So, during the weekend I created the game I.A.N (Interdimensional Administration Network). In the game you’ve become the administrator of I.A.N, which is a network used by different dimensions to send data between them. Your job is to make sure that the data is transferred between the dimensions, which are represented by nodes on your node map. You swing between the nodes by tethering to them, and have to deliver data packages between them.

I really enjoyed creating this game, for several reasons. Number one is probably that I developed this game in dart, a browser-based language which compiles to Javascript. I’ve never worked with dart before, and it felt great, since it was something new and refreshing. I used the render engine pixi.dart, which worked out great in the end. I had the idea of creating a game that was really difficult even before this Ludum Dare. So when the game got the level of difficulty that I was looking for I was really pleased. The game is frustratingly difficult, but you still want to keep playing it, I can’t stop playing it myself, and my friends has told me the same.

What was difficult during the development?

Of course there were obstacles I had to climb in previous Ludum Dares, but not as much as this one. In the previous ones I’ve used Java and LWJGL which I’m familiar with. For this game I used Dart language and pixi.dart. Which are both new to me. This was also the first time I created a browser-based game. I had some problems with pixi early on, since I didn’t know much about it, and I did things inefficiently. The main problem with pixi was the it wasn’t as fast as I’d hope, and about six hours into development I considered switching to a different rendering engine.  Luckily, I was able to resolve my performance issues.

Another challenge I had during development was the physics for the swinging mechanic. It involved math I’ve never done before, so I tried a lot of different solutions, but none of them worked the way I wanted to. When I finally was able to figure out how to do it, the final solution was a lot simpler than my previous attempts.

After the first day, I released a playable demo on my website (http://goudagames.com/), unfortunately the playable demo was unplayable. I had performance issues, and these issues would when you got the third node. This time, the perfomance issues wasn’t graphical. Something in MY code was slowing the game down severly, so I spent the whole morning of the next day to optimize the game. And I think the performance was raised by (at least) 300 %. Now I had a game that ran smooth and got all the gameplay it needed. I’d decided to keep the graphics simple, so I didn’t want to change them either. I considered myself done, except for audio.

Audio was one of the issues I couldn’t solve, mostly because it wasn’t anything I could do. Basically, the current version of darts implementation of web audio is working horribly. The sound is crackling and just sounds horrible. I know that it wasn’t just my game, since I looked at other implementations of darts web audio, and they all had the same crackling, so I decided to remove audio completely from the game. I decided that I would submit another silent game.

Now, I thought, I was finished. But then I got the idea of implementing a highscore feature, so that the globally highest score would always be shown on the game page. Unfortunately, I was unable to do this because of my inexperience with web development. I knew about HTTP requests, but my POST request didn’t work properly, and I wasn’t able to solve it, so I decided to scrap the highscore idea too.

How do you think the game turned out?

I had the idea of the game the whole time, and I knew that I wanted the graphics to be simple, and the gameplay smooth but difficult. I’m really, really happy with how the game turned out, even if I don’t get a high rating. The game started out as an idea, and the final product was exactly how I’d imagined it the first hour of development. I stuck with the same idea throughout development, and kept it simple, which is what I think made the difference between this entry and previous Ludum Dare entries. In both of my previous Ludum Dares I started out with an idea, but the game that came out of it wasn’t as I’d originally planned, and therefore I wasn’t as happy with them as I was with this game. It felt great to see your idea materialize in front of you, with no changes or tweaks. I personally love to play it, and I’m more than happy with this entry.

I would write more…

I would continue writing this post mortem even more, but time is ticking and I’ve got to go. Go play I.A.N and leave a comment saying what you think of it. Don’t forget to rate!

Until next time, goodbye!

We just finished up Parallel Rift

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=37631

Have fun!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2014 at 5:31 am and is filed under LD #30. 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.

This ‘game’ leans on the ‘not a game’ category because its primary feature is the social experiment that it contains.  Coated by a skinner box, Cookie Clicker mechanic,  this #LD48 entry explores what sort of story all of us game developers would create if we all could only write one word every 20-ish minutes or so, depending on your mining facilities.

