I’m testing different textures for the underwater rocks in Balancitos… What do you guys think?

That’s how one slays worms

(sorry about grammar and over-complicated English)

You can play the game here

It was my first LD and, in fact, my first game. Actually I’ve been playing with Unity quite a long time, and wanted to make some simple game, but somehow I always tend to end up with some abstract and complex idea which is not-so-easy to implement, and do nothing.

So my main goal was to actually finish my entry. And that’s the main thing that went right I made it! The main thing that went wrong though is that I wasted too much time.

Idea and general

Underground worms was literally the first thought that came to my mind (and just to mention: I never played death/megaworm).  So I started to make a worm immediately. And all that “worm” part of idea went OK I think.

But when it came to the “player” part I just got stuck. I had some ideas including bombs, some distracting items, using of environment(e.g. some safe stone islands) but didn’t manage to have a clear enough picture of how it should work.

So just to start I made throwing rocks mechanic. I actually made aiming with mouse first =/ and then changed it to  keyboard aiming. The main reason was that I wanted character to throw only ahead, so you have to face a worm  before throwing, but for some reason it felt awkward to me with mouse. Anyway aiming doesn’t make much sense since you don’t have enough time to aim and in general shouldn’t even try.

Really sad thing is that such simple idea as to make more weapons came to me too late. I decided to make some melee and shotgun but only managed to add some halberd-like weapon which actually made it more easy and fun. But it seems that a lot of people just didn’t see it so if you’re one of them please just skip to the 4th level and try it! (you can skip level after dying!)

(some response to comments)
Many told me that “it should give some indication where the worm is going to break the surface”, but it doesn’t make much sense given the way the worm moves. The worm tries to reach you so it’ll break the surface exactly where you stand UNLESS you’re moving, then it would surface at some distance from you and more horizontally. And of course you cannot see the worm beneath the surface, because YOU CANNOT SEE WHAT’S BENEATH THE SURFACE, that’s the very idea.

Audio

Since I received a lot of positive feedback about music here is the link to it, just in case.

“Soundtrack” was made relatively fast, I was playing with synths recently and had most of  them already set-up, and music itself… well, it’s so simple and straightforward if you ask me. It sounds EPIC though In the middle of the work I thought that it would be great to make a feel of total wormapocalypse, to match the music fully, e.g. add some burning and falling buildings and some people to save but I would definitely need at least an artist to do this.

Alas, I didn’t have any time to make proper sounds.

Graphics

There is not much graphics, but graphics took much time. Character took I beileve 2-3 hours overall. I made him twice actually, and have been tweaking come colors and animations every now and then. Worm took over an hour. At least I’m happy with graphics.

Time management

Time management in general is what I’m bad at.
Fist day was productive I think. I made most of the graphics and most worm-related things. But somehow I totally wasted second day. I got stuck with gameplay. After making some gameplay I’ve been spending too much time playing game instead of making it So I ended up with the game being far away from finished at the end of day 2 and decided to use 3rd day. Nonetheless there was a lot to do, and all “levels”, sounds and other finalizations were made in last few hours of Jam. I managed to made it just in time of deadline, and it was 5 a.m. for me… such crazy!

Main things learnt

KEEP WORKING! If you’re stuck, switch to other things you’ll have to make, or just try to implement it as simple as you can, but keep working.

Anyway I’m glad that I made it! And I had fun playing your games, can’t wait for another LD!

Tags: ld29, postmortem

It’s the last weekend guys! Why don’t you give my game a try ?

[ Beneath a red sky ]

Tags: gameplay, gif

PLAY THE COMPO ENTRY

Hi man there it is a preview of our brand new menù system in action.

That’s more, on the menù we also added some usefull option(sound,light).

Many one said that the game was too dark , don’t worry, if you become blind playing the game, now you can simply change the light

Here it is a ScreenShoot about our menù system ps everythings are animated like water text and other, hope you’ll like it

So let’s say a certain game creation tool I used to create my Ludum Dare 29 Game is currently having a sale which includes export modules and a certain export module is perfect so that people on Mac/Linux operating systems can play my game (hint: it starts with H and ends with TML5). Also let’s say that I already bought this and have a port ready to upload. Also let’s say that in order to get this port working I had to change one line of code so that I wouldn’t have my character whizzing about the screen…

Will this be acceptable as a “port” for a 48 hour Compo entry or is doing a port (with a minor bugfix) at this stage frowned upon?

Thanks Everyone, and thanks for those who’ve already played my game 😀

Woah! Look at all those games!

Hey folks! So, this time I’ve only rated 82 games. Shame on my, I know – I’m busy with my Master’s Thesis, but apart from that, I really have no excuses. I didn’t think I’d actually get around to do a Best Of list this time, but since those games are just so incredibly great I’ve done one anyway now!

So here’s a list of the best and/or most interesting games I’ve played – and so should you, in my opinion! But hey, I know it’s only three days left, so just pick the cherries. (Hint: They are all cherries.)

Excellence in EVERYTHING

Dig Hard by petey123567
Have you ever wanted to save the PRESIDENT from EARTH’S EVIL CORE and the UNDERGROUND DINOSAURS wielding BADASS WEAPONS? Sure you have! And even if not, this game will teach you why you SHOULD want that. It’s just so much fun even if when you inevitably die in mere seconds – and it feels more juicy than any fruit you’ll ever come across!

Planet Corp. by Maschinen-Mensch
Planet Corp is pretty short compared to the other games in this category, but what it does, it does really well. You are drilling different planets in our solar system for resources in a totally safe way (that involves throwing freakin’ drilling bombs down on them). But hey, the TV says it’s fine! Which it will in fact do ingame. The cutscenes are hilarious.

The Valley Rule by Raiyumi
I sincerely believe that the two creators of this game didn’t get ANY sleep, because there is no way they could’ve finished The Valley Rule otherwise. This game isn’t just the very definition of polish, it’s also incredibly big and a lot of fun! What this game lacks in innovation, it makes up in sheer production values. (And I still want the OST for it. Please.)

Behind Mirror by SaintHeiser
So, your friend just got his reflection stolen, and you want to catch the thief who is underwater. You can’t though, because your reflection is blocking you! So now your goal is to become a vampire, because well, vampires don’t have reflections, right? Combine this premise with lovely vector-art-pixel-graphics (is that a thing now?), cool music and the hardest jumps in this LD edition and you get Behind Mirror.

Rosa Neurosa by Wertle
In the words of the game’s creators, Rosa Neurosa is a “digging/mad libs/improv game.” I can’t find words for how awesome it is that they actually managed to pull of a digital single player improv game that is fun and works well, haha. Awesome graphics, great music and the option to actually share the story that you write seals the deal for me. (Try it! Post your endings here, please!)

Excellence in humor

NOPE by shadow64
I- I really, don’t know what to say about this game without spoiling anything. It’s Monty Python-esque. It’s short. It’s extremely funny. I promise you’ll like it!

Inside Look Activity Book by rylgh
The same thing applies to the Inside Look Activity Book, actually! The humor might be a biiiit more twisted and dark, but hey, it’s a book for children, right? What could possibly go wrong?

Excellence in storytelling/atmosphere

The Stanley Enigma by nddrylliog
Ah, the Stanley Enigma. You had a pretty bad dream about your friend Stanley dying, but dreams don’t come true, right? And I mean, who’d hurt Stanley anyway? Hum. Who indeed. You better check. Maybe you’ll find out in the ever branching storylines of The Stanley Enigma, a brilliant dialogue game with (as one commenter rightly remarks) Kentucky Road Zero vibes and over 1000 lines of text.

The Westport Independent by Double Zero One Zero
This game has a “Papers, Please?” vibe to me, and that’s definitely a good thing. Less good is that you’re running a newspaper which is due to be closed by an censoring antagonistic government. You’ve still got a few weeks left though – so what exactly will you print?

In Hiding by Sheepolution
Sssh. Everything will be alright. If you don’t get found, that is. Slightly scary, pretty atmospheric and the coolest effect for ingame soundeffects that I’ve ever seen.

Seven Souls by BrothersT
This is one of those games that I really want to be finished. Seven Souls is a storytelling game where you play a very nice creature which only wants to play with those other characters. Preferably in the water. No ulterior motives, I promise! A clean art style and great writing make this top list material, even if unfinished. (Also I love the accent of the creature.)

Excellence in audio

Orlok’s Ordeal by Davelope
The gameplay is fun on its own, but DAMN! This opening! Awesome voice acting combined with expressive story book pictures and dramatic music, this is just perfect. (Oh, and I love those paintings ingame. And the ending, haha.)

Ripple Runner by DDRKirby(ISQ)
A one (sorry, two. Eh, I mean three?) button runner with an innovative mechanic, game boy aesthetics and the BEST SOUNDTRACK. And the game is synchronized to it! This is just an absolutely joy to play. (And in fact, I’m listening to the soundtrack while I’m writing this list.)

Space to go by geekdrums
“Space to go” is probably the only LD game that has the complete tutorial/instructions in its title. It is storytelling synchronized to music and I can’t even describe why, but – synchronizing the words to sounds gives this whole thing an unexpectedly awesome and quite humorous feeling. It’s pretty short too, so there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t give it a try!

Excellence in being really, really different

Underworld Evolution by StudioWolfox
Underworld Evolution calls itself an “epic RTSE (Real Time Strategic Evolution) game” and it really delivers on this promise. You’re taking control of a bunch of pretty incompetent minions which you’ll slowly but surely improve – generation by generation! (Hum, maybe you shouldn’t actually play it, it’s super addictive! Don’t tell anybody, but I’ve spent over an hour on it and only stopped because I wanted to rate more games…)

Mini Metro Subway Tycoon by ripatti
A subway simulator in retro Sim City style – pretty cool. It’s a bit hard at first (I recommend watching the How To Play video), but soon you’ll be building subways like it’s nobody’s business!

You Don’t Want That by Dark Arts and Sciences
A creepypasta Ludum Dare game about making a Ludum Dare game? Sold! This is the most obscure LD game I’ve ever come across and it’s also pretty hard, but I definitely felt entertained. And I just love the idea. Don’t skip this game. It might get angry. And, uh, you don’t want that.

Generic Adventure Game by Jezzamon
As the title of the game suggests, this one is just a generic adventure game. Yup. Definitely nothing interesting here under the generic surface. (It might be pretty funny though. And have a cool concept.)

Please Come Back by PapyGaragos
This game has the greatest play-controls-avatar relationship I’ve ever encountered with a mouse. If yours has a scrollwheel, try it – you won’t be disappointed. You might get exhausted though, and the distress is pretty real too after a while. The only thing that I don’t like about this game is that it’s based on a pretty similar game, but I still think you shouldn’t skip this experience – and it’s pretty cool that it still works with such a simple art style.

 
 
Did you like my recommendations? If so, maybe you could rate and comment on my game too. I’d be really happy about that! (Although I can understand if you’re exhausted after all those other games I just suggested, haha.)
 
SnakeFormer by TobiasW
A puzzle game combining Snake with pseudo-physics platformer mechanics. It only has four levels, but it’s not actually short – level 3 and 4 are probably the hardest puzzle levels in this LD. I’m terribly, terribly sorry. (If you beat them, please tell me!)

Tags: animated gif, best of

Hehe, a bit late I know. Better late than never! Also, I fixed the “can’t advance because the staircase was placed beyond my reach” bug. Whoops.

If you want to save kitties, play my game! Just, uh, don’t click on them.

NOW WITH iPad and maybe even other tablets as well SUPPORT!

<3 Stevie

Play and Rate Now

Built and Rendered by your’s truly

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL DOWNLOAD

Enjoy!
-Seth

(Disclaimer: I didn’t do this video, it is done by Ganil Ganilder)

Well, it was a nice first Ludum dare, and my first published game in quite a long time; I’m the type of person who begins many projects, but “takes a lot of time to finish them”… So the two-day deadline was very positive for me. I had first thought of using pixel graphics, but the theme (and the fact that I’m not that good at pixel graphics) made me think of a more vectorial and music oriented game.

Play the game *here*

What went well
> The music. For some reason, the theme inspired me greatly. It also helped my think of the three different theme songs. The first one, above the surface, calm and nice, as if there was nothing wrong. Then, as you enter the surface, BANG! an unwelcoming music begins (Beneath the surface, life’s not so nice). And finally, the third song begins and loops forever, a music that is exciting and nice, making you want to stay, because, even if it’s not safe, not calm, “beneath the surface, it’s not that bad”. This made me able to subtly add the theme thanks to the music. And finally, a great idea I had was “Oh it would be nice to have my music and game beat together”. Guess why I used all my music in 120 bpm, and my game at a fps of 32 (instead of the usual 30)?

> The Code. The code was great. Even though it had some bad things (more on that later), it’s probably the one I am most proud of. It’s the first time I use constants like M_MOUSE_PROPULSION for my switch statements, and it helped a lot, as I used to just use numbers for identifying different states. Also, using these constants and switch statements, I managed to fake the Component-Entity paradigm into something implementable in a couple of hours, while keeping the diversity. This allowed my enemies to have different behaviours, so that some of them are following you, and some of them are just circling around. I think this was vital, as if all of them followed you, it wouldn’t be as fun. Actually, there are only three classes; the Main, the GameEngine and the Entity. Beneath the surface, you’re just another “entity”.

> It turned out to be more or less fun. It is also very simple, yet difficult, but the music is rewarding. I think that helped it become nice as a game rather than just a program.

What went wrong
> The music. There’s this weird silence after the mp3s. I tried to cut it, but I didn’t manage to fully smoothen the loops. Also, the second and third don’t concatenate well. There’s this tension the second makes, and the third isn’t able to release it successfully.

> The graphics. They graphics weren’t horrible, but there is a problem with the colours. As you go deeper, the shade of the water changes from bright blue, to black. In between, however, there are a couple of shades that make it very hard to distinguish the red enemies, for some reason.

> Perlin Noise. I wanted to use perlin noise, to make the idling enemies move randomly, and not just in circles. But there isn’t perlin noise on AS3 (I don’t mean the bitmap perlin noise, I wanted the actual function that gives a pseudo-random value if given a three coordinate input). I think I’ll try to make a perlin noise thing for AS3, for my next ludum dares.

> The Code. I was very proud of my code, but it did have some things I could do better. The main problem is that I overused the copy/paste way too much; things that should have been made functions, were copy/pasted in site, and many different modes (after you exit, as you enter) are severe copy-pastes of the main theme, with very slight changes (I should have switch-ed in those changes rather than the whole code). This was due to poor forethought, to be honest.

> Wrong decisions? I tried to make the game as simple as possible, so that you actually didn’t need a tutorial to learn the game.  For that reason, I didn’t add any instruction, except “Mouse, that’s all you need : )”. Now, I also decided only to show the score on the surface, for three main reasons: add to the sensation of being lost in sea, avoid distractions in a game where concentration is vital, and prevent the “Oh no I could have gotten 120394 points, but I lost them, I’m very sad!”. These decisions had mixed and strange result…

“some kind of instructions or objectives would be fine” – agus97 (Newgrounds)

“I think it is fine without instructions but it would be nice if the score would move with the view.” – Mandarien (Newgrounds)

“Lots of fun with wonderful music. At first I found it strange that I couldn’t see my own score once I went deeper. But I like it – adds to the feeling of being lost in a vast ocean.” – reheated (LudumDare)

Tags: as3, ld29, postmortem

Hey folks! May be a bit late, but we released post-compo version of our game – “Descent”.

Update changes:

1. Fixed some bugs, like passing through walls.
2. Update balance. Now you have more health and enemy have less attack damage.
3. Now lightning strikes spiders too.
4. Fixed attack button. Now it’s “z” or “Space”.

That was our first jam and first experience in creating games like it. I think, we will use this experience in our future games.

We would be very grateful, if you play our game and rate it.

Play and rate Descent

Helevenium is an action melee one hit kill game about you with a sword killing things somewhere.

Sharpen your reflexes.

Don’t waste your time.

Make your attacks worthwhile.

Test yourself HERE!

The post-compo version of Under Ytan is done!

What’s new?
All levels but one have been remade with more care than I had time for during the compo. The short time makes me very bad at leveldesign, the pacing was kindof of in the original version. The levels now also teach the player some stuff that I forgot earlier^^
I have also tweaked a lot of stuff with the menus and stuff. Things lerp in and looks nicer.
Added a really cool splashscreen!
Music! I added a song a friend of mine did, I think it’s better, but that’s kindof subjective I guess.

Hope you like it! I can now complete the whole game with all triangles in 01:56.. I’ve been playing too much.. ^^

PLAY IT, COME ON. IT’S A COOL GAME!
ps. if you haven’t rated my original game, why not do it now while you’re at it?

