Hey again awesome people!

Thanks for all great feedback on the music in Pond Tycoon!

The soundtracks of three game jam games made by me will soon be up on Spotify, iTunes and several other music services.
These are the tracks:

• Polytonia Soundtrack (LD28)
• Pond Tycoon Soundtrack (LD29)
• Fiddle Daily Soundtrack (BossJam 2014)

My artist name is Robinerd, and this mini-album, “Game Jam Memories”, will be available in approximately 2 weeks.

I am also just about to release the post-compo version for android and iOS (more info here), which will take several weeks because of Apple’s approval process. But don’t worry, you can still play the web version:

Play Pond Tycoon

While waiting, here’s the album art as a teaser:

For this Ludum Dare, I worked with a group of friends to create Asteroid Tycoon. I’ve done the Compo a few times in the past, but none of us had ever game jammed in a team before, and it was quite the experience. I’ve learned that doing Ludum Dare with a team brings with it both enormous benefits and unexpected challenges.

What went right

Diverse talent

Being able to work with an artist, a UI designer, a game designer, an amateur musician, etc (some people filled multiple of these roles) was an amazing experience compared to previous Ludum Dares. For the first time, I’ve submitted a game that actually looks and feels really solid.

Combining multiple ideas together

During our team brainstorming session, a few ideas became big hits: a candy-box-like about building an asteroid mining empire, something involving moles and tunneling, and a game with programmable robots. The idea for Asteroid Tycoon came about as we realized that we could combine elements from these three ideas into a coherent concept.

Constant balance tweaking

Gameplay elements underwent many changes as work on the game went on. For example, the robot upgrade progression initially was triggered by amount of minerals collected (a different mineral for each robot), but switching to a depth-based system proved to be a lot more enjoyable for the player. For much of the weekend (at least once we had something playable), at least one person (usually a team member taking a break) was playing the game at all times, so we constantly had feedback that we used to adjust parameters, and in many cases, rework entire mechanics.

Cute little touches

Little things like the marquee seem to have made a big difference in enjoyment and immersion. Also, some of our last-minute graphical tweaks, such as the beaming-down animation from the ship, improved the look of the game rather significantly.

What went wrong

Repetitive music

Once we had a short loop of music, we deemed that “good enough for now” and decided to come back to the music situation if we had time. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any more time to work on music, and the result was slightly disastrous, as the constantly repeating main loop proved to be annoying to many players. We quickly added a mute button, but the damage was already done. In the future, I’d hesitate to add music unless it was sufficiently varied to not be a hindrance.

Not enough organization

Never having worked with a team on Ludum Dare before meant that my default workflow was an informal, poorly defined task list and a single development branch in git. This is reasonable enough for one person, but proved to be a disaster when working with a team of 7 people. On several occasions, lack of communication led to two programmers separately implementing the exact same feature or our two artists stepping on each others’ toes. Meanwhile, all work being on a single branch meant that nearly every commit resulted in a merge conflict, which proved to be very time-consuming in the long run. In retrospect, we should have had a more well-defined task-assignment scheme and used feature branches.

Gameplay not explained clearly enough

The primary gameplay mechanic in Asteroid Tycoon works as follows: you first click on a robot to build and then click on a destination square for it to try to move to. However, we didn’t explain this very clearly within the game itself, which led to many players thinking that they had to click on the surface or on the spaceship — the result being that the robots reached their destination immediately and from then on proceeded to move in a way that would have appeared to be more or less random to the players.

To make matters worse, important information is conveyed to the player via printouts that regularly appear but go away on the next mouse-click. What we didn’t anticipate was that most players click around so quickly that they don’t even get a chance to see the printout before accidentally closing it (old printouts are still saved in the top-left panel, but most players never bothered to use it).

In retrospect, we should have done a better job of explaining exactly how gameplay works from the start, and come up with a different way to hide printouts (perhaps by giving them a Close button). These are both hopefully things that we will work on in the post-Jam version.

Only starting work after 18 hours

We made the conscious decision to not start work until noon (PST) Saturday, to give our brains plenty of time to process our different ideas. While this gave us lots of brainstorming time, it put us at a disadvantage time-wise compared to most Jam teams, and led to us being very pressed for time near the end (compounded by the fact that many of us had to go to work on Monday). In the future, I’d like to spend a little less time brainstorming and perhaps at least try to get a little bit of actual coding done Friday night.

All in all

After trying a Ludum Dare with a team for the first time, I don’t know if I can go back to doing the Compo! Not only were we able to build something bigger and more polished than any one of us could do on their own, but we had lots of fun working as a group. We’ll try to work together in future Ludum Dares.

As far as Asteroid Tycoon goes, we’re really happy with how it turned out. We’ll probably tweak it a little bit post-Jam — primarily to make the instructions more clear, make the music a little less repetitive, and fix some sneaky bugs that people have reported.

Tags: ld29, postmortem

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 me@nratcliff.com with the following things

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

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

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

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

Play and Rate Here!
What went right:
The idea was fleshed out pretty quickly that first night.

No big interruptions over the weekend, even had Monday off from work!

I’ve learned from my previous entries to make the learning curve much more friendly. I think the tutorial worked really well.

Level design! I am pretty proud of the levels and the feedback I’ve gotten on the design.

The art overall was great, shout out to my buddy Kahlil (@kahlilangeles)! I really loved what he did with the cut scenes.

I think the narration turned out pretty well, though I am a terrible writer (as you can see in this post).

What went wrong:

All the people I was suppose to work with for this jam disappeared, I assembled different people right before it started so it worked out in the end.  I always prefer working with other people I think its more fun to share the experience! (If you think we would be good partners in crime hit me up! @CraziGame)

Terrible workflow! I was not familiar with any tiling plugins for unity it made level making a huge chore.

Collision problems! Lots and lots of collision problems, along with a few other small bugs.

Sound was kind of the rushed job. I initially forgot to loop a couple stage tracks which I fixed pretty quickly. There were also some volume issues where the music was too loud compared to the narration.

Timezones. The artist and I are on opposite sides of the world, our sleeping schedules heavily overlapped the most productive times for the other person.
Lessons learned:

LEARN THE TOOLS BEFOREHAND! Especially tools for making levels.

I need to familiarize myself with sound making tools.

Tags: ld29, postmortem

Well, I’ve finally rated 100 games from this round of Ludum Dare.  There have been some really great entries!  I thought I’d make a short list of some gems that may still lay beneath the surface for a lot of people.  Here they are in no particular order.  All screenshots are from the respective game’s entry page.

One Cold Night

Play as a dog attempting to rescue survivors on a snowy mountain top.

Play One Cold Night

FuMeKuRi

Catch musical notes while you avoid being hit by the page turn.

Play FuMeKuRi

Burrow Down

Survive multiple dungeon floors while leveling up and gaining upgraded spells.

Play Burrow Down

Shovel Quest

Explore a “dig site” while uncovering lost artifacts from the world above.

Play Shovel Quest

Jelly Hugs (Android)

Help the jellyfish hug the exact number of friends they want.

Play Jelly Hugs

Well there you have it.  You can of course play my own entry Tiny Haunt here as well, if you so choose.  It would be greatly appreciated.  I’m still planning on rating more games, so if you have one that you want me to play, feel free to tweet it to me (@rojomojogogo), or leave the link to your game in the comments.

Tags: burrow down, compo, favorites, fumekuri, game, jam, jelly hugs, ld29, one cold night, screenshot, shovel quest, tiny haunt

for the reasons I mentioned in http://blog.gamenific.com/2014/05/the-power-of-good-feedback-new-game.html, I am very proud to announce that my Ludum Dare 29 entry, Vaults Inc, will become a full feature game. Thanks for everyone that played and gave me crucial feedback.

Future development

The game needs to go back to design. Not only there are several features that I could not implement, but also I have to give a total remake on things that already done.

From a quick list, here are some items:

• Save and Load functionality: auto explaining and the benefits are quite obvious
• Graphical revamp: it was one top complains from LD players and not with reason
• Bots: a computer opponent for single player
• New game play features: challenges and empty blocks are among the things I want to implement to make the game richer
• Campaign mode: for single players, with specific scenarios
• Multi player: online and local
• Social: comparing scores with friends
• Multi platform: PC, Mac, Android an iOS for sure. Other platforms could be considered

If you have not played yet, Play it now!

Tags: final, ld29, SuccessStory, unity3d

Hi there! Just finished post compo version of Mini Merto Subway Tycoon where you construct your own metro system to unload traffic jams in the small city. In this version I have added all that planned for compo version, but had no time to add, and a bit more.

Full list of changes:

– Added beautiful music created by my friend Zuick.
– Sounds
– Added “Train Occupance Rate” Tab
Now you can see load of your metro subway lines.
– Changed economic model
Station costs $1000 and spends $40 per second if in use.
Line segment costs $100 and spends $8 per second in use.
Station/segment is in use if at least one route goes through it.
Every route going throuth metro system gives you $3 per second.
All info about your economic state you can see in the right panel:
Income = 3*routes_using_metro
Expense = 40*stations_in_use + 8*segments_in_use
Cashflow = Income – Expense
Changed initial amount of money to $10000.
Now you’ll get GAME OVER if your balance will be -$1000.
– Added Happiness parameter
Every of people calculates comfortable travel time between home and work.
This value depends linearly on distance between home and work.
If real travel time actually no more than this time, this man is happy.
Happiness parameter shows how many people are happy over all of them.
– Achievements
1. Well done! [complete game – get load less than 12]
2. Excellent! [get achievements 4, 5 and 6]
3. Brilliant! [get achievements 7, 8 and 9; almost impossible to get]
4. Optimizer [get load less than 11]
5. Richi Rich [earn $100000]
6. Santa Claus [get Happiness at least 95%]
7. Perfection [get load less than 10 (yes, sometimes it’s possible)]
8. Millionaire [earn $1000000 (not so hard, but really long)]
9. Messiah [get Happiness 100% (don’t know it’s possible to get it or not)]
– Clouds in main view mode.

PLAY HERE (and check compo version too!)

Hey Everyone! I just wanted to post about my LD29 entry, Igneous!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=5839

Igneous is a puzzle game where you, through a rock character, must dig paths under the surface from the magma below to the volcanoes above! But there are many different obstacles in the way, such as boulders, water, children, etc.

This LD was very very fun and I can’t wait for the next one!

This is my first time making a trailer, but I think it turned out pretty well. I used Open Broadcaster Software for recording the game and then Movie Maker to edit it. I recommend both since they are both free and worked well. I tried to showcase the gameplay and how it really speeds up as time goes on, while also showing some of the main features of Bitmite Blitz. Let me know what you think!

Bitmite Blitz Trailer

So there is a huge barrier to entry for my game, StrataGEM. It takes a few rounds before things start to click and few players are aware of all of its rules. This is partially because its gameplay is quite abstract, but it is also due to my explanation method – description text. There has to be a better way! I should have included an in-game tutorial, but Crefossus has made the next best thing – a video guide:

Really, no surprise there. You can still play it here!

A big thank you to everyone that has rated and commented so far

Project Tethys was my entry for this Ludum Dare. You can play it (and rate it!) here.

I’ve written up a post-mortem over on my blog, for the interested among you. TL;DR – not much went wrong but plenty went right, I just need to get to know my tools better before the next compo.

In case you’re wondering what the game’s all about, here’s what it looks like:

That’s right: intense underwater 2D side-scrolling combat! I hope you’ll all have as much fun playing it as I did making it.

Logos and funny headlines.

Note some things may not be 100% accurate as I just did this for fun and not cookies. Why won’t you give me cookies? Oh you’re broke too? Wait what am I doing with my life again?

Decent chart with ld dates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludum_Dare (oh dear you know it’s going to go well when there is a wiki link right?)

Ludum Dare at archive.org

24hr Compo in April  2002

Judging Categories:

– Gameplay (the grand prize essentially), Adaptation of Theme, Originality, Art, Sound, Code,  Polish

July 2002

Overall, Gameplay, Fun, Graphics, Sound, Technical, Complete

November 2002

Overall, Gameplay, Fun, Graphic, Sound, Technical, Theme, Cosmetic, Complete

Mechanical cat does some hosting?

Minimalist categories

2004 ish?

• Fun,Innovation,Production (graphics, sound, polish)

July 2006:

Noted this information which is still in great contrast to today:

• “No Game Makers”

Obviously it wasn’t allowed before this and at some point this changed.

2008 host?

Jan 2010

Innovation,Fun,Theme,Graphics,Audio, Humor, Overall, Completeness

First seen humor – not sure when it was introduced though

Interesting tool discussion from 2010:

Should we consider banning game development tools such as Game Maker?

August 2011

Fun Audio Overall Theme Graphics Humor Coolness Innovation Community

“As of December 2011 (Ludum Dare 22), we’ve added a new Entry Voting Category: Mood.”

August 2013

• Mood – Storytelling, emotion, and the vibe you get while playing.
• Community – Journals, photos, timelapse video. Everything you do above and beyond just making the game.

Some guy was QQing about getting banned from irc in 2002 ish but the thread wasn’t archived… aww! No harvesting tears from the past You can taste mine from the present instead.

The general feel of the competition has gone to making a game from scratch without any game engine code – to making a new game with whatever tools you want. Of course it’s without any art assets/music and having pre-declared code.

So it’s kind of less about rebuilding boilerplate code and more about making games! I like it.

Judging Criteria

What can we gather about the overall judging theme changes? Well – community doesn’t mean your game is good right? I believe this is changed to “coolness” which is just how many games you’ve rated and has no affect on your final placement, but I could be wrong as community is still in the ludum dare rules.

Minimalist category groupings don’t really work since there are many different types of games.