Nearing the 24 hour left mark I had a rather large change in direction because I was thinking “this sh*t sucks, wtf am I making.”  I had a pretty nice looking intro (Im a programmer so it was nice for me), and  some boring game mechanic that just didnt make me happy.  I was sitting in the shower thinking how can I make this even slightly interesting within the next 24 hours.  I always wanted to do some sort of social game like Twitch plays pokemon, or the like, so I changed the intro sequence text slightly to make the plot make sense.  Busted out a rather large chunk of networked code, a database, and turned this terrible cookie clicker into a terrible story generator.  Yay!  And this shitty story generator is recruiting you,  yes YOU, to be the driving force behind it.

–On a slightly more real note, it has been particularly fun to watch the story grow live as it sits running on my second monitor.  So thanks to all who have participated so far!  And hopefully more will join and before you know it, THE FINAL NOVEL will be complete!

–I have done solo LD48 now quite a few times and will be looking for a partner next time!  Get in touch on twitter fellow gamedevs, even if your not interested and stay connected!  Gamedev is my world and I want to meet as many people as I can who share a similar love in the craft! https://twitter.com/TeddyNashor

Only few hours before the Ludum Dare end. I have certainly deserved my Ludum Burger!

I’ll publish my entry at the end of the challenge.

World Traveler

It’s the first build. We will add more contend until deadline.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=39425

Collisions are finicky little beasts. Especially when what you need is not a collision but an overlap.

But hey, we are back on track! If we finish this in time (and it looks like we may do just that) it will probably be one of the wildest saves of this ludum dare. Realizing halfway through the jam that we don’t know how to implement our idea in Phaser, changing the platform to something totally different, that we have even more vague idea about and completely changing the game concept. On top of that Delta has some errands to run back at his place, so for the last hours he will have to work remotely. Now using a git, even with some problems with merging stuff earlier, turns out to be one of our best ideas for this LD

Gotta stick those planets together man!

To all compo participants that just couldn’t make it in time, and to all fellow jammers biting their nails in fear right now: Don’t ever give up. LD is over when the timer ticks to 0, not when you think it’s over!

Hey!

Since my entry “The Beginning” appeared to be a bit hardcore, I think it’s a good idea to make a video walkthrough for those who don’t have enough patience to beat the game

So, here we go! Spoiler alert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsDNMcukSpg

I finished my game! Well, I didn’t really finish it. The levels are set up poorly, lots of coding didn’t get done, there’s virtually no main menu graphics, there are numerous bugs and I made the music in about 25 minutes as opposed to the several hours I had planned. But hey, it was submitted on time!  It feels good to have successfully participated in my first Ludum Dare. I will await more comments before I dive into fleshing my game out too much.

It’s a simple one button runner with jumping, wall jumping, and auto scrolling. I took a colorful approach to the theme (literally). I didn’t do a very good job tying the two together but the idea was that there are different worlds of color and you alter the world with the colors you find. Here’s a list of some of the things I wasn’t able to accomplish due to time constraints:

– Sensible level design

-Multiple color switches per level (I thought I would get this for sure, but didn’t leave myself enough time to make a playable build)

-Objects that kill you in the levels (besides falling off the map)

-Buttons to control colors on the fly (wasn’t 100% if I wanted this but wanted to at least test it)

-Controls for choosing whether or not you wanted to activate a color switch

The last bit definitely should have been included, I even had it working but sort of forgot about it in the heat of the moment. I submitted within the final 10 minutes of the contest.
That’s all for now!

Hi !

Level 1 is done !

Now we just have to do sfx, music, more levels, more tiles, a menu, …

It’ll be done soon !

DarksteelPenguin, Coldman07, tchassin

Tags: 2D, C++, jam, progress, screenshot

Hello guys, need to write this story.

My theme

Okay, so the theme. I was hoping for this one so hard, when it comes out, I was so happy. All the vote week, it was the one i was thinking to be the better prepared for. Just because “Connected Worlds” speaks to me like “Do something with space in it”, and I freaking love space stuff.

So here I am, Saturday 3:00 am (I’m in France, UTC -1), stream on twitch ready to go. With a great idea : make a lite-Civilization, with planets instead of cases.