I’ve avoided showing content for Divernaut made outside the development window for fear of not letting go of the project. I know lots of entries have a post-compo version posted right on the page, and that’s awesome! I love those! I personally try not to do that because I’ll get in an infinite “just one more thing” loop and will never ever finish.

That being said, I did really really want to share the music I had originally planned for the game, but didn’t get a chance to finish enough to actually implement in the compo version. To showcase the music, and also have a little fun playing Divernaut myself, I put together a game trailer. Enjoy!

I had such a great time with Divernaut that I’m going to be remaking it from the ground up with new graphics, new content, and new coolness. I’ll be posting occasional progress updates on Twitter, Facebook, and Dustout Games’ Website so if you want to follow progress, those are the places to do so.

ICE HOP (LD29 VIDEO GAME – FREE DOWNLOAD)
www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35354 credits:  Music by QUETZATL
CG by QUAZAAR

The SNOOTHAs is a self-described prestigious ceremony set up to award Ludum Dare entrants for their efforts. It may or may not be real. The “S” stand for Snoother (me, of course) and the “A” stands for award. I can’t for the life of me be bothered to fill in the rest.

The awards ceremony was held in a musty, windowless room by the “Robed Ones” — a bunch of self-appointed game critics donning brown, hooded robes. They quipped back and forth about “innovation”, “agency”, “underlying messages”, “immersiveness” — all that stuff. After weeks of sleepless deliberation, they finally reached a judgement. For each category they have assigned an overall winner and a selection of honourable mentions, listed alphabetically. Here are the results:

EXCELLENCE IN INNOVATION

Winner: And the Moment is Gone

An introverted and experimental conversation game. It brilliantly depicts the pains and frustrations of so many conversations by using an innovative game mechanic. The Robed Ones — for whom the voice of love often calls, only to find it’s a wrong number — felt they could particularly relate to the game.

Honourable Mentions: A Day in the Life; I Remember Alice; The Loudest Ballerina; The Pond; Space to Go; Substratum; Tenkosei Robo

EXCELLENCE IN FUN

Winner: Gravity

A ridiculously addictive game in which you descend below the surface to collect all the artefacts, reveal the ending and, of course, beat the high score. The Robed Ones stayed up way past their bed time playing this one.

Honourable Mentions: Beneath the Ice; Black Bile, Inhuman Circuits; Coin Diver; Doomsday Bunker; Mimic of the Deep; The Pond; Senilescape; Substratum; Tenkosei Robo

EXCELLENCE IN USE OF THEME

Winner: Not All of Them Died

A chilling and beautifully-minimal use of theme. It is “a game celebrating industrialised warfare” in which you walk through a vast cemetery of deceased military personnel, all individually named, including rank and date of death.

Honourable Mentions: A Day in the Life; Abstraction; And the Moment is Gone; Black Bile, Inhuman Circuits; Castle Engineer; Heart of the Cards; The Loudest Ballerina; RMBR; Series of Choices

EXCELLENCE IN GRAPHICS

Winner: Wunderheilung

Wunderheiling has some gorgeous art with a gently-surreal touch. The gameplay consists of examining peculiar creatures for medical problems, virtually forcing you to stare at each fabulous pixel cluster. While playing, the Robed Ones were gazing endlessly into their computer screens and drooling slowly — oh wait, they do that anyway.

Honourable Mentions: Gravity; Last Dive; The Pond; Seven Souls; Tenkosei Robo; Watch Your Step

EXCELLENCE IN AUDIO

Winner: Space to Go

A one-button music game — doesn’t sound like it should work, right? But oh my it does. With each spacebar press you control the pace of the music, moving forwards through this abstract plane and unexpectedly discovering a narrative. Just sublime.

Honourable Mentions: Any Ship Can Be a Minesweeper… Once; Coin Diver; Fragment; Gravity; In the Black; Last Dive; Magma; Mimic of the Deep; Tenkosei Robo

EXCELLENCE IN HUMOUR

Winner: Black Bile, Inhuman Circuits

The humour is so incisive and devious, thanks largely to how well-written it is. Loads of subversions of tropes and referential humour, but, as I said, it’s done so well. You experience that which is “beneath the surface of the body, in the realm of bodily humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.” (The Robed Ones nod along, frothing.)

Honourable Mentions: Any Ship Can Be a Minesweeper… Once; Orlok’s Ordeal; The Sadness of Rocky Barbato; The Surface; Wunderheilung

EXCELLENCE IN MOOD

Winner: The Pond

This isn’t an outright mood piece: you have to sustain life in the pond for as long as possible by feeding the fish and moving the water. But it’s minimalism and life-and-death theme makes it remarkably evocative. Playing it feels serene, sombre, wistful. As the second-counter moves steadily onwards and your pond life begins to die away, you feel dejected — if only life weren’t so ephemeral.

Honourable Mentions: A Happy Place; Black Bile, Inhuman Circuits; Gravity; I Remember Alice; Last Dive; Mimic of the Deep; Not All of Them Died; Sopora

BEST GAME OF LUDUM DARE 29

Winner: The Loudest Ballerina

So cute and well-executed: a game about ballet and a giant monster. Intrigued? You should be. For goodness sake, go play it! Even the Robed Ones love it — and getting them to abandon their hypermasculine gamer culture and do ballet is indeed an achievement.

Honourable Mentions: And the Moment is Gone; Black Bile, Inhuman Circuits; Gravity; Last Dive; The Pond; Tenkosei Robo; Wireside

MY GAME

And what post would be complete without some aggressive self-promotion? This is, oh kind, generous reader, my game. A game that — wait for it — looks beneath the surface of an FPS.

Okay, in all seriousness I’d be really grateful for anyone to check it out. I put quite a bit of effort into it and there’s an important underlying message. It’s a text-based second-person shooter that explores the worst aspects of violent video games and the culture surrounding them.

–Snoother

Tags: best of

CLICK HERE TO VISIT MY BLOG

Hello there! Now that I’ve played and rated 100 games, it is time. I might be a bit late in getting people to rate these games, but that’s not why I’m writing this post. These aren’t the “best” games I’ve played; at least, not by the traditional category metric. My main purpose here is to point out and analyze games that use interesting methods to tell stories and evoke emotional responses from the players.

I highly recommend you play the games before reading my analyses, as they will spoil the games for you.

Here are the games (the ordering is meaningless):

Sopora

I Contemplated the Sun of Limbo

The Dead Rest Beneath Us

Le Ver

Sunk

Persona

I Remember Alice

Drowning in Problems

Beneath the Surface

A Happy Place

Most of you are probably aware of the ongoing ‘video-games as an art form’ debate. If not, I recommend you go read up on it, particularly Roger Ebert’s arguments. The whole debate revolves around how gaming as a medium compares to traditional media of expression. In my opinion, the question is usually tackled from the wrong angle. We shouldn’t ask- how can we create a game that retells ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and does a good job of it? Instead we should be asking- how can we harness the power of video-games to create unique experiences unparalleled in other media? This power I’m talking about is, of course, interactivity. The medium’s undoing, according to Ebert, but I think otherwise. Jon Blow gave an interesting talk about how we can harness gameplay as a powerful story-telling device. He talks about meaningful gameplay, which is deeply tied to the story. In fact, the gameplay should create the story. The key word here is immersion- movies, books, and music all have their own ways of immersing the person experiencing them, but video games can do so much more! In video games, you can evoke a sense of agency, which in turn will make the player feel responsible for his actions. In video games, you can make the player feel that he is his avatar in a much deeper sense than in other media, or indeed in most modern video games.

In the game ‘Sopora‘, you awaken to find yourself in a coffin. You can escape, panic and suffocate, kill yourself, etc. When you do any of these, you feel like you’ve actually done something meaningful. Moreover, you don’t feel bad for the avatar, as is the case in so many games, because you feel that you are your avatar. You experience the game through his eyes. The game uses powerful audio to create tension, but it only serves to amplify the experience created by the gameplay.

‘Sunk‘ is another excellent example of this. You play as a man in the open sea, struggling to stay afloat. One button only, and yet you feel responsible when you drown. And just like in ‘Sopora’, when you screw up, you panic. You suffocate. And again, the sound effects and graphics are amplifiers, no more.

I loved both ‘I Remember Alice‘ and ‘Le Ver‘ very much, but the reason I’m mentioning them here is that they deviate from the pattern I’m presenting with the other games. Both games feature monotonous gameplay, and both make extensive use of text to deliver the story and the experience. The games lack in agency, but that is what makes the gameplay powerful. They stand out because their gameplay is tied strongly to the story. What I find interesting about them is that the gameplay, at least in my opinion, is an amplifier for the story, not the other way around. The experience is a sum of the various components- text, audio, visual feedback, gameplay. They create a cohesive whole that is very enjoyable and evocative. I’d like to see more games like these, because they explore in a not-so-obvious direction, and that is invaluable to the developing medium of video games.

One of Ebert’s main arguments is that games lack authorial control- if you give the player true agency, how can you walk him through a story-line? I find it very interesting to approach this question in the context of theology, but I digress. Ebert is right. We can’t guide the player through a linear story without limiting his freedom, and if we don’t, it generally ends with disastrous results. Let’s look at music- most songs don’t tell any story, and what about melodies with no lyrics? In my opinion, games can’t possibly tell stories like ‘Romeo and Juliet’ without devolving into lame movie-likes. Games like ‘Sunk’ and ‘Sopora’ are complete, and they are perfect examples of gameplay done right.

Responsibility: In ‘Beneath the Surface‘, you play as a buff American soldier who commits atrocities in the name of democracy. And you control him. This control you have over him forces you to click the ‘kill’ button in order to progress. There is no agency. You don’t feel responsible for your avatar’s actions, and by the end of the game, you despise him. The game is interesting because it attempts to elicit strong moral responses from the players, and it succeeds, to some extent. Most people quit the game because they can’t bear press the ‘kill’ button any more. That’s powerful. And yet, I think the game could benefit from a well thought-out choice mechanism. If players had a real choice, and chose to kill (which would happen a lot, I bet. Especially with the back-story provided in the game), they would really feel responsible for their actions. I can’t help but think of the LD25 game, ‘Cure 48‘. Play it before you read the post-mortem.

Speaking of morality, here’s another game where you are made to feel bad: ‘The Dead Rest Beneath Us‘. Well, OK, it’s not meant to make you feel bad. In this game, you are presented with different scenarios where you must rescue a person in immediate danger. As opposed to ‘Sunk’, here you don’t play the people in danger, which is a substantial difference. The idea behind this game is that you can’t actually save any of them, which is why people end up feeling bad after playing it. I must say, it was very frustrating for me as well. So here we have another case where there is a lack of agency, but does it create a disconnect? Well, I didn’t feel like I was responsible for the deaths of those people, but the game doesn’t mean to make me feel responsible. Instead, is sets out to raise awareness to the transience of life. A lofty mission indeed. This is another example of an idea which can’t possibly be executed in other media.

As we look at another game, ‘Persona‘, it seems that the ultimate lack of agency is a recurrent theme. In this game, you control your avatar through dialogue choices in various social interactions. You are presented with a choice between 3 masks, each one representing a certain behaviour. However, if you use the wrong mask, it breaks and can no longer be used; instead you have the option of speaking your mind without any filters. The premise is interesting, and it definitely makes for an interesting gameplay mechanic, but the ending presumes that you have failed to use your masks at least once, when in fact, it is possible to complete the game without failing. This reminded me of the scene in ‘Groundhog Day‘ where Phil tries to get Rita in bed, so he memorizes her quirks and gets closer to his goal each day. However, he never succeeds. ‘Persona’ could be exactly this in game form, if it would be unbeatable. Notice what I’m doing here- I’m talking in favour of reducing the player’s freedom and guiding him to an inevitable outcome. However, I’m not limiting his immediate choices, only his ultimate agency. This can lead to a very strong experience, albeit a frustrating one, where the player acts as one with his avatar, and feels like he has true agency, when in fact the outcome will always be the same.

Another game where this is the case is ‘Drowning in Problems‘. In this game, you play through a person’s life to the inevitable, bitter end. But it’s beautiful. I found myself in the part right before you can click to die, working and buying stuff indefinitely. The game is linear, and yet I feel like I have a choice. More importantly, the gameplay maps perfectly to what Notch wants us to feel from the titles of the actions. When I was clicking away, buying more and more stuff, avoiding the death button, I didn’t feel like I was clicking in a game with the theme of life. This theme isn’t artificially strapped on the gameplay- it is created by the gameplay.

‘A Happy Place‘ is another game where you play through your avatar’s demise. You play as a block, surviving in a wartime bunker. You walk around, cry some, eat, drink and sleep when you need to, while being constantly barraged with text. This text is the avatar’s thoughts, and it contributes a lot to the experience, but it doesn’t create it. As I said in the comments, I wasn’t sad when I died, because I knew it was inevitable, but the whole experience felt very real. Was it the audio? The visuals? The text? Maybe it was the gameplay? This one remains a mystery to me.

Last but not least, a game that scared the crap out of me- ‘I Contemplated the Sun of Limbo‘. As I said in the comments, my conclusion from this game is that I am fucking scary. What do I mean by that? Well, in this game, you control an avatar from a first person perspective, and you walk around on an island. You dive and resurface on the other side of the island, you sit on a stool, and then you go back to the other side. There you see a person sitting on a stool just like the one you sat on, and you suspect that he is actually some sort of vision of you. You interact with him and he explodes. Again, on the opposite side, you find the stool vacant. You sit on it, contemplating the sun of limbo, and then, while still on the stool, you turn around. You see the same figure standing behind you, exactly where you stood on the other side of the island when you disturbed him, and he pulls a slenderman. It’s scary, and it made me think of how other people might be experiencing my presence. The game shines in its surrealism, which is a sum of the visuals, the audio, and indeed the gameplay. I’m analyzing this game because it is completely different from the other games. When comparing these games to other media, most of them map roughly to movies or books in what they attempt to do. This one is a song. It’s a spiritual experience. Now, a lot of people would classify all of these games as ‘interactive experiences’ and not games. While I disagree with this, I find it interesting how a very diverse array of games can all be classified under one category.

And now for something completely different- my game! You didn’t actually think a post like this wouldn’t be followed by some shameless self-promotion, did you? Well, actually, my game has a lot in common with these games, so I don’t feel bad doing this

It’s called ‘A Day in the Life‘. I urge you to go play it before reading on.

In this game, you control the individual actions in your avatar’s life. You set a certain period in your life where you learn programming, and in the following frames, the option of making a game is available. There are three objectives- ‘Get a job’, ‘Be happy’ and ‘Start a family’. To fulfill the job objective, you need to work (which requires that you learn programming), ‘Be happy’ requires that you learn the piano and make a game, and to start a family, you need to work and date. People figure all of this stuff out in the first couple of minutes of the game, and then they realize that the overall objective is to get all three objectives at the same time. They manage to get a job and be happy, and they manage to get a job and start a family, but they can’t get all three. Most people realize this, and this is what I set out to do. I wanted people to realize that they can’t get everything in life, and that they have to make choices. It doesn’t matter if you quit the game with some objectives activated rather than others, there’s no text or cutscenes to acknowledge your choices. The game ends in effect when the player realizes what the message is. A strong theme that I have noticed in people’s playthroughs is that they get frustrated when they try to figure out the game. They attempt to solve it as if it were a puzzle, but it doesn’t unfold. Now, this game doesn’t tell a story, not does it evoke spiritual emotions. If I had to classify it, I’d use the word that flrn used to describe his game, ‘The Dead Rest Beneath Us’ – vanitas. Both our games aren’t exactly games in that they are more static in nature, and would compare best to paintings.

I want to create a discussion surrounding the ideas that I have presented here, so I’d love to read what you people have to say about this!

If I have offended anyone, please accept my apologies. I only mean to provide honest feedback and encourage discussion.

Enjoy rowing about in vr now :), you can find the download links on our ld game page (in the top of the description are the download links to the Oculus version, running out of space to link to stuff :D)

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=23493

It took some effort due to reflections and skyboxes not working properly on the rift and you need to do something special if you use NGUI to make it work with the rift, but that’s sorted out now.

Intro Tips

This being my third Ludum Dare I had a decent idea of what I was getting myself into. These game jams are really a great way of practicing on actually making something from start to finish. I think that is what many of us really need to get better at, I know I for one have put tons of time into other bigger projects which never see the light of day, maybe because they are simply too big of projects. Here are some quick tips which I’ve learned from previous mistakes and could be good for newcomers entering into a ludum dare, for starting any new game project I guess.

