or could be situational and I could change the texture to reflect his mood (Smile, Sad, Neutral)
Btw If you haven’t already, please check out Infection \o http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37445