Limit the ambition… kinda

Of course I knew I couldn’t make a Civilization-like in 48 h. So I start to focus only on the combat system, with a simple system of Attack/Defense gathering. I don’t wanted to make a static map, because Universe is random, you know. I love recursive system so I try to plan a graph/tree oriented system, to generate a map, and verify connection between planets. Also, I prepare the fact than, the player is not alone, and need an enemy in this random universe.  So I planed something terrible : An AI. Yeah.

Running out of time

Last time i’ve done the Ludum Dare was for the 28. It was pretty lame because, I remember during the vote week, I was like “if <You Only Get One> goes out, i’m so dead i’ve no idea”. So you can understand why it was so “special”. Anyway, last time, I was so stressed, I’ve work all the weekend, with just 6-10h of sleep divided on 3h naps. So this weekend, I was like “take it easy bro”. I just worked until Sat 5am, goin to sleep almost 10h, woke up at 3pm,  take my time to eat, doing the dishes, do some shopping, make my dinner, all that stuff, work like 8-10h on the LD for all the saturday. And I woke up at 2pm on Sunday and I was like “there is so much work to do, that will be impossible…”.

Plus, It was very different on Unity than the stuff I usualy do on it. Like, I’ve never do some generation, graph system or RTS view in Unity3D. And It was a very long time since i’ve worked seriously on it (like 8 month).

So on Sunday, at 11pm,  the AI wasn’t finished, and the graphics was just some white textures with “SUN” and “GAZ” in block capitals on it.

But I made it. At 3am, I’ve posted the “final version” of my game. Not a sh** game this time. A bugged game but still a game!

My AI wasn’t debugged, so I just let it capture planets, not fight. My biggest regret.

Results

So,
– My AI does one third of what it had do at start (Capture instead of Capture/Defend/Attack).
– I’ve never find some time to create some cool GUI interface with images and stuff.
– The commands are hard, rigid, not naturals.
– There is still some bugs I’ve never figurate why there here.

But I’m proud of myself. Because, that was a big project, and if I hadn’t took my time on Saturday, maybe I would finish it on time, and make a big surprise for anyone who tests it. And it’s much much […] much better than the last game i’ve made for the LD28 x). And it’s good looking. I love the effect on the planets I’ve made.

Yeah, big experience.  Thank’s to the “Ludum Dare” team once again, i’m now completely burn at work in this monday morning x). But I can’t wait until the LD31 now :D.

So, see you next time guys, take care!

Cheers

[link to game]

PS : My game is dedicated to Sid Meier btw, that’s why the name is in Swahili language, like Baba Yetu, the song from Civ IV main menu :).

Tags: LD30, post-mortem, postmortem, unity3d

I didn’t know where i was going when i started, but here it is.

I finished my Game.

Orbital Expansion

Orbital Expansion is a Space conquest clicker game, try it here if you want.

Well, my 4th Ludum Dare entry has come to an end. This time I made a Box2D game with LibGDX called The MillionWood.

The basis of the game is that every now and then, another screen with another character is added to the game, and you have to control all of them simultaneously. All characters start at the same level, so soon enough you’ll be trying to finish old levels and new levels at the same time – and the farther you go, the more of the characters will reach the really trick levels! And if one character dies, the rest of them go down as well, so you’ll have to be careful.

The fact that this was my first time fully implementing Box2D has me very pleased that I got something working this well. I should probably have eased up on the polish, though – I was done with the game well before sleeping time, but my drive to add “just this little detail” had me going almost all the way to the cutoff point at 3 AM. Still, I’m very happy with the end result!

With all that said, good luck with your games everyone! I’ll start rating within the week. : )

You know things are going good when you’re spending more time in your level editor than the codebase because it. just. works.

That’s a beautiful thing. The base mechanics of the game are pretty much finished. It was a little tricky to get it right because I’d never done anything with interconnecting maps and portals before. By leaving it very generic and letting the data from the level editor speak to the engine, it became almost academic.

Now it looks like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I just might get this finished and packaged up before the Jam ends. No matter what though I came out of this with a good game engine that I didn’t have only 2 days prior.