Completeness was totally dropped, possibly because semi-incomplete games may also be really amazing and/or it’s just unnecessary because the ratings should reflect how complete it feels overall.

I could swear there was like a health/taking care of yourself category or something idk if this was a joke one LD.

We just updated our game Beyond The Dark.

Play and rate  it here !

I’m working on a new version of Beneath your House. I’ll use the same mechanics from my LD entry, but switching up the genre. The game will feature some minigames that happen when different events are triggered. I am journaling the progress on the Stencyl forum. You can check it out if you are interested:

http://community.stencyl.com/index.php/topic,31850.0.html

Chuck

Tags: game, journal, update

So this past ludum dare I made a game about… Surprise surprise! DIVING!!!!

Play it here.

So this is a post mortem and I geuss I have to do a good and bad thing. here we go!!!

THE GOOD!!!

• The majority of this game goes here.
• The graphics turned out great tanks to my friend Pichus tileset and character design.
• The music turned out great because I forced my big brother to do some music. Give him some love check out his soundcloud or facebook
• The core gameplay is very solid if slightly glitchy.
• Most importantly it’s a game I want to play.

The shop GUI. Although very confusing it’s the most complex I’ve done so far and it turned out well for a jam.

The random sealife distribution keeps the game a little different on each dive. Add that to you’re most likely increased oxygen capacity and you have a not grindy feeling grindy game.

This is the entire level as in the (in the works) post compo version. The stuff above the red line was mostly in the original release. I used tiles to design it but using the ocean ripples filter in photoshop. got a nice varied effect.

Welp this is the best animation I’ve ever seen. :P

THE BAAAAD!

• The game was glitchy as I opted for unitys polygon colliders and you could go through certain walls.
• You couldn’t tell some of the collectible wildlife from enemies. These were shown in the tutorial and some people seemed to guess but it was still awkward to explain.
• The boss (cringe) even though few people made it it was a let down to them. I’m really sorry and have a super ultra boss planned for post compo to make up for it.
• Difficulty: People complained of not having enough time or money. But at the heart of it I think tha adds to the charm. I feel the game hase rouguelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelike elements in perma death and random wildlife distribution that’s how I justify the difficulty to myself .

The best boss I could scrape together in 2 hours or less.

Overall

I’m proud and the game can be found here. I’m begging you to play and rate 😛

I added some features that will hopefully make the game playable.
Play+Rate Games and let me know what you think 

Part 5 of my tutorial series on beginner Blender modeling and getting it to behave with Unity is up! This post is a bit short, but it covers making the actual texture for your character. I give a few tips on stylistic choices, but it’s mostly up to you! Also, there’s a bit about getting the texture into Blender.

I created Sail using this process, so if you like my style of low-poly graphics and are wondering how on earth I made the models, UV’d, textured, rigged, and animated them all in 48 hours, you might be interested in this series! I’m trying to crank out a post per day for the next week, each covering a different aspect of the workflow.

Also, I’m totally open to feedback on these articles! Please let me know if any parts are confusing, or overdrawn, or straight-up wrong! You can leave a comment here, or on my site (no email or registration is required–  you can leave any or all the fields blank in the comment form), or let me know on Twitter!

—–

We’re going to take a break from Blender for a while! I’ll be using GIMP to make the texture, but the concepts should be the same whether you prefer Photoshop or anything else. First, you’ll want to open up characterUV.png in GIMP or whatever your image editor of choice is.

Create a new transparent layer (Layer->New Layer or Ctrl-Shift-N) and drag it beneath the UV layer. The UV layer acts as a blueprint, so paint everything on the new layer! It’s up to you how to paint the character, so I’ll just give a few pointers…

Read the rest on my site!

I’d love some more feedback on my game. Let me know what you think I should add. Download it on your Android device so you’ll be ready when I update it to maximum awesomeness.

Rate mine, I’ll rate yours. Follow me on Twitter, I’ll follow you. Download my other Android games, you are awesome.

I’d like to port my LD29 entry, which is a LÖVE2D game into a different programming language, or maybe even to a different device (Android, etc.), how can I decide which would be the best choice? For example, I’m 90% sure I’d be able to do it for C++, with Allegro, but does that worth, especially if I want to monetize my game in the future?

This is a post about development of LD29 entry Greed for Gems, you can play and rate it HERE.

This time around I’ve decided to make a screenshot every 2 hours of the compo that will picture the most significant thing I’ve done during that time. Sometimes I’ve made 2 or 3 and sometimes I’ve skipped it altogether because I was too busy trying to complete the game in time or the progress of the past 2 hours was non-detectable on screen (recording of sounds and implementing respawn and reload mechanics for example).

Anyway, those shots were a great motivation for me during the compo and a nice nostalgic inspiration after it, so I’ve finally got around to publishing some of them with comments, maybe they can inspire someone too. In some sense you can see it as a timelapse (with a step of 2 hours). Here are the most important:

Day 1, 2 hours in:

Global map generator is in and functioning, it’s quite similar to the final version actually, just a few probability variables were changed. Rectangles are rooms and number is its ‘depth’ – distance from the entrance. Every depth-14 room has a megagem in it.

Day 1, 6 hours in:

After another 2 hours the room generator was in but there’s not much to see so no screenshot for you, another 2 hours though, and rooms are actually linked to the global map, placed in world and you can switch between them (Can you find shown place on the map?). In some sense that’s a key point of development for me, at least it has no loose ends.

Day 1, 10 hours in:

At 8 hours I had working platformer mechanics (this time I’ve decided to use a publicly available code instead of spending half a day on writing my own, but in the end I’ve rewritten quite a lot of it because it was not suiting me too well and it was too much integrated with its project and I had to reintegrate it to my needs). Nothing to see in static there too, so here’s a picture from 10 hours in:

That’s one of the pictures that I like the most visually, and it probably tells that I’ve made a wrong turn somewhere later (probably shouldn’t have made tiles so dark, they were cool a bit lighter). You can see that shadows and light are added, by the placement of the light sources I guess that you could already place them at your position in game then, but I’m not sure. It’s definitely a landmark, you basically have a core gameplay here – exploration of a dark cave. Maybe I can even call it a minimum viable product.

Day 1, 14 hours in:

Another 4 hours (it seems that landmarks happen every 4 hours and I can just skip every other screenshot I have) and I have working ladder and torch placement mechanics. At last you can go not only down, but up too! Colors are very different from what you’ve seen before, at this point I’ve started doing at least SOME graphics (actually, the ground tile you see here made it to the ‘release’ so it’s kinda final). It’s also almost the end of day 1, I’ve worked only 1 hour after that and added gems to the game but there’s not much to look at (and I’ve posted day 1 results with a picture before).

Day 2, 4 hours in:

Skipping 2 hours image again, the second day, 4 hours in and I have some GUI, inventory and bats!

Bats are the first – and since I had no time to create more – the only enemies in the game. I’m satisfied with their AI, I think they actually move quite bat-like. Well, most of the times. (If you can’t notice them, they are brown rectangles)

Day 2, 7 hours in:

More graphics added, most new things you see are almost final. Also that’s almost every light source in the game on one screen.

Day 2, 10 hours in:

Main character is drawn, added megagems to the game so it at last has SOME goal. Hid them in the farthest rooms of the cave. I guess I could have submitted the game right then, it was, in a way, complete the first time during those 2 days. It still had no sounds at all, no respawn mechanics, no 2 players mode, probably few nasty bugs and some graphics were not final (you can see the old ladder that was changed before ‘release’).

Day 2, 18 hours in:

So, it’s 1 hour before compo ends, and I’ve skipped the whole 8 hours. I have some images but there’s not much to show, because first I’ve spent 3-4 hours on creating sounds, around 2 hours on adding second player to the game and implementing death and respawn mechanics and 2-3 more hours just polishing what I could with very little overall visual effect. So here is a final screenshot for you, made around half an hour before the compo ends. I was working until the very end and submitted the game around 10 minutes before the deadline and was afraid I won’t make it in time as the site was too much laggy at that time (didn’t know there was a submission hour as I always was finishing earlier and was already asleep at that point before).

Well, that was one long post, hope it at least amused you with the images. If you’re interested, please play and rate Greed for Gems and leave your comments!

Hello everyone,
Here’s a little speech about our Ludum Dare experience you can play here. To sum up, we really enjoyed the experience (for some members, it was their first jam experience), but intense and very short. The subject inspired us, and we had different ideas. But we can’t tell you how we arrived to this point: kill annoying little boys scout in a dark and dangerous forest…. We are weird people.
At the beginning, we thought about a gameplay more complex. But with only one graphist, (even amazing he is), we had to take shortcuts in the gameplay. And we had only 48 hours to almost finish the game cause everybody had to go to work on Monday. Except for our 2 programmers who took a day off (for one) and an afternoon (for the other) to polish the game.
For the music, we’re not composer and we had some problems with our keyboard. So, we thought: “why not singing ?. It will be probably awful but maybe perfect for a group of boys scout!.” That’s why your ears can appreciate the sweet voice of a member’s team (thanks to Audacity, we made it more unpleasant and creepy… You’re welcome).
By the end of 72hours, we didn’t know if people would enjoy the game, understand what to do, have fun, appreciate the universe etc. But our team was a quite satisfied.
Now, we’re really happy about all your nice comments.
Currently, we’re working on a post compo version with less bugs, and more graphics.

Hope it still will be fun.

And if you wonder why our name is Lama :

Ludovic Espérou

Alain Bellenger

Mérédith Alfroy

Alexandre Bourdier

In this video:

– AHH LAVA! by Dreii
– Colony 31 by Crazi456
– Mini Metro Subway Tycoon by ripatti

Beneath the surface is an unforgiving pixelart action game.
The player takes control of a nameless hero and ventures into a mysterious cave to face whatever lies beneath the surface 😉

It was our second LD jam entry and our team consisted of 6 people this time.

What went right:

Theme/Idea

We watched the voting sessions very closely and centered our game-ideas on the themes that were likely to win.
We were therefore able to set for a scenario/idea early and start working on it. This was one point we were able to improve over our fist LD.

Atmosphere

Presentation is an important thing for us and one thing we always bear in mind, when working on a LD entry, is to create a compelling looking game.
LD is always a nice opportunity to try, incorporate and improve new techniques. This is why we settled with the pixelart look again.
Part of our team had little to no experience with pixel art but our artists/level designer did a great job and we are very happy with the final result.

Music/Sound

Thanks to the bigger team we were able to integrate more and better sound effects.
One programmer even disappeared for several hours before deadline and left us out in the cold…..

Just to come back with a self-composed music theme which adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game.

What went wrong:

Time Management

We submitted the game like 15 seconds before deadline…oO
Again we were not able to add all the things to the game we wanted and QA/polish those that are in it.
Even with – or because of – the bigger team we were not able to plan time accordingly.
But LD is the best opportunity to gain experience in project management without a real risk (except the time invested)

Controls

Our plan was to create a challenging game because we like difficult, challenging games. It is a coincidence that Dark Souls II was released on the LD-Weekend.
But us not being able to play it, due to the Jam, somehow translated into our game 😉
The thing that makes the DS Games so compelling for us, is the fact that the player is always in control of all his opportunities to react to a given situation accordingly.
Every death can be tracked back to a fault of the player. Its often nasty but never unfair.

Due to our – not great – time management we were not able to put more time into polishing/tweaking the controls and the animations.
This affects our game because we were not able to give the player the feedback and the precise controls that he needed to interact with the enemies as intended.

What we take away:

Things never go as planned and they always take more time than initially assumed!
Every time invested in player interactions and really tight controls is time well spent!
Sound/Music design improves the Atmosphere a LOT!…duh

Final Words:

We have worked on an more accessible and improved Post Compo-Version of Beneath the Surface.
Please give it a try:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=30260

Thanks to everybody who played our game and thanks for all the feedback and comments – We really love the LD-community and we’d love to see you again in four months!

Best wishes,

NoNoBattle

After 100 games, here is a top 5 of the ones I enjoyed the most:

1.

Beneath The Ice, by Danman9914

2.

The Sun And Moon, by Managore

3.

Wunderheilung, by kbm

4.

Bornard, by TomBoogaart

5.

Army of the Undead, by Atridas

Also, it’s worth a mention the cute competition within this compo that a father and a daughter are facing [games: Coal Not Dole, by badlydrawnrod & Under the kitchen surface, by lorniebear] and the game my fellow developer at @RLH_Studios has made: [The Ascent, by guimonpa].

And now, it’s time to resume playing games!

Now that Escape Enclosures Expeditiously is finished, and I even had time to do a post-Ludum Dare version, I figured I’d post its post-mortem on the LD website! Granted, this is a cross-post from my own blog, but probably interesting for the audience here.

Escape Enclosures Expeditiously (or Escape Drill in the improved, post-Ludum Dare version) is a simple puzzle-like isometric game where the player should to the exit of each map without being touched by one of the enemies.

It’s a short game – only 3 levels (plus an ending level). Here’s a video of a full playthrough with no deaths.

But of course, this being a post-mortem, what follows is some more information about the game development process.

First implementation of the tile terrain game object

I started development without much of an idea of what I wanted to create. My initial approach – which is fast becoming my common approach for Ludum Dare compos – is to just try something different for the sake of learning, rather than actually trying to create a full fledged game. This means that my emphasis is normally on the technical side of things – as long as it’s new to me – rather than on the fun. It sounds harsh, but that’s what makes it fun to me.

Getting tile height and color calculation working

This time around, I had my mind set on using Unity to create a custom level editor to make game creation easier. I was inspired by several different things: Hitman Go, a surprisingly simple but ingenious twist on the Hitman series; isometric turn-based games to the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre and Disgaea; and a series of tutorials of someone recreating Doom’s classic E1M1 level on Unity using a plugin of some sort, something that showed me how powerful custom editors can be in Unity.