• Start with making something really simple and make sure the “fun factor” is there early on, the rest is polish!
• Don’t explore some new technology while trying to complete a game.
• Give each aspect (design, planning, code, graphics, audio, testing, etc) enough time each. Don’t spend the first day and a half coding and get the rest done in a few hours.
• Make sure the game is done well before the deadline so you have time for playtesting, bugfixing and polish.
• The most important thing is to complete a game from start to finish, not that it’s the most feature packed perfect game.

The Game

So I’ve been playing unhealthy amounts of Spelunky lately and I wanted to make a platformer with a bit of the same vibe, and I’m a huge space fan so I went for that. When the theme got decided I thought I’d make a underground platformer. Since I love the jetpack in spelunky and don’t get it often enough, I thought I’d make a game with a similar feel as the jetpack in Spelunky. I also wanted to make a simple and addicting game with online highscore, so I played around with the idea until I ended up with what the game is now. It could still get a lot better, but I’m quite happy with the end result in just two days work.

I wanted to make a platformer with jetpacks with Spelunky feel!

Warmup & Making Music

I’m especially happy with having produced music for in the game, and am even quite happy with the end result. Truth is I’ve wanted to learn how to make music for a while now, and started various tutorials but never got very far. The day before Ludum dare I made a warmup game called Space Survivor. It took me about 2 hours to make, and looking at the highscore stats I can say that it’s probably the game I’ve made with best time coded vs time played ratio ever.. which is a bit depressing. Anyway, the cool thing is I also decided I was going to make music for the game. I opened a a music program called SunVox, which is the first music program where I actually like the UI, and decided I’m going to make a song from start to end, it doesn’t matter how crappy it is, but it’s going to be finished. My first song. Instead of trying to learn each aspect of music and mastering it before I even make a song, this technique really taught me how to make music and I put it in the game! And I’m so happy for it! The day after Ludum dare started and I made another track and put it in my Ludum Dare entry, and it turned out quite nice for my second track ever!

I used the “ludum dare” technique to learn how to make music by making a warmup game! Download here!

The Good

For the first time I felt that I was done enough for the deadline. Overall I’m very happy with the end result, here are some points which I’m happy with

• I had a nice balance of time spent coding, making art, making sound, making music, testing, bugfixing and polishing which made all areas good enough!
• I actually made music for my game and learned how to make it in the process!
• I had online highscores – this is something that really makes some games so much more fun!
• The game feels like a complete game and is polished
• I invited two friends over for a little Jam-Lan-Party, this made the whole thing event more fun and I think we made better games because of it!

Even for a 48h game, the graphics went through several iterations

The Bad

Although I’m very happy with the end result, there were a few hickups.

• About half way in on day two I began writing ugly code to make things rapidly. This made the final code quite cluddered and just makes it harder to update and improve the game further. I will have to spend a day just to cleanup the code later!
  • Lesson: Things don’t have to be perfectly coded, but alteast keep it clean and organized at all times!
• Some MySQL issues have made the online highscores slow/unresponsive sometimes, which results in a lot of statistics/scores have gotten lost. This is really a shame because I wanted to present cool playstats here for you!
  • Lesson: Brush up MySQL skills for next time for better highscores/stats!
• I’ve got about 60 ratings to my game and I’ve done 120 on others, so I can’t complain. Still somehow I feel it’s very hard to get people to try my game. I believe this is in large part because I don’t have a web version. I know the feeling when testing games, if you gotta download it, let alone run a seperate redist install, it’s hard to want to try it! I really do think this is a shame, I think games feel better when not played in a browser. And c#/xna is awesome!
  • Lesson: Consider using a web-platform next time or accept low play stats. (HTML5, Unity, etc)
• The title. To be honest I suck at titles. It was never really my intention that the game would be named Gravity. I sort of just wrote something while designing the graphics/menu to get the style right. In the end time was running out and I hadn’t thought of a better title and then I forgot. I thought of the George Clooney film and just added a random subtitle since I thought that looked cool too.
  • Lesson: Titles can be important, decide on a good one early on and roll with it. It’s hard to think up a good name at the last minute!

The  temporary working title ended up being final, I just removed George Clooney so that I wouldn’t need to share the royalties!

Some play stats!

With each play being registered in an online highscore, I can also calculate some play stats from them. Sadly my MySQL skills weren’t good enough in time, so a lot of the stats got lost because of a query taking very long time to load sometimes.. But here are some fun play stats at the time of writing!

Disclamer: Sadly up to approx 50% of plays may be missing, so stats below could probably be doubled, but this is what I’ve got! (Any new stats should be recorded correctly I believe)

• Total number of unique players: 82
• Total number of plays: 6617
• Avarage plays per player: 80
• Total play time all players: 35 hours 1 min 55 seconds
• Avarage time played per player: 25 minutes
• Player with most plays
  • Diamonde: 718
  • Rebecca: 595
  • Tobias-PC: 587
  • Maxime: 549
  • Anebo: 517

Top 10 scores at the time of writing.

Timelapse!

Check out the timelapse of making Gravity! May contain spoilers!

Lastly, I would really appreciate if you

play and rate my game!

Good luck in the final results all!

Tags: post-compo, post-mortem, timelapse, tips

We really need to stop leaving so much dangerous military ordinance underground.

Don’t forget to rate us before the Jam ends!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2014 at 12:58 pm and is filed under LD #29. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

[My name is Carlos Leituga, I’m a Game Designer, and once again I joined the Make A Game team to create a game in 72 hours for Ludum Dare #29.]

We were a smaller team this time: two programmers, one artist and myself in the same room, while another artist was about 1 thousand Kilometers in a straight line from us, and we could only talk to our musician through email. We couldn’t afford to be too ambitious so… no pressure.

It’s been a while since I did any game design from the ground up. With the exception of two months doing freelance work at the start of this year, I’ve been unemployed for more than a year now and I felt a bit rusty. My focus lately has been shifting from completing older design docs, to learning Game Maker Studio, and then deciding that I should read up more on logical thinking for programming, and at the same time spruce up my memory on an easy to learn language that I was still familiar with, Processing.

This led into choosing Game Maker Studio as our framework, besides the other three local team members having some experience with it, during any design downtime I could jump into the sprite or level editor and help them out. Hell, I could even help search for solutions if we’d get stumped by some of the different ways GMS does things, I can say I’m way too experienced in that.

This is what this whole past year felt like

The Idea

We probably broke our record of how long we took to decide what to do with the “Beneath the Surface” theme. We scribbled 20 subjects on our whiteboard while we discussed. Of all the ideas, I recall two the most: one where the Devil would manipulate events on the surface to make people sin and get pulled to hell, and another one that had a lifeform, on an operation table or petri dish under a microscope, defending itself against probes that would penetrate its shell or shield.

Psychology because… deepness

The Devil idea was giving us some trouble, we weren’t sure how it would play or what type of events were at the player’s disposal, but without the time pressure we might return to it someday.

The lifeform idea had us debating more about simplicity and presentation, a sign that we were on the right path. The original vision had the player choose between four sides of the lifeform, where energy could be increased to expel the probes, or decreased to be used on the other sides. It reminded me of managing your shields in Star Trek Online’s space battles.

But I guess that vision went to hell when I drew this dumb thing with moles from outer space, flying drills straight into a planet.

I’m so sorry

What went right

– Graphically sound

So vibrant! It was like everything clicked for our artist from the very start. We quickly had a very visually appealing style that kept us motivated throughout. It would be enough to inspire the remote rest of the team, we hoped, and we were right!

I tasked myself with doing the sound effects for the game but our musician unexpectedly started delivering on those very early. Only in the afternoon of the last day, when we were one team member fewer and getting tired, was when we got a sample of the song, and we went nuts! It was perfect and stayed on repeat for nearly an hour or so.

Technical problems on our end kept our other artist from helping out more, but she whipped out the best game logo we could ever wish for.

YOU’RE SUCH A DUMB LOOKING BUNCH OF MOLES

– Wax on, wax on wax on wax on

We are getting better and better at polishing our games. And I don’t mean having all the bells and whistles to catch someone’s attention, but in giving proper feedback to the player. We put flashes and screen shakes to good use, for landing a hit on the enemies and getting damaged, and the moon loses opacity after a dash, bouncing back when it’s ready to be used again.

During a game jam, polish is usually put aside due to the time constraints, but by participating more in these competitions, you start to get a feel for how long an idea will take to be made and you can start saving some time to concentrate on the visual feedback of the core mechanics.

Our motto for this Ludum Dare

What went wrong

– Keeping ourselves connected

Four team members together and two off-site, we could handle this, we just needed to progress a bit further with our work so that the other two could base their work on ours. We even had a second musician interested in our project, but technical difficulties of his own kept him from joining.

Our technical problems weren’t that far off though, suddenly our shared mobile internet stopped working. Our connection went from 30 Mbps to a whooping 128 Kbps and Skype wouldn’t even log in. There goes using Git and Dropbox out the window. We had hit an invisible traffic limit and there was no way to pay to increase that limit, we could share our credit card numbers with the provider’s customer support staff all we wanted, they wouldn’t budge.

Two of us could share mobile internet from our phones, but it had to be done in a hit and run manner so we wouldn’t spend too much traffic. We could no longer have those Skype calls with screen sharing with our remote artist that we had in mind.

Later that night, we fared goodbye to one of our programmers. He had work in the morning and couldn’t stay with us any further.

The remaining three of us then decided that in the next morning we would drive to the artist’s home so we could resume our work with some proper internet, which unfortunately shaved off around 2 hours of possible progress, but we endured.

RIP
25/04/2014 – 26/04/2014
“One had to go to work next morning”

– More like Game Breaker

Prior to the jam, I toyed around with the 1.3 beta of Game Maker Studio and found out that some of my code had stopped working. Further inspection pointed out that the change in variable scope was the cause. Granted, I’m not a programmer so my code is faulty 99% of the time, which causes anything I compile to crash or freeze or both. The problem is that crashes aren’t as graceful with GMS 1.3 as they were with the previous stable versions, and some of the times the actual software – not the game – would also freeze and crash.

I warned the team about this, but there was one new feature that we coveted: having proper pixelated rotations. We could achieve this by disabling interpolation between colors and resizing the application surface, but 1.3 makes it so much easier to set up surfaces that we bit the bullet and took some time to get used to the changes.

We also had a running joke/issue with the planet’s rotation. Drills would target a slice of the planet and miss it, but they would think they were on the targeted slice and not the adjacent one. The only way to destroy them would be attack the slice they missed. This took forever to solve, but somehow the ghost of that semi-invincible space drill return to haunt us, in the shape of an actual invincible drill that randomly appears during the game. We’re still scratching our heads with that.

Lastly, it was also somewhat challenging to port the game to HTML5. Performance isn’t great and we still haven’t had the opportunity to fix the bugs that aren’t found only in that version.

Look at all those beautiful square pixels

What’s missing

Too much is missing. Remember earlier when I wrote that we couldn’t be too ambitious? I was wrong, being ambitious is what drives an idea, you just need to keep a list of things you might not accomplish and then cut them when the time comes.

The moles were spared this time, since we decided to not implement the damage they would cause to the surface of the planet, we also didn’t add their reactions to the elemental attacks. Though we should have added a default death to avoid slowdowns when there are too many moles on screen, which is noticeable on the HTML5 version.

Such a tease

The biggest feature that was left on the cutting floor was the Elemental Combo Attacks. Players would gradually unlock these stronger attacks by destroying the invaders and collecting Experience Orbs. There are three circular slots at the bottom right corner of the screen, two of which are locked. Unlocking them would allow Elemental Attacks to be quickly cued up, creating a combination of two or three elements. Besides unleashing a powerful attack against the incoming waves of stronger enemies, it would also terraform the surface of the planet, creating harsh environments to fight against moles that would come prepared for a different type of climate.

Every planned biome was made and the planet’s
surface is randomized on each game

Conclusion

After so long, this game jam exceeded my expectations, it was another great experience. I still feel a bit rusty, I mean, I haven’t put much thought on how to balance the game, but that might be because I’m now looking at the current version of the game and forgetting some of the cut features, like some of the drills crash landing instead of going towards the core (I just remembered this!).

There was a great team chemistry and constant communication, to my knowledge there wasn’t one problem that we weren’t all on it and attempting to solve together. And taking into consideration the time wasted fixing issues outside of the jam itself, or relaxing with some TowerFall, we were able to exceed our standards from our previous entries.

Weirdly enough, this is the second game about planets that we made, where the player can interpret some kind of underlying message about colonization or nature. We are on the path to becoming true planeteers!

You can play “Orbital Burrow” at Ludum Dare or at http://makeaga.me/orbitalburrow/.

I recommend that you download and play the Windows version if you are able to.

Have fun and don’t forget to rate. 😉

Make A Game team for Ludum Dare 29:

Filipe Caseirito (@FilCaz)
Tiago Franco (@Alarka)
Filipe Jorge (@deejorg)
Carlos Leituga (@CLeituga)
Sara Mena (@_saramena)
“Minty Buns”
 

Tags: 2D, 72h, Beneath the Surface, jam, ld29, LD72, Make A Game, Orbital Burrow, post-mortem

I’ve created a Facebook page for my LD#29 entry, The Last Beacon. If you like it, then please like this page to get notified about future updates!

If somebody didn’t do is yet, please review my game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36343

We had couple of similiar games to ours, if you want to play and review the game, go here !

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=12048

Thanks

Get ready to jump on ice as long as you can to survive in this first update !

Play the compo & post compo here !

Tags: 48hcompo, Beneath the Surface, ld29, unity

Before LD29 voting ends I must finish off with a shameless plug for my game. Enjoy!

Have you played Inferious yet?  It’s a first-person-shooter that would fall into the genres of horror, platformer, shooter, and puzzle. It is available for Windows, OSX, and Linux and also can be played through the web using Unity Web Player.

Inferious can be played here.

…so don’t forget to take a screenshot of your “Previously rated entries” list if you want to keep a record of how you voted. If I recall correctly this list just disappears after the voting is closed…

As the end of the voting period looms, I decided to write a postmortem for my Jam entry, Neath. This is my second Ludum Dare. I had some troubles coming up with what the game would be going which led me to miss the competition deadline, but eventually completed it, with a short playable section, for the Jam. I focused on creating a great mood, simple gameplay, and creating a visually striking game in the time period I had. You can play it Here. In the spirit of my first entry, Crew, I’ll be listing some of the things that went right, some of the things that went wrong and what I hope to do differently next time around.

What went right:

• I finished the game in time for the jam I lost some sleep on this one, but made a concerted effort to get enough sleep and remain vigilant in working on my game.
• I decided to use Unity last time around I utilized GameMaker: Studio for my entry. This time I told myself I would tough it out and Use Unity for the first time to complete a game. The things I learned in the process were invaluable and it helped give me more confidence in the engine, which I wanted to move to full-time for any game development.
• Polish I spent a lot of the time implementing features that really didn’t need to be there, but made the experience classier. I also implemented some features that were there just so I could learn how to do them. For instance, despite having only 2 letters in the game, I created a system for handling any items and any letters with variable text. The same is true for the simple dialogue system in the game, which is triggered and custom, and displays text via script. The motions of the paper swooping in, the flickering of the flashlight on, and etc. were all fun to finish and see in action and I think added a lot to the game.
• Atmosphere I spent more time than I’d care to admit on the sound alone. I am no sound designer by any means, but wanted the game to have a lot of atmosphere and a heavy mood. Luckily, it wasn’t in vain and a lot of people actually noticed how much work went into the sound design. I had initially planned to finish by the Compo time, so many of the sounds are self recorded, but when the time passed I decided to include some snazzy royalty free stuff to boost the level of quality.
• I didn’t overstep my abilities Last time around I messed around with random generation and in the process created a sort of broken game. This time, I kept it simple for the most part and tried a lot of new things that I needed to know eventually. It made me more confident when I figured something out, and it kept me going until the end.

What went wrong:

• Ran out of Compo Time As the competition ended a sigh of relief came over me. I was a lot of pressure and I missed the gate because I was too hung up on what the game should be. Admittedly, the game kinda came out incrementally. Instead of having that grand vision in my head like my last game, I was confused about what the game was trying to be. As a result, a lot of the game occurred naturally, which was fun, but also lead to a shorter and kinda plain game-play experience.
• Brevity There wasn’t a lot “too” my game, but it also was a quite brief experience. If there’s anything people remarked about negatively it would be this. In its briefness, the game did feel more like a mini-demo  or a “slice” of game-play than a full experience, which is interesting. I don’t feel too bad about this, being the sole developer and having it be my first time going full-sail with Unity.
• Lack of Interesting Mechanics I wanted the game to have a mechanic that related to the theme of “Beneath the Surface”. Unfortunately, I just didn’t think of anything clever enough to get the pass from me.