Now here’s some more screenshots. I finally locked in an objective based on my own interpretation of the theme. Connected Worlds, almost immediately to me, went in reverse and I thought: okay, so two worlds are already connected. How do I disconnect them?

With bombs of course. The objective is to go through all of the portals to the other side, get a bomb, plug it into the computer port for that portal, and get back through before it blows.

Somebody set us up the bomb!

Plug the bomb into the computer port that controls that portal.

Get out of there!

At this point it’s a straightforward platform puzzler (platzler? pluzzler?) You could play it as-is and probably even have some fun. I’d like to add some enemies that can provide further obstacles and a reason you have a health meter, along with ammo crates.

Mixing multiple tilesets from different sources seems to be working well so far. I had to scale up and sprite the bomb and the computer port though (they’re both animated).

And I still don’t have a name for it yet. Any ideas? I’m open to suggestions.

Hello all!

I am writing a bit of a rushed post to tell you about our experience with this (ongoing) Ludum Dare Jam! If you go looking, you will not find a “We are in!” post like we usually write, and for a very good reason : we did not originally plan to participate.

We all had a busy weekend, and felt it was safer to give this one a pass. Until saturday, of course… When we learned the theme, some ideas started forming in our heads, and a simple question, worded as “Say, why are we not doing the Ludum Dare again?” was enough.

The catch : we decided to start around 4pm (Central European time, so like 12 hours after the start of the jam), one of us was away for the remainder of the saturday afternoon, and due to the short notice, we decided to do the jam with only 2 of us. Oh, and we both work today, so that is almost a full day lost again (and for one of us, the evening will be otherwise occupied too), in addition to forcing us to go to sleep on sunday at a reasonable time.

What could possibly go wrong, right?

First progress pictures we shared on Twitter. At that point, we could already switch map, had our movement system in place, and the dialogs were starting to work.

As far as genres go, our game can be categorized as a light puzzler/adventure game. We decided early on that we wanted Zelda-style controls and separation by screen, so we went with that. We also divided the duties between us : one would do the coding, level layout and the music, while the other would draw all the assets (neither of us being artists by trade :p) and help with the puzzle design. So far, this is turning out fine! We have all the assets for our scaled-down (this IS a jam, after all :D) goals, and most of the things are already in place. The levels are more or less design, so we only need to get to town with our tile-based layout tool!

We even have music in the game!

We should be able to finish the game as we envisioned it, since we basically have a little mechanic (buttons that, when you stand on them, open doors, oooooh) to do, and the rest is the level layout. Good times.

Oh, and a name. We still have not decided on that!

And just to give you some more info on our take on the theme, you will play inside 2 “worlds”: the physical, real world (pictured in the screenshots in this post), and a digital world, connecting various parts of the first one. You will have to juggle between 3 characters while doing so, and use all that to solve a couple of very mild puzzles. We of course had more ambitious plans at the beginning (like combat and such), but you know how plans go during a LD : they quickly go out the window :D.

Hopefully, we will be able to post a playable version tonight, and you will all get to enjoy it Good luck if you are still jamming, and get some well-deserved rest if you submitted your compo entry already!

-GSM Productions out!

The City, making up the bulk of the “real world”, and the first protagonist of the game.

I’m happy to say everyone who’s played my game so far has loved it. It’s such a good feeling to know people are enjoying something I’ve made! Please check out my game too, I’d love to hear your feedback

Downloads available for web, PC, Mac, and Linux.

Title
Matters of Perspective

Link
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=2726

Description
Hit E to swap between the worlds of 2D sidescroller and FPS to work your way through a mind-bending maze. (And click to hit buttons, but that’s made a little obvious in-game :p)
In-game notes have overtones of the connections felt in relationships, treating each person as their own world, with their own perspectives and views that enable positive connections with each other.

Oh boy, after a minor fixing we now have a full world filled with planets and stars and black holes! Since we have collisions solved already, getting the planets to collide with the rest and trigger either a planet destruction or a gameover will be a nice and easy thing to do. Since we can’t figure out how to keep our current background static, we may opt to use a tilemap of star specks on a blueish background that will be randomly generated to fill the whole world.

Ath’krtubhath will be proud.