Allowing tile heights to be edited in the 3d view

My goal, however, was not really to create a game in itself, but to learn how to extend Unity in a way that allowed that kind of map to be created more easily. I ended up with enough time to actually create some gameplay, but it’s almost a side effect.

Painting tiles with different surface types

What went right

Using Unity: in a previous Ludum Dare post mortem I mentioned Unity as one of the sore spots of my experience (although it doubles as one of the pros too). This time around, it shows exclusively as a positive point. I was able to leverage my past experience with the platform (as little of it as I have), work on top of what I learned (and side projects as usfxr) and basically spend more time implementing things rather than learning how to implement them.

Design of the first level

That’s not to say there was not much to learn. Quite the opposite. At any point in development, I had dozens of browser tabs open with the most random items from Unity’s references or random tutorials, blog posts, and questions/answers pages out there.

Testing enemy models

What’s more, my conclusion is that Unity is pretty powerful when creating custom editors and elements. I can see how the ability to customize your working environment can be a big boost for developers working on a game, especially on members dealing with content creation such as level design. Even if my level design solution was pretty ghetto (I had the worst method for painting tiles with different terrain types, for example), it was still a pretty important time saver.

Implementing movement and enemy AI

I still feel a little weird with the platform. Its emphasis on what I can only describe as concrete elements, such as adding scripts to physical objects and using the 3d view for everything, is still what feels strange to me. That, and maybe the emphasis on global access to everything from everything and a lot of helper functions to query the level elements. However, I believe I’m slowly learning to ignore my impulse for abstractionism and just get stuff done as inelegant as I might think it is. My hope is that with time I’ll understand what’s the actual ethos of the platform for performance and correctness, but I know I’m still far from that point.

Making multiple levels possible

Using simple assets: this time I purposely used very simple assets. The only texture used in the game was a 256×256 noise texture quickly created in Photoshop, and all the 3d models were simple boxes spliced and reshaped into basic shapes using Blender. I get very easily distracted into doing mundane tasks such as making sure none of my vertices are duplicated and everything invisible has a proper name or something of the sort, so I’m happy I managed to not spend too much time doing complicated art. I only had to deal with broken normals twice!

The final game scene with all levels

Conclusion

Now, what went wrong? Nothing, I think. This was fun, and I learned a lot. Given more time for level design and testing, I’m sure I could come up with more, and better puzzles. But that’s true of every Ludum Dare, so that’s something I can live with.

You can play Escape Enclosures Expeditiously on the web. The improved, post-Ludum Dare version is also available online. And as a test of the respective website APIs, I’ve uploaded a version to Kongregate (with high-scores) and to Newgrounds (not supporting medals or scoreboards yet; I’m currently implementing that as an exercise for future LDs).

Any Ship can be a Minesweeper… Once – Posts Mortem.

For my first Ludum Dare I decided to flip space invaders upside down with a battle ship launching depth charges at enemy submarines. In the end I’m pretty proud of the outcome but I learned a lot about my workflow and just how easy it is to turn a good idea into a mess of brain melting spaghetti code. To be honest, looking over the source now gives me a headache.

The GOOD.

Everyone seemed to like the style I went with. Hand drawn artwork, explosion sounds I made with my mouth, and an acoustic cover of the village peoples In The Navy I did on a whim with a few minutes left at the very end.

I really liked the 2d wave physics, and I spent a good amount of time getting it right. It’s based on a series of springs that propagate their tension across the surface of the water.

The gameplay, for me at least and from the feedback I’ve received, is pretty fun. It’s not easy but still possible to win and it feels like a really simplified skill-based arcade game.

The BAD.

The code quickly devolved into something resembling a burning dystopian landscape that still fires up some weird ptsd every time I look at it. The take-away lesson is proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

I would have liked the difficulty to have progressed over time, and there is a mechanism to apply this, but it doesn’t affect gameplay enough. As the time runs out I increase the cap on how many enemy torpedos can be on screen at any given time, but in practice it feels just as button-mashingly difficult out the gate as it does when the clock runs out.

Final Thoughts.

The thing I found the most interesting was that even after all the effort I put into making the physics behave the way I wanted, it was the artwork and the sound effects that stood out to people. I spent a good amount of time making the waves move, and making the depth charges lose velocity and change trajectory when they hit the water, making everything look just right, and nobody seemed to be nearly as impressed by that as the cheesy song I recorded in the last 10 minutes. They’re subtleties that don’t stand out but that flesh out the look of the game in a way that people probably notice more subconciously. Either way I’m overwhelmed by just how much positive feedback I’ve received and you’re all awesome for being a part of ludum dare. Can’t wait for the next one!

Pumped? Go play it!

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

Part 6: Rigging of my tutorial series on beginner Blender modeling and getting it to behave with Unity is up! This is a longer one, but should make everything involving setting up the bone structure of your character clear and easy to understand! There are also lots of screenshots, so you won’t get lost 😀

I created Sail using this process, so if you like my style of low-poly graphics and are wondering how on earth I made the models, UV’d, textured, rigged, and animated them all in 48 hours, you might be interested in this series! I’m trying to crank out a post per day for the next week, each covering a different aspect of the workflow.

Also, I’m totally open to feedback on these articles! Please let me know if any parts are confusing, or overdrawn, or straight-up wrong! You can leave a comment here, or on my site (no email or registration is required–  you can leave any or all the fields blank in the comment form), or let me know on Twitter!

—–

Rigging is the process of adding “bones” to a mesh, greatly simplifying the animation process. Each bone is associated with the nearby vertexes on your mesh, so when you transform a bone, it will drag the vertices with it. The entire set of bones are collectively called an “armature,” or a “rig.”

First off, you’ll want to set up the Blender UI to make rigging your character a bit more manageable. Change your UV frame back to a 3D Viewport, activate Object Mode (Tab, and this will change both of your viewports to Object Mode), and set the shading mode to Solid on both views. You’ll also want to set the left viewport to a front ortho view (Numpad 1) and the right viewport to a left ortho view (Numpad 3).

Read the rest on my site!

We’ve made an updated Post-LD version of Dark Depths!

We polished up a few things we didn’t have time for during the competition as well as listening to some of the feedback we’ve received so far.  The gameplay has been updated pretty significantly, so its worth checking out even if you’ve already played it.  We think it maintains the tension of the game, while making things a little less frustrating. You can find both versions on our entry page:

Play Dark Depths!

So far, I have played 180 games from the Ludum Dare. All of these games have been recorded and added to my Jupi Plays All The Games series! But, I need more games to play! If you have a Ludum Dare 29 game that I can play, add it here!

Hey! Daniel here from Team Infection. Sebastian and I are both extremely excited about all the positive feedback we have been receiving on our jam entry Infection. We really feel that the game has a lot of potential and reading all that people have been writing about it (and saying while playing it on youtube and streams XD) has made us even more keen to develop it further.

We also thought it would be great to share our progress since the jam release, as well as our ideas for the future with you guys.

First though, we would like to thank everyone who has played Infection and left some feedback. We appreciate it immensely <3

I’ve experimented with the main antibody character, tried a more humanoid version (that ended up looking like Machop from Pokemon)

People didn’t respond so well to that version both on the blog and on twitter, and asked for me to bring old Fatty McFatterson back. So I ditched Machop and went to work on a new Fatty version. (Sketchfab version)

Some people also suggested I bring back the smile, so I thought would be cool to have multiple textures to reflect his mood. (I might make a facial rig for him for marketing purposes, but would be kind of wasted in the game since you see him from a top-down angle.)

We’ve been working on a “quick” PostLD version, to be released soon with several fixes. Sebastian worked a lot on optimizating the game and we’ve added various quality settings to try remedy the lag some of you guys were experiencing!

Sebastian also created a new (and temporary) UI, so you can see more relevant information like how many enemies are left and how many infections you have let slip past you.

In response to lots of feedback about the tower placement, we’re experimenting with having Slow Motion while placing towers, so it doesn’t pause completely, but you’ll have some more time to position your tower before enemies creep in on you. Another tower related problem is that no one from the videos we saw of people playing the game figured out how to properly place towers (Click and Drag towards the direction you want the tower to shoot). So we’re changing it to “Click once to place tower, click second time to set rotation towards the place you clicked”.

A couple of quick fixes based off the excellent feedback we’ve received from you guys: Enemy death animations are now faster and the enemy turns another colour the instant he dies, so the player receives “immediate feedback” and stops shooting at dead monsters. Cells (Currency) now float up and down to be more obvious pickups and not confused with level decoration. They also now have a larger radius of attraction so it’ll be easier to pick them up without having to run too much through the level. We’re also adding some camera animation and Effects to make more obvious that the enemies are trying to get to the door that leads to the next body section.

Aaaaand, for this quick-soon-enough post LD version we’ll be adding… ENDLESS MODE! 😀

Lots of people in the comments mentioned they wish they had more time to upgrade everything, but the game finished too fast, we’re fixing that by adding an alternative mode of play in which the waves get harder and harder until you eventually can’t handle anymore (or can you?). See how far you can go and share your highscore in Endless mode! 😀 (Of course the main mode will be expanded on substantially in the future).

I’m also working on a new level with a different objetive. It’ll be even bigger, it’ll have 3 enemy doors, and this time you won’t be protecting a door, but an actual part of the body. It’s still an early wip but this is the layout we’re thinking of going with: (Red in the middle would be the object, the Purple balls would be enemy spawn doors)

Alright, so these are all the plans for our next version… There isn’t much new there… But what is NEXT?!

The Future:

Ok, so the following things are some of the ideas we have for the future. As such they’re all very liable to change and much in need of YOUR feedback 😉

PERMADEATH

First things first, we enjoy the idea of Permadeath. You go in, you get cells you upgrade your character, you die, you rinse and repeat. And we would like to bring that to the Full game as well. But in a full game with lots of different levels, that can be annoying, Character Progression would be a nice thing to have.

SETS OF MISSIONS

So, we figured we could have Missions to different parts of the body. Each of these sets would could contain 4 levels, climaxing in an epic boss battle. The missions would take you to different areas like the Heart, Colon (Diarrhea Boss!) and the last mission would take you to the Brain. These missions would be played through as a story, and you’d get feedback about how your host is faring based on your play.

DNA

On the missions you would earn DNA (You’d still get cells for upgrades in-game that will be lost with death, but you’d get this secondary DNA currency) DNA would be used to unlock new GENETIC MUTATIONS for your Antibody in the Character Creation Screen.

GENETIC MUTATION

Genetic Mutations would be things like “+X Attack Rate”, “+ Defense”, “+ X Attack Damage”, “% of Chance of receiving part of your damage as health”, “% of chance of igniting enemies on fire on damage”. So you would be able to have character progression, despite Permadeath. And you’d also be able to pick the Genetic Mutations that better suit your playstyle. Do you like to Run and Gun and rarely get hit? Invest in some more Attack Rate and Damage! Do you like to be more tanky and jump in the middle of enemies and melee them to hell? (Yeah we want to add melee!) Invest in some Damage Mitigation/Health!

Alright, so Genetic Mutations are cool,  but what about more towers? And what were you saying about melee? Well, we also want to give players another choice, and that choice is ISOTYPES.

ISOTYPES

You start the game with one Isotype unlocked, and after you defeat a boss you’ll unlock a new Isotype (One for each boss). Your choice of Isotype on the character creation screen will define what kind of towers you’ll have available in game (And maybe playstyle, not so sure about that. Melee will either enter as an Isotype or as specific weapons you can pickup during the gameplay).

WEAPONS

Wait, did I just say picking up weapons during gameplay? Hell yeah! Another cool feedback we got was that people didn’t like some of the evolutions of the weapon (Mainly evolution number 4). So for the Full Version we want to have many different weapons each with it’s own evolutions. So evolutions 1, 2 and 3 from LD version could be it’s own weapon, but you could find what was Evolution 4 or 5 of LD version as it’s own weapon in the game, pick it up and upgrade it into a better version of it. We want to have many different weapon types for different play-styles Find your favorite weapon and try to keep it loaded!

POWERUPS & ONE-TIME ITEMS

Another cool things we want to have are Power-ups.  Some enemies would drop buffs that would give you temporary advantage. (Temporary + Attack Rage, Temporary + Damage, Temporary + Explosions, Temporary + Speed.)

As another enemy drop we want to add One-time items, that wouldn’t be instantly in effect like powerups, but you would be able to use it whenever you want. (Landmines; Vortex that sucks enemies in for a little time; Decoy that makes enemies go to attack it for a little time; Confusion DNA Grenade or some name like that, that makes enemies get confused and attack each other; White Blood Cell Army, where you can summon a few White Blood Cells to fight enemies for you)

ENEMIES, MINIBOSSES AND BOSSES

We didn’t have much time to do variation on the behavior of the enemies for the LD version. But for the full release we want to have lots of different types of enemies! Explosive enemies, Tower-destroying enemies, Door-obsessed enemies, Parasite enemies that latch into your towers and turn them against you… So many possibilities! 😀 We also want to have At least one miniboss on each level which would have increased health and would be more of a pain in the ass, requiring extra attention (He would do massive Infection, being able to push you  over the limit to a Game Over by himself if you’re not doing too well).

And lastly Bosses! We want to finish each mission with a different kind of level, less tower defense and more action game. So the last level of each mission you’ll only have to defeat the Boss of that specific disease you’re fighting, nothing to protect but yourself. (I want to do Diarrhea boss SOOOOO BADLY XD that would be an awesome gross/funny boss fight)

LOCAL CO-OP

We got lots of feedback asking for Local Coop and HELL YEAH we want to have it 😀 Up to 4 players, we’re already thinking about new UI solutions to have them all on the screen at once.