What I would do differently:

• Spend Less Time on Prep Last time around I told myself I should have spent more time on prep, but after struggling to come up with an idea this time around, I realized things would have gone smoother if I had just taking a shot at something. I think this part is going to depend on the theme and the options that I’ve come up with, but overall just jumping into something helps grease the wheels.
• Gameplay First, Next Time! I want to do something interesting with game-play. I think adventure games are a hard sell during Ludum Dare and it’s not the most fun to see in action either. For Crew, I hated myself for trying to do something I knew I wasn’t insanely good at with random generation. This time around, I felt like I tried hard and learned a lot about Unity to go forward and make something more interesting to actually play. Next time I think I’ll focus on creating a simpler, but more fun game.
• Create a post-comp version? To be honest, I dislike post-comp versions. Not only because when I’m done I just don’t want to look at the game anymore, but also because I think – at least within the voting period – that it’s against the spirit of Ludum Dare. Some post-comp versions I’ve seen have completely changed some aspects of a game or added more levels that weren’t there initially. For anything but game-breaking bugs, a post-comp version is disingenuous to me, but I understand its place in the Jams. Next time around maybe I’ll work on a post-comp version just to see if it’s worth it and if my opinions have changed on it.

Final words: 

Like my previous jam, I got a lot of kind words and some coverage from sites like Warpdoor and IndieStatik. This time around it was a lot more positive because the game worked, hah! It was once-again fun to commit my time to this and helps me realize more and more that this is what I want to do with my life. Thank you!

Here is a short post-mortem of my third Ludum Dare Entry (Jam): Below Earth.

In it you play an adventurer (bomb throwing maniac) that is exploring an underground cave only to find a rather hostile environment.

This time I also tried out some new tools like IntelliJ (IDE) and Aseprite (Pixelart) and I have to say I like them.

The somewhat good things:

• Brainstormed the idea long enough and then sticked with it.
• Prototyped graphics really quickly.
• The game is actually fun to play.
• I successfully drew my own pixelart with aseprite.
• I didn’t neglect my personal duties during the weekend.

Don’t mess with the local wild life.

The rather bad things:

• I originally intended to procedurally generate levels, but then I realized, that I have absolutely no experience with procedural level generation. I ended up with uninteresting and lazy “random” levels. So I later created a level parser to read text-files and made some quick levels, but I also left some of the generated levels in it.
• It’s too hard. I slowly start to see a pattern with my Ludum Dare games. I always balance it in a way, so that I still have a challenge, but that might not be an acceptable difficulty for others. Having difficult levels itself isn’t the problem, but having a too steep difficulty curve is a problem. I should learn to slowly(!) ramp up the difficulty of the game. Giving the game to playtesters often and early can really help with this.
• Hiding content in later levels. Because of it’s difficulty, some players never got to see every enemy that the game has to offer. This might be something not true for game-design in general, but it holds true for Ludum Dare, where most people probably don’t have the time to try and master your game. This means all the main game features should be available within the “easy” levels, and only combine them and challenge the player after those levels.
• This is another entry without music. Music is important for a game, but before I hastily make some annoying 10 second loop I rather leave the game without music. This might be a personal goal for my next LD to focus on music and create some for my game. I just have to find a program I can make some with and learn to use it….
• I created pixelart. It’s not good, but it’s better than anything I’ve created yet. Still it took far longer than it should have.
• No Web version. I really tried to get that GWT build to work, but there are so many things that go wrong when they somehow possibly can…

Time spent (aka everybody loves statistics)

During the whole weekend (Saturday to Monday because it’s a Jam Entry) I recorded my development time with toggl.com, which is really useful for such things. I ended up spending more time on graphics than I thought I would. Programming seems to be so big, because I was always testing my game inbetween bigger changes and played it over and over again. I also spent a whole hour setting up the project because I was using Libgdx without eclipse. 😉

That’s how I spent my weekend.

Conclusion

Every Ludum Dare helps me in some way to become a better developer and even a better person. 😀

I found some new nice tools with which I will continue to work.

I also should try to make my future games not too difficult for the average player.

I already started and will continue to develop a post-compo version of this game, because this is one of my first games where I feel like polishing it is worthwile.

If you want to play or rate or try out the post-compo version, you can do this here.

Tags: ld29, postmortem

Judging will be over in just over 24 hours. I had a blast with this competition, and I thought I’d sum up what I learned, what went well, and what didn’t.

Hide-n-Stab is a multiplayer stealth game – player characters and NPCs are identical cloaked figures, and your goal is to stab other players in the back. Attacking will reveal you to everyone around as a human, so you have to be careful and wait for the right chance to strike.

This was my first Ludum Dare and only my second game jam ever – I previously entered the Game Boy Jam, which gave 10 days. 48 hours was a very different experience. I wasn’t even planning on entering this time, and was out at dinner when the theme was announced. I checked Twitter, saw the theme, and immediately came up with the idea for Hide-n-Stab, and I knew that I had to give it a shot.

Anyway, here’s what happened:

What went well

• I used a fantastic technology stack. The game was written in Haxe, with a Flash game client and a Neko server. I used OpenFL with the HaxePunk game engine, which I’m a contributor to. I’ve been using this stack for a long time so I was able to get right to work and build something quickly, and the server and client were able to share a large amount of code.
• I had my asset production pipeline down solid as well. Graphics were drawn in Inkscape with individual body parts as separate layers; I used the Inkscape command line tool to split each layer into a separate image and used Spine to do skeletal animation. I had the fully animated character finished, in its more-or-less final form, the on first night, only a few hours after hearing the theme.
• I serendipitously came up an idea that fit the theme well from the start. This let me tailor gameplay to fit the theme as closely as possible throughout the entire process.
• I had just moved to a new apartment and was starting a new job on Monday after the competition ended, so I had focus and free time to devote to the competition. Also, my very patient wife kept our 3-year-old occupied so I could keep working.

What didn’t

• Developing an online game in 48 hours is insane. I spent probably half of my time debugging esoteric networking bugs. Some of the more elusive had to be solved after the competition was over.
• I posted Hide-n-Stab to Hacker News and did not anticipate the outcome – it was on the front page for an entire Saturday. The server was instantly filled with players and remained so for several days. I was completely unprepared – the server had never been load tested, it wasn’t running on the most robust VM, and it didn’t even have a limit on the number of concurrent players! I spent the weekend running around with my hair on fire, migrating to a better server and trying to tweak things to accomodate the huge influx of players, eventually opening a second overflow server. To be clear – I’m very glad to all the people who played from Hacker News, and it was a great chance to test the game, fix bugs, and get feedback. The reason this is a negative is that I wasn’t completely ready for it.
• I didn’t have enough time allotted to fix bugs. As a result, the final version was playable, but had some intermittent breaking bugs.

Next time

• I’ll definitely try to use HaxePunk again. Great experience, can’t recommend enough.
• I will almost certainly not attempt another MMO-style game in such a short time period.
• I’ll plan to enter the competition from the beginning and brainstorm theme ideas instead of waiting around and deciding to enter after it’s already underway.
• Allocate enough time to thoroughly test the game before release, and aim to put out a fully functional version.

Thanks to everyone who played and/or voted! I played some fantastic games this round so the competition is fierce. Good luck to everyone!

Also, if you enjoyed the game, tune in to www.hide-n-stab.com – I’m working on a post-competition version of the game, with browser, desktop, and mobile versions. It’ll have new features and unlockable cosmetic upgrades. You can also follow me on Twitter (@monsterfacegame) to hear about progress.

Before:

After:

You can play compo version here.

A brand news!

Forever Alone Snake – NO MORE
We have published an awesome update,
from now on, snake is no more the “forever alone guy” that we all knew from school.
From now on, snake have got himself some new friends, but no one stays friends forever
when only one can win.

In the last week we developed an online version for our game WWE (Worms War Evolution)
It may have some bugs, but it’s still playable
All you have to do is to click “Network Game” then “Host”
and tell your friends to connect to your ip/port! (hamachi is the best solution for porting)

Known Bugs:
-When the game is over, everyone will recieve a lovely error. So everyone will have  to re-open the game.
-Bodies may not be exactly at their real place
-The bigger your ping is, the bigger the delay for clients is.

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE MULTIPLAYER VERSION RIGHT HERE

Thank you for following : )
If you didn’t rate our game yet, please do, your votes are important for us!

Enjoy guys!
Let us know what you think, we worked hard on this one !

Thanks!

RomAndTom

You can follow Rom’s Blog for more

Tags: rom, romandtom, tom, trasoside, worms war evolution, wwe

Right, I should probably have written and posted this much earlier. But my life doesn’t always give me enough time for these things…

Regardless, prepare your eyes for the wonder that is;

Not Your Average Mining Emulator*

* Gameplay may actually be average

N.A.M.E.

This would be my fifth finished game, but also the seventh Ludum Dare I’ve tried to join in on. And I’ve got to say that this was not one of the themes I was hoping for myself, but I still did what I usually do; Sit down for a few hours just after the theme’s released (3am here in Sweden) and sketch up a few game ideas. And then I can take those ideas and polish them after sleeping on it for a few hours.

The ideas I managed to sketch down for this LD were of a Diablo UI inspired rougelike, a submarine hunting game that also spun off as a wreck hunting game idea, an idea for a submarine shoot’em’up, and finally something of a clone of the old game Motherlode and Clonk. In the end I decided to go for the final idea, as that was the one I felt held the most promise with the lowest amount of graphical work (my weakest point).

So, with that in mind.

What went right?

• Had already prepared a simple framework that worked well for a 2D sidescrolling digging game, helped cut down some on the development time. Inputs and things prepared in advance is really nice, since otherwise such things would eat development time.
• Streamed everything, every second I was at the computer. This really helps with the focus, and I even managed to keep enough attention on the chat to be able to answer some questions that arose from viewers.
• My art ability seems to have improved slightly since I started Ludum Dare, so the first sprites I did for trees and ores came out looking really well.
• My thoughts on UI design turned out perfectly fine too, I’ve noticed that many people’ve commented on how nice and smooth the in-house UI looks.
• A crafting system turned out easier than expected, so I was able to throw it together and put in two recipes in only about one and a half hour.

What went less right?

• Didn’t think to grab an existing physics engine like Box2D, so lost a huge amount of time writing physics and debugging them. There’s actually a collision bug that slipped through when I was working on ladder support, since I moved some code about and accidentally removed the part of code preventing you from jumping when you have a wall above your head. I really need to cure my NIH syndrome I guess, but it’s just so much fun to recreate the wheel.
• Didn’t feel I had enough time to really work towards sound or music in the game, so it’s a very silent game. This is something I really suck at doing, so I guess I won’t be releasing any games that take in high scores on Audio any time soon.
• Still can’t draw a player character in any way, so the player stayed as a cube saying ‘IDLE’ until the last couple of hours. And even then I only really managed a simple stick man.
• I failed to put together an inventory system like what I originally thought of making, so lost several hours of development rewriting that. In the end I figured that only having a single object on the player was acceptable, and spent more time getting the house to be able to store things.
• Because the inventory system failed to be finished I had lots of code that was supposed to be used with in-game tools that you couldn’t craft or carry.
• Didn’t have ingredients for proper food laying about, so ended up with simpler food and that just doesn’t feel as good. No food photos from me this time.

Other thoughts.

• Another entry made from scratch in C++ using SFML, this is starting to look like a theme for my entries I think. Maybe I should sit down far in advance of the next one and create a larger base framework so I could use that instead, based on SDL maybe?
• This Ludum Dare I decided to try a simpler game without using my home-grown entity component system Kunlaboro, so this game is more of a statemachine based game. And while it feels really good to go back to my roots for a simple game, I can’t help but feel that I could’ve gotten so much more done if I’d used Kunlaboro for it…
• I should try to move game logic away from base C++ code and towards scripts, maybe using Lua or Angelscript. This needs for me to have more time before the start of the compo so I can properly prepare the framework though.

To finish, thank you to all the people watching me work. And those of you that commented on the entry, both during the stream and during judging, every bit of criticism helps.

I’ll be seeing about maybe cleaning this up later on and releasing a post-compo version, though I don’t know how much of the original code would be left afterwards. It started off so nice and neat, but now the codebase if just a horrible bunch of duct tape fixes.

Tags: 2D, C++, ld29, postmortem, screenshot, sfml

Yoohoo! My game “Upstream” achieved it’s 100th rating today!
That puts it in the top 3.5% of the most rated games in this LD according to itch.io – I never thought that it could achieve this.
Thank you for everybody taking time to try my little game, and for the kind comments!

And if anybody else wanna try it on the last day of judging: http://j.mp/1mO1tUK

I’m completely rewriting AHH LAVA! in unity instead of game maker, I’ve learnt unity from scratch in a few weeks! and now I have a swanky new submarine in THREEEEE-DEEEEEEE!

I’ve always loved this kind of pixel texture 3D artwork so I’m super excited I got to do it! Im gonna keep polishing up the game to be released as a couch multiplayer brawler of some sort! 😀

Check out the Compo version here give it a vote if you haven’t already

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=24533

Post Jam version of our entry is up! We fixed some bugs, added the plot, improved graphics and added even more selfmade sounds You can check it right here

Tags: jam, ld29, postjam, postLD

Hi folks, it’s my 3rd Ludum Dare, but I guess it’s my very first post mortem, for my LD 29 entry, Fish Goes Fishing (click here if you’re still to play it). So, with no further delay, my time lapse video, followed by the post mortem itself.

The Idea

When I first saw the them i was like “blergh”. I won’t deny it, I’m more an old school C/C++ programmer than a designer, and”beneath the surface” only ringed an underwater game to me. And that’s what I did, a game where you’re fish, constantly hungry, struggling to survive by eating other fishes and avoid being eaten by the fish you can’t eat at all. At first, I wanted to have a fisherman passing by a boat, which could mean an instant death in case the fish was caught, but this idea was scrapped along the way, as time was getting shorter. I also planned to have two gauges, one with the hunger factor (fish dies if maxed out), and another with an energy usage factor, that would be depleted when the fish moved, but would recover when the fish would rest. With that in mind and a very rough sketch on paper, I started my 3rd Ludum Dare.

The Code Base

Doing a full game in 48 hours is already challenging, leave it alone doing the full code to make the magic happen. Since I did Ludum Dare 26 I’m building a basic code framework over SFML. To bootstrap Fish Goes fishing, I had the menu system ready, plus a character hierarchy and controller code in place. This time I added character animation and very simple animated particles (the bubbles, plants and anemones). Maybe for the next Ludum Dare I’ll have tile map support with some physics library in place (Chipmunk, maybe).

Highlights

1. Mockup graphics: I wanted to have a sense of how things would play together as soon as possible. Both in sense of gameplay and how they’d look together on screen. For that I made characters that were simple rectangles to get myself going soon. This allowed me to focus on what I had to do first (the code) and to scale the time I’d spent to polish those resources later.
2. Do a game that your library or code base makes it easy for you: while we can have very complex ideas, it’s not useful if we can’t make them happen. It’s OK if we need to code something specific for the game, but getting it up from scratch is a hard task. use a library or framework if you can. If you’re old school and is starting out with a library like SFML or SDL, try to make a game that uses the libraries basic resources, and then, for the next time, you may improve upon that code base. I’ve been doing that for a while and it’s working well.
3. Generalize first, specialize later:when developing the game, I focused on creating the basic characters, and the other character were built upon those previous elements, by adding more states and changing animation frames.
4. Prioritize efforts: a game is much more a sum of parts, rather than only one individual aspect alone. Something I did was to question what’s required from here to get a build that plays like a game, even if we need to balance things to make the game more challenging. I was about 26 hours into the jam and the fish could eat other fishes, which was a good milestone.
5. Using well the right tools: I’m no musician, as I’m no graphics artist. But I can overcome those limitations (a bit, at least). Music and sound can always be generated by automated tools. For SFX, I used bfrx, and for musics I used Otomata. These can save a lot of time and effort, and give some mood to the game. Just for the record, I’ve also used in the past Punk-O-Matic, and I’ve also seen other procedural music generator apps that allow me to export files to MP3. As for graphics, Gimp is more than enough for pixel artist making, and also has very easy to use too to rotate layers that I used to make the scuba diver animation.
6. Not being afraid to scale back: the earliest we see something is too big for the original deadline, we need to remove it ad minimize impact. This goes well with number 2 above, and I had two occasions were this was important:
   1. Missing fisherman:I thought about the fisher man, but this character would have a moving part for the line and required a special hierarchy. To avoid expending too much time with this guy, I decided to drop it before I couldn’t finish the game. While it was hard, and a hit on my original idea, I fully understand it was for the best (as I’d complete the final build close to the deadline).
   2. Gauges mechanics didn’t work out:the idea to have two bars to control both how hungry and tired the fish was seemed awesome. Once I tried it out, it wasn’t working out as expected. To solve that, I change it to a single bar, which would go down faster when the fish was swimming, and slower when it was idle. Also, it was simpler for people to understand the game.
7. Life can get in the way: working at home to do a Ludum Dare and still having the regular responsibilities of a regular weekend is a tricky challenge. In my case, that meant shopping for groceries, taking kids to swimming classes or doing a BBQ for the family. This may manifest differently to each person (going to school, doing a report, whatever), the fact is that life is still there and we should be prepared to accommodate other activities rather than just doing the game. In other words, try not to procrastinate, as this time will be missing later ;).
8. Pressure can make simple mistakes become nightmares: when I was doing the Windows build (I only use Linux), i made a Makefile to cross compile the binary. And it wasn’t working at first. I had my entry in place, I had the source code uploaded, and it wasn’t before 5 minutes of the final deadline that I had my Windows binary after I found a small typo in the name of a file. Was under normal stress, I would have noticed and laughed this off, in the submission hour I couldn’t even see what was right or wrong anymore. Try to avoid the pressure of a ticking clock at all costs.
9. Oh, you may get sick as well: while normal life may get in the way, and I’m used to it by now, I wasn’t quite ready to deal with illness. I had food poisoning Sunday, and the last three hours were not fun to get over the final tasks. Had it happened earlier, I think I’d have retired from the compo. As most of the hard work was already in place I decided to push forward.

