My game, Alternation is FINALLY complete. I can sleep in peace.

My Entry

I lost the first day trying to figure out what to do, so I didn’t make it on time.

I also switched from my Java-based environment to a Flash-based environment with FlashDevelop and FlashPunk.

I won’t be able to finish it for the jam as well… But I’m still developing this game, since it’s becoming something nice.

Below the animations I just got working:

The protagonist and her sword.

Good luck for everyone that are still in. =)

I finished ‘Constellation’, a relaxing little game about transporting a strange assortment of goods between star systems.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=25909

Here are some screenshots:

Let me know about any balance issues.

Wow, this Ludum Dare was quite the experience — in many ways.

-Origin Story-

My history in programming actually started out in middle school when I discovered Qbasic and its “sample games” Qbasic Gorillas and whatever Snake game was there.  Since then I always like programming and games in general.  However, I haven’t in all these years complete many things, save some old Tetris 2 game in Qbasic.

I studied C and C++ on my own, but nothing much came out of it.  I -was- however always following the programming scene, watching what others have done and how the game making process works.  Because of this, I have a lot of information I didn’t do much with.  Only recently in the past couple of years have I started to try to take my experience and make something become of it.  Of course, I’ve only taken up game programming as a hobby.

Last Ludum Dare I thought I was gonna get my first finished game.  I picked a poor time with school getting heavy at that point — I couldn’t finish anything.  This time it’s different.

I got a horrible-looking SHELL of game, but it’s there anyway!  I certainly want to get -legitimate- graphics into it and change the design.  Music and fine tuning are required, too.  I think I did a great job in not putting too many features in the game.

The scope of the game is what got me.  I was trying to go for a story and I realize that it can easily get out of hand in a 48-hour competition.  I think I’m really good at ideas, but implementing them is a different story — let alone in a short time table.

I think with better artwork and some design tweaks, I think it can be a compelling experience, even without more complicated programming.  Still good, though.  I’ll definitely do more contests.

If anything, my goal of getting a basic game out was accomplished.

Rough screenshots of first LD submission

I have some more quick progress! Tile drawing now supports images, and I mastered jumping, in both dimensions.

 

Best of luck to the other Jammers, and good job all those who have finished the competition!

First forgive me my bad English. I will try to express a synopsis of my game.

This game chronicles the journey of a last lapse of energy (perhaps a spirit, a conscience, a soul), who wanders into a mind in coma , trying to re-establish the connections to the higher layers of consciousness.
The player must drive this lapse in the moments that connect the conscious and unconscious. In constant oscillation, the game proves challenging.

Have Fun!

My first Ludem Dare+Unity game finished!

Blow stuff up here

Our game for the Ludum Dare 30. Data-Man trying to honor to giant Pac-Man.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=23927

WARP  WORLDS

Fight and Flight

This is my entry for the Ludum Dare 30 – 48hr Compo, the theme of which was “Connected Worlds”. This game was made in the 12 hrs free time I had during the 48hrs of the competition. It’s a very simple 1 button game for kids aged 4-8, that switches between 2 connected worlds:

Here’s a quick gameplay video:

You can download it here: http://blue-thumbs-gaming.itch.io/warp-of-the-worlds-fight-and-flight

I hope you and/or your children have as much fun playing this game as I had making it.

Cheers, Ben.

My entry for LD30 is up! This marks the third time I have entered into LD48, but the first time that I felt confident enough with the tools I was using (Unity and Blender) to really be proud of what I made.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=29019

Process

Secondary themes I decided on for “Connected Worlds” were as follows:

–Hierarchy I interpreted the theme to represent hierarchies and pecking orders; each individual in a hierarchy has a connection to those above/below but can live distinct experiences. I loosely based each level (even the ones I hadn’t the time to make) on an individual’s actions in a corporate structure.

In terms of the mechanics in the game:

1. this means that at the bottom you are pushing buttons (flipping colours),
2. above that you are doing manual labour (moving blocks)
3. above that you are involved in sales (the cubes get more valuable [bigger] the fewer you have of them)
4. above that is the process of design (you can control how platforms move)
5. and above this is the requirement to do all of those things at once (had to remove one element from my final level)

–Network the console represents the gateway for the connection between worlds, and the idea that things online can have a tangible effect to things offline. Connections + Network = CONET.

–Contrast/Opposites There are only three colours in the net (excluding the console) blue, red and green. blue doesn’t change, but red and green can be, and are treated as opposites.