NEW STORE MENUS

With Local Co-op we think it would be really impractical to have players pausing the game to buy stuff all the time. So we figured we could use that kind of menus that expand from your character and you can pick the desired icon using your directional buttons, without disrupting gameplay much. We would only need Health, Bullets, Upgrade Weapons or Upgrade Towers, since we could have Towers mapped to specific buttons on the gamepad instead of requiring to open the store.

ACHIEVEMENTS AND COSTUMES

Because Achievements are fun! And Costumes are even funnier! We want to have several achievements in the game. (Can you pass the levels without placing any towers? How about without shooting? Can you pass the levels without getting ANY INFECTION? Without getting hit?) And we also wanted to have silly costumes to customize your character, so we figured we could mash both of those together and have Achievements unlocking cool costumes

Thanks for reading, and we’d love to hear your thoughts! Cheers

Tags: post-jam

Since Ludum Dare’s jam entries have closed I have been letting my ideas for my game boil and fester in the back of my mind. I have been thinking of ways to implement user interaction with their environment in a metaphysical way, but through text. Having enjoyed the ease with which Twine let me create a text-based game I have been studying the syntax for Javascript so I may recreate my text-based game from scratch with everything molded exactly as I would like. While doing so, in regards to text-based games, I came across A Dark Room which I played all the way through in one very long sitting. It was amazing, inspirational even.

While I do not want to create a copy of it, I do want to employ some of the special quirks I noticed while playing it. The ease of use, the menu system, the mystery that gripped me as I played, compelling me to finish a mere text-based game. Speaking of influence, since joining Ludum Dare I have had so much fun creating. It’s a wonder I put it off for so long. I wanted to join Ludum Dare many a time but felt incapable of participating in it. Just jumping in, embarrassed as I was at my lack of skill, has been what I consider one of my best choices of this year. Just working on something, doing it, and having fun while doing so is all I wanted for so long.

For those who haven’t played it yet, you should Check it out! the new version just posted has been Updated to have ambient background music and sound effects(Jam version is still posted for comparison purposes)

I also now have a dev blog going over at http://curseinthedepths.tumblr.com/ Which everyone should go check out, and go follow it if you want more updates. We are working on getting a website up and running soon.

Curse in the Depths has moved to Unity in an attempt to make the game as accessible as possible. This has opened up a lot of opportunities including ports to mobile devices or Consoles eventually. Looking to the future of the game, the move over to unity looks like the best move. Although I am only now learning development, I am already getting stuff done. It shouldn’t be long before I catch up to the running Java Version, and with all the Physics tools there will be a bunch of things that I couldn’t do before.

It’s me again. And with my old tradition I want to show timelapse of development. Here it is:

As always godlike Tom Fulp featured the game to main page of Newgrounds. Got not a lot of feedback, but good rating.

I have plan about making a port of game to mobile devices. Have some new ideas about features.

So here the game again:

Snake Intuition

So, I’ve uploaded the game to itch.io. You can take a look here. Nothing new, I’m afraid, just a rather snazzy webpage with a money-giving option for those who are particularly kind-hearted. Here’s a snapshot of the page (clicking it will take you to game’s page):

And I’ve received some criticism lately that’s given me plenty of food-for-thought, especially when it comes to a potential post-comp release. JavadocMD pointed out the lack of agency in the game, a very good point that hadn’t quite occurred to me. Of course, some of this is to do with a lack of time — there’s no way I could make x varieties of kill methods and path choices in just 48 hours, but it is feasible to do as a post-comp version. I also agree that this inclusion could make it a lot more affecting, as the player will feel more personally responsible for their actions rather than feel as if they are merely following the breadcrumbs laid by me, the author.

But I’m not sure how I feel about implementing any kind of change. I’m really happy that for many people the game worked and that the message(s) came across, so I’m reluctant to make any dramatic changes that may compromise the already-effective parts. It’s a damn-annoying dilemma. And there’s so many other projects I want to start that I almost just want to move on. But I am proud of this piece. Grr, I hate indecision.

Edited to add: I better also mention that I changed the game’s title screen slightly — though it’s so unimportant and superficial I didn’t bother to class it as a post-comp version or something silly. Hopefully I haven’t infringed upon any of the rules, but if I have I’ll happily revoke the minor change.

Due to the lack of time and several other factors, my first attempt at making a game for Ludum Dare was left rather unfinished. In Finland the competition starts at 3:00 am and I lost a few hours because of that. The first day was just making the engine and some of the core mechanics. I ordered a new Wacom tablet just before LD and drew most of the art on the second day. The animations were also coded that day. I couldn’t spend the third day just making the game. When I got home I made a test level and coded the AI for the skeletons. I made the sounds and last finishing touches at around 1:00 am and got only four hours of sleep.

I didn’t use the time as effectively as I could have. I also had trouble finding inspiration and ended up making a pretty generic dungeon crawler. With C++ it took a long time to get the mechanics coded. The competition is also a lot tougher physically than I thought and I underestimated the time needed to make a game like this with my inexperience. I think it’s best to keep the concept of the game simple and get the ruddy thing finished rather than trying to aim too high.

The game can be played here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=28876

Tags: Herbert Crawler

I’ve updated my game, Submaruins, to what I orignally wanted to make during the Ludum Dare.

Take a look:

– Bugfixes
– Doubled the health of plant walls (100->200) 
– Tripled the health of metal walls (100->300) 
– Made humans construct faster 
– Made humans reduce cooldown on cannons faster 
– Made Craman destroy things faster 
– Nerfed Cannon damage by half (100->50) 
– New drill bomb weapon (3 scrap) 
—— Attaches to ships 
—— Short range, slows down after a while 
—— Does 20 contact damage 
—— Does 30 damage a second while attached 
—— Explodes after some time 
—— Does 200~ damage at epicenter 
– Added building help icons 
– Added building panning 
– Fixed AI so jobs aren’t taken by everyone 
– Fixed AI so levers are correctly pulled when needed 
– Eelan added 
—— 75Hp 
—— Move faster in water than out 
—— Drowns in too much air 
—— Electrocutes enemies in water if there are no non-eel allies nearby 
—— Strengthens engines 
– Added fan 
—— Replaces bubble rock in functionality 
—— Reduces water, provides lift 
—— Hurts workers 
– Pulsors now damage blocks/workers in front of them when on 
– All worker types now have different attacks 
– Jellyfish workers(name undecided) added 
—— 25Hp 
—— Requires water to swim in 
—— Breathes in water, can’t get killed by suffocation 
—— Regens health 
—— Can’t use medaby 
—— Attacks with stun clouds (1 minute stun) 
– Radar now displays stations as larger blips 
– Added tanks 
—— Can be open or closed as long as a worker is around or in it 
—— Fills with water when closed 
—— Main usage is too keep eelan and Jellyfish alive in air ruins 
– Starting ruin can be selected 
– Friendly ruins will attack if fired upon by other friendlies 
(ie you can no longer sink allies with out consequence) 
– Packs of Eelan boarders may be found occasionally 
—— Will swim to nearest solid block and enter the ruin, destroying the block 
—— Can be shot with cannons 
– Added grates which let water in 
—— Can be open and closed using a leverruins
– Starting ruin can be selected
– Friendly ruins will attack if fired upon by other friendlies
(ie you can no longer sink allies with out consequence)
– Packs of Eelan boarders may be found occasionally
– Will swim to nearest solid block and enter the ruin,destroying the block
– Can be shot with cannons
– Added grates which let water in
– Can be open and closed using a lever

Part 7: Animating of my tutorial series on beginner Blender modeling and getting it to behave with Unity is up! This covers creating basic animations in Blender, keyframing, what the Dope Sheet is and Actions are, and a few useful techniques!

I created Sail using this process, so if you like my style of low-poly graphics and are wondering how on earth I made the models, UV’d, textured, rigged, and animated them all in 48 hours, you might be interested in this series! I’m trying to crank out a post per day for the next week, each covering a different aspect of the workflow.

Also, I’m totally open to feedback on these articles! Please let me know if any parts are confusing, or overdrawn, or straight-up wrong! You can leave a comment here, or on my site (no email or registration is required–  you can leave any or all the fields blank in the comment form), or let me know on Twitter!

—–

We’re ready to add some animations to our character! Like with previous steps, we’ll want to set up the Blender UI to make animating our little guy a lot easier. First, close the left 3D viewport by dragging the bottom left corner icon of the right 3D viewport. Now, raise up a thin frame from the bottom using the same icon. Next, re-open a left frame, once again using the same icon.

Set the big left viewport’s type to “Dope Sheet” with the Type Selector. The dope sheet is basically Blender’s animation editor. Change its editing mode to “Action Editor”. This is the mode that allows you to work with a particular “action,” and in the context of what we’re doing, each “action” represents a separate animation clip in Unity. Finally, change the type of the narrow bottom frame to “Timeline.” The Timeline shows what frame you’re on in the animation, and it provides a few playback controls. However, you’ll want to keep in mind that it’s mostly a read-only kind of tool, and you’ll be doing the actual editing in the dope sheet.

Read the rest on my site!

Remember our brilliant game, Dr. Pepsi, Marriage Consultant? Are you curious what was going through my head when I decided, “Sure, let’s make a game about a talking can of soda that worms his way into people’s brains and fights dominatrixes with awful fashion sense”? Now your prayers have gone answered. I’ve posted a postmortem on the Thingo Studios website.

http://thingo.plippi.com/dr-pepsi-marriage-consultant-a-postmortem/

(I have no idea why I’m unable to post links still. Whatever.)

If you haven’t played this game yet, you’re in for a treat. A treat that will give you diabetes and kill you.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=31541

What?!!!

A new version of Switcher?

It has music?!!!

After some days of work a new version of Switcher is ready 😀

You can play it here

I hope you enjoy the improvements!

Here’s my short post-mortem for The Legend of the Thunder Fish.  Cross-posted from brianmacintosh.com.

I worked with Justin Britch on this one. We met just after the theme was announced to brainstorm. I really liked this theme – it evokes mystery and exploration, provides an easy setting (underground or underwater) to start with, and could simultaneously be tied into gameplay elements. While we thought it would have been a lot of fun to make “Ben Eath, the Surf Ace”, we ultimately decided that we really wanted to go after the mystery, the thrill of exploration, fear of the unknown, and such themes. We also knew that we wanted to attempt to introduce some sort of narrative into the world.

The beginnings of the conversation system.

The design was ambitiously scoped for a jam, and I’m happy I was able to turn out so many features.

More conversation.

The Good: Dedicating time during the development process for polish worked well for the game. When polish gets left as a task for the end of the jam, there’s often no time to actually do it. I didn’t leave a feature until it was in a state it could stay in.

I also didn’t run into too many momentum-killer problems.  I’ve worked on several smaller projects using HTML5 and ThreeJS over the past few months, so I knew some of its quirks and was able to work continuously without getting stuck on strange bugs, even though the codebase for Thunder Fish pushed way past the size of my previous HTML games.  Familiarity is key for jams, and it definitely pays off in the ability to continue grinding out features.

Learned: Yet again, I completely failed to allocate time for audio. Fortunately, I was already in the Jam category for this one, so I pulled some free music fromNGXmusical in the last hour. Sound effects could have improved the feel even further, though.

Interested?  Play and rate here!  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=15030

I thought I’d make a little guide to my submission, From under the snow

I’m very proud of it – it’s the second game I get to make in the Furnace Engine. I obviously recommend it 😉

Hello guys Gluckauf Troll, our entry in LD29 was in a technology exhibition, in Tenerife (Canary Islands). The name os this exhibition its “FI2”.

We have a lot of  photos from this event. If you want to see all, you can do it in our facebook page. We have a good news about this game, A COMPANY WANT TO BUY THIS GAME!!! :D. We are so much happy just right now.  I add more photos here from this event.

I tried to review some games as I said but my video (1 hour long) got destroyed by a bug!