Conclusion

Every time I go through a jam or Ludum Dare I learn something, and I also enjoy the challenge to come up with something even if the theme is not the one I’d liked the best (like this time). I may try jamming with friends some time, as soon as we can match our schedules, but until then, I can get into the compo by myself and have some fun :).

Ever since the end of #LD48 I’ve been working on improving Landshark Missile Attack (what a mouthful), and seeing as it’s the last 24 hours of voting, I’m NEVER going to get all the changes I want to do before the end of that. But damn there’s a lot already, so here goes:

SUPER ANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK POST-COMPO EDITION V2!

(and the orignal LD48 Compo version)

Changes made to this version that I can remember:

1. A thumpin’ track by Tim Harbour! Unfortunately hadn’t gotten to sound effects yet.
2. Focussed on one level, removed others for now.
3. Screenshake! Of course!
4. Removed time limit.
5. Fixed stuttering bullet time.
6. Health + death mechanic added.
7. Eat people to heal.
8. Removed swimming up walls for now.
9. Added enemy dropship.
10. Aerial dodge – double tap forward, left or right while airborne!
11. Missiles and dodge energy reload when you land.
12. So wow, so much. Can’t remember.

This was my first Ludum Dare and it has been incredible! There’s still A LOT MORE to add and improve on SUPER LANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK, but I need to know if you think it’s worthg persuing! do get in touch if you wanna see it get further / finished!

Or did I even go the right way with the changes? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks for your time! 😀

Here’s an instagram video cos my gif capturerer thing doesn’t wanna work  http://instagram.com/p/oKTdcXN1aF/

And now, bed. 4AM >_<

Play and download SUPER ANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK POST-COMPO EDITION V2! And tell me if I went in the right direction since the original LD48 entry! XD

I had a lot of fun making my LD29 entry, “Seed“.  For once I decided to make a game that wasn’t tense, scary, or overly monochromatic; I think I did it that way just to prove that I could.  This also gave me a chance to write some pleasant music for a change.

Things that went well:

1.  I was worried that the method I was using to draw the plant (spawning multiple objects) would cause massive slowdown, but it turns out Unity handled it well.

2.  I was actually done after only 24 hours, but there were still a few minor bugs (the flower would sometimes grow out at an angle at the surface), and I wanted the plant itself to look better as it was growing.  I’m glad I took the extra time to draw the little roots that come out of the side of the plant randomly; it really looked cool in the end.  On a similar note, my script for it worked right on the first try (save for a few number tweaks).

3.  The four layers of music fading in and out at different times made the music feel dynamic and was worth the extra effort to get it all to sync up.  (For reference, the cello part always plays, the medium piano part plays only when the bud is moving, the high piano part gradually fades in as you get closer to the surface, and the low piano part gradually fades in as you start running out of water.)

Things that needed improvement:

1.  First, the “endless” method of adding additional rocks and bugs works as a short game, but doesn’t offer much variety.  If I go back and revisit this at all, I’ll probably add additional things to find underground (like worms, for example).

2.  It looks fine on my monitor and is supposed to be dark as you’re underground, but the darkness was a common complaint.  If I had time, I probably should have put some kind of brightness adjuster.

3.  As much as I like how the music came out, a much longer piece would offer a lot more variety and be less repetitive.

Overall:

I had fun, and I hope other people did as well!  Bring on LD30!

[blatant self promotion warning]

An idea that came up for me during a few ludumdares combining a tile matching puzzlegame with anagram solving. I never did end up using the idea during ludumdare itself, but I did make the game, which is currently available for free so I thought I might share while I’m still in a good mood before the current LD results are announced and I go into depression/hibernation/the liquor cabinet:

GemWords is currently free for Windoze/OSX/Android from http://voxel.itch.io/gemwords

I present my personal Top 5 games of LD 29 in no particular order, their titles redesigned in the style of my entry: DIVE

I have rated 116 games now, liked a lot of them, but these are 5 that really stood out to me.

UPSTREAM by Viza

This one is probably the one that impressed me the most from a gameplay perspective. You rarely see a puzzler this well put together in a LD-competition. The mechanics work flawlessly and, as an outstanding feature, it has an undo-mechanic, which completely eliminates the frustration of restarting a level when you made a mistake. You just rewind a bit, correct your actions, and move on. Viza also hit the difficulty of the levels just right: Hard enough to feel like a proper puzzle, but never frustrating or ridiculous. Really loved this one. Check it out.

OUR GOD LIVES UNDERGROUND by Andrew Shouldice

While this certainly is lacking in gameplay, it has absolutely stunning graphical design. The downscaled, pixely top-down 3D graphics make it one of the moodiest games of the competition. When walking through the underground tunnels, the shadows and cleverly put assets near the camera give it  a really cool feel. Some added gameplay, a top-down shooter seems pretty obvious, would make this a really promising game. You gotta check it out just for the mood it sets, though.

FRIEND OF THE FISHERMAN by rubna

The best pixel-art in the competition. Period.

This game has its beauty in the movement. Everything moves, everything moves somewhat physically correct, while perfectly blending into the highly pixelized look of it. Very carefully and well put together entry, this really deserves praise for its visuals while also having quite fun gameplay.

KALAHARI BABYSITTER by TijmenTio

Juicy as hell. When talking about the “feel” of the gameplay, this one takes the cake. It feels fast, it feels responsive, it has wonderful arcade gameplay. Part of that are the amazingly animated graphics. This guy knows exactly what he’s doing. Definitely give this a shot, it is really fun.

THE GATHERING by oatsbarley

A city-builder. As a LD-entry. Haven’t seen that before.

I had some troubles with this one at first, as i did not quite understand the Hunger-mechanic, but once you figure it out, this works really well.  With a cool day-night cicle dominating the gameplay-mechanics, your village grows bigger every day, smaller every night, and finally strong enough to defend against the monsters coming out of the forest.  This combined with the really beautiful low-poly graphics (that day-night cycle looks amazing) makes this one of the entries i have spent the most time on.

_____________________________

Looking forward to the results, now that there are only hours, not days, left on the clock. Found a lot of enjoyable games this LD, and my scepticism towards the theme seems unreasonable now, as i really liked some games it inspired. Good job everyone.

Hi there!

Daniel Snd (The arts side of Infection Team) has recently been featured in one of WeiseGamer’s Interview with a Dev, talking about Infection 😀

The game was also recently featured in a Let’s Play by oNightPineberries

And the awesome Ludum Dare to Believe Series, from the Button Masher Bros! (At 7:50)

We’re very happy with all the videos we’ve been seeing of people playing Infection ^^  It also helps a lot to see where we can improve 😀

Here is my timelapse for this ludum dare, and link to game:  Dungeon Auto-Crawler

I felt like writing a bit about some of my thought process while making my game, and some reflections, I’ll also talk about some of the changes I’ve been making and planning as I’ve continued development, since it’s taken me so long to get around to writing this. This might just turn into me rambling on for a while about my game, but maybe someone will find at least part of this interesting or informative. For reference, I’ve also posted the art and sound effects from the jam version here. Anyway, if you haven’t played it yet you might want to check out my entry here before reading more (and thanks to anyone who has played and rated it).

Concept

The first idea I liked when thinking of the theme “beneath the surface” was some sort of traditional platformer where the level and action is being controlled by someone underneath the level. The general concept I eventually turned this into is that Jumpland is a theme park based on classic platformers where the main attraction is to travel through a platformer. The inspiration from classic platformers is why I went with “grassy” visuals similar to what you would expect out of an early Mario level, or Green Hill Zone in Sonic. Though one of my plans for future development is to have more “lands” with different visuals and obstacles, such as a “snowland” and “desertland.”

The above ground character (referred to as the “Guest” from now on) is a guest at this amusement park, while the underground character (referred to as the player character from now on) is using the underground maintenance tunnels to run the park. Thus you only directly control the movement of the player character to see where the Guest is going and use underground buttons to move pieces of the above ground level to help them get farther. In addition, the jumping of the Guest is actually the result of the player character triggering the jump boots the Guest is wearing. (Though in game there is no real indication that this is how jumping actually works).

I felt I wouldn’t have the time to do a good job building static levels, which is why I went with a randomly generated endless “runner” style game. When working on the post jam version I’m going to continue to focus on the endless mode, but at some point in the future I would like to at least consider also working on a set of static levels for this, possibly focusing on more finely tuned challenges or puzzles requiring more precise timing or thinking to get through.

Characters

For the Guest I went with an obvious grin and big eyes to reflect the idea of a kid enjoying a big amusement park. I went with a red cap due to the Mario inspiration and to avoid having to worry about drawing hair. Since the idea was for jumping to be triggered by the player character from underground, I needed some sort of “jump boots” instead of regular shoes. Thus the design was actually loosely inspired by the “Thwomp Stompers” from the Super Mario Bros. live action movie. The walking animation for the Guest is an exaggerated march to reflect how he will continue to blindly walk forward, oblivious to whatever danger he might walk into. Other details like the shirt color didn’t get much thought aside from getting something that I thought looked good.

For the player character I used a faster animation because I wanted an effect similar to a short cartoon character scurrying about. The lack of eyes is mainly a result of how I started with just a head and hat and liked the look of it without eyes, especially after I added the big nose. I guess the general concept of the character design initially came from the idea of an old construction foreman. This was why I started with just a yellow hard hat, which then led to the idea of adding a miner light. That was probably what also inspired me to add the notepad. There isn’t much reason for the green skin aside from how I felt more natural skin would blend in with the hat, and I thought that shade of green looked pretty good.

As seen in the above gifs, I’ve started working on improvements to both sprites. I added some shading to the edges of both their heads and bodies to help the sprites stand out. I’ve made the guest a bit slimmer which should help make the march animation clearer, and better differentiate them from the player character. In the case of the player character I’ve changed the shirt color to make it more visible in the dark tunnel. I’m also considering ways to allow customization, such as changing character colors or alternate hats, though this will likely require some significant changes to how the sprites are made and displayed in game. My current idea for this would be to have each character made up of multiple sprites (separate sprites for arms, legs, head, body, and hat). This would likely simplify the process of character customization, but I’m going to continue considering other options since there could be a hit on performance by using multiple sprite renderers for each character.

One of the things I’m really happy about is the mining light of the player character. When initially designing the character I quickly fell in love with the idea of having a spotlight attached to the character to handle the lighting in the tunnel. However, at first the character and light felt very disconnected due to it being a flat sprite using an attached spotlight to light a 3d tunnel. This was partially fixed by moving the light source further into the sprite, rather than actually coming from the headlamp on the sprite. This still didn’t look right due to the headlamp being dark like the rest of the sprite, so it didn’t look like the headlamp was actually on. This was then finally fixed by adding a point light positioned on the headlamp, and setting it to only illuminate the player character.

Original Configuration

Moved Spotlight

Added Point Light

Spikes

Originally when I came up with this idea I didn’t plan for there to be so many spikes. But, since I needed a way to kill the Guest, spikes were the most obvious first choice, and were quick to make. Then as I worked I never got around to making other ways for the Guest to die (such as being crushed, or other hazards). In addition, given the nature of the game I didn’t want to allow the player to leave the Guest walking into a wall while slowly looking and planning for what’s ahead. Thus I ended up with some obstacles with extra spikes thrown on the front to kill the Guest. Luckily there are a number of things I could do/have done in the post jam version to avoid the repeated use of spikes:

• Slopes.
• Crush deaths (Removes need for spikes on bottom of moving blocks)
• In ground pits (so that traps like the ones using a bridge would only need the bridge to rise to ground level,  while the spikes, or some other hazard, are below ground)
• Allow the Guest to get “stuck” walking into a wall, but set up a fail condition if they spend too long not moving forward.

Here are some screenshots showing some differences in the post jam version after implementing slopes and crush deaths.

Jam Version

Post-Jam Version

One of the issues I found while continuing to play after the jam was how the spike collision detection seemed unfair sometimes when jumping onto blocks. This is because I originally set the collision as a trapezoid to more accurately reflect the visuals of the sprite, Unfortunately this meant that sometimes when it looked like the Guest should of just landed on the edge of the top of a block, they would still barely hit the corner of the spike collider and die while standing on top of the box. As a result, I’ve now switched to using just a normal box collider on spikes, which fixes the jumping on blocks issue while not having any noticeable impact on other spike interactions.

Collision shown by green outline. Left=old, right=new

Buttons

In the jam version all the underground buttons behave the same, hold the button to raise a portion of the obstacle, which lowers back down while the button isn’t held. I originally wanted more variety in how the buttons affected the above ground, but I didn’t have time to rig up different types of button behavior, such as toggles and other ways to manipulate obstacles. In order to maintain consistency for the player in the post jam version new obstacles using this button will likely keep the same “hold” mechanic, though possibly with more variety in direction of movement (such as a platform which moves right while the button is held and goes back left when let go). I may also still implement toggle type obstacles, but they would likely have a different model used for interaction (such as a switch or lever).

In order to make it clear when the player could hit a button I added a spotlight above the button which is only turned on when the player is in position to press the button. I used the color of the light to signify if the button was being held. I felt this visual feedback was really important given the darkness of the tunnel and the possibility of a user not getting audio feedback if they are playing without sound (which would be very likely in the case of a mobile user). An extra bonus of the spotlight is that it allows the user to get a clearer view of the player character which usually only has the slight lighting of the headlamp on part of the head and hat. In the post jam version I’ve also made the button itself a little larger to help with visibility.

Sound Effects

The sound effects were all generated using Bfxr. I’ve included the sound effect WAV files in the assets zip (available here if you missed the link at the start of this post, or don’t want to scroll all the way back up), however you may notice they don’t sound the same as in game. This effect was done by adding an audio reverb zone to the camera and using the StoneCorridor preset to make it sound more like you are hearing the sounds while in the underground tunnel. I didn’t spend too much time generating sounds, so I will likely go back at some point and modify the current sounds, or create new ones, so that they sound better when heard repeatedly.

Music

The music was generated with abundant music. My process was mostly just using random seeds to generate MIDI files, which I exported to WAV using LMMS. Once I got something that I liked the sound of and fit well enough with the game the only other editing I did to the file was using Audacity to cut out some of the ending silence to make the loop less noticeable.

You can download the music track from soundcloud below.

Under The Hood

I’ve also been working on some internal structure changes to help make future changes and additions easier. The most significant of these is how I create and manage obstacles. Originally I created each obstacle as a prefab, and the script generating obstacle placement had a list of these prefabs. The main problem with this though is that Unity does not currently support nested prefabs (unless you use a third party plug-in, or build some system yourself). This meant that if I wanted to make a change to a common object (like the spike collision mentioned earlier) I would then have to waste time copying that change into each spike of each obstacle prefab, instead of simply changing the base spike prefab and having that change automatically propagate into the obstacle prefabs. So for now I’ve removed the large obstacle prefabs and now have an empty “Traps” gameObject in my scene, whose children are the gameObjects for each obstacle. With this I’m able to have individual objects like the blocks and spikes maintain links to their prefabs. Another benefit of this change is that the script generating obstacle placement only needs to be given the one “Traps” gameObject, and can then read its children at start-up to generate a list of obstacles to work with.