Mechanics

The game mechanics are as follows:

1. Levels are mirrored in size between the net and the real world, important items (doors, ladders) are placed at the same distances.
2. Colours Red = off, Green = on. A green item will have a positive action on a real-world item located in the same relative space.
3. Pressure Plates will flip the colour of all Red/Green elements in the level to the opposite colour, but will not change itself. If they are placed over a door, the door will open when the plate is green.
4. Cubes can be moved by the player and used to open doors/perform actions in the real world, they are not affected by gravity. Cubes can also be resized.
5. Recycler putting a cube in the recyler will destroy it but make all other cubes in the level larger.
6. Tris (triangular prisms) will move along a set path provided they are the colour green. The colour can be changed with pressure plates. (there are blue Tris as well, but their movement cannot be changed)

Summary

I am happy with how CONET turned out, I would like to have made some more complex levels to better use the mechanics I had made, but it turns out that designing them has a few challenges, as does my flaky process of setting them up.

The aesthetic meets what I wanted and everything looks reasonably sharp, though I had to get lazy with some of the models. I never made the time put in sound effects, which is disappointing, because its always fun recording popping noises. I also never implemented the door’s swing animation, so it just disintegrates, but I am very happy with the other transitions I made; namely the shrinking cube and the moving elements.

My code has its ups and downs, I had a bit too much fun making the script for moving elements and ended up re-writing it three times, but I had to have some fun. The code isn’t as flexible as it could be; a lot of things are hard-coded with different tags for example, despite me storing the level number and other relevant info, whereas each ‘net’ level has the same tag but still teleports correctly when you fall off (which I was surprised to find out after forgetting I wrote that in). There are also too many scripts for the amount of work that gets done, but it seems to work with stability so I won’t complain.

There is also no real end state/fail state. ~

In conclusion; yes this is my best LD yet. Until next time!

I believe I mentioned earlier that I would try to time lapse this.

I did. So now I can post them.

Day 1

Time Lapse – Day 1

Day 2

Time Lapse – Day 2

Day 3

Time Lapse – Day 3

Overall, I think I did well this time around. Once again, I tried to do too much (let’s reprogram the map generation sequence, add a non-standard grapple mechanic, and rewrite the gravity system…) so that’s why I don’t have too much to show.

I’m rather happy with the consistency of the art style. It doesn’t look too bad for being hand-drawn by me… I’m obviously not practiced as an artist.

I’ll admit I used more tools than I mentioned at the beginning of the compo. I used Excel for random calculations and Notepad++ as my comfort editor (with regex capabilities). Vim is wonderful, but sometimes I don’t mind going back to a true GUI application.

Here is my game  http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/27958. It was published under the 48 hour compo. It’s a platforming game

with a bunch of cool stuff, check it out.

This is the logo of my game.

Story: Humans and Martians(species for Mars) have to team up to save their planets from aliens outside the solar system called Galectous.

We did!

A Jam entry game made on 24h!(ok ok, we use one day more to make this better!)

This is a introspective game, about how music connect people, places, all the universe. Different sounds, styles, with a flat art and easy way to play. It was a experimental game. The first we made with this purpose. We knew that will be a lot of games with planets and universe. And than I think “Hey, why we don’t make the comum idea with different flavor?”

And that is Universal Feeling.

Feel free to play ^^

LINK TO PLAY

Tags: ChipSound, game, LD30, link, sound

Perplexing Wormholes is a top-down puzzle game where you have to solve puzzles using the tools you find laying around and switch between two worlds while doing it.

There are three short levels, total play time is about 5-10 minutes.

Play Perplexing Wormholes here!

Well, we have finished our Ludumdare game. It took us an extra hour to publish it unfortunately but we have a team here so have the 72 hours per the Jam rules anyway. I can’t believe we came this close to publishing it in 48 hours. Here’s the demo/tease trailer we made for Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqA2H4SbyEk

It’s on Kongregate as well: http://www.kongregate.com/games/seraphicmedia/gravity

We’re probably going to throw it up on the Google Play Store real quick while we’re at it.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we did check it out and vote with us.

So, I had a bug today that I couldn’t skip. When I started my game, it filled up my PC’s memory completely in about a minute, breaking literally everything that was running. I had to fix it to continue.

8 hours of hacking at this problem.