Sorry! I’ll make shorter videos from now on in order to avoid such bad destructions caused by bugs. (The video is called ‘Review of various Ludum Dare games’ (by Caridorcc Tergilti)), if you want you can check it out and you can hear the audio)

If you want consideration for the video and your game isn’t on the list of games I’ve currently played (and you think your game has at least a small shot at being in the top 25 or so in any category) then let me know your game’s name and I’ll try to get to it before the video is done. Note that I really do try to play every game to completion. Here is the list of games I’ve played so far: (Should be Alphabetical)

24100
30 Days Remain
a story
A Trip Underground
Above and Below
Above the Core
Abyssal Trek
Airport Security Screener
Alien Lobotomy
An Osterreich tale, or something about ostriches
Anett
aoutch!
Apologeticum
Arctic Desert
ASCII: Beneath the Surface
Atlantis Explorer
Atoms – Literally beneath the surface
Aviation Disaster Recovery Simulator
Bacteraemia
Balancitos
Ball Club
Barry the Avalanche Dog
Basement
Baum
Beat To The Bottom (BTTB)
beneath
Beneath Europa
Beneath Me
Beneath the Duck Face
Beneath The Lab
Beneath the Surf Ace
Beneath The Surface
Beneath The Surface
Beneath The Surface
Beneath The Surface
Beneath The Surface In The Sky
Beneath the Surface… Adventure
Beneath the Trolls
Beneath the… hey, look, shiny things!
Berserker
Billy Bigdigger
Bloody Barry
Bloop
Blundergaffe
Bobs Incident
Bombcano
Botch Bundle
Bouboule is Rolling
Bridge to the Abyss
Bubble Cannon
Cave Money
CavEscape
Cavesploration
Chacket Valleyparker: DRILL BUNNY
Charly’s Psyche
Chassis Driller
Clarity
Clobsters
Come Home
COVERUP
CTS
Cybs Submarine
Dagfin
Damn Sharks
Damned Scouts
Dark Soils
Dead men tell no tales
Death’s Masquerade
Deep Sea Diving
DEPTH BENEATH
DepthCharge
DIG! DIG! DIG!
Dive
Dive! Dive! Dive!
Dolphin and Lava
Doors & Secrets
Down
Dr. Beat
Drill
Drill18: The Mars Project
Drop Up
Dungeon Encounter
Dungeons Of Yeragr
Dwarf
Effin’ Rats
Escape From Guardian (Fixed link!)
Exile
Explore Beneath the Surface
ExploZone: Beneath the Surface
Fake Zoo
FedIt!
Feelin N Dealin
Find the Booty
Firefish
First Person Platformer
Fish Photographer Simulator
Forerunner
Forsaken Pit
Fortune and Glory
Fridge Magnetism
From Below
From the Under
Frustration
GLUCKAUF TROLL
God Hunter
Gold Digger
Gold Diver
Gravitas
Growdrop
Gun Bat
Hammerfall
HammerHead in the Sea of Monsters
Happy Fishing
Hare’s Harvest
Hollow Earth
Holy Moly
Hopelessness
House of Clouds
Hungry Dolphin
Hyper Seed
Icesome!
In The Caves
Infinite Hell Loop
Installation ZA-3
It Came From The Sewer
Journey to the Center of the Hole
Kappa cat
Keep the Gem!
Kill or Kill
Klondike Nuggets
Kraken
Let’s Save the World (again)
lightness of being
Lim
Lost Sheep
Lost Villages
Louis and the Louse
Lumbricidae
Memory Eater
Mind the Gap
Mind Your Business
Mine The Planet
Mining Under The Surface
MOOD
Mr Tibbles Lost in the City of R’lyeh
Mra
My Little Submarine
Nadir
Nauticalamity
Necronomicon
No Eyes Willy
Octopus Simulator
Off the Hook!
Olm
OVER/FISH
Pawn
PET RUN/STOP
Pixel Draw
Planet Improver
PlanetoLution
Plop Away
Poopy Kitty Defense
PR0BE
Princess Fart
punk n roll
QP : Fix the leak!
Raged Milling
Rats Under My Skin
Reflection
Relica
Revenge of the Fish
Revenge of the Kraken
Room Cleaning Simulator 2014
Safe House
Save Us
Saving Grace
Scratch
Seafloor Defense
Searching Beneath the Surface
Seismic Charge
Sewer Rat Escape
Shark, Shark, Shark!
Shifter
Side B, Track 1
Sinful Horse
sirtet
Small sacrifice
Snack on the fly
Soil Manufacturing
Somewhere… Beneath the surface…
SOS
Soulitude
Space flappy shrimp bubble ninja blob 2048 X-Alpha Turbo Edition
Speed Driller
Starpit
Sub Bomber
Sub Memory
Submarine
Submarine Playground
Submersed Joe
Submersion
Subocula
Subsea War
Subterranean Extermination
Superficial
Surface Tension
SurfaZ
Teddy & His Cat
the Attack – Beneath the Surface
The bunker game
The Collector
The Creature of the Depths Must Feed his Sheep
The DARING ADVENTURES of the BLOB that can hide BENEATH THE SURFACE
The Drowning Man
The Gathering
The Golden Bean
The Hole
The Leeway Brothers’ Bohemian Debut Of A Lifetime
The Longest Way Down
The Money Beneath Our Ground
The Moustache Rebellion
The Sea Has No Claim
The Spikes Beneath
Theres’s a Twist
They Come With Fire
Things for free
Thurgood P. Marshall and the Quest for Ontological Theory Advancement
Tingling Under Attack
TIT for TAT
To Hell
Totems
Trapped Under Ice
Tube
Tunnel Digger: Artifact Man
Under
Under Arctic
Under Heroes
Under the bed
Under the kitchen surface
Under Your Skin
Underground City Defender
Underground Racing 2
Undermine: A lesson in Middle Management
Underneath Your Skin
Underwater Words
Villager
Water Beneath Mars
What Happened?
Where am I ?
Winter Is Coming . . .
Wunderheilung
XUNDER
Zits!

Ghost Story updates:

– Updated version with new input control.
– New Windows version with customizable input control.

Thank you all for playing and commenting this game, I hope you like the game ^-^
Here is the LINK.

The Theme and Initial Ideas

The theme for LD29 was ‘Beneath the surface’, initially the theme didn’t fire up my imagination. It had obvious connotations of mining and deep sea. Once I did a bit of brainstorming I started to come up with ideas around emotions, controlling complex mechanisms with simplex mechanics and political systems.

This brainstorming around these areas led to about 16 ideas, which I then whittled down to 4 ideas which included the following

Building Shelters

You have to protect creatures that live below the surface of the world, these creatures are very vulnerable to the elements and you have to build structures to protect them while they navigate to their new homes.

Creating Patterns on a Surface

This idea and the basis in how old Cathode Ray TVs illuminated pixels on the screen. In this idea you would be using electro-magnets to guide a beam to a given pixel and then illuminate said pixel for points.

Herman’s Head

Do you remember the really crappy US TV ‘comedy’ Herman’s Head? If not, lucky you! This trailer and wiki page are enough to give you an idea what the show was like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman’s_Head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8tzXFagaso

The idea is that control different aspects of a persons personality to complete tasks, the important thing was to keep everything balanced.

Political Corruption Games

In this game you would be control the hidden forces which lurk beneath the surface of a supposed Democracy.

I basically decided to go with the Creating Patterns on the Surface idea as I believed that I could limit the scale of the project, I also liked the idea of playing around with simple mechanics and finally I really liked the idea that you where not in direct control.

Constraints

Obviously because this project was part of Ludum Dare the biggest constraint of all was the time limit of 48 hours, I also added an additional time based constraint to myself by deciding to have a normal sleeping pattern. Usually in a Jam situation I would stay up for as much of the 48 hours as possible but I couldn’t do this for Ludum Dare as I had a bunch of work to do on the Monday after the Jam.

The next constraint was my skill base, I think of myself as a Games Programmer. My art skills are pretty much non-existent  and I believe that I don’t flex my design muscles enough to really have a very polished game system. With this constraint in mind, I decided to keep the art style very simple(basic shapes and colours) and keep the main mechanics very simple but with enough design space to enable some interesting mechanics to come out.

Part 2 – can be read here and my entry can played here. Please play, rate and give feedback. Cheers!!!

I am not a big fan of wordpress, so I was using my Tumblr to post very intermittent dev diaries of my LD29 entry, these can be read at the following link

http://bigbearscot.tumblr.com/tagged/ld48

I have to fly somewhere tomorrow, but I wanted to make sure I got at least a partial Post-Compo version up of The Creature Below before I left! There are still a lot of cosmetic changes I want to make, but I got around to some of them, and fixed plenty of bugs as well.

Bask in the fact that you now face the correct direction on KEYUP events, that you can see what new item you received, and that your health actually refills to full when you die! Plus, a much-requested change: The Creature takes longer to kill you.

Still didn’t quite get around to that death animation. It will happen! I promise!

Hey everyone!

I’m very happy to announce that I finally managed to release an album with soundtracks from my LD games.

The album includes three totally happy tunes from totally awesome gamejams:

• Polytonia – LD 28
• Pond Tycoon – LD 29
• Fiddle Daily – BossJam 2014

And as always, I’m really curious to hear your opinions! So feel free to drop a comment to share your thoughts

Thanks for great jamming!

Spotify

iTunes

DRM-free: contact robinerd(at)gmail.com

Check out my Blog HERE

I just received a really awesome review from Jupiter from shoddypixels.com

Carnival Warfare is a game about selling enough stuff at the carnival. This one of the only games that I played several times. The player controls a man at the animal station. He must sell a quota of animals or face losing his job. In order to do this, he must advertise, but not too much as to annoy customers, and keep his station stocked. The more animals that are sold, the better respect the player has. You can trade in respect for upgrades, like a bigger booth that can hold more stock. I really liked the simple but well done graphics to this game. The objects that the children buy at the carnival are then carried around on the peoples heads, which I found to be funny. I was able to last three days in this business, but found it hard to keep my respect when I had to restock. The restock tent is far away from the animal tent and requires the player to walk all the way to it and then back to their own tent to continue playing. This game is challenging and really addicting. http://shoddypixels.com/2014/05/12/ludum-dare-29/

You can play Carnival Warfare here:

My game, The Last Beacon now has a post-Compo version! Still WIP because I want to extend the game itself, but it has some major updates: – fixed bug that didn’t update laser beam when it destroyed a block 
– fixed bug that allowed player shooting a buggy laser beam while falling 
– reduced breakable block durability 
– grappling hook now doesn’t work on lvl1 
– improved (but still WIP) main menu

Get it here. You can find the submission page here.

A lot of people liked the music of your game, so we will share a track!

The music was created by Adalberto Rodrigues!

Tags: music

I finally took the time to make a tutorial / walkthrough of Planet Improver:

You can check out the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=6821

Alright, I’m working on the Post Compo version of StrataGEM.

I’m adding simple animations to the tile movement. This should help the player understand what is going on when they make an action. The plan is to “pop out” tiles before moving them. They have to rise above the other tiles or else they will Z-fight through their neighbors as they move. I also need to transform the tile as I move it because the base hexagons are slightly differently shaped. WIP pop out:

I just finished Part 8: Importing into Unity! This concludes the tutorial, which takes you through the entire modeling, UV mapping, texturing, rigging, and animating process from scratch! You can find the first post in the series here. Thanks to everyone who left feedback, both constructive and positive!

I created Sail using this process, so if you like my style of low-poly graphics and are wondering how on earth I made the models, UV’d, textured, rigged, and animated them all in 48 hours, you might be interested in this series!

Also, I’m totally open to feedback on these articles! Please let me know if any parts are confusing, or overdrawn, or straight-up wrong! You can leave a comment here, or on my site (no email or registration is required–  you can leave any or all the fields blank in the comment form), or let me know on Twitter!

I just released Tiny Thor for iOS. The game I started at Ludum Dare 28.

GET IT HERE 😉

It’s a couple of weeks after the contest, a few days before the results will be released. It feels about right to add a how-did-I-do-it? post.

Like last time I kept an extensive log on the subject and my progress. I used these tools:

• GameCreator (Online game editor)
• Gimp
• Blender

Using my 3d mouse the 3d explorer and a wacom cintiq drawing board as main hardware input.

I started off with the writing down the concept on paper (or word for that matter). The game ended up as a point and click adventure through an underwater base which is near total destruction. I thought up an emotional story about a young girl, trapped beneath the surface of the ocean. As she’s the only person, deep underneath the surface, she feels trapped and alone as she tries to flee her confinement.

Writing down the concept on (digital) paper

After finishing those I went on to create every scene in a story board. I drew my storyboard directly inside the GameCreators editor as it allowed me  to quickly prototype it.

Sketching and prototyping

After I decided the prototype was correct I continued to improve the logic and update the graphics.

The three stages I used to improve the scenery.

What went wrong?

Nothing really went bad, but I did end up with an issue related to the audio. I couldn’t match the mood with the audio, so I had to leave it out. Other thing is I probably used too much time on the scenery. I first thought to draw it all out in 2d. But after I finished all the mockup scenes I decided 3d modelling would allow me to easier set the mood I wanted.

What went right?

After I decided to go full 3d I only needed a few hours to work out the scenes in 3d. It looked good and was easy to import and fit inside the editor replacing the old art.

The thing that really succeeded with my chosen game type was the ease to create storyboards in the game editor I used and transform it to the final game.

To read more visit my LD29 blog.

To play the game visit the LD29 entry

Tags: Beneath the Surface, gamecreator, incourse, islandworks, ld29, ld48, Ludumdare, strong99, troubling times

Here is the link to my game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=29515

I’m mixed for this jam. On the one hand, i like the game i made, on the other hand i wish i could made a better and a longer game.

Working

First, i have learn to never work with someone when you don’t know his capacity. I lost a lot of time and i didn’t know where i was going because of his inexperience. (I didn’t blame him, it’s was cool to work with him.)

Then i was too ambitious, so the game tooks me one week to finish everything i planned.

And I need to organize myself better in code and for tasks to be relax when i work.

The Game

My first goal was to give a real adventure feeling  (like in Thief : the Dark Project) for a 2D game.

So I think the two first part of my game should be better with a step by step gameplay : i mean you don’t control the boat or the diving bell but the character and you have to do different actions for get where you want.

The story was not clear and a lot of people didn’t know what to do, i have to think about it next time.

I know the diving bell controls are frustrating, i was trying to do something cool, but i failed :D.

Finally here is the three features i wanted to implement to the game :

-Pad control

-More living World

-Better transitions between levels and text on the screen.

For the rest i’m proud of the result because i learned a lot.

Thanks for your reading.

Striwx

Concepts art by LeHobbit

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

I think you’d believe by now.

Let’s continue the countdown to the end of judging with Ludum Dare to Believe! Ep. 4!

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: Scuba Bear
Category: Jam Entry
Creators: Shannon Mason ‘Pongball’, Richard Lems ‘Rilem’, Diane de Wilde ‘Ziryf’
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=18340

Title: Beneath the City
Category: Comp Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Deepnight
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=2982

Title: Delve
Category: Comp Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Conormn
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=31095

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.

Whoo! After some rendering problems, I’ve finally managed to upload the LD29 compilation!

Thanks to everyone who entered, without y’all I would be some weirdo posting a 10s clip of my own game on YouTube and calling it a compilation.