Newly split segment prefabs

In a similar manner, I’ve also split the “segment” prefab I was using to build the tunnel and ground. Now the underground portions are in one prefab, while the dirt and grass of the surface are in a separate prefab. This means now new prefabs used for different environments on the surface (such as the snow and desert I mentioned earlier) only need to contain the unique surface portion, while the underground tunnel is still only contained in one prefab.

The Future

In addition to some of the changes shown above I’ve added an options menu to allow for adjusting music and sound volume, as well as some options for input layout. I originally planed to have the initial release of the post jam Jumpland Underground for Android before the end of voting, but I think I’ll delay it some since I want to add a tutorial and maybe a few other small things before releasing on the Google Play store. Anyway thanks for reading all this, I’ll probably make another post once I’m ready for the initial release of the post jam version. But for now I’ll go play and rate some more games since there’s less than a day left to rate.

Not so much a post mortem about the game, but about my goals: Same as last time (LD#27) i wanted to use this oportunity to learn, to get to know PHPStorm and to make my first Phaser.js game using TypeScript.

Well, i have to admit, i am very happy with the outcome. Not that my game Beneath the surface with Sir Walter Wuffington is so great and enjoyable that i am utterly sattisfied with it as a game per se, but i achieved my goal of finishing my first Phaser.js game and i got know PHPStorm a bit. On the TypeScript side i have to admit that i had a hard time to adapt the way i code JS to the TS style and paradigms, but these things can’t be achieved over night so to speak.

THE GOOD

Which JS Gameengine to use? After wrestling with my bare hands (i.e. without any game engine) last time around, i decided that it is time to try one of those nice geme engieenes everybody was talking about. After doing some research Phaser.js caught my eye for being relatively new (i.e. supposedly not filled with obsolete clutter and paradigms), which seemed to have a relatively active community and responsive developers (rich hangs around a lot over at the html5gamedev forums) and mobile performance is one of their main focal points. Now, after implementing my first game with it, i am a convert. Try it out for yourself, there are tons of examples and tutorials, and on top of all that it has TypeScript bindings too

Is TypeScript really that much better than CoffeScript or just plain JS? No idea! Looks good though. I have to admit that even with all my motivation, i simply lacked the time to really make use of TS’s advantages. I managed to write my game in TS (well, TS compliant) but it is basically plain JS with a coating of TS to make it compile. After all the time i spent setting up the whole TS / PHPStorm / Phaser.js shebang, there was not that much time left to worry about elegant coding, sth. that i normally value very highly (although i am more an average programmer solutions that are generally more interesting and than elegant).

I found my new personal favourite IDE: for everyone out there pondering the question of which IDE to use for all their JS / PHP / HTML5 coding, i can give you a warm recommendation: PHPStorm (or WebStorm if you don’t need the PHP part, PHPStorm is WebStorm + PHP) After using Texteditors, KDevelop, Eclipse, Aptana for over a decade for all my WebDevelopment, i have found my new IDE of choice. The code completion, existing templates (jQuery, Drupal, WordPress, …) JS Debugging, the ease with which it integrates with other libraries absolutely convinced me, after being disapointed with the slow improvements and overal buggyness of Aptana.

THE IMPROVABLE

Expectations: As i mentioned before, due to the time constraint and my high expectations i had to the game itself, it is not as good as it could have been, but that was to be expected. As i spent probably two thirds of my time figuring out how to do stuff in Phaser.js, TS and PHPStorm, there was not that much time i could invest into the actual game making. I am still pretty content with the result, this time i even have some sounds (two to be exact, but it is a start). If i continue at this pace and stay with the current toolchain, i might produce sth. halfway decent around LD#31

I was still expecting too much from my game i guess, as i wanted to learn all that stuff but at the same time couldn’t bring myself to tone down my ideas for the game, as it would have felt even emptier / more boring than without the second view. It might be worth to scrap that second part and add some juicyness instead, but who knows, next time around i’ll probably have enough time for both as i will be more proficient in using my current toolchain.

THE BEATUIFUL

As always it was amazing to see how much can be achieved in such a short time. For myself i am happy about the work / learning i did in just 48h, and it is always stunning to see what other ppl can come up with in just 48h / 72h.

The fact that there are others like me out there that just love making games, creating stuff, seeing their ideas come to life and being (more or less 😉 ) enjoyed by others warms my heart.

I can’t wait till next time, till then
goeth forth and codeth

p.s: But please, don’t let my ramblings keep you from trying my game :

Beneath the surface with Sir Walter Wuffington

Tags: phaser.js, post-mortem, postmortem, typescript

As I received a lot of good feedback on my LD29 entry, “Oh My Oilrig!”, I decided to continue working on it. After rewriting the whole code base, I added more features and designed stuff for upcoming updates. Now, the first release version is up in Google Play! If you have an Android device, go grab it and tell me what you like ^_^ –> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manabreak.oilrig

Thank you so much for everyone who played my entry and gave me awesome feedback, wouldn’t have done it without you guys and gals.

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

Concept: Deal or No Deal crossed with an infinite runner wrapped around a sea monster… BENEATH THE SURFACE.  (Try web or download here.)

What worked

The Whirlpool
We put a lot of time and effort into the whirlpool.  As the central mechanic and visual element on the screen, we wanted to get it right.  We’ve had great feedback that the controls felt pretty solid, and the physics were well received.  What was interesting is that the original whirlpool had a clean, clear cut, unpixelated design.  What we found though, is that all that detail in motion made it incredibly hard to focus on the other details like where the player, coins, and enemies were located.  Instead we pixelated it, and stacked a partially transparent copy out of phase (at a slightly lower frame rate).  This allows us to get a background animation that doesn’t repeat for much longer without the hit to download size.

Deal or no Deal
We added a mechanic to let the player sacrifice a part of their score to escape death and get a chance to earn it back and then some.  The catch is that your score is held in chests of varying value and the one sacrificed is chosen at random.  I think it was well received among LD players because it was something a little different than the norm.

What didn’t work

Deal or no Deal
Outside of LD, we had a lot of feedback that the mechanic was sort of confusing.  In the middle of all the action, players were not intercepting the visual cues we had though would help explain what was happening to their coins.  A tutorial that would freeze the game and explain each part of the scoring as it becomes significant would probably have mitigated that.

Dying Immediately
Due to the way the vortex physics were calculated, every time the game restarted, the ship would be rotated directly towards the monster and die if the player didn’t know to hold an arrow key before hand.  We didn’t notice during development because the adjustment became second nature.  :-/ This was probably the source of most of the negative feedback received.  I finally hacked in a solution tonight as a post-compo bugfix.

Game Over Dialog
This screen was re-purposed from an earlier iteration, and really should have been redesigned from scratch.The red X was supposed to let you know you’d be sacrificing a chest, but instead indicated to players that they were not allowed to click it.

The white text above posing the question about sacrificing was never noticed because it was so bland compared to the rest of the screen.  We found several players chose to lock in their score when it didn’t make sense, or would restart when it was safe to continue.  We should have had other eyes on the screen earlier in the process.  There was no time to fix it at the end.

Mac Support
There were also a few random display bugs that I couldn’t track down since they seemed to only happen on Macs.

Workflow

Collaboration FTW
I’ve participated in LD before, but this was my first time working with an artist.  It was fantastic to be able to really focus on my strengths of design and programming and leave the art and sound to someone else.  I highly recommend it.  We used Google Drive to easily share assets.  It may have been overkill, but I also set up a Git repository for locking in each iteration of our design.

High-level mind map of rough gameplay elements

Getting Organized
The biggest hang up for me in getting a game from idea to reality was finding a way to capture and organize my thoughts.  I wanted something I could rapidly dump ideas into, but structured in a way that I could make sense of it still in a semi-sleep deprived state 47 hrs later. I finally stumbled upon XMind, a free “mind mapping “tool and it made all the difference.

It allows you to very rapidly transcribe brainstorming sessions and logically group your ideas.  Then you can collapse, expand, and zoom around your idea making it far more manageable.  When you get that next amazing idea, but aren’t at a great breaking point to go hash it out, you can quickly capture a few bullet points near related features.

Focus Like a Laser Beam
What this low-overhead organization really buys you is the ability to let 95% of the idea fall out of focus so you can really concentrate on the task at hand.  Our primary goal was to get something, anything playable.  Then we would iterate over that design and enhance game play based on what we learned work and didn’t.  Iterative design also gave our play testers  a chance to say “I wish this could…”.  We plugged this feedback right in to our mind map for a future iteration.  For example adding the monster, then later tentacles, then still later allowing them to move and adding the visual blending effects.

Collapsed Milestones (iterations) tree.

Fully expanded milestones tree.

Triage
Late in the compo when you’ve built up dozens of polish items and bugs, it can be easy to allow the scope creep to overwhelm you and torpedo your project.
At this stage it’s important to be able to triage your most significant faults and features and let the others lay to rest (until the post-compo version of course.) 😉

A lot of great ideas were left out, but I am really pleased with what we were able to pack in within the competition.  Several of the features we had to nix were the same ones many raters mentioned in the comments, which made us pleased to see we were on the right track.

Am I satisfied?

Absolutely.  I’m really pretty proud of what we’ve made.  It’s my highest quality work to date, and there is a lot of opportunity to wade in to the hosted and mobile markets with a few improvements.

Thank you all for being a part of this community, playing and rating my games, and inspiring the rest of us to greater levels with the works of your imagination.

Early in the jam I had a bunch of different ideas. This is pretty normal. I liked the theme, so much so that it almost gave me too many options for achievable small games I would have enjoyed making. In the end I went for my ‘fallback idea’ – something I’d wanted to try if I could tweak it to fit the theme: a Descent-like game with visuals similar to Zombie Gunship.

What I wanted to achieve was:
1) Set up 6DOF ship controls that felt good. Not necessarily identical to the original Descent, but along those lines.
2) Recreate visuals similar to Zombie Gunship (essentially inverted greyscale, with object highlighting)
3) Incorporate this into a small prototype game, as a sandbox for something bigger.

All image effects applied

I’m happy since I feel like I largely met goals (1) and (2), with some detours, while the gameplay component of (3) isn’t nearly refined enough.

For (1), I created a ship controller based on applying appropriate impulse forces each frame to a Unity rigidbody. Compared with a kinematic (non-Newtonian) object where you just move the position of the transform directly, using forces had the advantage of having proper rebound physics for collisions with terrain, obstacles and enemies. The key parameter to tweak here was “Drag” and “Angular Drag” on the rigidbodies, so that when you stop pressing a direction the ship glides to a halt as if it’s in a viscous liquid or dense atmosphere. I think I managed to get the feel of the controls working reasonably here, but they aren’t yet perfect. Also, as noted by a one commenter, colliding and rebounding with the rings can be annoying. Ignoring these collision will be something to experiment with in play testing to see if it reduces unnecessary frustration without spoiling the challenge.

For (2), I started with standard Unity Pro Image Effects. I quickly discovered there was no “invert colours” effect in the standard set. While this should be one of the simplest effects to make, I’m no shader jockey, so rather than going down the rabbit hole of creating this shader, I decided I’ve have to just go for visuals that were similar but not the same using what I had on hand. After a whole lot of playing around, I found a combination of Screen Space Ambient Obscurance (similar to SSA Occulsion) interacting with grey fog, plus Contrast Enhance and some noise gave an interesting grainy greyscale effect. This appears to be exploiting some artefacts many games would try to avoid – for instance, the Ambient Obscurance modifies the fog so that distant objects can all be seen, but still become coloured by the fog. By adding a local point light to the ship, and some nice splashes of colour to the terrain, the result was a grey noisy world with local “rainbows” on the terrain. I also added some Sun Shafts to enhance the ‘dusty’ feel of the environment.

Example of SSAO+fog interaction: Fog turned off

Example of SSAO+fog interaction: SSAO turned off

During initial play testing trying to shoot stuff and navigate rings, it became apparent that the objects of interest were not visible enough in the grey grainy world. I needed a way to highlight them. I made a second camera higher in the stack and added the rings and enemies to a Unity layer that only that camera could see. The ‘Right Way(tm)’ to do this is probably using a “replacement shader” on the camera, but instead I made a cyan-tinted transparent RenderTexture showing the output of the second camera rendered to a billboard and positioned it in front of the main camera. Even though this second camera was set to Depth Only, the alpha transparency channel didn’t work as I expected, so the main camera beneath it couldn’t initially be seen. I fixed this by calling GL.Clear(true, true, Color.clear) in OnPreRender() – not really sure why setting the initial buffer to transparent pixels was required, but it worked. This camera setup has the cool side effect of enemies and rings being visible through the terrain (which is invisible to this second camera). Since the texture and it’s billboard are square, it doesn’t cover the whole screen – this isn’t actually what I wanted, but it has the interesting effect of keeping enemies and rings greyscale when they are in peripheral vision. It looks better with a vignette filter applied to it, but I didn’t remember to add that until after the compo.

Here’s what it looks like without the second overlay camera highlighting rings and enemies … compared to the original above that Mech enemy just right of the nearest ring is almost impossible to spot

Goal (3) is really gameplay, and I’ll be first to admit it’s a little uninspired and a bit “meh”. My initial goal was really to just a “shoot stuff” game, but having done various styles of space shooter before, I knew there was a lot of work required both on the AI, wave design and scoring side of this to make it interesting. After spending time on (1) and (2), and making terrain, textures and enemy models, I felt like I didn’t have time to make the original gameplay goal fun or engaging. Ideas of a 3 stage, race, then shoot, then race+shoot structure were quickly discarded as too large in scope. I instead decided that a quick 3 lap time trial where people could compare scores would be a better ‘minimum viable product’ for a 48 hour game. I left the enemies in as an extra challenge and for some flavour, tuning the behaviour a little to try and suit the new gameplay, however as others have noted, it seems a little confused as to whether it wants to be a racing game or a shooting game. Actually, I think there are examples where both can work in some form (Wipeout, Death Race, the run for the exit in Descent, or even Mario Kart) but the enemy AI isn’t good enough in “Deep Dome” to make it work.

Instead of going down the rabbit hole of improving the enemy AI, I chose to stay up late putting together a simple background track in Caustic. I hadn’t used this software much, especially version 2, but it’s fairly intuitive if you’ve used and tracker & soft synth before so I was able to come up with a very simple techno track with a bit of an EBM / cyberpunk feel. Not amazing music, but I think it works to set the tone. As a result for spending time on music, the enemy AI remained quite brain dead (face and follow), but it was enough to cause the player a nuisance (sometimes too much of a nuisance) while navigating the track. I also spent far too much time trying to make random procedural terrain with Terrain Composer – powerful software with a horrible UI that I can never remember how to use properly.

This is the first time I’ve ever made and animated skinned mesh character. Common sense says I shouldn’t have even tried this during a 48 hour game jam if I’d never successfully done it before, but after many years of tutorials and attempting to use Blender, something just clicked. I suppose this is a result of perseverance, along with improvements to the Blender UI and documentation. The “Mech” walking animation is really bad, and uses the old legacy Unity animation system rather that Mechanim, but it’s still a significant personal milestone.

I need to put more time into learning how the nuts’n’bolts of how Unity image effects, and shaders in general, work. It’s a testament to Unity’s success in “democratising game development” that someone like myself who is not a hardcore graphics programmer can throw something like this together in 48 hours – however you can always do more by learning more, and I need to learn more. Maybe some naivety is an advantage, since you try crazy things, but I can’t imagine what I would have been able to come up with if I’d understood more of the details.

I’ve done a bunch of game jams now, some have worked out okay and some didn’t. I think next game jam I need to have a timer every 3 or 6 hours, where I must stop and prioritise what is important for the “minimum viable product” game. Throw out what’s not essential for gameplay and work on the most critical task or feature first. I generally try to do this anyway, but a more structured method would prevent me losing track of time while engrossed in implementing features that aren’t actually very important (e.g. terrain details). For this game, I did maintain a list of features and assets, but failed to effectively triage them. Also, the ‘improve gameplay’ task wasn’t given enough priority, partially since it’s a difficult thing to break down into micro-tasks – I’ll have to investigate techniques for doing this and work on it.

General responses to comments on the entry:

First – thanks for checking out my game and commenting ! On the whole we agree about the gameplay deficiencies – shooting or racing but not both would probably have worked best.

Yes, the system requirements are a little high, and it’s probably not very efficient. I recently upgraded my graphics card after many years with a Geforce7, so I didn’t notice how poorly it ran on “lower spec” machines until some more testing after submissions closed. It will run at acceptable frame rates on OUYA at 640×360 though !

Sorry if the controls seemed a bit much (I’m looking at you orangepascal ). I tried to keep the controls as FPS-like as possible, since this is what many people are used to. Of course, if you don’t play those types of games, the controls could be a little unfamiliar and overwhelming. The barrel roll was just for fun and could be ignored. I also left out strafe up/down for simplicity, but in a bigger game the option would be there to use it.