I just fixed the bug. It was with Scene2d.ui’s function Table.drawDebug(). If you set debug, apparently it runs this blindingly expensive operation that constantly creates new objects. Yay.

I followed a tutorial telling me to do this. And who would guess that something that draws literally a few lines on a screen would break my whole computer lol

8 hours of not actual game developing haulted… due to a single line of code I would have eventually taken out anyways….. FFFFFFUUUUU–

Long story short, my LD time is done. But now the bug is fixed, I’m going to continue my game to see if the fun factor is there or not. I think I definitely came up with an idea at least worth exploring and finishing an alpha.

Here’s a final LD screenshot of the game. See you guys at the next LD!

Sender

In Sender, you fight off gelatinous beings like flubber, that are invading through portals. In order to make progress, you seal off the portals with blocks that you have to charge with energy collected from killing the flubs.

My initial idea was to do sort of a platforming tower defense. What was the tower? I wanted to make a 2d Ico, where you protect someone, you hold their hand and lift them up on platforms fighting back monsters and making your way through some sort of dungeon – that’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but I gave up the idea after thinking about the pathfinding involved.

Tools

Game Maker
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at Game Maker, I decided before hand I would try the free studio version. Physics was a nice addition, they should update the room editor, at least a bucket fill, and different shape tools for tiles and objects would be nice. 24 hrs in I found out that i was limited to 10 scripts, 32 hrs in I found I was limited to 15 game objects. If I had known I probably would have picked up Unity. In hindsight though, being limited was probably a good thing during the jam – – maybe.

Used bad coding practices, shameful variable names, a lot of copying and pasting because of the limit on scripts. Fixing bugs was fun, which was just taping the code together till it worked. I don’t think either of those are bad per se during a jam, getting over myself and letting things not be perfect are probably what got me through the weekend – there are also some cool things that happen as a result of not being entirely in control. Like the enemy ai, the scripts pretty simple, move towards player on the x axis, if player is above, jump – the way I implemented the shooting, there’s a slight kick up to the player, which results in the enemy dodging shots – so I went with it.

Grafx2
Saved my ass on the autotiling ground. I learned about the tilemap fx when Arachne posted her tile templates on the tigsforums. I’ve since been using feature for creating custom templates and tiles for vagante. So what is the tilemap fx? Basically it runs through your image finding matching tiles when it turns on, when tiles match, placing a pixel will update all instances of that tile. Another cool thing about grafx2 is how you can use patterns from your image as brushes, x y z will rotate/flip the brush – there are a lot of repeating pixels in the tileset.

Photoshop
I’ve been using photoshop for modular animation for vagante, so I’ve amassed a handful of animations files, that takes several source images as various body parts and accessories. They are linked to the psd file as smart object layers, if I update the source file, it gets reflected across all animation files. I’ve writtened a script also to export spritesheets from all open documents. I think technically these count as content generators as per the rules of the Jam. The source image looks like this:

I use 1px drop shadows set to “screen”, with an adjusted contour in the animation files for the linked smart objects, to get nice outline. I do this because if you rotate a smart object that has the outlined pixelated, the outline gets broken.

Bfxr
Game Maker won’t play the sounds I generated >:

Moving Forward

I’m really happy with the end result of Sender, this is the most I’ve done on a game solo, and want to continue working on it during the weekends I have off and make it something good.   There are a lot of ideas I have floating around that don’t fit the structure of Vagante that I want to play around with in Sender.  I’m looking forward to also working with a close friend on this, I think we’ll have something nice in a couple months.

And now I’m gonna plug Vagante’s kickstarter, because it’s happening.  Considered it plugged.  We weren’t sure whether it was a good idea to do this LD, but we did it anyways and it was a nice break honestly from the 8 months we’ve been staring at it.   Speaking of which Eugene completed his entry also for the 72 hr compo, Irdencore.  It’s an online multiplayer team based king of the hill style space shooter, done with vector graphics – it’s pretty fun, grab a friend.

Thanks for reading! You can Play Sender here

I made a time lapse of my gamedev process to make “One“, my compo submission. I hope you’ll find it interesting!

Made in 10 hours. But still a reasonably complete game!

CLICK THE ABOVE PICTURE TO PLAY!

-ENDESGA

(p.s. I’m in)

I’m really happy with how it turned out. I didn’t get everything that I wanted into the game. But I still achieved my goal and ended up with something functional!

Feel free to try it out here: goo.gl/79tcGJ