Be sure to check the list of games in the description. Sorry for having to post a link, YouTube was unhappy with the number of games in the list.

One last request… I do this for fun and involvement in the community more than anything else, but if you could please check out our submission, Mind Your Business, that’d be awesome.

Thanks again to everyone!

Some say failure is the best teacher, and if that’s true I do have a lot that can be learned from this LD 😉

Slime Lord

I was pretty excited about the theme. Pretty much immediately I had the idea for a 2D defense game where you play the role of a subterranean horror, a Slime Lord, who lives under a fragile little hut. The twist is that the Slime Lord wants to protect the lonely hut from the myriad of dangers that continue to befall it.

I thought this dynamic might be a good opportunity to tell a story about a monster living underground, having an emotional attachment to the puny and helpless humans living above ground.

However, by late Sunday I realized it wasn’t working out. Some gameplay aspects depended on ideas that just weren’t coming to me, and time was also running out in general. One thing I liked about Slime Lords is the graphics – and that could be the reason I might return for a second take on the thing. But by Sunday the game was dead as far as Ludum Dare was concerned.

Here, have a time lapse regardless:

Planet Improver

On Monday, I fought against the urge to give up altogether – but I didn’t. What do you do when you have no time and not a lot of energy left? Well, you might make a text mode game. Enter: Planet Improver.

it consists of two parts: the first part is an economy simulation where you play the role of a terraforming machine that’s been dropped on some forsaken planet to mine it for resources. For the second part, I reused some code I had written for the Warmup Weekend, it’s a minimal rogue-like game that I adapted for the Planet Improver setting. In it, the Killbot character (of LD27 fame) made a reappearance, doing the bidding of Planet Improver by ridding the planet’s crust of xeno organisms.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of Planet Improver:

After Completion

The good thing is, Planet Improver got finished on time. I posted it as my entry and went to bed. The next day, I began to have serious doubts about the viability of this minimalistic game. So I left it sitting there for some weeks, which also resulted in a critical bug not getting fixed until yesterday.

Now that I’ve come back to rate some games, I’m actually at peace with Planet Improver.

So what’s left? Well, to do better next time of course!

Here is the Soundtrack for our entry, Souvenirs

Enjoy !

Hi Everybody

Finally I can annouce ‘Organ Run – The Meaty Edition’.  It’s a visual rework of the original entry.
It’s all about eye ‘candy’, eye meat ?, eh … slimier, gloomy meat, a more lively char etc

Here some comparisions:

#1 after:

Titelscreen reworked

#1 before:

Original Titelscreen

#2 ingame reworked

Reworked Ingame example

#2 ingame original

ingame original

Check it out here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=20508

If the interest is big enough I could also scale it up some more… release a level pack, bring it to the droid etc. Let me know 😉

Cheers

Mr.B.K.

Tags: postmortem

I’ve rated a little over 100 games so far and have decided to finally do a postmortem, but this time, in video format.

Here be a link to my game’s page

Tags: ld29, postmortem

I liked where Gems of the Deep was going, and decided to keep working on it after the competition.  I made a lot of progress since then, but I feel like I ran out of steam on actual gameplay ideas, so I figured I’d just post the current version for people to play around with in case I don’t take it any further.

Windows

Mac/Linux/etc

Still requires Java to run.  Controls are mostly the same, too.

You never know when inspiration can hit, and I still would like to flesh this one out more since I really enjoyed making and playing it, but we’ll see what happens, I guess!  In the meantime, at least people can enjoy what there is of it.

We added a post-jam version. Just fixed a few bugs and added checkpoints. The original submission is still up for judging. (Quite frankly, we’re not sure if adding checkpoints is allowed as a ‘fix’ as described, can anyone verify this?). 

Play here! (or click the image).

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

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

Day One

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

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

kevyee started working on the character controls and test level.

Day Two

We had steady progress.

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

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

We were slowly working on the first level.

Day Three

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

Here’s the soundtrack:

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

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

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

This is the first time we do a post – mortem for Ludum Dare . We hope to be able to inform what is necessary about  the experience gained during this Jam , and how we got it .

I Trigueiro Neto , am participating for the fifth time in the Ludum Dare, but only two games have been completed : Find the Rat , made in LD28 , and Catacombs , in the LD29 . Paloma Guimarães participated for the second time ,in the same games mentioned .

In this LD we decided to do something different : just the two of us composing the team for Catacombs .

The Game

Story : With the theme ” Beneath the Surface ” , our brainstorming was somewhat filled with games and various style options . But what attracted us most was the idea of telling a story that takes place in the famous catacombs of Paris. The player assumes the role of Steve Fortaine , a young descendent of a famous thoroughbred French family, which for two centuries , mysteriously lost their entire fortune . Because it was not resolved, the case was eventually filed by the local police , and was never heard of again. But for Steve , his curiosity went beyond . He was determined to understand the mystery , and initiated a series of related searches. As a result , he found that one of his ancestors , Baron Condregore , had also disappeared in the same period that the family wealth did. Your journey then begins with the search of the corpse of the Baron in the French Catacombs .

Aesthetics : We try to throw in a bit of the beautiful aesthetics presented by Pixel Art , taking the game Sword and Sorcery as a reference. We tried . Unfortunately , all the art was done by a programmer , and the result ended up not being as satisfying as we wanted it to be .

Mechanics : We used the little time we had to introduce simple mechanics both in character and the enemies. No complex artificial intelligence system was implemented . For a game made by two people , complexity and reduced time do not match .

Technology : We used Construct 2 , a simpler engine compared to the others, but very powerful . It was enough to meet the needs we encounter in developing Catacombs .

So , in these three days of development, what did  we learn ?

First, game development is not an easy task . It requires dedication, knowledge ( knowledge aggregated to continuous dedication ) , love for what you do and, more importantly than all that, working as a team . Of course, these points are not the only ones , but they are critical . And to associate this to the time we have in a jam, becomes even more difficult. However , all this served as experience. It was really fun to develop Catacombs , put our ideas into practice , and to see the final result … I , in this issue ,  had contact with the artistic part . I had never done assets or characters , and I’m terrible designer, but I felt excited while doing the sprites and other game elements . With this experience , I affirm that no process of developing a game shall be lightly esteemed . Everyone has their proper complexity , and are of fundamental importance . To conclude , I wish to congratulate everyone who participated in this edition , and urge them to continue participating . Ludum Dare is an experience of unparalleled importance . We are all warriors o/

So I’ve been making small changes and additions to what was my Ludum Dare basecode, and its getting to the point where I think it might actually be useful for other people. This begs the question: What do people actually need/want in an entity/component management system? Anything you can think of, please post in the comments, or tweet to me @nico_m__

Note that my system is for HaxeFlixel, and is already available on github, the point of this post is just as a general question though, whether you use flixel or not, what would you want/need in an entity/component management system?

Thanks:),

Nico

Tags: component, Entity, Entity-Framework, Flixel, haXe, HaXeFlixel

Whoops I wanted to do this earlier, but at least I’m still timely.

I absolutely love mystery and crime-solving games. I was delighted when I realised the Below The Surface theme allowed me to make a mystery game of my very own; and during the voting process I was magnetically drawn to other games that eschewed ‘Surface’ as a physical location, and took it to more metaphorical places.

These five games are my favourite of those that I’ve come across, and I’ve awarded them all the It’s A Mystery Award!

Agent Thursday
Really solid noir interrogator. Is both closely tied to and cheerfully ribs the genre, with some amusing characters to grill for info.

Beneath the Surface (Spaceship Edition)*
Features a delicate balance between finding out about the true intentions of your space exploration crew and pissing them off (with fatal consequences). Incredibly solid atmosphere.

*Subtitle mine, for clarity’s sake.

They Beep.
Who’s the robot? Is they guy in the toilet a robot? Will you use your terrifying robot powers to increase company morale? Who the hell broke the photocopier again?!

Cases
A randomly-generated murder mystery system! I love logic puzzles like these – with enough detail for me to need to take notes, but not enough to have things feel obfuscated. The way characters are presented (and that the main character reminds me of Agent York from Deadly Premonition) are bonus points.

Sub Rosa
Gothic mystery! The atmosphere is thick and heavy, and the generated cases mixes things up. Could show some awesome potential with new clues and extra sound design.

Beneath The Surface: A detective story of video game conspiracies
Noir detectives meets video game meta humour. Definitely worth a play to see where it goes with its graphical style.

And, of course, there’s my wonderful and sexy neon-noir visual novel, Thought Police. Check it out, if you haven’t yet!

I’m sure there are many more awesome mystery games submitted that I’ve not seen, so if you know of any, please tell me in the comments – I’ll definitely check them out.

Well, this was my first entry into Ludum Dare and my first somewhat serious attempt at making a playable game.  I named the game Latin for apology, because I didn’t polish the game very well.  I used only 48 hours, but did enter this as a Jam submission.  The game’s main mechanic was that it reverses gravity if you fall “beneath the surface.” You can play the game here: Apologeticum.

Tools Used:

• Language/Framework: Haxe/Openfl/HaxeFlixel
• IDE: FlashDevelop
• Map Editor: Ogmo
• Sounds: Bfxr
• Drawing tools: Fireworks CS6, Pickle

What went wrong:

• Lack of interest towards the end.  There was just something about the first night, I felt unstoppable.  I was coding rapidly and coming up with new solutions to problems quickly, the process was fun and exciting.  Not so much on the 2nd day.  Maybe it was because I had some wine on the 2nd day.  Possibly my stamina for these kinds of tasks aren’t built up yet, and maybe the process does slow down quite a bit towards the end.
• My health implementation.  The way I used health and other things were not focused.  For example: players take damage when they flip from “Top World” to “Bottom World.” The main reason I did this was in  case a player got stuck bouncing back and forth, they would just die and restart the level.  With more thought a better solution would have been found.  In other words: I don’t want to use mechanics to fix flaws in design.
• The boss… I really just half assed this one.
• Picking up bombs and throwing them wasvery glitchy.
• So right before the compo I saw HaxeFlixel was recently upgraded to 3.3.0, so I decided to get into  PowerShell and do a $>haxelib upgrade This was a bad idea.  I don’t know what it was but trying to use tilemaps was bugged and didn’t work.  I wasn’t quite sure how to go back to the previous version, so I just went to the dev branch of HaxeFlixel instead.  This solved my problems.

The Good:

• I FINISHED!  Wow, it’s a really good feeling to finish something.  I’m the type of person who typically just buys stuff and doesn’t produce anything.  Even at my job (nurse), it’s not like I’m making anything.  It’s a new feeling (for me) to make something.
• Ludum Dare community.  Very constructive.
• I think my initial concept was interesting at least, even if I didn’t implement it to the nines.

Summary of what I learned:

• I need to make more games.
• It’s ok to spend more time figuring out design solutions.
• It’s ok to trash some ideas if they’re not working out.
• Don’t use mechanics to fix design errors.
• Expect issues when upgrading software or libraries.
• It’s good to make things.

Thank you everyone, who tried my game.

As a little experiment, now that we’ve all spent a few weeks judging other people’s entries, here’s a question for you: how would you rate your own game?

Try to forget everything you know about your game and pretend you’re seeing it for the first time, then judge it like you would any of the other entries. If you’ve done any post-compo work, make sure you’re playing the original. Be honest. Apply the same criteria you usually apply when judging other peoples work. What do you think of it when you look through the eyes of a player instead of the creator?

If you’re comfortable to, post the ratings you gave yourself here. It could be fun to look back on when the results come out: you’ll be able to see how much of a gap (if any!) there is between what you and your audience thought of the game.

I’ll rate my game in a comment below.

By the way, I can’t take credit for this idea: Jeremy Nikolai suggested it after LD 24. I just thought it was a cool idea & wanted to bring it back this time around.

As promised, a new tuesday, a new 3D Quick Game Art tutorial ^^ This time around I’m doing Modular Walls 😀 I’ll be covering all asssets needed for a imple Dungeon Crawler game (Including Character and Weapons)

Let me know what you guys think \o I’ll release a new one next tuesday covering some decoration asset for the dungeon 😀

Tags: tutorial

Some small changes that make the game much nicer to play:

• Enemies fall slower.
• Larger field of view, so you can see enemies sooner.
• Smoother camera movement.
• Press “shift” to run.
• Persistent configuration (saves changes to music, sfx and fullscreen).
• Laser gun only costs 150 instead of 250.

Slightly more detail can be found on this blog post if you’re interested.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know why I hadn’t included these features in the compo version, they took no time at all to add. I guess by the end of the competition I’m so tired and just want it over and done with that I forget to add very minor things.

Hope you enjoy playing!

Please vote on my game, thanks!

We’ve had a fair number of people commenting positively on the soundtrack for our entry Ama so our erstwhile composer has put together a more listenable, standalone piece based on the music throughout the game. You can find it embedded below for your aural pleasure. If you like what you hear and haven’t already, please feel free to play and rate the game as well, that’d be much appreciated. Thanks to all who have so far, we’ve received many kind words and got some immensely useful feedback which we hope to incorporate into a much more developed, post-compo version at some point in the future.

If you play Vaults Inc you will agree with many of the players that gave me detailed feedback: it has substance, but it is buggy (specially the interface) and has mixed graphics.

As the developer and programmer, bugs affect my very soul. I’m bound to a moral code that I will fix them ALL. In fact, many of them are already fixed in the major rewriting that I’m doing.

What about the GRAPHICS

I’m not an artist. I have a good sense what is good and what is bad, but I cannot execute. As an indie, I can do something, but definitively not a professional.