Maybe this will be the foundation of a bigger better game in the future, but for now I’ve got several other projects that have to be pushed out the door first.

Tags: postmortem, unity

SnakeFormer is the best puzzler I played during LD29. Part puzzle platformer, part Snake – beware, it gets dang hard almost immediately (level 2). You will be incinerated by lava no less than a few dozen times but energetic music is there to console you while you stumble through it.

WILL YOU ACCEPT ITS CHALLENGE?

BONUS: I did not get the title pun until long after completing the game.

Tags: gloating

This is my compo right here and here is the story of how I discovered it got nabbed.

HOW TO BE ANAL-ITICS

For The Hunger, I had no idea how many people played it and where they were stuck. So I added in some analytics using Countly, which I like because it’s real time.

Numbers are super high at … 20 new players a day, well super high for me I guess since I didn’t promote this thing so I was a bit surprised the other day when I saw this.

Exponention growth, but from where?

I did post it on Kongregate and Playdot, could K be that popular? Problem with Countly is it’s not made for web, it’s for mobile, so they don’t capture the source url. So I spent a few minutes implementing Google Analytics to a new build, that didn’t work so I did something very low tek: verion prefix with the domain, 1.1p for playfot and 1.1k for kongregate and in case they hotlinked it to my server I kept 1.1 for http://mcdroidgame.com. Then I waited to see which number was increasing the most. And got a surprise.

Sourcing from the stone age

Someone nabbed the .unity3d package and placed it on his own server.  

THE GRAND LARCENY

Making something for free is fun because if it sucks, who cares. But how is it if someone steals your free thing and makes some money off it? It does suck a little but what I am really interested is finding what site gets THIS MUCH TRAFFIC, because 1500 play a day is waaaaaaaaaaaay better than Kongregate.

So I google Water Miner Unity and find this…

This is not the Water Miner you are looking for.

The file was probably renamed and google leads nowhere.

What do you guys think, any idea which site it’s on?

Okay, I played a lot shortly after the compo, but after the first few days, as usually happens, I was swamped by various other activities.

Regardless, here’s my top five:

Compo
1. Epsilon Adventure

Quite an interesting exploration game full of puzzles.
2. Broken Heart

A beautifully stylised entry, quite emotional and moody atmosphere.
3. Like a Bird in the Sea

Very enjoyable questing system, along with a depleting oxygen level when you were beneath the surface. Nice level design.
4. Beneath the Memories

Amusingly narrated and brilliantly executed short storyline
5. Iceberg

Fast-paced puzzler, simple design and ugly as hell but fun to play.

Jam
1. The Stairs

Classic RPG-style game, a lot of content for an LD game.
2. Defy Hades

Platformer in which you obtain various powers which you use to your advantage (or not) to complete levels. Looks & sounds beautiful.
3. SUBLEVEL ZERO

3D space shooter, quite an impressive entry.
4. Charly’s Psyche

Surreal… I don’t know what to call it. Weird and wonderful, nonetheless.

5. Obolos

Beautiful and relaxing.

Also check out my game, Descent 😉

I’m taking all suggestions for my post compo edition of my game. Nothing new has been done as of yet, but I’d definitely like to make a full game out of my LD entry.

Check it out here

Let me know what you think I should add and also suggestions for the name of the game possibly

This was a great Ludum Dare for us, specially for Dick because it was his first one. We gotten so many positive comments, we started to work on a better version of Wormhunter for all who left such comment.

Keyboard Controls:
Move: arrow keys / WASD
Attack: E
Dodge: Q
Throw beacon: 1, 2 or 3

Controller Controls:
Move: Left thumbstick
Dodge: Left bumper/trigger
Attack: Right bumper/trigger
Throw beacon: Action buttons, except the top one.

You need to stand still to throw a beacon.
For co-op you will need a controller and single player can also be played with a controller.
In co-op when a player is eaten by a worm, the other player can save the eaten one. Just kill the worm.

We really like to have your feedback. If you want to give feedback, you can leave it as a comment on this page or via Twitter: @dickpoelen or @smallgaming

Where are the links to the builds.

Windows build
Mac build
Linux build

Enjoy and lets us know what you dislike or like about this build!

As LD29 comes to a close I just wanted to say a big “Thank You” to everyone for making this jam so amazing. You’re all diamonds in my book!

Hello my name is Tom (tom3d.de) and I have here created the characters for our game.

The Main Character should be a little creepy imp and i searched the internet and in the surrounding area for suitable references.

As inspiration i found Quasimodo from the movie Hotel Transilvania.

For the shape of the character I use Sculptris from Pixologic. The advantage of Sculptris is that you not need to worry about the mesh, as it completely dynamically divides the mesh depending on subtleties. So you just let your creativity run free and do not care about the technical stuff.

After sculpting you can paint a basic texture on the mesh directly in Scultris.

so far so good.

The mesh is of course in a very high resolution and must be first in a playable low poly shape.

This I did by hand with the beautiful Retopolize tools in Modo 801

then i have shaded the high poly mesh and baked all on the the low poly mesh texture.

creepy texture

and the final result at the end was the nasty little imp that running through our game and defended his Princess.

so now you can also try out our game the same

play our BlackWald Forest

Our post-compo version of Kitsuni is now playable!  It should have fixed a lot of the issues with the original, although it is still very much a work in progress.
If people like it or are interested in seeing more, then we may continue to develop it into something much bigger.

Play it on our page HERE

So as some of you may know I put out a open call like a weak ago to get turned on any awesome LD29 games I might not have played. My goal was to play as many as possible (and attempt to beat them all) and then come up with a top 10 in each category. Well, I’ve played 350 games (third highest reviewer of this LD), played every game that was requested by somebody in that post (Which was a lot, thanks for the interest), and I’ve beaten most of the games (There is one LD game I know for sure I’m the only person who has beaten…), and now I’m compiling my video of my picks for top tens in each category and it looks like it should be done… in more than a couple hours.

D’oh :/

I’m still going to finish it and share it with you guys, I just really really wanted to have it done before the end of judging seeing as interest in such a video is liable to drop off very very fast after judging is over. So for those who are among the 350 I’ve reviewed (or anybody else who is interested) please keep an eye out for it, the results of judging will not influence my top 10s which I’ve already decided. Thanks for being such an awesome community, guys, and I hope you like the video when it is finally done.

what keeps going through my mind

Finally managed to get a post jam version of my game out there.  I think this better captures the look and feel that I was going for.  You can play it here:

http://jasonlay.itch.io/truth

I also appreciate everyone who has taken the time to play my jam entry.  Your comments are valuable and will help make me a better game designer.

If you still haven’t played and rated the jam version, there is still time, play now before it’s too late and you never find out the truth!

Truth

I’m probably not going to find out the results of the Ludum Dare until tomorrow. I spent the long weekend (Victoria Day in Canada) hiking in the woods, and I’m going to crash soon.

I want to say before it’s all said and done that everyone did a fantastic job! I played and rated 350 games, and there were so many outstanding games that I lost count. I hope one of those wins this thing!

As for my game (Kill or Kill ), as I’ve said before I’m making it into a full proper release. The end result probably won’t resemble the Dare game too much, I’m taking the core ideas behind them and putting them into a more solid package. I’m proud of what I made, but it definitely couldn’t work as a complete game that I could sell. I hope to have something new to show in the near future.

This has been an amazing experience, and I really hope that everyone who participated got what they wanted from the experience!

Sorry we are a little late for our Post Mortem, but here it is folks !

This was our first game jam together, and even the first game jam for some of us. We are quite satisfied with what we were able to do, and we have learnt a lot. Of course not everything went perfectly, that’s also why we learnt so much, so here is our post mortem in the classical ‘what went right and what went wrong’ format.

What went wrong :

– We were a bit too ambitious during the brainstorming phase. There were a lot of features in our initial project and we had to cut off a lot of it. But even with a “lighter” project, we finished our game ‘just in time’ letting very little time for tweaking and debugging. That’s probably why our game play is so tricky and our hitbox strange.

– Mapping and level design. We left it for the end and then rushed to make some maps. That’s why some map were buggy. Due to our game play, we had to make a LOT of map.

– We didn’t knew our tool. We never used haxeflixel before and weren’t really ready for a project. We lost a lot of time searching for way of doing things we needed.

– Our developping environment wasn’t fully operational and we lost some time configuring everything.

– Random world generation was a really tricky part, even though it was a must have feature for the fun part of our game.

What went right :

– General feedback were good.

– We were pretty happy with the final result.

– Using haxeflixel was a huge gain of time.

– Despite our problem in the begining with our environment, we had a really good workflow. Everyone knew what to do and the task repartition went seamlessly.

– We were able to release the game in time. We included all the feature we defined after the cut off.

So, here we are ! If you haven’t played at our game yet, don’t hesitate to take a look at it !

Link to our game

As the results are being calculated, the winners posted, the scores tallied, and the cheese being eaten, I would like to take this time to say thanks to this community for an amazing ‘first’ LudumDare.

The feedback I got was great, the games I played were excellent, and the posts I made were lame and unoriginal, so all around this was an amazing experience.

So, Good Luck to everyone, and don’t give up if you don’t place high. After all this is about making games, not ‘winning’! The point is that people played YOUR game, how fricken cool is that!

GG, everyone, GG

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2014 at 6:06 pm and is filed under LD #29. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Warning spoilers and loud language below.

Radioactivity

What does a warehouse full of radioactive tutu wearing ninjas have to do with my post compo update? NOTHING!**

But this sample of some new commands does:

Consider, Train, & Kill

Sick of that tutorial woman talking about her favorite game? MURDERED.

Give

A cute little teddy stranded in your inventory? FREEDOM FOR THE BEARS! I wonder what else you can give…

Rest

Feeling a bit tired from all the reading err murdering and pasting? REJUVENATE!

Yeah no gif for this one. Use your imagination!

Skills & Skill Reset

Need to reveal really far back, to dig up stuff beneath the surface  of time but just got your slay on? ADAPT AND OVERCOME!

Wordwrap, Spelling, & Placeholders

Words. You can read them as intended now, whole. Spelling – fixed. Placeholders – eliminated.

IDK WHAT THIS IMAGE MEANS, BUT I’M YELLING ABOUT IT

1800 Lines of code, 1200 statements,  complexity, and other data I’m not yet sure how to interpret. But look! I’m in the green hoop sometimes! If I can’t green hula hoop, life is not worth it.  Thanks source monitor you give life purpose again.

*The surface of Cuer is radioactive. That’s why the game takes place beneath the surface.

**Oh wait there is a radioactive heart…I wonder what that’s for?

Holy crap that blue bird with feathers website!  I always for get to say Follow @Crefossus . Not this time. If you got this far you know you want to increase my followers over 11. We can do it! You can help! If we get to 100 I might ask for money to make stuff. Oh wait…I’m not supposed to say that here. Are you delving me? Get out of my head! Stop seeing what’s beneath the surface.

After today I can’t make that joke anymore. But I probably will anyway.

Hey there, fellow jammers!

Results are almost out!

Have you ever noticed how, during voting, you always play one or two games that make you go like “Holy Crap, this guy is totally winning this LD!”, but then the final results come out and you actually haven’t played many of the greatest games? So many jewels are hidden right now beneath the surface (ha!) of the voting system, and in a few hours they’ll be revealed! What crazy, marvelous games I have missed this time? PRETTY ANXIOUS RIGHT NOW!

Anyway, since we have to wait a few hours longer, I decided to write about this struggle that was very present during the development of our game Last Dive.

In a nutshell, as you grow into a “mature” indie developer or whatever, you usually lean more and more towards being really minimalistic, going for the smallest possible scope, and then adding lots of polish to it. However, for this theme in particular, we got ourselves into an “all or nothing” feeling, where we felt that it was either a boring theme, or the most awesome theme EVER for us – as long as we had the time to make the game that we wanted to make. It wasn’t a minimalist game for a 72 hours timeframe, but if we cut anything out of the scope, the design breaks and we don’t wanna make it anymore…

Stupid and crazy, right? Have you ever felt that way about a project?

Anyway, I wrote a little thing about minimalism versus giving up your vision, in the context of this Ludum Dare. Considering the irreversible path towards simplification that we have been trailing over the last few years, our participation this time was quite a thrill. I honestly don’t think we could pull this together if we hadn’t been participating in Ludum Dare for a few editions now.

Here’s the game, if anyone still has the stamina to play through one more game! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=11099

So, as always, a big THANK YOU to this community! The things we learn here we are being able to apply on our main project, and that is invaluable to us. Seriously, dude. Pixel Cows is very much *defined* by Ludum Dare right now! 😀

Cheers!

High five for a good Ludum Dare.  *High fives you*

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2014 at 6:39 pm and is filed under LD #29. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Play the LD29 COMPO HERE

Here it is some screenshoot about my game, if you didn’t play it , what are you waiting for, there’s no more time…..Play it.

Ripple Runner now has an official post-compo version!  Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy Ripple Runner Deluxe!  Featuring 3 new stages, more difficulty, more parallax scrolling backgrounds, extra level mechanics, and of course, more awesome chiptune music!

For a complete changelog (we’re at v1.22 now), look at the submission page here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=7285

Here’s a look at the new backgrounds and stages:

Ripple Runner has already received a lot of positive feedback and support from you guys, and I really appreciate it!  Hopefully the new post-compo update will satisfy those of you who were left wanting more from the original. ^_^

And last, but certainly not least, I’ve included the 3 new songs in a new album release, so grab the new music here!

http://ddrkirbyisq.bandcamp.com/album/ripple-runner-deluxe-original-soundtrack

It’s not too late!  4 hours remain in voting, you can still play and rate Ripple Runner now!

I was initially going to submit a post compo post, but the lack of time during the past weeks changed my plans. Perhaps I should do one in the upcoming, even though everything is over soon.

I’ve had a blast, and no silly migraines this time :). I would just like to share a gameplay video and timelapse video I made for Cubulis.

(I believe the GUI got messed up due to a programming mistake)

The timelapse is still uploading I believe, so please be patient. Good luck guys, and good night

Play Cubulis here!

How did I do this??

I got first place in Innovation. What can I write about this? I don’t even know.

Tags: first place, innovation

Hey, here’s a coding time lapse for compo entry PLANET CORP. We used Coffeescript and HTML5 to drive our game. Enjoy!

You can play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33058

Just 2 hours..  And my first LD is over. I am little sleepy. If you want, play and rate my game Beneath your feet.

I now open this:

And go watch Step by step.

Finally the post-compo version of Pond Tycoon is released on both Android and iOS!

The original version as well as post-compo can still be found by simply browsing to the Pond Tycoon entry page if you prefer that

Feel free to check out my game if you think it looks interesting, and if you feel like sharing your thoughts, I’d love to hear your comments!

Finally, many thanks to everyone for making this a great ludum dare! Special thanks for the guys at Sony Hackathon as well! Hope to be back next time 😀

Hello,

now that LD29 comes to its end, I wanted to write my favourites post. I’ve tested much games so far, but not enough I think. Many gameplay, graphic or sound jewels are lying beneath the surface of untested games. But from the list of games I’ve tested, these are my favourites:

Ripple Runner for all it is. Great music, graphics and Gameplay.

Le Ver for the mood that let me shiver.

Platform Hero for the music and gameplay, which i liked very much.

Thought Police for the story, the drawings and the amount of good written text.

Scary Ugly Face for the story, the well made graphics, it makes me smile and Sir Face.

Giant Pumpkin for the graphics, the sound, the gameplay and the pumpkin.

Room Cleaning because I never had so much fun cleaning a room like in that game.

The Sun and Moon because I couldn’t have stopped the game before solving the last level.

Mine Cannon for its gameplay and the jewels.

Me & my metal detector because of its sounds that make me lough everytime I hear them.

This list is not sorted in any order and I’ am happy to take part at LD29.

Bye and hope we see us again next time at LD30,

ruerob.

This year I was short on time and ideas so I didn’t post much throughout the competition. I wanted to say thanks to all who played and rated my game this time around and say that I had a great time overall with other games. I also wanted to take the time and publicly thanks and point out some of the great tools I used to create this game in such a short period of time.

First off is the game engine, Stencyl, which has proven over and over that it is an excellent tool for those dedicated enough to develop a polished product. A great community and helpful individual worked with me to get the lighting effects in later levels to work, something I had never done before.

Graphics: Well I used photoshop for my graphics and unfortunately waited until after the jam to purchase, Pickle. Pickle has since been the best tool i’ve used thus far in creating pixel graphics and most importantly animations and sprites. All of which have improved since my purchase. Please support this excellent tool.