That is why I decided to open the my heart and my wallet to find a partner for my gaming adventures. I’m hiring artists. I need someone with great artistic view, bold style and great skills. But I have to confess that it is harder than it looks. Maybe I’m searching in the wrong places. Currently, I opened a position using oDesk freelance platform and advertised the job at Pixel Junk. Also in my blog.

Is there anyone with experience that could share hints and tips?

Tags: artists, hiring, pixelart, unity3d

With everyone posting their top-5 lists of best games (that mostly look similar to each other), I ‘ve thought about composing a top-5 list of games that could use more user ratings.

Infantile Oceanic Feeling

This is one of those ambiguous audio/relaxing experiences, but it held me for at least 30 minutes trying to make a self-sustaining ecosystem. In my opinion, this is the most beautiful and underrated game in the jam.

Seven Souls

Seven Souls is the winner in Mood section for me. A very stylish and depressing game, with an interesting take on dialogue/puzzle mechanics.

Sprites.CSV

Although I don’t like platformers (sorry), this one did some nice experimentation on the gameplay. The only platformer in the jam that left me wanting more from the mechanic.

The Moustache Rebellion

Can’t say much about this one – it is a nice, polished puzzle game, and I have no idea why it has so few votes. Not really related to the theme or innovative, though.

NerVS

This game has an interesting and somewhat innovative concept, but be sure to check the rules/instructions before playing – seems that everybody have a hard time figuring out what to do.

Trapped Under Ice

This is a bonus entry, just because I like seals, and this game has the most beautiful seal in the world. Also, the gameplay is pretty interesting (although somewhat hard).

Here’s a time-lapse for my entry. It’s probably not very exciting, but I’m posting it anyway.
Play the game here

Tags: time lapse, timelapse

RMBR is probably my most important game since I started to bake some pixeled stuff 2 years ago.

If you have trouble to understand the concept of the game you can watch this Vine. Or try to imagine a Twine game where you “drag” the words and not just “click” on them. That’s a bit synthetic but it’s the closest description I can write with my poor English skills.

There are two main ideas behind RMBR. The first one was, I wanted to make a game about Alzheimer. I actually have a grand-mother who suffers from it, and I wanted to try to explain feeling you can have when you speak with her, but also what I imagine (from what I see and what she tells me) being her mind. How words are losing their meanings, how memories are becoming blurry and fade away, and how some of them, the oldest ones, are in contrary back vividly.

To be honest I totally failed to do it correctly, mainly because I needed a lot more time to write and include some contents. Time I didn’t have during the jam. But more on that later.

The second idea came from my recent interest in french surrealists. I’m presently reading a lot of novels/poems by Breton, Leiris, Desnos or Queneau (about whom I already develop with a game called Milmiliar – only in french right now sorry about that – which was inspired by Hundred Thousand Billion Poems). And Leiris specially worked a lot on the words and their meanings, how each one of us have their own  personal dictionary. If we think that the meaning of a word is shared by everyone, that’s an illusion. Because we all have our own experiences of the word, our own memories, our own understanding of it. So he decided to write his own dictionary (Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses in french, I didn’t find any translation of it sorry about that).

And because he was a surrealist and a poet, Leiris decided to write only definitions with puns.

For example in RMBR you can find this definition of “game”: a gem. This is something very personal for me. It represents the way I feel about games – well some games at least – and at the same time is an anagram of “game”.

This is what RMBR is about. You start with a very simple little story, told in few words. And then you can explore it like you would do with a landscape or a building in an adventure game, by exploring the words and what they mean in context. Until you finally find a definition like the one above.

The exploration is mainly about two points of view: mine and my grandmother’s. Exploring her mind or mine produces different results. In the boy’s mind things gets accurate and are a lot in the moment. In her mind things are confusing, words fade away. Well that was the intention at first.

I had a lot in mind while doing RMBR. But because it was my first mobile game so I spent a lot of time struggling with basics mobile dev problems, and didn’t get enough time to include all the content I wanted or all the features I imagined. But the main concept is here and the feedbacks I got surely convince me that I had something.

I like this idea of navigating in a text like you would do in an adventure game. As a fan of Simogo’s Device 6 I sure want to explore news ways to build a bridge between literature and video games. And mobile phone or tablet are probably the best media to do so.

That’s why RMBR is my most important game. I think I finally got something that’s really merging these two objects. And now I want to push it further.

I’m currently working on a full version of the game which will not be only about exploring a text but also will integrate puzzles and enigmas. The structure of it is a bit uncertain at the moment while I’m mainly trying to improve the “engine” and testing some mechanisms. But I’m also rewriting all the content, in french this time. Because I can’t do something good in a language I can’t really master. Two people are going to help me.

David (Badabing): He did some SFX and music for the jam version (at the last moment, thanks to him) and will be in charge of the sound design.
Violette: She will work on the English translation of the game. We’ll work together, because a lot of the texts will not be directly translated but in fact entirely rewritten.

So I hope this little post-mortem gave you some interest in the game. If so, you can:

– try the jam version http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=7969 
– stay tuned via my twitter @Pitoum
– take a look at my unfinished website http://www.pitoum.net
– leave a comment if you have any question

Thanks for reading/playing!

Tags: interactive fiction, interactive novel, mobile, poetry, simogo, Twine, words

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

I think you’d believe by now.

Let’s continue the countdown to the end of judging with Ludum Dare to Believe! Ep. 6!

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: Bellhook
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Colorvade
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=22146

Title: Bombcano
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Bentog
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=17307

Title: Wormhunter
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: Small Gaming and Dick Poelen
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=14618

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.

Introduction

Another Ludum Dare!  Let’s take a moment and look beneath the surface of what made my game, Truth, possible.

I was apprehensive at first about doing a 3D game.  There’s always a lot to account for when making a 3D game and you don’t have a lot of time.  However I was really into the theme.  I started thinking about all of the usual cliches: underground, underwater, devils, etc… but then I started thinking about humanity, and ourselves.  Looking in to myself I was able to draw some metaphors that I really liked and thought translated well to this dungeon-esque adventure.

The goal I had in mind was quite lofty, but I WANTED to do it and see it through.

What Went Right

I’m comfortable working with Maya, Unity and Photoshop.  I think my familiarity with those tools was what ultimately helped me finish this game.  I just love working with that trifecta of tooling.

I also created a design document that I tried to stay true to and used it to help guide me along the way.

I used a modular approach to the level design which was very beneficial.  Unity was a big help in this regard with it’s use of prefabs (although that did cause me some trouble down the road).

The number of pieces I had to model was very small.  It could probably be argued that I could have modeled less pieces!  These pieces were modeled VERY low poly, with very few triangles.  The door was probably the most complicated one.  Since the poly count was low I went ahead and used mesh colliders on them when I imported them into Unity.  For the wooden posts and lamps, I used box colliders.

I then combined these parts into bigger wholes and made prefabs for halls and sections.  Then I began piecing them together.  This workflow made it really quick for me to put together the level that I wanted.

I also used a single texture/material which was very low res allowing for quick and dirty pixel work.

What Went Wrong

When I posted my design document, I mentioned I was working on a technical design.  Well, that didn’t happen.  I really needed to invest the time there, to work through how I was going to try and accomplish certain things.  I think this would have benefited me more than anything.  Instead I had to figure things out and trouble shoot as I went along.  I at least should have had a list of assets that I needed to create.

The prefab thing was awesome, I love Unity for this.  However, if you have nested prefabs you run in to trouble if a component inside one of the lower, nested ones changes.  This caused me some difficulty when I realized I needed to go back and tweak my UVs.  It should be so simple right, re-import the model and it will get changed everywhere.  Well, that didn’t happen due to the depth of my nested prefabs.  My experience with this might make for a good blog post though!

Even though the texture was small, I saved it until the end.  I chose to focus on the Unity and 3D aspect of it and getting that working first, then go back in and paint the texture map.  This of course left me scrambling at the end trying to get the textures right, and me not being truly happy with them.

In Conclusion

I had a lot of fun.  I made something I am proud of, and I can’t wait to do it again!

I’m in the process of working on a post jam version of the game.  That prefab issue is seriously kicking my butt though.  However, I still love Unity, and believe you can make great games rapidly using it.

I really appreciate everyone who has taken the time to play my game.  All of your feedback is welcome and is being considered.

If you haven’t had a chance to play Truth yet, play it and rate it, I would love to hear what you think!

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

Lately I’ve been trying to be more thoughtful about the way I work and how easy it is to get certain common things done in game development, as well as potential pitfalls and bottlenecks I may not be fully aware of.  And since commenters were surprised at how much I got done in 48 hours, I decided to do a different sort of postmortem for Vertico: I’m only going to look at how my time was spent.  I know it’s very self-centered (and also a bit OCD); this writeup is primarily introspective but I’m hoping others find it informative as well.

If you want to watch the goofily-narrated timelapse for yourself it is here.  Since I took the timelapse, I was able to go through frame by frame and (tediously) write up a record of how my time was spent over 48 hours.  Then I made several graphs to help visualize how time was spent.  Here is an overview of how much time I spent on each type of game development task:

Analysis:

That programming is the biggest slice of the pie is not surprising.  And from previous gamejams, I know that I cannot operate without sleep.  8 hours the first night and 4 hours the second night is my golden rule for 48-hour gamejams.

What’s clear to me from this overview graph is that I burned way too much time on music.  I need to work on improving the creation speed of my compositions.  I know of two reasons why it takes me so long:

1.) I need to improve the quality of my music.  When I make music and it sounds bad, I have to keep reworking, and reworking, and reworking until it sounds good.  I’m sure this is normal to an extent but if I could make better-sounding music on the first pass it would mean less passes overall and more time saved.

2.) I need a better computer.  I spend a lot of time pencilling in notes in the piano roll.  It would most likely be quicker to record notes from my MIDI keyboard.  However, I rarely do this, because on my computer the MIDI latency is so bad, it’s like trying to talk to someone on Skype while you’re hearing your own echo… except you never even hear your own voice in the first place.  It’s only echo and it’s so disorienting I can’t play in notes with any semblance of nuance or skill.

Most everything else was necessary except publicity.  I only took a few minutes here and there, but surprisingly it added up to over an hour.  You can argue it’s “only an hour,” but what could I have done with that hour?  37% more level design!  Or 35% more artwork!  Publicity is good to worry about as a game developer, but I think from now on, I’ll worry about it after the development period is over.  Hardly anyone watched my stream anyway.   😛

It also would have been nice if my tablet was working.  I may have saved a tiny bit of time on art over using the mouse.  However overall 3.15 hours certainly doesn’t sound that bad for art, especially since people have praised the artwork :]

I’m especially curious about bottlenecks in programming, so here is that slice of the pie, expanded:

Analysis:

Sadly this graph wasn’t really as useful as I thought it would be.  But I guess it’s not so bad because it confirms what I really felt strongly about after I finished the game: my programming has finally reached the point I had always hoped for.  When I look at the individual tasks there is almost nothing that took longer than it should have in my mind.

The one thing I do see, though, is that I spent almost an hour coding that stupid energy bar.  I detest coding HUDs for whatever reason, so I guess I let it get the best of me.  I should find a way to make HUD coding fun for me.

Looking through the timelapse, I realized that I almost went into a sort of adrenaline-induced trance on Sunday, and got certain things done perplexingly fast.  If you are motivated by hard deadlines, ride that wave of adrenaline!!  Drink some coffee and it might just be what you need to send you over the edge into “beast mode.”  You can pass out as soon as the game is done.

Finally, I somehow managed to make this color-coded timeline illustrating what type of tasks I was doing over time:

Analysis:

I’m glad I made this because it’s neat to see how I transitioned from one type of tasks to the next.  I have a couple thoughts about it.

The order of events worked out well for me.  It very well might be different for other people.  But this is what I did:
1.) Music.  Some might not think to start with this.  However I really liked this order because if you make the music first, it sets a sort of primal chromatic tone for the entire thing: art, gameplay, and sound.  I really think it’s good to start with how you want a game to feel and work backwards from there.  Just as most level designers will start with what they want a player to do and work backwards from there.

For some of the time I was making art, I honestly listened to the tracks I had made on loop.  I really think it helped, because I was able to constantly focus on making art to match that music.

2.)Sleep.  I had some issues with my music, and I went to bed thinking it sounded horrible, almost beyond salvaging.  After I’d slept, the pieces sort of fell into place and I tweaked a few things to make it sound good.  Granted, I wish I was able to do the music so fast that I’d be able to start programming before bed, but it didn’t work out that way.

3.) Programming. Of course it’s good to start this ASAP, but remember what I said about mood.  Even cold, logical programming has a mood.  You’re coding a videogame.  It may be ones and zeroes to you, but to the player, it’s magic.  So I still think doing the music first worked out well.

Notice the little slivers of purple though.  I took breaks from programming to draw final assets for the player, coral blocks, etc.  Why bother with placeholders during a solo gamejam?  It just adds another step to the process.

4) Sleep.  Time is of the essence but if you get four hours in it will improve your efficiency tremendously.

5.) Design.   In a gamejam, it’s really good if you can manage to rig up your game so you can design and playtest at the same time.  That’s what I did for Vertico — just hit F7 to go into design mode.  (note: you can even do this in the release version.  Though I think it was bugged by that time)  Taking little bits of time to program editor tweaks will save you loads of time in design, so don’t be afraid to hop back and forth between programming and design.  While they often get separated into two separate jobs in the game industry, programming and design are so closely related you can almost consider them as two sides of the same coin.

6.) Sound.  I left this to the last minute,  because you only know how many sounds you need once the game is finished.  And if you’re going to churn out a bunch of sounds in something like sfxr or LabChirp, I think it’s much quicker to go down a list of assets than it is to generate sounds as needed.

I would’ve liked to spend a little more time polishing the sounds, but I was running low on time so favored speed over quality to an extent.  I did wind up spending more time than I wanted on a “movement” sound effect for the player.  However not only was it buggy but it was also annoying, so I got rid of it in the end.

?.) Art.  I just drew art on-demand throughout the whole process as you can tell by the little purple slivers.  I’m curious as to whether this is faster or slower than doing them in a whole batch.  However, I’m inclined to think doing them in a whole batch would be slower — the reason being that, if you don’t create art as needed, you have to put something in as a placeholder anyway.  This adds an extra step to the process.  Art is a nice break from the other stuff anyway and I think it helped me keep my attention span.

One note about the “what went wrong” in this timeline.  There were certain distractions that could’ve been avoided.  They only took a small amount of time but I suspect they had an impact on my focus.  Such as hardware problems (having a computer that isn’t on its last leg would avoid this).  Or publicity (the stream kept having technical difficulties).  Or having to get a pizza because  me and my girlfriend accidentally bought a gross kind of fish (stick to frozen dinners for gamejams, I say).

Conclusion:

Making these graphs and this analysis gave me a lot of insight into the way I work and how I can improve.  I really need to get quicker with music; save publicity until after the gamejam; make sure I have dependable hardware; don’t drag my feet on HUD coding; make sure food is all set up before I start the gamejam.

Perhaps others can glean insight from these conclusions.  However I think the major takeaway is just that you can do this for yourself as well.  Make sure you take a timelapse of your work.  It’s incredibly tedious and you’ll feel silly spending hours analyzing something that only took you hours to make anyway.  However if you’re thorough enough you’re sure to find some good ways to improve your workflow as hopefully I have.

Just wanted to brag/inform about the fact that the game I created for the previous MiniLD, The Stanly Parable LD Demix, has been reviewed as IndieGames.com’s Browser Pick here. Boy, are my ears burning!

Hi everyone,

this was my 2nd participation to the Ludum Dare. My first attempt turned out pretty well (77th overall), and it was an amazing experience, so I just had to participate again.

My game is Light Eater, and here is how it looks :

Tools used :

• Language : CoffeeScript (compiles into JavaScript), target : HTML5/Canvas
• IDE : WebStorm
• Map editor : Tiled
• Art : PhotoFiltre 6

The good

• I’m quite happy with the result !
• I learnt a lot of things ! Collision handling, math, OOP tricks…
   
• The controls are better than my previous entry (but still not ideal)
• I learnt how to deal with angles and basic pathfinding, how to give each monster a different approach to kill the player…
• I made a fancy intro 😀
  
• I made efficient art : quick to draw, not too ugly 😀

The bad

• Bugs Monsters are dumb and get stuck in walls. The boss is either overly easy or impossible.

  

  I hate collision handling è_é

•  I find the game idea not as good as my previous game. Nothing fancy with game design.
• No audio. because of time constraints, I had to choose between including audio or making a final boss. I failed to create a proper boss (it’s either too hard or way too easy). I should have added some audio.
• Everything random is broken. I found last time that using Math.random() was making the game slow. This time I decided not to use it, and use weird time-based functions instead — and it’s just an epic fail :/
• I should have used a framework. 50% of my time was wasted by technical stuff.

For my next game, I will use a framework, I think Phaser.JS. This will allow me to focus on the game and less technical problems. I won’t have to worry about collision problems.

I enjoyed a lot playing your games.

If you want to rate my game, you can try it here

Hope you had fun too 😀
Thanks for reading and good luck for the results !

Procrastination got in the way, but it’s done!

Stuff that was changed:

• Saving/loading added. Due to being a short game, I didn’t work on this much, and merely added it in case someone may need it. May be buggy.
• Secret thing added.
• Some of the obvious things you couldn’t examine/assist now can be examined/assisted.
• If you already examined something, this no longer prevents you from examining it again.
• Game lasts a bit longer, but you can now gather faster as well

If you haven’t already, you can play the entry at
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36267

Or, play the finished version  at http://games.nj-tv.net/villager/postcompo

Speed of Light – Made in an incredible 3 hours, it’s one of the first that I played and it would be a shame if it didn’t make it into the results.  Give it a try, it doesn’t take long – easily the best 30-second long game I’ve played this compo.

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

I think you’d believe by now.

Let’s continue the countdown to the end of judging with Ludum Dare to Believe! Ep. 7!

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: Colony 31
Category: Jam Entry
Creator: Justin Luong, Kahlil Angeles, Phoenix, and Justin Walker
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=20961

Title: Inferious
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Dylanigan
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=24589

Title: Balancitos
Category: Compo Entry (48 hr)
Creator: Nick Zangus
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=25285

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.

accessibility jam

We’re hosting a free venue for #AccessibilityJam in Liverpool so drop by and show off what you’ve made.

The office isn’t open on weekends so I’ve booked a room for Friday 30th May.

If you can’t make a weekday we can still meet up over the weekend in some cafe in town.

Click the link for details:

http://www.mechabit.co.uk/blog/liverpool-jam/

A little late to the reflections party this time, even though it is my favorite kind of party. My game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=27032

Exclusive in-game footage!

A bunch of things went very well this time, and I made a both subjectively and objectively better game this time than last LD in August. People seem to generally like it, although commenters on this site are notoriously horrible at voicing critique. I’d wish more people actually told people what’s wrong with their games, but that’s for another post.

Right now, here’s one of them lists the kids dig.

Where I Rocked

• Was stubborn at trying to find a good idea. I instantly discarded all ideas that included going under a surface of water or ground, since those were the most obvious ideas, and I was going for something unique. So I used at least an hour thinking about different ways to use the theme in a way that combines mechanics and story, and ended up with an idea that I was confident would work.
• Time management! The only things I was not able to implement because of Not Enough Time were an end boss (which a lot of people wouldn’t have seen anyway) and another lover. The game did not suffer very much from lacking any of those two, and I managed to put in lots of other stuff: passable story, good sound, decent graphics, unique game-play.
• Had all tools set up, and I knew the main tool (Game Maker: Studio) very well. This is a big one, since I wasted almost no time with trying to make them work.
• Abundant-music.com! Seriously! USE THIS! I got a lot of compliments for having music in my game, and it only took me like one or two hours to get a fitting soundtrack. Just make sure to also look at how SynthFont works before the jam (it’s a bit complicated), because otherwise you’ll end up with boring midi files.
• Tried my hand at things I had never tried before, like designing color palettes and making sound effects, which was a lot of fun and a great experience. It also went well, and I ended up getting a lot of compliments for sound and graphics, which are things that I’ve formerly jumped over lightly or completely ignored.

Where I Sucked

• Although I had a good idea from the start, the story wasn’t fully worked out from the beginning, which just resulted in a very vague and not extremely tight story. The majority of my writing happened at 10 pm – 3 am (deadline) between Sunday and Monday, and it suffered accordingly.
• Difficulty: I don’t actually think that the game is too hard, but it was definitely too hard for a LD game, because people play the games in a very cursory way, and if the game is too hard, people don’t see much of the game.
• Communicating a crucial part of the mechanic (the fact that when your lover shoots enemies, they are stunned) was not good enough. This is something I always struggle with, because I often try to create new experimental mechanics.
• I did not solve the problem of telling the story in a satisfying way. This is obviously a huge design problem to be solved in games, and I think I did it better than in many games, but it was definitely too hard to read, because it was told during action.

All in all, I am very satisfied with the game, even though some things could have been better. I cannot wait to see the results.

See you all next Ludum Dare!

-ZC

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

3D Scanned mesh to game ready asset in a few minutes :

Scanning the Blackwald Forest

 
This is part two of our 3D Scanning Postmortem.

What you get out of the 3D scan is a very high density triangulated mesh, that is uv mapped using a very large atlas texture.

What we want is a low poly object, 3k polys max, with a nice uv map, as well as a clean high poly we can use for the bake.

And we want that fast

Cleaning up the scan :

This is what it looks like when imported into zBrush. As you notice, there are some parts flying around, and the scan has a hole in the top.

We’re going to fix that now.

First we applied the bitmap texture and deleted the useless parts by splitting the mesh into subtools.

Then we subdivided the mesh a couple of times, for converting the bitmap texture into a polypaint(vertex map) texture.

Retopology and fixing texture errors :

We ran a zRemesh over the scan. This converts the scan into a mesh with better ( all quad ) topology.

It won’t conform entirely to the scan, and will also lose the vertex colors. But we can project that back from the original scan.

Before we do that, now is the time to close the holes in the mesh.

Remeshed with zRemesher :

Converting the cleaned mesh into lowpoly :

We duplicated the cleaned mesh, and ran a decimation over it, and brought it down to roughly 1k polys.

After that, we did an automated unwrapping. This works very fine in zBrush. It won’t fill the uv space optimal, but it has little to no seams.

Substance is amazing when you need to batch through a couple of similar objects. It’s like a node based photoshop that also has every texture baking option available you could think of

We did the node graph once, and then used that as a preset for all objects. It also takes care of downsizing the textures.
What we baked :

• Bake vertex map from high poly onto the lowpoly as a diffuse texture.
• Bake a normal map from the high poly to the lowpoly
• Bake an ambient occlusion map

The rest is blending and color correcting the maps, with some further tweaking of the normal map

Baking and processing in Substance Designer :

Inside Unity we used the Marmoset Shaders on every object and lighted the scene with an very blurred hdr image.

In the end we used some post effects to finetune the look abit.

This is what it looked without post :

And like this after some grading, vignette, and blur :

What went right :

+ Confused village people staring at a bunch of nerd taking pictures of rocks and tree barks – priceless.

+ after we figured out what steps to make, the scanning was rather quickly

+ would have been impossible to get the same level of detail and texture work with traditional modeling/texturing in that short timeframe

What went wrong :

– as usual, could have used some more time to finetune the distribution of level objects

– if the pipeline would have been defined abit earlier, we could have used a lot of automatization.

– was not aware of that unity can actually use LUTs for color correction. We could have graded the scene in Photoshop instead of using Unity’s limited color correction post effect.

None of us had ever done 3D Scanning using Photogrammetry before. Although the result was not optimal in some parts, it’s interesting enough to pursue further, and the LD gave a good kickstart of how to do that and optimize the process even further In total, the entire experience was a blast.

Enjoy our game

I am working on a game and I need some help with character design. I can make other textures but not people. If you can help me and send me your stuff I will credit you in my game. I need 16-bit characters for a little boy, his parents and some pirates. If you could help me please comment and if you need to send me stuff send it here: oobie99@gmail.com

Thanks for your help

@gikdew | http://gikdew.com

My ludumdare 29 game started like 12 hours later, since in Spain the Jam started at 2:00AM and I couldn’t stay all night awake. I might have work on my game about 15 hours in total, including graphics, music and code, I spent more time trying to get a cool idea and mocking up things that finally didn’t work.

Game Idea

My game was going to be a rogue like game, with dungeons, monsters, lasers and cool pixel lighting since I had a little engine for those kind of games that I built some weeks ago. After trying to code the level generation I ended up by giving up that idea and trying something easier to code and with less maths.

I love taking screenshots while I’m developing something, so this post is full of it.

After wasting 3 hours thinking a new game, I came up with the worm idea, at first it was going to be a dirt worm, exploring the world and avoiding enemies to survive but then I ended up making a water worm because I wanted the background to be blue (fits better with the overall design) and not dirt brown.

Making the game more Juicy

Since I watched this video on youtube, I’m obsessed of making “juicy” games, I mean, adding tweens, color changes and flashes to it because I think it makes the user experience better. In Wriggle Worm as you can see the HUD fades in and out when you change the game state (from menu to the main game) and also the background color changes once in a while making the game design more clean.

Lots of Maths

One of the mains problems I had while I was developing this ludumdare entry was that I was not fluid with the maths that I needed to develope my game, eventhough I’m studying a Engineering degree in Electronics and we use advance maths everyday. I didn’t have enough time to get a paper and start calculating things so I made the game more simple than I wanted to be.

Dev Screenshots

As I said earlier, I love making screenshot and tweeting about it, below there are some of those screenshots, you can see the progress in the game development.

Rate my game! | LD entry – Wriggle Worm | @gikdew

Helevenium was featured in @ButtonMasherBro Ludum Dare To Believe show! Awesome! Check it out!

You can play the game HERE.

Also, be sure to check out their channel! They are funny and they are doing a great job playing Ludum Dare games! GO! SUSCRIBE!

Tags: Let's Play, youtube

These are the time lapses for our submited game (Hair spirit adventure – PLAY IT!)

What the designers did – time lapse!

1. We created all character and level design, but only half of characters were added to game!
We hope to add every character we wanted and create additional levels for them.
This video shows our work with all of designing aspects from drawing to animation creation.
We will definetly continue our work to finish this game…!

And now our coders timelapse

We hope you will enjoy playing our game, thank you all for rating and commenting our submission,
and everyone who made a game for us to play.

Its that time of the week again when i get time to update the post compo version of Frack you, the game about the dangers of hidraulic fracturing.

Updates:

• Pipes can only be placed if they connect to other pipes.
• Added CC0 sounds from opengameart.com, a full list of credits will be available on the site shortly.

Due to popular demand and a lot of people complaining that it is too easy i had restricted pipe placement to just connected pipes. I’m still not sure about this mechanic, so i would love to hear comments about it.

Please play and tell me if you’re pro or against the new pipes mechanic.

Also please tell me if you want gas to be a limited resource that depletes as its being extracted.

Post compo version: Has balanced gameplay, police bribing, etc.

http://games.duckygo.com/frackyou

Original version:
http://games.duckygo.com/frackyou/original

Rate and comment here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34443

Fracking is bad for you. M’kay