Finally I would like to address the audio. The SFX were generated using the very popular CFXR while the music was generated randomly using an amazing website (abundant-music.com) that I was directed to during the jam. The game is flash and browser based so please if you have a minute head over and CHECK IT OUT HERE. Thanks and good luck. 

With my first Ludum Dare coming to a close, I’d just like to say thank you to the moderators for putting this together and to the community for making it such an exciting event!!

I definitely plan on doing more, and plan to do even better, regardless of the results tonight.

I played over 40 games (which I thought was a lot, boy was I wrong), and all of them showed true creativity and skill. Even though some games may fail in certain areas, I can honestly say I found something unique and fun in each and every one. Great job, LD Community! Everyone should be proud!

Best of luck tonight and congrats to those who meet or exceed their expectations!

Regards,

– JimmyBoh

I’d just like to say Goo djob to all the participants and everyone involved 😀 I had alot of fun playing and rating the different games. I look forward to the next Ludum Dare Good Luck in the Final Round! 😀 -Mallot1 www.codingrevolution.blogspot.com

This Ludum Dare was a lot of fun! I played a lot of awesome games and I’m looking forward to LD 30! After seeing a lot of post compo versions of games, I was motivated to flesh Cry Baby out a little more. One of the main things I added were some sound effects. I’ll probably update this a bit more in the future, but for now I’m rather happy with it. You can check it out here: Cry Baby

What was added:

-You can play as a boy or girl

-You can get hurt by getting hit by enemies

-Enemies can shoot lasers!

-SOUND EFFECTS (some thing are still silent though)

-Hidden pathways containing hidden items

-“Special” ending if all hidden items are collected

-Some bug fixes and tweaks here and there

I was so curious about the Ludum Dare ratings I decided to sleep in tomorrow and view them on release.

For my relaxed approach to the jam, I’m pretty fond with the ratings.
I hoped to get a higher rank in mood, but place 48 of 1004 Jam entries still is OK.

Getting into the top 25 has become so much harder!
5 Jams ago I would have gotten with such a score at place 2 …

Anyway, it was a great jam to me!

I created a game which is meaningful to me and learned a bunch on my way.
I hope that the gameart I released as CC0 will help other gamedevelopers (maybe you?) with their future projects!

Best wishes,
Rick

P.S.: You can play my game here, in case you missed it.

I have to say my first Ludum Dare has been pretty incredible!

What blew me away the most was how nice everyone is! There were multiple people who couldn’t play my game, decided to take the time to look into the problem, and then commented or e-mailed me how to fix it. I mean, that’s crazy how much effort some folks put into just trying to play my game! They could have easily just rated it N/A and then moved on to the other ~2,500 or so games. Heck, they could have spent that time rating games and raising their coolness!

Honestly, thank you to all the LD people who spend time fixing problems in other peoples’ games or who take the time to give meaningful comments and constructive criticism! The vibe here is just awesome!

Also, now that results are out, I’m pretty blown away with how my first game did! I really liked the LD theme, but I never would have expected to win a medal for it!

I can’t wait ’til August, I’ll definitely be there! 😀

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

I’m so happy because of the released ratings that I created a graph in LÖVE about my progresses during my LDs.

You can download the file here, if you are interested in.

I made a video as well, it shows my absolute first impressions. Check this out! I’m kind of pleased anyway, and even though I expected a little bit more, it was still far my most successfull Ludum Dare event!

I hope everyone else feels the same way.

– Katamori

Tags: ld29, statistics

These people’s pages were ‘not found’ and these are the awards that they won:

48 Hour Compo
drilltail – Innovation 2nd
pixelpun – Graphics 3rd
geekdrums – Audio 1st
brian-corr – Humor 2nd
toki-anholmes – Mood 3rd

Jam
negiyan – Audio 1st
chickadeegames – Humor 2nd
dmcfarline – Humor 3rd
simonlarsen – Mood 1st
simonlarsen – Innovation 1st

Congrats to all of the winners! 😀

Not gonna call this a post-mortem, literally anyone can make the player move around looking for stuff in a couple of hours using Game Maker. I do, however, wanna share why I made Oshan and how I retained my sanity after I scrapped my original idea.

The original idea:

Before you ask, no I won’t go back to this for the foreseeable future.

I wanted to make a “Underground Moé First Person Shooter” — I did my best, I swear.

The first day went on to get 3d to work on Game Maker, went pretty good but could not get a nice camera wobbling nor a satisfying shooting. It was kinda ambitious, in the sense that I’ve never, ever worked with 3d before I mean, I come from making Visual Novels for god’s sake, even a platformer would be a pain in the ass for me. I was confident I could do it but I wasn’t having fun and the game did not felt good… it even gave me headaches and stressed my soul in more than one way.

After wasting one day and a half on this failed execution of an idea, I fell on my bed, and thought.

“I need to relax… I should make a game to relax”

“What’s relaxing to me and is beneath the surface? ooh! floating underwater…”

“What if I make a game about just finding funny stuff under the water?”

And that’s how Oshan came to be.

This is what caused Capc*m’s demise.

The original idea with Oshan was to make this cute, colourful sea explorer — you know, blue oceans, different kind of sea creatures, the usual stuff, but I have quite some time getting around the idea of a series of games that are built around a “Peaceful End of the World” — stories that are not about survival, but about finding what made humanity and our civilization so beautiful before we destroyed everything, so I decided to take a monochromatic approach to visuals to get some desolate ambient going on, in the vein of a modern Game Boy game and try to make the items you can find the weirdest things I could think of. Now, most of the items I wanted in-game couldn’t make it since I did Oshan in approx. 6 hours and I was already incredibly tired due to my failed FPS attempt, but I’m satisfied about the ones that made it. Talking Octopi, sunken game corporations and mysterious talking clothing were, at least in my mind, a combination that basically said… The world just kept going without humans, but our blueprint is still here.

Yeah yeah, not very beneath the surface apart from the fact that the game is underwater, but in reality I just wanted a game to relax myself, it was boring to me, but I didn’t cared, somehow just wandering around got me in a very good mood, almost therapeutic and can’t stress how much it worked for me, it made me realize that whenever I want to have a game idea, I just need to see myself in the mirror and ask “what do I want to feel?” the rest will just follow.

Good! so, that’s why I did a cute but boring game. I’m very happy with the results! but I’m going to work hard and use the knowledge I gained from this LD to make cute AND fun games that can also make me feel how I want to feel when the time comes, and you should do so as well, make a game about how you want to feel and the rest is just like make game.

Lots of people said I should flesh out more this idea, and might do so once I get some work done on my current project or maybe after the Space Cowboy Jam, I liked Oshan enough and want to make it even more relaxing so I can play it whenever I feel bad.

Edit: forgot to link the game! Oshan, my compo entry lives here.

Yay for actually placing this time.

Link to Game

#66 in Graphics.

Thats okay. I was hoping for a Top 25 here, because i had for once not another pixel-art entry, but i can’t complain. The 65 entries in front of me all look very good as well.

What surprised me is that i actually finished worse than the last time i participated in the fun-category. Only #823 with an average of 2.72 stars.  While its obvious that i did not have the most original gameplay and some people struggled with the controls a bit, i definitely thought i would finish comfortably above my confusing and mediocre last entry here. The problem was, i think, that i did not manage to encourage the players to play any more than 2 minutes or so. Some people complained that the transition from dying to restarting took too long, and thats definitely true. They just died 2 or 3 times, got no feeling for the game, and quit.

Apart from that, i am happy i went with 3D visuals this time, i enjoy them a lot more and find myself creating the look i want much faster than with ye olde Pixel Art. Will definitely continue on this way the next time i participate.

I am also happy some of my favorite games finished pretty well. Until next time, then.

Hey guys! This has been my first Ludum Dare attempt, and I must say that I am really pleased with the results. My game, Beneath the Surface, has taken a nice spot in the mood category top 25 at #17.

I’ve used percentiles because they make the game look better [insert sly laugh]. Here are the results taken directly from the game’s page, if you insist.

Something that I’ve observed is that when games rank well in a category they usually do the same in other categories. My game’s ranking across all the categories were quite erratic (it’s worth noting, though, that the game I’ve created is definitely not fun and humorous). Maybe the game isn’t as good as I think it is. Perhaps it’s just dumb luck. Or just luck. Or just dumb. But anyway, it’s not bad for a first attempt, right?

You can play my entry here.

Congrats to all those who won, and I hope all the best for you guys in the next LD. See you around!

This was my first LD attemp and i must say….iam very pleased ! I am not last place ^^ Heres my results :

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33146

Hey everyone! We are the Button Masher Bros!

Ludum Dare is done – but we aren’t! Ludum Dare to Believe! Ep. 10!

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: Igneous
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: torcado194
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=5839

Title: Beneath the Lab
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Techblogogy
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=25556

Title: The Creature Beneath
Category: Compo Entry
Creator: Otrora Interactivo
Link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=32989

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.

MY FIRST GAME???

AT 13 YEARS OLD???

788th PLACE????

I am absolutely staggered: I was expecting to be last!

The 35 of you who rated, you’re all amazing!

Everybody who gave feedback, you’re all awesome!

Everyone who submitted a game, well done too!

All else I can say is, see you all next time!!!

72 in mood! Oh, my GOD! Thanks a lot people, I love you all! Even though my goal for each LD is to get better than last LD had failed this time if one judges by overall (last LD I scored 6 more than this one) I still think I succeeded, I never’ve been in top 100 in any category, so this is big deal for me! This LD was a lot of fun and now I am waiting for August even more! (You see, I have a birthday on 26th of August!)

Now, let’s look at graph, they’re so popular these days!

As you can see, I gradually getting better in most categories. The Big problems I can see is Fun and Theme (Though I guess, I can call it fixed because of this LD). I don’t really care about humor, as I never intended to make a humorous game.

Well, thanks for reading this unformated, random text. And I’ll see you all next Ludum Dare!
– RedPanda

Tags: graph, ld29, rankings

1. How many ratings are in each category?

2. Why visual mode sometimes doesn’t work?

3. How to see list of all games and its rating?

Here is a comparison of my 5 entries to Ludum Dare.

As you can see the game nailed it in pretty much every category.

I got better ratings on Innovation, Overall and Graphics for my Ludum Dare 24 entry (black) – the only time I jammed with someone else.
The rating on Fun is slightly better for the Ludum Dare 26 entry (green)- my only 3D entry so far, which has in fact a really funny Review:

Awful PC Games: Iceberg Explorer Review

All in all I’m pretty fond! I’m learning a lot and work more intuitive and effective.

Best wishes,
Rick

P.S.: You can play my game here, in case you missed it.

On the page for my entry, I see these scores and rankings:

However, when I look at the top 100 Overall (Jam) results, the rankings appear differently:

In the top 25 list, I appear 20th:

Why are they different?

Anssi from MooseflyGames here! You can find our LD29 entry, StromnetZ here. With that out of the way: the results are finally in (well, they have been for hours now)! Of course I had to take the data and see how we did compared to our previous entries. As can be seen from graphs 1 and 2 (check the full post for graphs and more!), our results are once again pretty solid. Even though our game was somewhat lacking in humor and mood I’m really glad we managed to raise the “Overall” and “Fun” ratings from our frustratingly difficult LD28 entry. Didn’t make it into top 100 in any categories, but we still have our humor ranking of 45 in LD27 to look back on on our deathbeds. Yay. Don’t feel like cluttering the whole front page, so be sure to read the full entry by clicking somewhere, beneath this paragraph maybe?

Graph 1. Ratings (click for a bigger version)

Graph 2. Percentiles (click for a bigger version)

Adding a leaderboard into our game also gave us an interesting tool for tracking the amount of games finished and the scores people managed to get. As of this morning our score-database had 610 total entries. Although a large chunk of them were from our friends and other people who didn’t participate in the voting process, here are some statistics on the scores attained: 188 entries (around 31% of total entries) had a score of zero, 341 entries (around 56%) were below 10k points and 535 entries (around 88%) were below 100k points. The highest score of 400752 points was attained by Shinetti, good job. Too bad we didn’t see any unfamiliar names on the leaderboards, but I guess people don’t want to waste too much time rating a single game. And the bar was indeed set pretty high by some hardcore players. One thing that amazes me though is the number of plays with a total score of zero. I would really love to know if that’s due to a bug or if people really had a problem getting anywhere in our game.

Managed to play and rate almost 160 games too! It always amazes me what people manage to make in such a short time, so I thought I’d list some of my favourite games so others can experience them too! Here are just some of the most interesting games I had the chance to enjoy in no particular order:

Go! Go! Purgatory! – Pretty, and somewhat witty (heh) visual novel.

They Launched a Probe! – A game about programming computers. IN SPACE!

Ripple Runner – A really nice and complete rhythm game.

Beneath The Surface Of A Scratch Ticket – A game about scratching tickets. Wonderful!

Water Miner – Really impressive tech in this “digging” game. Funny sound effects too.

Dowser (Lucy) – Cute girls (and uncles) doing cute stuff. Yay.

A Mole’s Life – It’s as if I really am a mole. Really got me going.

Wunderheilung – Amazing art and a bizarre mood. Doctor game 1/2.

LAIR M.D. – Same as above really, doctor game 2/2.

Beneath Colossal – Control a colossal, wreck stuff, look fabulous.

Tenkosei ROBO – It’s like watching anime. But it’s a game. A typing game. How confusing! How wonderful!

Inside Look Activity Book – I bet I would’ve grown up to be an upstanding citizen if I had had such an activity book as a child.

The Show Must Go On – Organize a play. All by yourself. Who needs actors anyway.

Safety Blanket – Nope. NOPE. Don’t play at night.

I look forward to competing with you all again in LD30! Moosefly over and out.

Tags: graphs, statistics

It’s not something totally unexpected, but anyway. It seems that all your ratings can easily be affected by overal impression of your game, and you can get higher theme ratings with higher overall or fun ratings for example. And thinking of it now I’m not even sure I myself was obective enough in my ratings

Hello every one,

first congruats to the participantes of this wonderfull event.

i’m really sad as i have participate only once in ludumdare a year ago, and it was an amazing experience, because for some reason exams are equal to ludumdare :p.

but this is not why i’m posting, i’m posting because now i’m a happy man, as i have create my first(ever ever) game, and creating it was the most (aaah i can’t discribe it, you people are devs and you now what i feel).

when first i’ve start this project i never thought at once that it will be  a game, and i remember that i have create the project file in eclipse a 10 months ago, and for more than 2 months a was playing on the project in that folder trying to load an image, or a text file, or (you now), and when i start school, i’ve had to make a project that a teacher will give us, then i say, why not working on this game, in that same folder :D, i propose it to the teacher then he said why not, then the journey began. after 6-8 months i have managed to finished it (well not really but it’s playable, and it even has a story 😀 ) but the probleme is that i still cannot post it in the play store, however i have a video to it :).

please please guys your opinion will mean a lot to me, as this is really wath i want to do for the rest of my life, nice watching and please email me, leave a comment like share, just help me make it visible to the world, so that i can put it in the store,

thanks for listening (reading actualy) to my stuped words.

note: the project is in French i’m suck at French (and even english :D)

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS5sHbgoueY

The ratings just finished and even though I came #1063 it was still a great experience to not only making a game but to play others as well.

Thank you guys who participated. Hopefully we all will do better next time.

Hope to see you guys in 93 days! (Sorry for bad english, not my native language.)

Tags: First LD #29

I made They Launched A Probe in less than 48h after completely screwing up the first day of the weekend but then extending it into the Jam.

It’s an idea I’d had kicking around for a while, write programs for that take sensor input data and let you control spaceships.

Anyway I got something out for a jam entry and you’ve gone and given it SILVER for INNOVATION!

w00t

Thanks all! And thanks to playcanvas for allowing me to actually write this in the time.

Not much to say here, other than the fact that I’m proud of the outcome. I’m currently working more on the post-compo version of Villager, as I’ve gotten a ton of useful feedback off it’s release. Thanks to everyone who played the game!

Full ratings:

Tags: first, ratings, villager

This is my first Ludum Dare (age 14 for your infomation) and I had never made graphics before (as your could tell if you played my game). I made my game not knowing what I was doing. After I submitted it i kept looking at the comments and more people said it was funny. I didn’t think is was meant to be funny (now like an idiot I realise it). So when I got #266 in humour for my first ludum dare game that I thought was not funny I felt happy and confused. But #266! Did you guys vote wrong! Anyway thanks guys and see you next time!

-Oobie

Hey0, can’t believe I placed above 500 in any catagory, but here I am 162nd for theme and 243rd for Fun! Thanks a lot for anybody who played my game and enjoyed it, hope all of you guys had fun and enjoyed my theming. Anyway, great, super successful first Ludum Dare, most likely going to be participating again!